Decoding the Gurus - John Vervaeke and Jordan Peterson: Word Worshipers

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

That's right—we’re back in the heady world of sense-making, but don't worry, we're just in time to witness the final resolution of the ever-looming 'Meaning Crisis.'Join Matt and Chris as they embark on an epic journey with the cognitively inclined philosopher John Vervaeke and none other than the uber-guru, Jordan Peterson, himself. Together, they navigate a vast semantic web of meaning that spans discussions of Power, Beauty, Love, Religion, and, of course... the Logos!Along the way, we'll probe the limits of complex wordplay and autodidactic insights, consider the ancient art of delegation, and ponder how the religious-shaped void might just be filled with engagement in Dialogos. On the more mundane level, we'll also explore the inner workings of Jordisan Academy, the logistics of the 'We Who Wrestle with God' tour, upcoming Sensemaking cruises, and the vital multivitamins every Responsible Man should be taking.So come along as Matt and Chris grapple with the Omega Rule, cast aside their reductive materialism, and bow down in horror and awe to worship the words that the eternal Logos issues forth.LinksThe Meaning Crisis: Resolution | Dr. John Vervaeke | EP 482The Stoa: Wisdom Signalling & the Wisdom of Criticism w/ John Veraveke, Chris M, Chris Kavanagh, & Matt BrowneA Bit of Fry and Laurie: A Bit of Fry & Laurie Concerning LanguageJohn Vervaeke: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh. He is the Gimli to my Lagerlis. Maybe he's the Frodo to my Sam. Which one would you prefer, Chris? Which Lord of the Rings duo would you

like to be? Well, Matt, can I just add a meta comment before I answer that? I believe you've used those comparisons before. In your old age, your senility, you've forgotten. But- I didn't do Gimli in Legolas. That was new. Are you sure? I'm pretty sure I remember being compared to... Obviously I'm Gimli in that equation. Yeah. Do you see yourself as more the Frodo or the Sam in our little guru's quest? I'm Frodo.

But I'm more Gimli than Leg. So that's the trade off, right? Only Frodo because of the temptation, Matt. You would have no temptation. You're just stalwart. Whereas the dark side tempts me. That's right. Frodo is carrying the weight. Frodo has seen the eye.

Whereas Sam's kind of along for the ride helping ride helping out. He was a ring bearer. He was a It was Didn't he get to go he was like an emotional support friend. Let's be honest That's what I didn't get to go to the West eventually Like I'm not talking about you know, no kiss ins the West. No, we didn't go to the west though. He stayed with the No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, whatever. Yeah. Oh, good. A good Hobbit town name. Well, good. Well, that's settled. Um, yeah, that's, that's, yeah, we're glad we got that out of the way, but yeah. So we're here today, Matt.

And well, we, we have a lot of people that are on the docket for us to cover a lot of heavy topics, and we just recently finished, you know, the Om omnibus episodes on Dr. K, right? So we decided, we know what people wanted. I asked them on the Petron. I know the feedback. I know you want us to do Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, some left-wing figures, Michael Hobbs and Naomi Klein, right? These are all figures.

We're going to get them. I'm going to get them. Okay. But this is an indulgent episode for us because we enjoy sensemaking. That's what we like to do. So we decided to take like a little holiday in the sensemaking realm. And there was some sense making content released. Is that not true, Matt?

Did you not enjoy some sense making? I do. I do think of sense making as a little intellectual holiday. You can float around in the great big sense making ocean. It's relaxing. I could listen to it as I went to sleep. Jordan Peterson, obviously, he's many things, but one of the things he is, is a sense maker. And in this particular episode, he's talking to John for VACU.

I think he's a nice guy. We like John. He's also a sense maker, though. Yes. Jordan Peterson also had a magnificent episode with someone who's put on our show. What's his name again, Chris? Jamie Will.

That was really something. Oh, yeah. That was sense making. Yes, that Jamie Will. That was really something. Oh yeah, that was sense-making. That was some sense-making. Maybe we can, maybe we have another holiday next time. No, we can't stay in sense-making land for too long or you become a sense-maker. That's the truth. So it is like the ring then.

You can't wear the ring. Don't look at the orb. Yeah. So yeah, Jimmy Weel went on and it wasn't actually that much of a fascinating episode. It is sense-maker-y, but there's actually Jimmy Weel on the Keynesian pushes back at Jordan Peterson on some points, which was somewhat surprising to me. Like not a lot, but more than is typical in the sense making realm where the Omega rule applies, right? So yeah, that reminds people what the Omega rule is, there might be some new listeners who, I'm sure

who don't know the Omega rule. I think it was the Omega rule might have been the Alpha one or the like, who knows, but in any case, it was basically always look for the sliver of truth and the point of agreement in everything that the other person is saying. It's like extending ultimate charity at all times. Never, never look critically, too critically, because that will break the sense-making jazz. That's the principle. They wouldn't exactly put it like that, but like that's how it applies. Yeah. You take the big long convoluted thing they said and you sift through it and you find those nuggets of truth in this in there. And then you riff on those and come up with your own thing and you bat it back to them.

Back and forth we go. It's terrific fun. And I think we're going to see some of it in this conversation. Yes. Yes. So John Fervacki, for those that don't know, is a cognitive scientist professor at the University of Toronto, known for various things, but he, like Jordan Peterson, he has a public online profile. He has a YouTube channel, which is relatively popular. And on there, he has a series, Awaking from the Meaning Crisis.

He's got other series about after Socrates and so on. So he's got a lot of material online, right. And he's often engaged in discussions around the meaning crisis and sensemaking and big ideas. And you will often see him in conversations with Jonathan Peugeot, Jordan Peterson, you know, the general cast of The Sense-Making World. And actually, should you want, you can find him having conversations with me and Matt on the Stoa on the topic was wisdom signaling and the wisdom of criticism. So if you want to see us

talk directly about things, you can see that there. Now, as Matt said, John is a friendly sort, not prone to the kind of conspiratorial rhetoric that you will see in like Jordan's content and whatnot, or even Peugeot's content for that matter. He often takes a more moderate position and sticks more to like the philosophy and that kind of realm. Some could say to a fault because he almost entirely doesn't engage with the fact that his fellow sense makers are often promoting that kind of thing. But so this jaunt is not intended to like argue that. This should be clear to people now, but we're not covering people on here to say that they are the worst, most evil, toxic guru.

Some people got that impression, but that's not what the show is about. So us covering John and Jordan's conversation doesn't mean that we are saying he's a toxic secular guru trying to promote Trump to the White House and sell ivermectin. I just want to make that clear. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We, we cover the full spectrum and yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Understood.

That is fine. Yes. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Understood. That is fine. Yes. And so this episode was released just two weeks ago. It's called the meaning crisis, colon resolution, episode 482 of Jordan Peterson's Jordan B Peterson's podcast. So finally, Matt, I've resolution. We desperately need it. There's been a quick YouTube or Google search will, will confirm that this is a

topic that has vexed Jordan Peterson and Pals for many a year, the meaning crisis, what gives life meaning, maps of meaning, how to find meaning. Awakening from the meaning crisis, getting over the meaning crisis. Making sense of meaning. It comes up a lot. It comes up a lot, but, uh, yeah, okay. M- maybe this time it gets resolved. That would be, that would be a relief.

That was so good. The meaning crisis in the gospel with Jonathan Pajot. There we go. So let's have a look at the kind of things that they were talking about. And maybe a good place to start is with the introduction of the topic. So this is Jordan kind of framing the episode. Hello, everybody. I have the privilege today to speak yet again to Professor John Vervecky.

He's a repeat guest on my show, maybe more than anyone else. That's possible. John and I have been involved in a conversation now that spans more than a decade, we've been both working assiduously in different ways on defining the meaning crisis and also exploring potential solutions to that crisis and with some success, I would say. And one of the things that we do in today's conversation is to continue that dialogue and to delve more deeply into what the meaning crisis signifies and also what it means, say in John's terms, that there's a new advent of the sacred and what that means, what the sacred means, what a new advent might look like, what that means philosophically, what it means scientifically and theologically for that matter. We spend a fair bit of time as well discussing Peterson Academy.

John's one of the lecturers there. He's done three courses for us, which have been very, the first one is released already. It's been very well received. And along with Pagio and my work on the Peterson Academy, that's another place where this meaning crisis, at least in principle, is in the process of being resolved. There you go. So Peterson Academy is the ground zero for resolving the meaning crisis. Cause you've got Peugeot, you've got Vervaki's courses there, and you have Peterson, right?

They are working hard, Matt, to get this meaning crisis resolved. And you've heard some of the high level ideas that are going to be covered. Obviously Jordan is very into this. He considers this his Ballywick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll be hearing a lot about the Logos and finding wisdom and so on. It's a kind of, I guess the topic is

a abstracted philosophical approach to religion and spirituality, which is definitely something that Jordan Peterson is super into. And yeah, it seems like students who enroll in Peterson Academy will get a thorough grounding in that as well. Yeah. And just to mention as well that Vervaqui is promoting a book about the meaning crisis, which this is related to.

So just his little summary of this. Well, the book is my best attempt to, there's two halves. The first is sort of the historical half. The second half is the sort of cognitive scientific half. It's my attempt to, the first half is like, how did we get into the meaning crisis? What is it? Why is it? And then the second half is, well, what do we mean by this meaning in? What is it? Why is it?

And then the second half is, well, what do we mean by this meaning in life? What's the best cognitive science? What do I do? I think I'm very good at integrating material across different disciplines. And looking for patterns. And looking for patterns.

And getting kind of a synoptic integration and then also making it clear how it has that kind of existential import that you mentioned. Give that to me again in words or one syllable. Synoptic integration. It's essentially interdisciplinary approach, right? Like that you're going to be talking about the meaning crisis and providing answers that have been given from disparate disciplines and kind of synthesizing them together in a way that like people can practically help to deal with their existential dread or

whatever they might be facing. So again, fair to say that this is a topic that Hravaki is quite focused on as well. And by his own account there, might be approaching the realms of the galaxy brain category, right, or feature. Now, you can, of course, take interdisciplinary approaches and synthesize things, but this would be something that you would want to do with careful consideration when you're claiming to synthesize answers from

disparate disciplines to provide like a solution to existential issues. That's a tall order. So not to be undertaken by the fientaureate or whatnot, but yeah, nothing inherently wrong with doing it. Just noting that it is a feature that we often see amongst like secular guru types. Yeah. Yeah. Now, but you've, you've listened to this stuff more comprehensively than me, Chris. often see amongst like secular guru types. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, but you've, you've listened to this stuff more comprehensively than me, Chris, and I wonder, do you know, or maybe you've got a clip that illustrates this, presumably they believe that there was a crisis in meaning, existential meaning, or some kind of deep purpose to life or something that is particularly acute today, is that fair to say? Yes, that is fair to say. Hello. Well, let me just play one clip. particularly acute today. Is that fair to say? Yes, that is fair to say. Hello. Well, let me just play one clip.

This is, this is very briefly the counter point where they, they usually don't focus on this, but they do note that they're having alert crises of meaning, but this is, this is one of the few times that I've ever heard anybody reference that in this space. So just listen to this. I'm giving the wrong impression if I say that they were saying there's nothing special about the current era. But in any case. This is something I also found extremely useful, for example, in the Exodus seminar, because

the Israelite sojourn in the desert is the crisis of meaning. They're the same thing. And so it's also very useful to know that this death of God phenomenon is not new. It's a recurrent theme in human history that a crisis of meaning is a condition. It's not a permanent state and it's not a statement about the nature of the world. It's one of the various ways you can be in the world. And it isn't, it isn't the final solution for those who are rationalistic, rational enough to see through, let's say, the protective superstitions of religion. That's not a good way of thinking about it. I see. Yeah, yeah. So being like wandering the desert, I guess. I mean, he,

in his way, he says it very strongly that literally is the meaning crisis. But I think he means kind of a little bit metaphorically, maybe, you know, it's because it is a good crisis, but I think he means kind of a little bit metaphorically, maybe, you know, it's because it is a good metaphor, right? The long night of the soul. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking for, looking for salvation and so on. So, okay, so it's a personal struggle that humanity and humans have always had to do. Is that right? Yes. Although, as I say, focusing on that little segment gives a wrong impression, because usually in the sense making ecosystem, there's an acute contemporary crisis, typically brought on by the loosening of religious authority on society. Right.

And in particular, the new APU are often singled out, materialists and this kind of thing. So Dawkins does come up. So like, listen to this. And you know, for you to be able to conceptualize the meaning crisis as an existential situation, and then also not say or imply that that's hopeless. And that's the problem I have with approaches like the selfish gene or the more rationalistic atheist movement. It's like, well, no wonder you have a meaning crisis because things are meaningless.

There's that's I think the fact that there is a meaning crisis is actually evidence that evidence that things aren't meaningless. I agree because it's not a neutral state. It's a very negative state. Yes, so the fact that there is a meaning crisis helps illustrate that there is such a thing as meaning, otherwise we wouldn't be having a crisis about it. And he doesn't like the Selfish Gene because I think you and I are re-reading the Selfish Gene right now. And I can tell you it has nothing to do with meaning or philosophy or purpose of life. And I guess you think so? Yeah. I mean, purpose of life from a biological point of view, like even Dawkins on the first

couple of pages says Darwin's theory of evolution means that essentially all our answers to the meaning of life were pointless. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, I get that. I get that point. I guess I guess it's so it's saying well, I guess I'm kind of agreeing with Jordan which is I'm just trying to understand what his issue is like to me, it's a very clear account of evolution and in as much as it is a Replacement story because I think for sense makers all of these things the narratives and stories and yeah Yeah with with which we construct, you know, a personal meaning for life, it's incredibly unsatisfying.

And in fact offers you, and Dawkins does emphasize this, offers no guidance as to how we ought to live our lives. Yeah, yeah. So, well, this is the, I mean, in this way, he shares an interpretation with a lot of more like liberal critics of the selfish gene as well. There's an interesting, um, yeah, because they also imply that Dawkins is endorsing evolution as a guideline for human behavior. And that human behavior is inherently selfish, right? Which is like the title of the book is the selfish gene, not the selfish human. Right. So nonetheless, so yeah.

So Jordan objects to it and, you know, he objects in general to materialistic. Yeah. So scientific. Interpretations of. Yeah. Reductionist ones. Yeah, that's right. to it and you know he objects in general to materialistic, like secular interpretations of existence. Yeah, reductionist ones. Yeah that's right and like you said there is a nice parallel where a lot of sort of humanities academic left-wing types also sort of quietly disapprove of reductionism for the implication because of the implication Chris, it's really in the human spirit. Yeah, and it reminds me very much of why Flat Earth is very much disproved of cosmology and astronomy. And it is for the same reason that the kind of universe that science describes is a lot like evolution in the sense that it's a very cold and heartless one that isn't a very cozy place for squishy,

you know, meaning-seeking humans to inhabit. And they much prefer a little snow globe universe where you have a nice flat earth and you have a dome around it. It's all quite small and it's kind of human, it's human-scaled, right? And it's obviously created by a personal God that cares about us in particular. Yeah, much more meaningful, I would say. Yeah, well, and just for people who might not be familiar with the selfish gene or that whole approach. So I'll try to do this in a very brief nutshell, but that book and that approach is talking about evolution from the perspective of genes and the legacy that has

left in biological life on earth, including in humans. But one crucial aspect of that is that it is also arguing that that is our biological legacy in terms of like genes are out to produce more copies of themselves in the next generation and this is how you have to understand evolution. But the humans crucially are not subject to genes being solely in control. We have culture, we have self-consciousness. So we now, through the products of evolution, are able to rebel against the selfish impulses of genes. So there's no implication in this other day that the good thing to do is follow the selfish whims of replicating genes.

But that is often interpreted. And I think with Jordan as well, I think he is doing the double thing of saying, like, if you're acknowledging that humans are like biological machines programmed by genes, that you're removing the grandeur from human existence, where we have poetry and art and all these complex cultural things and, you know, higher orders of morality and whatnot. So that's the objection. of morality and whatnot. So that's the objection. Yeah, we're probably veering off topic here, but I remember in one of Dawkins books, he described it quite nicely, which is that bodies, including human bodies, the phenotypes are vehicles that were constructed by genes for their own ends. And he made an analogy to like human consciousness and self and you know free will to the extent that we have it and so on as being like a virus, like a computer virus that kind of took over the control mechanisms of

these vehicles that are now using those vehicles for our own ends, right? Like human ends, not genetic ones. And I remember Dawkins being quite explicit about that and I quite like that metaphor. But I suspect for Jordan, the mythos of humanity being like a cognitive virus is probably not a particularly fulfilling one. around though I do also note that Dawkins has described religion as a virus and meaning it in like a moralizing pathological point of view. But in that case, he's talking about it as a mind virus on humans. Yeah, as a meme. Yeah. In this case, he was using virus in a different... Yeah. So we are, our consciousness is like a virus for genes from the perspective of genes, right? Yeah. Yeah. We've invaded their construct, which is basically our, the perspective of genes, right? Yeah, yeah. We've invaded their construct,

which is basically the biological brains and getting them to do stuff that we want as opposed to what our genes might want. Yeah, yeah. So the other thing about it is that, so Peterson does talk about being inspired by Dawkins for his new book. So listen to this, Matt, and see if this you think this makes sense.

Well, one of the things that I wrote about, I have a new book coming out in November, and I actually drew somewhat heavily on Richard Dawkins for parts of the book. We Who Rest With God. I've read it, of course. Right, of course. And we're on the tour with me. Yeah. And so Dawkins makes a strong case and repeats it again in his newest book, which is just out that the, an organism, any biological organism has to be a microcosm of its environment, has to be a model. So it has to reflect the environment at every level, right? From the molecular

all the way up. Christen says the same thing. Christen says you don't have a model, you are a model. Right, right. And while that's exactly what I guess Dawkins would say both, you have a model, or you are a model and you have a model. And that would be particularly true for people. And well, the fact that you're a model and that you have a model, so that's the interior logos that might be more associated with, say, Judeo-Christian thought, but it has to match the external logos of the world because otherwise it has no connection point. But that also begs a question, which is one of the questions I raise in this book, is

that if Dawkins is correct in that supposition that an organism has to be a microcosm of its environment and human beings are embodied personalities at the highest level of their organization, then how can it be otherwise than that the human being as a personality is a reflection of the essence of the cosmos, let's say. Of. I haven't read Dawkins new book. I don't know if it's available to read. What is the book that they're referring to Chris? Is it something genetic book of the dead? Is it? I don't know.

Peterson seems to regard the Dawkins as a thing about organisms being microcosms of the environment that they are active in. You don't know what that is in reference to? I mean, I can guess. I can think of some ways, but I'd be guessing. I mean, I can imagine Dawkins talking, say, like, just take a microbe, for instance, and its life is living in water where there might be some sunlight and some chemical sources of energy and predators and so on.

And in many ways, you could say that the organism is, it's like a mirror image of its environment because it's entirely adapted to it and you could tell a lot about the environment that it's in based on how the organism is structured. So, you know, the organism's phenotype and is, you know, gets, gets trained. Yeah. We'll reflect the environment. I would imagine that's the way in which Dawkins would mean it. Yeah.

But Peterson has to draw on that and basically extend it so that human beings are embodied personalities at the highest level of their organization. And they are therefore a reflection of the cosmos. Right. So this is him wanting to say like humans instantiate the logos through what they're doing. Now this parallels doc and talking about organisms, internal workings, reflecting the environment. Right. Right.

Yeah. Okay. So just if you switch out environment for logos and you switch out things reflecting the environment. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. So just if you switch out environment for Logos and you switch out the organism for the human spirit, then you have his cosmic version of whatever he's talking about. Yeah. Okay. And the other aspect of it, of course, is that you want to inject a kind of teleological principle,

a directed nature to the universe in Peterson's version. This is crucial. He views Dawkins or materialists as having a very, like a version, which is just all it's all random and it's all, you know, nihilistic and there's no purpose to anything and like he doesn't feel that's how the world operates. So like, listen to this. This gives you some sense making jazz. And you get to hear Jordan Peterson's teleology dropped in or pretentious.

But well, not pretentious. I mean, it could be taken as pretentious or you could reframe it as, you know, there are potentially there are potentialities in reality that are only actualized in our personhood. Right. And they reflect and without us, access to those principles in reality would not would not be available. Well, that seems to be akin to something like emergence. Well, yeah, very much. You can think about us as random, like as the consequence of random processes, which I think is a fairly absurd way of looking at the evolutionary process. But you can also look at us as manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate right from the beginning of time, right? And we know that these potentials exist because while hydrogen and oxygen join to make water

and what that, and so on up the chain of complexity. And what that seems to indicate to me is that there's an unrealized potential even in the simplest of material forms that contains within it, well, whatever possibility is, it's very difficult to define, but that it isn't that that possibility makes itself manifest in an entirely random manner. It reflects something like an

implicate order in those lower order material properties or properties. So you're turning in, and this is a great joy for me, you're turning into a neoplatonist because I mean, you have emergence up, right? But emergence up has to be constrained. Did you process all that, Chris? I had a lot to take in. I did. You didn't, Matt, are you lost constantly with South speakers? Because to me, it's quite clear what they're saying.

No, well, yeah, no. Give it to me in words of one syllable. I genuinely do just lose the thread halfway through Jordan's thing. Well, so he's talking about that there are in the most basic elements of the universe, there is a move towards order from like hydrogen and oxygen atoms coming into a stable pattern in order to form like elements, right? And that because that is there and we are made up of those things that like the universe in a sense tended towards an order that was inherent and that we are the outcome of all these processes.

So there's an innate structure and direction of the universe, which you can see even in the fact that basic elements and atoms are going into particular arrangements. So for that reason, it doesn't make sense to talk about evolution being a random or unguided process because it's following all these fundamental rules of the universe. Yeah, but of course evolution isn't a random process. Randomness is one part of it and the other part of it is replication and fitness, propensity to persist. And yeah, I mean, look, that's fair in some ways, right Chris?

Chemicals do have a propensity to connect together and form more complex chemical formations. And those in turn, as we've seen on earth, have a bit of a propensity, at least sometimes, to organize themselves into self-replicating organisms and then the mathematics of evolution tends to create more sophisticated organisms as they compete with each other to make copies of themselves. So I think I agree with that, and you've explained it to me in purely materialist terms.

I think that agree with that, and you've explained it to me in purely materialist terms. I think that's fine. I don't think you necessarily need to inject some sort of cosmic significance into it. I mean, it is a topic for meta physicists. Why does the universe we live in happen to have that propensity for order and complexity? Because you can imagine there are a bunch of fine tuning type parameters out there, the laws of physics, which could be different. And if they were a little bit different, then you'd have very little scope for the kinds of complexity we see in humans. But of course, one explanation for this is in universes like that, you wouldn't have

people like us in it to even ask the question. So there's that hindsight bias, right? Where you have to be living in the kind of universe with physical laws that creates a propensity for complexity. Otherwise, you wouldn't have anything complex enough in it to ask the question, right? Yeah, it is notable that the universe has been around for, by current estimates, like 13.7 billion years. But for most of that, there were not, or there's no evidence. And not only in time, but in space as well, right? In the vast majority of places that you look from Venus to the moon,

to the surface of the sun, there is a limited type of complexity, but not that much. Yeah. So there's a reasoning backwards. It's a bit like you got a full house in poker and say, well, that was obviously meant to be the outcome because how else would I have got it? One thing I wanted to say from before is that I feel like he does, like the materialists, like Dawkins, a little bit dirty here. Like, as you said, the way that Jordan frames it is that, you know, materialism, having a materialistic worldview is one that is inherently nihilistic and is absolutely meaningless, right? And the only alternative to that is a kind of cosmic pseudo-Christian spirituality like what he's keen on. But I think that's a bit unfair because there is like a very broad stream of thought, not

only in academia but also in popular popular culture of a thing you might call like, like materialist humanism, right. And from this point of view, which I think most people who like us, just people who don't really care about this stuff very much sort of low key kind of subscribe to, which is that yes, the universe itself, um, you know, evolution, the, the, the cosmos, the laws of physics don't naturally have any kind of meaning woven into it. But you know, as humans, we have the capacity to create and find meaning through our actions and our relationships and the various intellectual pursuits like podcasts that we get into. So that isn't, like it isn't necessarily the case that you have to be

into. So that isn't necessarily the case that you have to be like a despairing nihilist, right? There's no option. Yeah, absolutely not. But Jordan Beasley doesn't ever address that from his point of view that insofar as that functions, it's parasitical on the religious traditions and in particular, the Christian tradition. Yes. And that reminds me of that book, Dominion, because he's not the only one, right? He would say that, oh, you might think of yourself as an atheistic, secular type person, but really everything good that you've got, everything that stops you from just killing

yourself at the end of the day is kind of fundamentally derived from Christianity or some other cosmic religion. Yeah. So like, you know, Jordan's description uses the cloak of materialistic science. He talked about the manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate. Like this is sounding like technical scientific, but what he wants to talk about is essentially like a supernatural force that permeates matter and the universe and orientates it towards humans as a, you know, an expression of order and meaning. The highest expression of order and meaning. Yeah. Well, Jesus is the highest, but we simply...

We're the second highest. Yeah. So there's that. Now, this is high level sense making, right? Now, we got a bit of a head of our skis because we haven't exactly illustrated what sense making is all about. I think they're like Jordan feels about the universe and the cosmos. I feel about sense making is all about. I think they're like Jordan feels about the universe and the cosmos. I feel about sense making. There are building blocks that need to be understood

that permeate all aspects of sense making. And I feel this is a good illustration. So this is from early in the conversation. God only knows what that means, but it seems to be a genuine phenomenon. And so, phenomenon, that means to shine forth, by the way. And that does look genuine. And so, well, John and I had the opportunity to delve more deeply into all of those issues. And that's great fun. That fun, that's an enthusiastic fun, you know. And when that makes itself manifest

in the conversation, you see that in itself is something like the advent of the sacred, because a conversation that takes you outside yourself and beyond yourself and into the future and up into the realm of higher possibility is a manifestation of the sacred that's been characterized for centuries as part of the process of the logos. And it's so useful and interesting to understand that you can experience that and that you do experience that when you get caught up in, let's say, an exploratory conversation. We talked about other ways you can get caught up in love and in raptured by beauty, but the enthusiastic thrill of a conversation that's transformative is a marker for the emergence of something that the world depends upon, right?

And that's something sacred. And there it is, tangible as hell. So that's a very useful thing to know. So join us. Yes, that was the introduction to the conversation. So in words of one syllable, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's saying that when two people are having a conversation with each other, as you and I are now, and when you're having fun doing it, that is a manifestation of the logos and a creative thing that manifests the sacred everything. It's an amazing thing. That's a very excessive way, I think, one could describe a conversation. Yeah, I mean, I like talking to you, Chris, but I wouldn't go that far. Do you remember, Matt, when Jordan Hall talked about having a conversation producing this third entity, you know, a union between two people's minds that is neither one mind or the other, but an intrinsic, holy joining and a creature

which is not... A simple oasis. Right. Yeah. Part of that is me. Part of that is him. Part of that is things beyond both of us, right? It's the whole complex, the whole warm data milieu. I may be able to come into something like an integrist relationship with aspects of Brandon, aspects of me can come into integrist relationship with aspects of him. And for the moment, it forms a new being, which is those aspects coming into relationship

and exchanging perspectives and possibilities and tensions. And then perhaps coming back into relationship with the complex relationality that is me. So it's the same thing like the sense speakers to me in a way are idolatrous because they are worshipers of conversation. That's what they they their holy sacrament is indulgent chats. And Their holy sacrament is indulgent chats. And I think I genuinely, I've got to be this close, right? And I think this is true because the way they talk about conversations, it's unbelievably reverent and invested with so much deep meaning.

And they take the fact that they enjoy them and get lost in them and find them thrilling to be like as they talk about there, like something secret, something divine. It's a feeling the spark of creation in the very act of talking to someone. And so you see the same thing in people like Russell Brand, their love of language, their absolute like obsession with going on these vast illiquids. Yeah, I'm gonna say that sense speakers are word worshipers.

Yeah, idolatrous. I like that. I like that. Well, you make you make a convincing case there, Kavanaugh. I have to admit there is that self-referential quality, right? So you could be talking about something else, like Christianity, God, and Jesus and stuff, or the Romans. Or you could be talking about the actual conversation that we're having right now and reflecting back on yourself, like a mirror or the moon or something like that in the still pond. And that provides so much scope for some pretty exciting stuff, but it is like naval gazing, lotus eating. It is a pursuit. There is something of a parallel to, as all those have noted out with postmodernists, in the attention given to specific words and subjective interpretations of words

and words having multiple meanings. And this being deeply significant if you can find parallels between certain kinds of words and words that might have similar structures or forms or so on. And another secret sacrament for sense makers is what we talked about, the Omega rule, right? The principle that you must almost always, like, yes and the person. It's like the sense making game is that you must add another concept to pick up the conversational ball, right? And you might disagree, but being too disagreeable would be to break the sense making chin, right? And that is not allowed.

That's bad form. The worst things you could say is one, I don't understand. Two, no. And three, is like something completely different. No, what you need to do. It's very much like jazz, like we described it before. What you do is you take the riff that you heard and you expand on it. So what you want to do is have the conversation grow like a fractal and increase in complexity.

And that's where I think the joy comes into it. And I believe that it's real. They have a real aesthetic love of what it is they're doing. And I can understand why. It's the same reason why people, I'm not saying they're conspiracy theorists, although sometimes Jordan is, but you know, there is a cognitive delight

that conspiracy theorists have in constructing incredibly elaborate things. And I think you were right, this is a theme we have hit upon before, but there is a strong correspondence between the kind of ultra indulgent, postmodern, academic, philosophical wank and what Jordan Peterson and friends do, I have to say. They seem very similar.

Well, I'm going to jump just because of some of the themes that we highlighted there too a bit later in the conversation where they're talking about the development of conversations, the ability to have conversations. And this is part of like Jordan's thoughts about maturation and development, right? So we're kind of jumping in on that conversation, but you'll hear a little bit more about the deep meaning of being able to exchange thoughts between two people using the vibration of sounds that travel across the air. So listen to this. So more and more things are taken into account simultaneously. And I think that parallels

cortical maturation in a society, let's say, that properly socializes children. I don't think there's anything arbitrary about it. I mean, you and I have been able to have a relationship because of the pattern of interaction that we fall into when we converse. You know, you make an offering, and then I assess it and incorporate it, and then I make an offering, and you assess it and incorporate it. And we're able to do that in a way that jointly gratifies our desire to explore and integrate, right? And that is a cognitive act and an embodied act, but it's also something that indicates our fundamental concordance with each other at a level that's more than merely personal, right? You're doing something, this is the dialogus that you referred to, right? You're making an offering that I'm accepting and vice versa, but we can do that in

a manner that makes both of us want to continue the process. That's not an arbitrary definition of a moral interaction. It's very practical. It's an optimistic viewpoint too, because then you could say that the patterns of action that most optimally facilitate the desire to continue the patterns of action are the, in principle, are pointers towards the most moral way of behaving, right? And that, I think that's manifest in something like play. Yeah, you might have to do some more explaining to me. I'm talking? Yes, please. Wow. Yeah, you might have to do some more explaining to me in words. Yes, please. Wow.

They destroy your mind, Matt. Well, so there he's essentially saying that as we develop, we learn how to engage in turn taking and conversations and interactions are based on these dyadic understandings of, you know, give and take and response and reaction and so on. Not pure selfish motivation, which is like characteristic of earlier stages of life. And so he here analogizes that to the kinds of conversation that he is having for Bravaki, where they give and they take and they enjoy it and they make offerings, cognitive offerings, which they then inspect and imbibe and show their respect to by maybe riffing on the idea that the other one takes their turn. Okay. But the other aspect, which is quite impressive is that he suggests that like

getting the way where you would have the most enjoyment, the most like kind of frictionless conversation is morally good because you know, you're allowing conversations to flourish, so it is a moral good, not just like a functional development to what I might describe as engaged in furious intellectual masturbation. That's one way to put it. I mean, I see what you're saying there. Right. So it does have that moral dimension. It's like this process of increasing complexity and the maturing mind is able to engage with its environment and with others in a more complex way, which this back and forth is this process.

With that talk about offerings and the... It is making your case there that they are worshiping. Word worshipers. Word worshipers. And it's a moral behavior as well, because the better you talk and the more, the more your ideas can interact and bounce backwards and forwards, then the more cooperative and the more sociable person you are. So there's, there's another clip, Matt, which is talking about, you know, the underlying logos and whatnot. And it embodies, if you want, the spirit of sense making, because listen to how Vervanke responds to Jordan outlining his idea.

Right. And this is the proper way to receive an offering in a conversation. So this is talking about like Greek and Christian culture and how they're fundamentally the logos underpins them all. And one of the things that's remarkable about the conjunction of Greece and Jerusalem is the Greeks posited the exit, the existence of a logos that was embedded essentially in the material and corporeal world, that there was an intrinsic logic to things, that the world itself was comprehensible and that comprehending the world was good.

And the Jews, essentially in the Christians, had an embodied Logos idea that the human being was a rational creature and an exploratory creature, and that there was a match between that and the world, and that combination of Greece and Jerusalem is one of the sources of Western civilization. But it's very good to be able to conceptualize the Gospel account in that manner, because it, well, it starts to put rationality and the mythos that you described back together, which is, I think, you know, something of cardinal importance for our, and I think it's what's occurring in our current time. Thank you for saying that. I think that was very well articulated.

It, for me, it afforded, because the kind of truth we're talking about is existential truth. We're not talking about just propositional truth. Right. We're talking about the truth that's only, and P.I.J. would agree with this, the kind of truth that only is realized through personal transformation.

Um, but. And embodiment. Yes, of course. And it was so Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates could properly dwell together within, within me. So did you hear, you know, thank you for saying that. I think that was very well articulated and, you know, it afforded me the chance to talk about this.

He's a good sense-making citizen. This is the way you do it. Yeah. You're essentially acknowledging the offering that has been made by your conversation partner and then you're going to respond. You're going to go on to the next thing in the jazz session. So another example of this, Matt. So they're talking at this, in this clip about a kind of seminar that they were part of, like a seminar on the Bible, you know, discussing the Bible with a bunch of sense makers and theologians and so on. And they got to the topic of the resurrection and they were worried this could cause conflict, right?

Because some of them are more metaphorically inclined and some of them are not Christians and whatnot. So this could break up the sense-making jazz. But... Well, we were all worried about the seminar, period. Yeah. jazz. Well, we were all worried about the seminar, period. But I thought it went extremely well and we were very happy to have you there. One of the wonderful things about the Exodus seminar and the Gospel seminar is that that Logos spirit, everybody abided by that Logos spirit 100% of the time, because everybody was trying to extend their knowledge instead of trying to prove that they were right.

Exactly. And that's maybe that's something like the opposite of that pharisaic religious pride that's often conceptualized as the ultimate sin, right? Is that, you know, when you're trying to hammer home your status because you're right about something, that's a completely different game than trying to build something together

that expands you both in the course of the conversation. I think the seminars were flawless examples of that. Everybody played extremely well together, despite very, very few- Like the way you play music. Like the way you play music. Yeah, right. Socrates made

a distinction between phyllo sophia the love of wisdom and phyllo nokia the love of victory and he said the greatest thing that thwarts the love of wisdom is the love of victory i wonder if there's any difference between the love of victory and the worship of power yeah well i mean it's all good sentiments though, isn't it? I mean, loving knowledge, wanting to cooperate in a community of minds to expand knowledge together, not being concerned about winning arguments, but rather looking how you can learn more together. Well, I think it depends in the way that you take it because in the case of jazz, Matt, you're trying to make nice music together, right?

In the case of a seminar, critically evaluating something or whatever, maybe the truth isn't exactly in the middle of everybody's opinions. And like somebody might be wrong about something that feels bad to correct them on, but like they are making a virtue out of engaging in something where everybody comes away feeling that they were respected, feeling that their ideas are heard and whatnot. But like surely the truth wouldn't necessarily make everybody happy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I hear what you're saying. Whereas it's approaching that kind of thing as a form of art. Right. Like play as they say. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and one that is meant to be like a beautiful thing and a beautiful thing to participate in.

And, uh, actually again, this parallel is one of the, the feelings I've had about why I don't like some aspects of the feelings I've had about why I don't like some aspects of the humanities in terms of how they approach things. Because I think they do muddle the practice of art and actual scientific investigation and understanding the world. So art is one thing.

It's, at least to me, I love art. And I happen to like really abstract, crazy, modern, expressionist type art, right? So it's the ultimate kind of free for all jazz, whatever, right? But mixing that together with the task of actually, I don't know, understanding why the Roman Empire fell, for instance, which is one of the big... Or critically examining the Gospels. Yes. Those are two topics.

Exactly. If you turn it into a form of artistic expression, then that's not the right approach to actually get the correct answers to any of those things, I think. No. So there's the positive view where you just like, you know, you don't go into some collective endeavor by being an abrasive thickhead and like insulting everyone that's there, right. And so on. Like there's the interpersonal social aspect of those things where, yes, if people get along and are willing to hear others ideas and whatnot, that this is generally better for the quality of conversation. But there's the issue about indulgence and removing anybody who might be

disruptive of the indulgent conversations. And like you and I, for example, Matt, would not go down well at most sense-making parties because we wouldn't agree to like just yes and everything and ignore the things that people might claim. Yeah, well, we wouldn't be Harmonia's voices in the chorus. And you're right. I mean, this is the thing that, you know, and I think it's fair to say that Vivaki and Jordan are exemplifying in this conversation, which is that they deliberately avoid discordant issues. Right? Vivaki is like a nice, polite guy who generally steers clear of those fraught culture war things.

Jordan Peterson isn't. If he was in different situations, for instance on Twitter, like just in the last four or six hours, his tweets are things like, soon they'll be botching greedy, sadistic, blood double mastectomies on confused girls. Hey, British Columbia, don't vote for the idiots socialists again. You know, Jordan Peterson has many aspects to him, which is not polite philosophical stuff about truth and beauty, but they won't come up here too much. Right.

That's right. Uh, like his conversation with Helen Lewis, for example, that was obviously for Jordan, a deeply unenjoyable conversation because he constantly references it and how mean and how unfair and how cruel and like essentially evil. Helen Lewis was like, because she did normal journalistic practice of asking them critical questions and wasn't the push of her, but Jordan that's remained like a totemic experience and that is anti-sense making that is, you know, you are bringing up stuff that I don't want to talk about.

I like this Helen Lewis, the anti sense maker. She'd be proud of that. Yeah. And so like you heard there at the end of that riff as well, that Jordan said, right. And, you know, love of victory isn't that like worship of power. Right. So we've added a new word like power, right. Victory and power, they're related. But that allows more jazz to happen. And power would be one, because you can unify to some degree with power.

I mean, it produces a counter position, because if you use power on people, they tend to rebel, but at least for some periods of time, you can use command and force to bring together. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it's much better to bring people together in a unity under the aegis of something like the logos, which is that game of genuine exploration and self-transcendence. But maybe there could be a corollary to that,

which would be that if God dies, if the God is logos, and it dies, the deity that rises to replace it is power. Wow. You do what you frequently do. That's very pregnant with a lot of possibilities. I mean, first of all, that notion of dialogue by means of a Logos. And then I think that's something we should practice and do a lot of work about trying to help afford people

being able to practice that as an explicit practice. So I think that's a very valuable thing to say. I think power is one of our senses of realness. I think, and we need it. You talk about this. You talk about the fact that we don't want to be overwhelmed by anomaly. We need to have some power. We need to be able to, our skills have to get a purchase on the world. Right? So yeah, I'm thinking not so much power that that's more of a Nietzschean notion of power, I would say a functional. I'm thinking more of compulsion, right? Like that I can force you to abide by the dictates of my power with power as force, not power so much as

a reality. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's move to there. Because what's really interesting is this and talked about this in the course on the Peterson Academy, the primacy of beauty. Yeah, you know, you see, you see the ideas like the fact you said they're pregnant with possibilities. Yeah. You can do that so frequently, Jordan. You don't want the fully.

Yeah, it does. It does. It does. So victory power over others, as opposed to an each game power, which is competency, which is a good thing, in control over your environment, perhaps. But they have the god, which is also the Logos. The Logos. God and the Logos. The Logos. The Logos.

The Logos. Yeah. Then what rises is kind of the devil, which is the power thing, which- Totalitarianism. Or wokeness, I think, compared to- Yeah, well, I think you get the double entendre of the totalitarian urge to power, which they anyway, or Jordan at least, conflates with Wookness and totalitarianism, one the same. But also that their postmodern Marxist approach is so concerned with power. Foucaultian analysis is obsessed with power relations.

So that's the devil that's rising to replace. And the alternative, Chris, is dialogical practice. Yeah, there was a lot of practice. There was, you know, I feel a little bit mean in this case. There was a sentence saying, like, that's something we practice, practice we should practice do a lot of work if i tried to help afford people being able to practice that as an explicit practice yeah yeah well at least when i'm saying praxis that's well true but you know that's that's just the nature of people riffing on things immediately because you can hear at times where they're like what i want to say by power okay Okay, what about this? Right?

I mean, it is like verbal jazz. It's just like, well, what about power in the sense that, you know, power determines realness, right? Like, because isn't like objective force to do with powers. You're like, wow, that's all into another, you know. Like Chris isn't a child, you know, a child interacting with his environment, learning to see how they can interact with the environment. They see they could just even to knock over a cup that they've exerted some

power over the world and therefore it becomes real for them. They can become a real entity, an embodied entity inhabiting the world. Fascinating stuff. So that's right. So remember we started off here with the gospel seminar and sense making, conversation, dialogos, right? Then we got to love of victory, which morphed over to power. Now we've went to power and some riffs that. And thank you for making those like interesting

points. And you heard for Vakhi at the end, they're say, what about beauty? Right? So what about beauty? And that produces a sense of disharmony and rebellion. It could be that the reason that beauty and love can be compelling without being powerful in that compulsion way is that they speak to something like an emergent harmony of value that's part and parcel, you might say, of the soul. So beauty could compel you forward in part because if you, it might be that if you integrated your values properly, you would be naturally oriented in consequence of the makeup of your soul towards those things that beauty and love are pointing to. Right, and let's not remember, beauty and love are also overlapping with reason,

and you need reason because you have to care about the right things to reason well. Yes, you have to care about the right things, which implies that there are right things to care about. And so notice what you're doing. And that goes back to the microcosm, macrocosm, you know, yeah, right, is that moment where the principle, the grammar of my cognition and the grammar of reality are calling to each other, they could, and it could interpenetrate. That's right. And you know, I can't give you an argument to prove that that's the case because every argument Presupposes that in some sense the grammar of reason and the grammar of reality

Must have some deep harmony and the same thing with love and the same thing with beauty Like and these are profound ways in which I think I think faith Well, I think faith is actually the willingness to posit the reality of that truth in the absence of final proof. Okay, let's talk about that because I think that's really important because there's different notions of faith. Wow, yeah. It is certainly pregnant with possibilities.

It's prolific. Yeah, so many concepts and words getting woven in there and they're all related. It's all the big hits, isn't it? It's all the big ideas. Power, realness, God, logos. Beauty, love. Beauty, love, reason. The soul.

The microcosm and microcosm, got to shout out. Yeah, that's right. Can't forget the microcosm and the Marco Cosm and the, you know, but how do we reconcile the fact because isn't beauty and love a form of power, but but it isn't a bad form of power because because it integrates rather than imposes its will. Look, it really isn't possible to comment on this except almost just bask in the jazz of it. Like it is word smithing, isn't it? It is... Well, I mean, I'm going to stop here for following this train of thought,

but just to note that like at the end there, they moved on to fear. So it wasn't finished. You actually heard for Vavaki say, you know, well, this is really interesting because this brings up notions of fear. Like there's different definitions of fief. So he's going to go into discussion of the different ways that you can have fief. So it's traveled all over these different concepts with profaned insets being implied. But a lot of it is a vibe.

It is a vibe. So I'm not saying that they aren't constructing a dialogous conversation and like, you know, a kind of semantic network of things, but it's very thin. A lot of it rests on riffing on words and concepts. Like one person mentions a concept. Yeah, like traversing the semantic web. Yeah, and it's almost demonstrating to the other person how capable you are to take a concept, integrate it with references to philosophers and psychologists and theories, and then hand it on to another topic. Right? And as long as you can

both keep riffing and both connecting it back to the topic, you can see why Jordan regards this conversation as like an instantiation of the divine. Yeah. But like you said at the beginning, the truly ironic thing is that this is so much like constructivist postmodern philosophy. It's all about words and semantic concepts being disconnected from a material reality and creating this arbitrary structure. And they enjoy it so much. The audience enjoys it. I was reading the YouTube comments and they love this stuff. And I can understand why without being mean or looking down at people, whatever.

You know, who doesn't want to hear about beauty and love being connected with meaning and truth. And you're learning about Plato and you're learning about Socrates and you're learning about Plato and you're learning about Socrates and you're learning about P.H.A.'s developmental research. You're hearing all these big thinkers, all these philosophical ideas condensed down into a very enjoyable conversation with people being polite, praising each other for their insights. There is a very an aspect of this, which is social

primates love this shit. Like we, we, we do worship social interactions, like in a way. And there, there is a vast contrast between, between this and the kinds of conversations I have as a workaday researcher. These goddamn people, you know, criticizing my work, finding fault with it, asking me to revise things, having to justify things, they're having to redo it. It's not particularly pleasant and it's not particularly aesthetic. But it's just like, this is the recreational version.

Obviously, Matt, we're quite critical about this style of conversation, although we recognize that other people enjoy it. Right. But I will say that the criticism is not entirely without substance. Right. It isn't just a stylistic thing, because one, we are suggesting that a lot of the things are less profound than they are communicated. And that a lot of profundity is being injected by the reaction of the co-participant. If you had somebody that was more willing to say, well, hold on, so why aren't you just saying that, that, that, right? That would break things.

Like, yeah, critical commentary of any kind, like even a mild sort. I don't quite follow it. I don't see how that necessarily implies this. Couldn't be the case that this is the case? That would be allowed as long as that was only done once. You didn't keep saying, well, I don't think that actually follows, or that kind of thing. But another aspect that I want to highlight about why I'm more than just aesthetically displeased by this kind of approach to things. As Jordan does this a lot, where in invoking concepts and ideas,

you've seen it like in conversations we've seen with Bret Weinstein, that they both talk as if they're building up these very complex, robust, semantic and theoretical constructs to understand how the world functions and whatnot. But a lot of it is just based on their intuitions, like their self-generated concepts from the other didactic insights. Right? And here's an example where Jordan Peterson starts talking about his intuitions about psychopathology. Well, that seems to me to be associated too with this idea of higher order, ethical virtue. So, of course, let me walk through this with you for a second. Tell me what you think. Well,

I've been thinking more and more about general psychopathology as a failure of maturation. Right. So like being a psychopath is that what like being a psychopath? Being a psychopath is a good example of that because two-year-olds, for example, are radically egocentric. They can't play with others. They can't occupy a shared mental space. They can't take turns. There's some proto-sharing that emerges, but they're not sophisticated, for example, at sharing toys.

So the typical two-year-old, and some of them are much more like this than others, are pretty... they're oriented to the particular, is they learn how to bring another party into their goal-directed space and to unify their desires, their whims, their motivational states with that of another. That's how they make a friend. Is that what you mean by going up this hierarchy? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So now you can imagine these primordial motivational states and emotions and we kind of know what the basic ones are. They're all pointers, fractionated pointers in an upward direction, but the upward direction actually emerges as a consequence of their interactions across time, but not only across time, across time in a social space, and they weave themselves together. And this would be something like Jacob's Ladder from the bottom up. They weave themselves together.

So he's been thinking about child maturation from the ages of two to four, which is a topic that's been studied quite a bit by developmental psychologists. And it's occurred to him that aren't they a bit like psychopaths because they're very, you know, selfish and they don't play nice. Um, and then what came next? What was his, what was his new idea? No, that's it. That's it.

He was just elaborating on the, I mean, he's going to go on in the material, right? To like flesh this out, but he's essentially thought that since two year olds are egocentric and psychopaths are selfish and egocentric that maybe, you know, they're kind of... Oh yeah, we can think of psychopaths as a failure of maturation. Right. So, you know, it's an idea. It's not a particularly good idea. It's not a very good idea. No, I mean, there's lots of problems with it because it's not a particularly good idea. It's not a very good idea. No, I mean, there's lots of problems with it because it's not founded on anything

apart from exactly what you said. It's an intuition. He's noticed that these two things have this thing in common. So maybe it's the case that one of these things, the adult state, is a case of that, right? I mean, there's not much there. So as an illustration, Matt, like with that particular clip,

if we were to look at it in a non-Omega rule kind of way. Right. So Jordan is drawing a parallel between the egocentricism of two year olds, like their developmental capacity, right? They lack theory of mind. This is one of the issues. They're not good at modeling others having different thoughts and feelings, right? So they're very egocentric individuals, in part because they're unaware of others' minds, right? Now, he likens that to psychopaths and thinks like maybe psychopaths are stuck at that developmental stage, but there's obvious issues there.

Yes, there is a parallel you can make that. Well, both of those things, psychopaths and two year olds are egocentric, but there's quite a lot of crucial differences as well, like, for example, psychopaths don't lack theory of mind typically, right? They're perfectly able to model others having minds and different wants and whatnot. What they tend to lack is empathy for what other people want, but it's not because they don't have any theory of mind. And also, yes, some psychopaths have shown in various studies to be more sensation

seeking and impulsive than normal people. But this does not mean that they cannot engage in long term planning. As anybody with the kind of stereotypical view of a psychopath would know, many of them have famously engaged in rather detailed long-term plans to satisfy their... Of which, Dexter, I know how it goes. You know how it goes. Well, you've probably done as much work as Jordan has. done as much work as Jordan has. But there like, so there is strategic and goal orientated behavior observed in psychopaths. So the parallel is really rather shallow that he wants to draw. And it's unlikely that it's going to be that psychopaths are egocentric narcissists because

they stopped developing that too. Right. Because if they stop mentally developing it too, there would be a whole host of other issues about the cognitive maturation that would be problematic. So he's just basically saying, yeah, that there's an egocentric thing. There's an egocentric thing. And it's not an incorrect parallel to draw, but it's because he's just working from this vibe-fierce association that these kind of connections seem like very profound. And I think they can sound profound at a superficial level,

but they would break down if you have subjected it to critical scrutiny. Yeah, exactly. If you look at the etiology of psychological disorders of various kinds and psychopathologies, yeah, you can notice superficial similarities with immature humans, but that doesn't necessarily give you any insight into how that disorder came about and what are the structural forces. So yes, you could list off those, those similarities, like you said, um, egocentric behavior and so on, but there's awful lot of dissimilarities as well. And in a completely different set of causes, right? Yes. I mean, you're talking about your problem with this, with this talk, right?

And I may as well set out a few of mine now. One is I obviously just don't subscribe to this humanity style, I don't know what to call it, sense making, maybe it's European philosophy, I don't know how to classify it, but it's certainly post-modern. And working through analogies and metaphors and relating things to using concepts from the Bible and stuff like that to understand psychology. None of it is evidence driven. It's all driven by intuitions and vibes, like you said, from your reading of the Bible and so on.

And it takes so long to say anything because really, they really enjoy the process of talking more than actually just spelling something out nice and briefly. It's very elaborate and baroque. And there's absolutely no appetite for critical analysis. There is only an appetite for yes-ending and going, well, that's very interesting. Yes, how can I take that and then do something else with it? So the conversation drifts around from one thing to another, incorporating everything from love to God to psychopaths to whatever

And then after two and a half hours the conversation ends and then in a couple of weeks They're going to have another one and they've been doing it for years So I don't really approve They said this is time to resolve. I bet you it's not As I bet you in a couple of years, we're still talking about the meaning crisis returned. It's like resurrection. Resurrection. Yeah.

So, you know, you said, Matt, that like, this is Jordan Stiles speaking. It takes ages to say the most straightforward thing because he has to give examples and extended metaphors and whatnot. But I think bits like this also interrupt, you know, we were talking about the kind of fairly indulgent way that you have to respond to somebody offering something. So here's the case of that. There's nothing about that that isn't highly constrained and orderly. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is very frivolous, I think very highly of what you're saying.

It's convergent with a lot of things that I also think highly of. I mean, this is, I mean, this is very frivolous, I think very highly of what you're saying. It's convergent with a lot of things that I also think highly of. I mean, this is Habermas's proposal of universal pragmatics, that there is in the very act of communication, and he doesn't mean simply information exchange, he means in the very act of the logos, which I agree with him, he is necessary for a properly functioning society, let alone a properly functioning society, let alone a properly functioning democracy. You gotta say, you know, look, that was a very valuable incentive. Actually it parallels the insights of Habermas, who I really respect because I agree with

him on these and the concept of this is very important. But especially Matt, I think very highly of what you're saying. And I've had, you know, thoughts which are aligned in a way with that. So let me elaborate, but like almost every conversation, but you have to add in how much you got from the thing that the person has went on to say. And like, like you and I, for instance, rarely do that with each other. I mean, because, you know, I mean, I don't think normal people do. You don't, you don't really need to. It happens a bit. It happens a bit. It like, you know, if you analyze conversations, people tend to

say something positive and affirm and then like switch the topic to talk about something that they want to talk about or whatever. Like this is, you know, but it's so labored in a sensual environment that it feels a little bit like I returned to Victorian era where you're like, well, my good gentleman friend there made an insightful commentary that I did find intellectually stimulating and my diet to that, that the venerable parity said at the party last week that, you know, it just it feels, dare I say, performative. Whereas their presentation of it is that it embodies the true nature of the universe and the cosmos. Like this kind of Prius is, you know, the correct way to have a conversation. And I don't know, it's one way to have a conversation.

I don't know if it embodies the pure nature of the, you know, the underlying essence animating the universe to do it. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, conversations are conversations, right? We're having conversation right now, Chris. And, you know, most podcasts are based on that. We're analyzing a conversation. We're having conversation about conversation I guess what I'm saying is that you know, it's fine. Anyone can have a conversation about anything Competitions. No, there's no premium on competitions. I don't think one should overstate the significance of them. No.

As a way of figuring out how the world works. It's like you could take some academics and go into a common room after they've had a couple of Sherries or something in Oxford or whatever, and you could find an indulgent conversation like this. Maybe something comes out of it. But ultimately, I think anything important that comes out of this kind of thing, I don't know, it has to get written down. You have to do some more work in order to actually get something useful out of it. If it's not just going to be a source of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.

Well, Matt, one thing that might undercut the profundity of this conversation is this is hosted on the DealyWire platform? Ben Shapiro's network. So periodically there are advertisements that come in. And I just want to play one that bust into this high-minded discussion of the offering of conversation and the secret values and beauty and love and passion. And then... Ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about something that matters, your wellbeing. In a world where traditional values are under siege, it's crucial to stay strong mentally and physically. Enter Responsible Man, a daily wire ventures company that understands what it means to be a pillar of strength in these challenging times. They've created the Emerson Multivitamin not for the faint of heart, but for men who shoulder their responsibilities with pride.

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vitamin pill. Multivitamin. Real strength comes from a van and apparently from a multivitamin. For strong men to be stronger. To help you fight the culture battle. They literally say it will give you fuel for the culture battle. What he said is it's got nothing in it but pure American craft. He said craftsmanship in a weird way. It sounded like he was going to say something else. Pure American craftsmanship. Yeah.

Craftsmanship. Yeah. Just like that is the most culture war Breein did. Like that's an Alex Jones level out. I just want the highlight. It might sound like this is a bit unfair. Well, you know, Jordan, this is just a daily wire putting in, you know, the advertisements, he doesn't have the control over it.

He chose the partner with Ben Shapiro. This is going out on that network. If you want to hear the additional conversation with John Vervache, you have to subscribe to the, you know, the bonus. So like, that's a reality of this, this high-minded conversation about the beauty of nature and conversations, it is grounded in the partisan online platform of the Daily Wire.

And actually we'll get into it more because there's more stuff that comes up, but that was particularly jarring because it's like a parody of a fucking Red Pill advertisement, right? Like responsible man. Are you a resilient responsible man? Did you work hard? Like, you know, oh God. So yeah. Good, good, good, good, good. Contrasting the responsible man responsible man, just to finish off in this point about the dialogus and the kind of worship of the word, which I observe in the sense making sphere. Here's Jordan talking about

how fundamental this aspect of the word is to society and the US in particular. Right, right. No, the process. The process is like... Well, and you added another layer to that, which is relevant with regards to emergence, because you know, you could say, well, we have to conduct ourselves in a certain manner, like all the participants did, let's say at the gospel seminar, in order for everyone to want to continue the process in the highest possible manner. But then you could also say that that works for you psychologically because it's compelling and interesting, and it works for both of us practically because we learn. But then as you expand the social, as you expand the size of the group that that process is operating in, you start to see a concordance between the operation of that dialogus and the possibility of sophisticated complex societies emerging that aren't predicated on power. And I think that's why we have, for example, in the United States, we have the First Amendment. It's because it's a recognition that something like you have the right to engagement in the dialogos, not merely because

it's a right, let's say, because you're made in the image of God, or it's a right because the state grants it. It's actually a right because it's a necessary precondition for the maintenance of the society as such, and that's not arbitrary. It's like it works for you, it works for the people you're immediately communicating with, but it also works to stabilize society across long spans of time and to make it grow. And so you can't dispense with that without bringing the whole hierarchy. I want to add to it. Yeah. There's always more layers that can be brought in. So in simple terms, Chris, he's saying, well, first of all, reasoned discussion between equals, dialogous is a good thing.

It's nice. It increases the total sum of wisdom and understanding in the world. And on a bigger scale, the scale of a country where the politics are based in principle on, you know, the democracy, parliaments, the senates, things like that, where people supposedly discuss policies, discuss issues, and then come to reasoned decisions about them is better than like a power-based one, I suppose, like a king and his dukes just making stuff up and forcing people to do things. Yeah, although I think he's arguing that it's more, he is making that point, but he's also making the point that like it's more fundamental.

It's like the primordial building block of society is this like dialogue. So like, it's not just about politics. That is an instantiation of it. But he specifically says that the First Amendment is not like because of people being made in the image of God, or it's not a right granted by a state. It is a component that allows society to function. But that's like, that is also not real. Again, you can see what he's saying, right?

It's important to democratic functioning and like social interaction that you have exchanges. But actually the first amendment is something that is guaranteed by a specific political nation state, right? The U.S. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. That does sound like a steed granting a specific legal protection to a variety of rights. So he's saying it's not that, but that is what it is. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess in simple terms, it is a construct, right, specific to the United States. Countries like Australia, we famously don't have explicit constitutional protections for free speech.

On the other hand, we still have a lot of free speech in Australia, so it's not like a necessary precondition. It is, I think, something that sort of societies tend to kind of invent. Like, you know, there were laws in the, in England, right? Merry old England. When the printing press stuff first came about, then they were shutting them down all over the place when they didn't like the kinds of stuff they were printing. And that gradually changed.

So, I mean, I'm not quite sure what he's saying. Is it a necessary thing that any society has to have or any good society has to have? I don't know. Yeah, I think, you know, it's just his worship of the logos, right? This is the example of it. But one of the issues there is like, it's presented that essentially what they did at the gospel seminar, which I imagine, haven't listened to, but I have seen their Exodus discussion. And that is largely an indulgent discussion amongst people that, yes, they have different positions, right? You know, they have different theological specific beliefs and whatnot, but they're all sense maker inclined Jordan Peterson guys, right? You don't have people there that are going to cause too much friction. And Jordan says that's the fundamental nature of, you know, like we expand out the gospel seminar and the spirit of what was happening there

and you create society and you create nations. But actually, like nations tend to come from robust debates and disagreements and people arguing the case for like, this is a better way to organize than that. It's not from these like super indulgent, polite, yes sounding. Like even if you go back to antiquity, there is quite a lot of the beard valuing more robust exchanges than you see in the sense maker. So he's basically saying what me and my friends do is the fundamental holy unit of social progress. And you're like, is it?

No, that's not, it's, it's clearly not right. Like from ancient Greece to modern America, there's very few public debates where people were yes, anding each other and saying, oh, let me add another layer to what my colleague on the other side of the chamber has said, and then expands on it and grows and everyone leaves feeling. So what about harmony? What about harmony? Have we considered harmony?

There's a really good sketch between Fry and Laurie, you know, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. And it's a very good parody of this. Exactly this kind of thing. And this was before the Sand Speakers, right? It's from the 90s, I think that club. Yeah, because this kind of thing has always existed in certain areas of academia, right? Here's a question.

What is it? Ah, well, my question is this. Is our language English capable? Is English capable of sustaining demagoguery? Demagoguery? Demagoguery. And by demagoguery you mean? By demagoguery I mean demagoguery.

I thought so. I mean, um, highly charged oratory, persuasive, whipping up rhetoric. Listen to me, listen to me. If England had been British, would we, under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged out, fired up by his inflammatory speeches or would we simply have laughed? Is English too ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles? Would his language simply have rung false in our ears? We're talking about things ringing false in our ears. Um, may I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? May I?

Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on? Or do those qualities come extrinsically, extrinsically, from the language itself? It's a chicken and egg problem. We're talking about chickens. We're talking about eggs Let me start a lever at here. Um, there's language and There's speech. Um, there's there's chess and there's a game of chess

Mark the difference for me. Mark it, please We've moved on to chess Imagine a piano keyboard, 88 keys, only 88 and yet, and yet hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Yeah, we'll link to it in the show notes. I actually watched that recently, Chris. It was very funny. Yeah, it's just a very good parody. And the fact that it maps so well to the kind of thing that you see in the sensemaking sphere, I think speaks to the primordial nature of this pattern that resonates across different

communities in time. So, you know, though, but we heard responsible man intruding the daily wire platform coming in. But this conversation is not all lofty discussion of philosophical concepts and words. There is some more grounded material in that and it has a particular flavor. So I'll play you a clip, which I think is illustrative of the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Yeah. When what did you think of the tour? What was that like for how many times? How many days did you spend with me? And was it three or four?

I can't remember. Yeah, I think it was four. Yeah. Um, I had a really good time. Uh, and, um, I enjoyed, I enjoyed our dinners. You and I got to reconnect on a more personal level, which I deeply appreciated. I thought that I mean, it was like touring with a rock star. I've told people I enjoy touring with a rockstar. I don't want to be the rockstar. That's you can you can have that. But I enjoyed it a lot. Your staff was fantastic. I enjoyed, there was electricity, some places

more than others. And then you and I having, it was really powerful in the way we were talking about earlier, after you gave a talk and that electricity was there and to sit with you and talk afterwards. Or even before, you were gracious, you would have let me to sort of talk a little bit about who I was before I introduced you and feeling even that a little bit there. A lot of people, especially the last one, because in the last one I didn't go back.

I actually booked in a hotel right across right across from the convention center. And a lot of people were there from the event. And I got to talk to a lot of them. And there was a lot of them that, of course, they were expressing appreciation for you, but a lot of them were expressing a lot of appreciation for me and my work. And I, that was very, very, very, very encouraging. So there was a lot about it that I enjoyed.

Like I said. So he really had a good time. Really, really liked that tour. Now, Chris, is this the We Who Wrestle With God tour? Yeah, probably. Actually, I imagine that must be it. It's one of Jordan's speaking tours. You know, he's done them with various different people. And I guess this is one of his recent ones. So it probably is the We Who Wrestle with God tour. Cool. Well, okay. So they had a nice time. It was a great tour. Okay. That was established that. So, I mean, fine. This is France talking about the nice time they had the Geller, but like,

there is something, I don't know, you can call me cynical or analyzing things too much, right? But like, isn't it a bit weird? Like in this relationship, Jordan Peterson is the bigger star and he is the one that is inviting John Vervache on the tour with him. And we'll see all the things that he's invited him on. And then on this podcast, he's like, tell me about the experience. How was it? And like, what does he think he's going to get back there? Oh, it was OK, but I didn't really enjoy it.

Like, so no, he got back. You know, it was great. It was so fantastic. You're a rock star. And George is like, uh huh, uh huh. And I'm like, what's that's exactly for? Because this might be something that you ask someone in private, right? But this is a recorded conversation that goes out to millions of people or Jordan's subscribers. So isn't it a bit weird? How much

do you like doing the podcast with me? Well, hang on. I'm the big dog in this. You should be, I should be asking you how much, and I don't generally ask you how it is. No, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess, um, you know, a bit of promotion of the tour and, um, is, is, is. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe that's what it's about. Right. But I, I do think, I do make an extents to more than that. So like, first of all, just to mention as well, I think it's useful to remember the kind of people that, you know, are in this ecosystem and active touring around

for Jordans. It was really good to have you there to provide an informed overview of what I had presented, because I'm presenting things that are spontaneous. And so it's very good to, and for the audience as well, to have that reflected and then criticized in the proper critical sense, because the proper critical sense is separation of the wheat from the chaff, not derogation of everything as chaff. And so it's very helpful for people to see that modeled, but also to have it happen. And so I thought we did a good job at that. Yeah, I think so.

Oh yeah. Well, it was fun. We'll do it again. Yeah, it worked so. Oh yeah. Well, it was fun. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll do it again. Yeah. It worked out real well. It was good too, because I had you and Constantine Kissen and Jonathan Pagio along and I've also traveled with Douglas Murray and Rex Murphy. And so all of that, that's all been extremely good to have that second party in there to third party in there to interrogate.

Right. Yeah. And I'm sure Constantine Kissen and Jonathan Pascho, they're really pushing back at Jordan quite hard. Like you heard the Omega rule restated there, right. In another form, separate the wheat from the chaff, but crucially make sure that that's what the focus is on. Like what were the best bits?

Be critical, but not critical in like an overly critical sense because that's not real cynicism. No, just helping people see the gold that is buried in there. Yeah, no, definitely a group of like-minded people there that's accompanied Jordan on his tours. I'm interested in this We Who Wrestle with God tour. Sounds great.

It's cosmic, man. Well, I guess it's the same old themes, isn't it? Basically inspired by the Bible, drawing these metaphysical themes from it, making stories, weaving out these narratives and stories from it to have this mental struggle to find a united sense of meaning in the world and how society should prioritize things. But, you know, given what people like Constantine Kissin and Douglas Murray, given the people that are with him and Jordan Peterson himself, it's pretty clear what, what the social priorities are.

No, those are good people to push back. My very critical as well. So like you say, I guess this is promotion of the tour, but, um, allow me like another illustration of the kind of thing I'm talking about. And if you'll allow me, you, uh, by behind the curtain off camera, you treat your people very well and that impressed me throughout, uh, you treat your people very well. And that impressed me throughout. You've risen to quite a bit of influence and notoriety, and people have been twisted by that in certain ways.

And I was very impressed by how gracious you were with your staff, with your people, how kind you were. You know, part of that, there's kind of a... What would you say? I think that's an important thing to note. It's an important thing to watch for when you're evaluating people. That's what I was doing. Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, I understand that. So, Vivekhi evaluated... If you don't lie to me. Yep. I just want to give you some unabashed praise for a moment here publicly. Yes, Vivek was observing him closely and to see how well he treated people, even when the camera wasn't running, Chris, which he may well do. Right. Yeah, I suspect that could be like a true report, but it's again, like it's free as well.

You know, if you let me say this, right? Like I realized this could be, and Jordan is like, well, that is an important thing to evaluate someone on, right? But it's talking as if it's not him being praised. So like what we're back here saying is, you know, you're such a wonderful person behind the scenes and people don't know that about you.

And Jordan is like, well, that is important, isn't it? It's important to know how good people are, but the people in this example are him. And then Bravack says, yeah, that's what my point is. And he's like, yeah, I get that. That's great. And it's just like, again, this isn't a private conversation breaking down the tour. It's a public podcast praising Jordan Peterson for being, you know, like a good guy. And like, for Vrvaki specifically talked to people being twisted by their notoriety. And anybody who objectively looks at Jordan's content online and his behavior, would have to acknowledge he is someone that has been twisted by his prominence and notoriety. His Twitter feed is just an endless parade of outrage and clickbait reacting to titles. He had a thing,

decrying psychoanalytical approaches alongside hospitals and medicine. Right. So he's added to that. And he is a demagogue, but he's being like kind of praised here for his balance and, you know, ability to stay above it all. And you're like, but he doesn't actually, you know, like, there's a huge contradiction that's coming down. And I know for Vavacky is commenting on his like behavior on the tour, but that's part of his behavior as well.

Yeah. Jordan is, is on extremely good behavior when he's talking to John Vavacky, but you know, it is remarkable that, you know, John, who was so closely intertwined with Jordan Peterson's activities, has such a studied blindness. Like it is if he is completely unaware of what Jordan does with the rest of his time, which is, it's not like a minor thing. His, his culture, ant culture, antics, his railing against hospitals or vaccines and all of these things. It seems like it's a studied ignorance, I have to say.

It's understandable that you're not going to want to be confrontational all the time, but if you're going to spend so much time paying attention to all the things that make Jordan Peterson such an awesome guy, then maybe you have to pay attention a little bit to other stuff. On that subject, have you considered how good a manager he is? I saw you delegating without question. And that's a marker too. I look for that in people. I look for, in people. I look for can they delegate

authority? Can they trust people to run with things? And you were basically, to my mind, you were managing things from sort of 30,000 feet above. You're giving sort of general orientation or I want that. And you'd have specific things here and there. But other than that, people would say we need to do this. We need to come here and you go, okay. And you were just like... Well, the other advantage, I mean, there's a bunch of advantages to that as a managerial style. I mean the first advantage is for me, it frees me up to concentrate on only what's necessary. So when I thought through, well what's necessary for the tour to work and to continue? Well it's necessary that Tammy comes along with me and that she has a role and that that works.

Okay, so that has to be set up. And it is. Then it's necessary for me to get there. Like, no matter what, right? I have to be there like an hour ahead, period. And then I have to do a good job. And that's really the three things. And so everything else has been farmed out to other people. You know, the hotel logistics, the flights, the meals, all of the scheduling of my days, other people take care of that. And then if they do that fully, then I'm very happy about that. And they have something that's really crucial to do and can take pride in their work and are committed to it. I mean, people often ask me, like, how do you do it, Matt? How do you do this podcast?

And I say, it's very simple. I think about what has to happen and for the podcast to occur. One, you have to be here. That's essential, Chris. You have to be here. Two, I have to be here too. I have to turn up at the time

that we have arranged beforehand. And if I focus on those things and I delegate other extra news to other people, then that's how it happens. It's really quite simple. People, it's not great mystery. People think it's very, very hard. Actually, as long as you delegate and you focus on what's important, you can make it happen.

Well, and there's a lot of people behind the scenes that don't get credit. You know, your family are making food, you're making food, right? But also your children, they give you support, your colleagues give you ideas. Yeah, like Jordan here is really, it is making a mountain out of a molehill with how did I do a tour? But it also started with Vrvaki being like, another thing that's good about you, Jordan, you're a great delegator. And he's like, yes, I am. I have a great delegator.

This is how I delegate. Yeah. And what I delegate are things like flights and meals and travel-a-ridge, right? And you're like, right, yeah, we know. We know our delegation works. But it's, and again, yes, it's a nice thing to say, but it goes on. God forbid. Examples of this. And I don't know, is somebody being able to undertake

a tour and like delegate other people arranging their flights and hotels. Is that really a huge marker of the quality of a person? It's a marker of exceptionalness, Chris. No, but seriously, I mean, this mode of of back padding, like really, really strong praise of each other. This is a constant theme amongst the Guru set, right? You listed any stuff from Eric Weinstein, people talking to Joe Rogan. There's a lot of- Sam Harris. Sam Harris.

There's a lot of kissing of butts, I have to say, in this set. Like the regard in which, to which they hold each other, in like, unless someone's having a spat, which does happen from time to time, is difficult to measure. It's extraordinary. It's like a French court. It's how I imagine, you know, the French, maybe the French court had more bite.

This is how they talk to the king. Yeah. This is how a courtier talks to the king, right? Louis the sun king. Oh my Lord. You know, you could be the, the Lord of the privy, the privy seal or something like that, and you congratulate the king on his wonderful bowel movements. Very magnificent.

Well, so that was about the tour, right, that they went on together. But there were other topics to cover, Matt. So for example. So you taught a course for Peterson Academy. Let's talk a little bit about your experience, first of all. So as you remember, and you graciously said recently in the Toronto Star interview, you know, I offered you the possibility of coming to teach for us about absolutely anything you wanted to teach

about. So walk us through the experience and the course. And then I'll update you a little bit about the state of the art with regard to this endeavor. First of all, I want to thank the reporter, the reporter reached out to me at the last moment and said, I'm going to do this. And I do you want to talk? And I said, I bet I really do want to talk, because I wanted to be clear. And I didn't, I'm not attributing anything to this person. But I get this, I've been misquoted before. Yeah, right, right. And so then there's a couple things I want, and I was very insistent on. So I'm happy that it came out the way it came out. So I just want to express the,

as far as I can tell, the reporter was true to their word. And I think that's honorable. And when reporters are honorable, we should honor them. Absolutely. Have we got the feedback yet, Matt? We're going to get to that. But just to note, you know, the reporter, I imagine, didn't do what they would consider a hit piece and quoted, you know, feverable feedback. So this is an honorable reporter. Now, a reporter who had written a critical piece of the Peterson Academy, I wonder if they would have been regarded as honorable.

I don't think it's possible to be honorable in Jordan's framework and be highly critical of him. I can't think of any examples, put it that way. But Jordan said, let's get your feedback on my Academy, which I invited you for and you taught a course on. I would imagine there is some compensation for that. But nonetheless, nice to be asked. So here's Ravacky discussing his experience.

So first of all, let's go going through the experience. Pleased throughout all three times. I don't know if I should mention any names but like Vincent the person, excellent just fantastic. Your crews are fantastic, super professional, gracious, careful, competent, inviting, good welcoming, constantly checking with me about my needs, how can we improve this, how can we do this, right? And just... Good, glad to hear that.

That's what I've said consistently to everybody who asked me about it. It's very, very professional. I want to make clear what I made clear in the interview. When you reached out to me and I wrote you an email and I said, I don't consider myself a conservative or a Christian. Do you want me on this? And you said, of course I do. I want you to, and you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy.

I have had it through every course. You said, and I've said this on video, so I'm happy to say it again. I want you to teach the course you've always wanted to teach. Yeah. And true, true to your word all the way through for all of these courses so far. I'm proud, genuinely proud of all of the courses

I've done for you. Great, great. Well, we're dead serious about that. I mean, my intention in identifying people is that I am bringing people to the platform whose views I wanna hear. And I actually wanna hear them. And so that means that the constraints have to be lifted. It's like, no, I want to hear what you have

to say. And so, and it's such a wonderful thing to be able to afford people this possibility because you know, when you're teaching at a university, you have an approximation of that, but you're subject to a whole set of constraints, some of which are necessary and some of which just are entirely arbitrary. And it's not helpful because you can't wander where the spirit takes you can't follow the logos exactly exactly. And you need to be able to do that. And I think we I've taught three courses for Peterson Academy to

Yep, lavish, lavish praise. Was it inviting? Inviting? Would you say inviting? Yes, inviting. I like how he was struggling to find more praising words. Jordan helped him out a little bit there. Yeah, now this is obviously one of Jordan's many ventures, which they're collaborating on and just praising the hell out of it, out of each other.

It was absolutely great. The tour, the Academy, I'm sure anything else that they work on together will be deserving of lots and lots of public mutual congratulation. It is notable, however, though, that he considered this huge virtue that he gives people editorial control of the content, right? Which I would consider like the bare minimum, if you were going to ask someone to contribute a course. But nonetheless, here it's a, you know, this is absolutely unheard of levels of freedom, right? But also he talks about it as if he wants it worse and all, just people tell it the way

they're going to tell it. He's not going to put his finger on the scales and whatnot. But like when you look at the people contributing at Peterson Academy, they are very carefully curated. Yeah, there are people like he said, whose views he wants to hear, which is Bret Weinstein and Heller Heying, Eric Kaufman, the conservative political scientist guy. Eric Kaufman, the conservative political scientist guy, Brian Keating, noted conservative religious seeking physicist online want to be influencer and Rob Henderson complaining luxury beliefs person and so on.

The only person I've heard him mention that he would actually have fundamental disagreements was that he invited Richard Dawkins to contribute to the course. And like, obviously, that's because Richard Dawkins is extremely famous, and it would be a very big deal if he provided a course. So yeah. I know, I know, I know. I mean, it is ironic, isn't it? Because the thing that purportedly inspired these independent, alternative, red-pilled universities to get started was this lack of ideological diversity. Yeah. Universities, but my God, the standard university looks like a rainforest compared in terms of diversity compared to the monoculture of ideas that are there in Jordison Academy. Yeah. Jordison Academy.

I like that. Just on, on that Dawkins point, but so here's where this was mentioned by the way. Well, I would recommend if you're interested in this sort of thing, check out Peterson Academy, check out John Vervecki's courses, check out Jonathan Pagio's courses, my courses. They definitely make a tight unit and there are other thinkers on the site whose thought is, what would you say, well sometimes opposed to that. I invited Richard Dawkins, by the way, to lecture for us. So, you know, and we don't necessarily see it eye to eye on everything to say the least. So, but there is a developing consensus around the kinds of issues that John is bringing up. And I think you can be most rapidly, perhaps you can be most rapidly exposed to what that is on the Peterson Academy site.

So his best example of somebody, you know, with ideological diversity is someone that didn't contribute to the Academy. And he correctly identifies Peugeot, Brevecky and him as like a tight interconnected unit. And that Pearson Academy is the front lines for resolving the meaning crisis. So yeah, there's like kind of nods to ideological diversity but no actual clear indicators. Just like some people don't agree with everything I say.

Yeah. No, no. The theme is clearly like a, it's a Christian inspired metaphysical. Yeah. I don't know how to describe the particular field of philosophy in which Peugeot might be placed or Vervaqui, but it is a very specific kind of approach. Yeah. And so just to finish off this part, Matt, there's one more example. I don't know if you listen to much of Infowars, but one of the things that he's fond of doing is revealing his audience with stories of where people have come up and talked about like how correct he is and how amazing, like how everybody agrees with him.

Right? This is something Alex Jones does all the time. And Jordan, during this conversation, felt that important to point out that people are nice to him a lot of the time. And it, in fact, I have the opposite of that pretty much wherever I go. I'm so fortunate because people are very good to me. They're good to me in airports, wherever they meet me. And I'm more than pleased to return the favor. And, you know, you're asking for too much if you

have a public face and the benefits of that and you're not also like thrilled that people are responding to you in that positive manner. You said that to me multiple times. Oh yeah, well, you're a fool if you don't, if you're not continually appreciative of that. So, and you know, all the people around me, all my staff, they're all like that. They're all wonderful people. Good, good, good. Well, I'm glad to hear that. So people are nice to Jordan everywhere that he goes.

They tell him, you know, how wonderful he is. He is nice to all of his staff. He's a great manager and the staff are great to everyone around him. And you got to appreciate how great he and everyone that he surrounds himself with is at all times. And this includes Dave Rubin, who might go on the tour with him, or Constantine Kissin, or Douglas Murray. They're all great people.

Great people engaged in incorporating our great works, like promoting the We Who Wrestle With God Tour or contributing to Jordan's Jordan's Academy. You also had responsible man vitamins, the Daily Wire with the Jordan code there., as we said, that could be a bit of a cheap shot because it's the Daily Wire inserting ads, you know, for Peterson promotion. But Peterson himself has some ideas. You know, we've got the Academy, we've got the tours that he's on. We've got his book coming. We've got his podcast. Some areas though that haven't been fully explored.

And we're also with an eye to the future, starting to think out, think things through like, well, one possibility that we've been investigating are cruises, specialized cruises, because, well, cruises, all things considered, especially compared to the cost of, say, a private university education, cruises aren't that expensive. You know, they're, they're actually quite remarkably inexpensive. I, I saw a retired couple, for example, who booked 51 cruises back to back because it was far cheaper than staying in an old folks home.

And the service is a lot better, let's say. So cruises, right? Sensory king cruises, the next, for the, like, you know, you might think cruises are somewhat expensive, right, a luxury thing. But if you compare them to the cost of a private education, they're relatively inexpensive. Yes, yes. I get that. So so this is the new thing to go on a cruise,

a Jordan Peterson cruise where you'll... It isn't. It isn't up and running. Yeah. But what would be better than sealing the high seas with Jordan, sense making, hanging out by the boat. Like who needs to go to university when you could go on a cruise and have, you know, maybe a Constantine Kissin there, a Jonathan Peugeot, you know, whoever might with the sky's the limit. Peterson Cruise is coming soon. This feels like we've got quite far from the discussions of agape and love and beauty and harmony and power.

We're now pretty much down in the influencer, self-promotional, mucky reality of branded cruises, online courses, and talking about how great you are at delegating your travel arrangements to your staff. Yeah, indeed. We've moved on from the phenomenological Christian philosophy and just settling into some straight up promotion of stuff that they sell basically. Yeah. Yeah. And I, okay. So there was just a few other things, Matt, to mention before finishing.

And one that I just wanted to note to give you credit to highlight that you never miss, you know, have ever told you that, Matt? That you never miss. You're so good at not missing. People come up to me and say, Marvin, does Matt miss? And it doesn't seem like he ever misses. And I say, no, not much. He doesn't. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That all sounds right to me. That all sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's the quality I look for in people is not missing. So I'm just, I'd want you to know, I appreciate that. And here's you not missing about Jordan annoying Christians.

Well, this is actually a problem that I have with the Christian, the classic, what would you say? To standard Christian community. Well now, because the Christians are all annoyed at me because I won't, I don't, I haven't proclaimed my faith in the propositional manner that many people who've adopted a creed would find, would require.

And so they're upset about that and on my case. And it's, I find it's quite distasteful in some ways. There's an invitational element, but there's a compulsion element. And the compulsion element is, first of all, the insistence that the faith that's necessary to define something like Christianity is actually propositional. Now, it should be the case that your propositional content is of faith is an existential move. And the danger in the propositional, this is the pharisaic danger, as far as I'm concerned, is that you substitute the propositional for the existential. Totally.

Totally. Totally. I followed every word of that. I mean, actually, it makes perfect sense that Vavaki said totally that. Chris, I want to just quickly just read you a short quote from a paper of Vavaki, it's from a couple of years ago at least. This is it, real quick. This paper will argue that the psychotechnology of dialectic is a practice of discernment that discloses the effective difference between valences of nothingness while integrating their aspects.

Dialectic cultivates perspectival stereoscopy, a form of contradictory self-identity that functions as an opponent process that resolves into an implicit singleness and depth of being that the Buddhists call shinyutta or no-thingness. Shinyutta. Lovely. Anyway, the point is, is that it's a very similar vibe, but, uh, you know, regarding, yes, I was right.

Of course, I didn't miss. I read stuff on the internet about Christians being upset with Jordan Peterson. I tell Christopher Kavanaugh, Christopher Kavanaugh doesn't believe me. I didn't say, hey, this news. This is the anti-Omega principle in effect here. My feeling to give me charity. All I said was, you said he gets in more trouble with the Christians than he does with like the left.

And I was like, no. You're misrepresenting my words, worse than a BBC reporter. Oh, well. Oh, look at that. Worse than a BBC reporter does to Jordan Peterson. This is not a divine conversation. This does not spark joy. This is the opposite of dialectic.

Stop telling me about my qualities. I'd like my time management. But notice, Chris, that like the way Jordan Peterson frames that, like, first of all, like, it's very natural, right? The traditional Catholics, traditional evangelicals or whatever, who really do believe in God, right? And they believe to various aspects of the New Testament and all the Old Testament. And Jordan Peterson is an extremely famous proponent of a certain interpretation of Christianity, which is in line with the vacuums. It's we know what it is, right?

But it's, it's nothing like Orthodox Christianity. I think it's very natural that they would have criticisms of how they are representing their religion, but just notice that for Jordan Peterson, it's quite distasteful, like it's hurtful and, and, and just not legitimate for them to have a problem with what he's doing. And I think it just speaks to how, how they approach all criticism, like regardless of where it's coming from, it could be coming from people like you and me could be coming from proper Christians.

But if you disagree, if you're not doing the dialectic, and if you're not doing the Omega principle, then you're just not okay. You're not really getting it. You're not getting it. And I, on that subject, Matt, just to note, you said, you know, Vervecki and Jordan agree on Christianity and religion and whatnot, but, you know, they would see it that there's very important distinctions in their perspectives, right? Which they enjoy discussing and working through, right?

And you will hear this kind of sentiment, I think, for example, will, for certain people, sound like very different from Jordan. So listen to this. I'll do the personally first. Yeah. Although it bears on the, it bears on the intellectual. So I've, I've been, I'm very cautious of the fact that I shouldn't ever come to the conclusion that my intellectual or philosophical

assessment is somehow swinging free of my idiosyncratic bias that has come from my own personal background. Right, right. Okay, so that's why I have—and sincerely, by the way, and with affection, especially for a lot of people like Jonathan and Paul, I take a very—I think I showed it in the gospel seminar. I showed it to Bishop Barham, for example. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Even more than respectful, I'm open, I'm listening, I want to hear. But on the personal, like I said, what it did for me is,

it's almost like Kierkegaard's thing. I realized I'm not going to ever return to Christendom, but maybe I've. And I don't mean to be offensive to any Christians here. I'm trying to answer your question. Honestly. Hmm. So his experience at the gospel seminar cemented into him, that he's not going to return to Christianity. But I don't find that at all surprising.

Right. But I think for certain people that we'd regard that, well, Verveki's like kind of focuses on Buddhism and, you know, incorporating Plato and this kind of thing where Jordan is more focused on the Bible. And so this is like a very important distinction. And what do you think? Well, I think you've spoken about, what is it? Syncretic? Syncretic?

Um, yeah, syncretic. Yeah. Yeah. Beliefs. And I think like the, they have obviously a huge amount of common ground. They're both sort of into that kind of thing. huge amount of common ground. They're both sort of into that kind of thing. Vervaqui more so into other religious traditions, perhaps, including Buddhism, then Jordan. But you know, that doesn't really matter, I don't think.

Like, it's quite interesting. Vervaqui's lectured on behalf of this thing called the Circling Institute. He spoke about circling and dialogos very much on this topic, the After Socrates wisdom intensive. And what is circling, Chris? What is circling? It is a proprietary multi-stage relational practice and unique transformational modality. It is a dynamic group process that is part art form, part skillful facilitation and part relational yoga. So, quite relational yoga. Wow. That does sound quite familiar to your conference that I was at recently that was interdisciplinary and there was a lot of a kind of sentiment. So, you're saying that when you adopt that kind of freedom, that there is a lot of,

I think that kind of, it is an association of the Omega rule, right? Basically you are going to yes and even if you have metaphysical commitments that might not be attuned. Well, well, I'd put it like this. I think the stance that they take, which is like this kind of Jungian symbolic interpretive approach. That's the most important thing. That is the most important thing. And you can apply that to archetypes and stuff where you could apply it to the wisdom coming out of the Bible,

you can apply it to Buddhism, but it all blends together into this stuff that they both like. And I think it's just understandable that your bog-standard, boring Catholic goes to church and stuff. Yeah. Isn't necessarily into that. No, correct. You correctly assign that. And I will say, right, this is a little bit of a,

going to be a little bit of a personal critical commentary, like none of the other stuff has been. But I don't mean this actually specifically to focus on Verveki because I think he here in the clips I'm going to play outlines a very common narrative that you hear in the sense making and also the religious or symbolic religious space. Right. And part of it goes like this. So he mentioned in the clips about his background influencing his attitude towards things.

And this is him talking about his background. So, as I said, I was brought up in not only in a nuclear family, but an extended family with a very fundamentalist kind of Christianity. And only I would now say, I wouldn't have said it then, but retrospectively looking back after therapy, by the way, I did extended Jungian therapy, that it was quite traumatic. Some of the most I think some of the most horrific experiences of my life were around that I belong to a version of it that had a notion of the rapture and I came home once when I was 10 and there was nobody home and that it was a very rare event. First time it occurred to me I'd come home from school

and I was convinced that everybody had been raptured. I had been left behind because I was clearly a sinner condemned to the Antichrist and to hell and for a ten-year-old you can imagine how horrible that is. Or I remember when I was reading the Bible, I came across the passages that talk about the unforgivable sin. And I was just riven with anxiety. And my mother trying to help me,

took me to the pastor of a church and he gave me the most platitudinous useless. And even as a 12 year old, I was able to recognize you're useless. So I was a fan of science fiction because I was always intrigued by speculative thought from very early on. And I read a book by Rogers O'Lasny called Lord of Light that introduced me to Buddhism and Hinduism and the power of myth.

And it opened me up and I rejected Christianity. And I became well, I became that that that person you were criticizing earlier, the very antagonistic atheist materialist. Yeah, that's that's kind of a moving story there from Babaki. I can you can imagine like growing up in that very fundamentalist environment where, you know, at 10 years old, you're absolutely given to believe that things like the Rapture are absolutely definitely going to happen probably quite soon. And you can, you can be kind of traumatized by what would seem like a really minor thing to someone who hadn't

been indoctrinated with that stuff. Yeah, it sounds like very powerful experiences. And I will also say that I think he's speaking about them very honestly and genuinely here, right? And I'm reflecting on that experience. But also that is a very specific kind of experience. Like I was raised a Catholic, right? I never had these big concerns about the particular descriptions of hell

or the rapture, right? Because that is a particular style of fundamentalist Christianity, like he highlights. And this is not to say I didn't have existential dread and concerns about dying, right? And look around religions in a similar way that like Vervicki and Sam Harris have done. So I get the impulses. But that bit with like, you know, a genuine dread of the rapture and this being psychologically traumatizing to you as a child, that sounds like a very specific kind of religiosity and one that like I think does a bit of a number on people. Like one, it can make them very, very negative in response to religion.

But also I think it, it does speak to the degree to which you're being indoctrinated with very strong emotional, like religious concepts. And that's different than like a cultural Christian or somebody from like, you know, like say Catholic background where there is a less of an emphasis on the emotional experience. Well what he's describing as well as that personal background as being from that fundamentalist milieu, which he rebelled against, is the kind of seeker. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Which sort of leads one to one may kind of abandon and reject the original. But then as you know, it's a very common pattern where one falls into new sources that that could deal with the same issues. And those could be Jungian therapy. Those could be like science oriented, even Scientology. Scientology type of stuff. I mean, I've, I've read Roger Zelazny or Buddhism, as in a couple of my friends sure went to that, and you to some degree.

Yeah. And I, I've read Zelazny's Lord of Light. Great book. Yeah. And I, I've read Zelazny's Lord of Light, great book, but I mean, someone like me would read that and go, wow, here are some wild ideas. That was really fun. Whereas someone that is maybe more traumatized and is looking to resolve some serious issues actually takes that as guidance for where you go. Yeah.

So let's hear a little bit more about that. as guidance for where you go. Yeah. So let's hear a little bit more about that. I left and I went through a profound personal meaning crisis, deep nihilism. How long? For how long? For about three or four years. How old were you when that happened?

Sort of 15 to like 18. Right, right. Well, it's interesting too, and I would say significant, that you turn to science fiction. That definitely happened to Elon Musk too. And it happens to a lot of smart, rational people who lose their religious connection. And I think it's because the science fiction contains the emergence of a new mythos. Especially the new wave that I was reading, people like Rogers Zalazny, I mean, Lord of Light is about a planet where people have sort of mutated themselves and done sort of hyper technology and they've assumed the roles of the Hindu pantheon. And so this is one of Zalazny's themes about the relationship between myth and science

and philosophy and religion. And so I was deeply interested in all of this. And then I got to university. So that is the seeker mindset, Matt. And like, I know that you will have elements of that that resonate in terms of like, you know, finding these big ideas in science fiction, appealing, and like Jordan talks about science fiction giving, you know, like an alternative mythos, which is his particular spin that, but it is true that lots of people find out and that lots of people go through existential or nihilistic periods, right? Often

when they're teenagers, but I will say, for example, that according to my parents, and I experienced this with my own son, that existential dread period can happen at a much earlier age. According to my parents, I went in the bedroom when I was like six and started saying, you know, we're all going to die. What the hell? Yeah, I definitely had the same experience when I was the same age range, six to 10. I remember like in the dark going, oh my God, everyone's going to die. Yeah, my son, I mean, I don't want to go into too much detail, but crying and stuff about the realizing people are going to die.

Right? So like, this is a common thing. So yeah, I don't want to downplay that having a significance in people's development. But I do think there is something about the response to this being extrapolated. I think an appropriate point of view maybe is you have to have sympathy with the motives, the forces and the anxieties that are driving people towards a resolution of those existential concerns. And this is clearly a big driver, a thing that attracts people towards religion. And it can also be a thing that attracts people to other forms of finding meaning, some of them more salubrious and some of them

less salubrious like Scientology or UFOology and the rest. And for Vervacky at university, he explains this. So okay, so you got turned on to philosophical and theological ideas? I took an intro to philosophy course and we read the Republic and I met Socrates. Aha. And what did that do? Well, see, the thing about my upbringing is it had left a taste in my mouth for the transcendence, you know, missing a sage, if I can put it that way. And then I met this figure of Socrates

who made the logos come alive and gave me a new way of understanding rationality and made me a way of understanding spirituality and transcendence in a way that was consonant with my burgeoning interest in science and reason. And that- Right, so that was a defragmentation process profound. That's why I will not follow. I will not follow any religion any su any pseudo

religious ideology any political vision that says you must abandon your loyalty to Socrates. That's not going to happen for me. That's not going to happen for me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, this is just a remarkably honest and Frank segment, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he mentioned that his upbringing has left in him a taste for transcendence. And then he discusses finding the work of Socrates and this being like finding a guru, right?

Like I mean in the traditional sense of a guru and one with a deep emotional attachment and one which sounds to me, I have to say, it sounds religious in nature because like I have lots of thinkers that I respect that have influenced me that I find very important to my intellectual development. But I would never speak of them in the way that he does there about my deep abiding loyalty to them. I like Richard Dawkins stuff, for example. But I have no problem talking about him being an idiot in the culture war or whatnot. Like, you know, so... Yeah, you don't need no heroes, huh?

No, I understand what you're saying. And I look at a big theme of this entire movement is that there's a religion shaped hole in society, they would claim. I've never felt it personally, someone that has never had religion. I don't see it around me in Australia very much. But I believe it's true for them. And I think that they're projecting their own feelings there onto the rest of the world. And it is a... Like, Vivaq has done us a big favor here, and that he's kind of described the secular guru thing perfectly in his own modality, which is that reconciling of those transcendent spiritual emotive, ineffable impulses,

desires with this sort of like these endless conversations are kind of them reconciling these two aspects, right? Yeah. And, you know, it's not us reading into this. They acknowledge this. And so you get this tremendous... Yeah, because questioning improves, but it also destroys. Right. Exactly. And so you need a figure that is like Socrates, you know, he's open to following the logos. Wisdom begins in wonder, but there's tremendous courage. He demonstrates it unto death. He demonstrates it unto death.

This is tremendously encouraging for, that was tremendously encouraging for me. And so I got caught up in this and then I wanted to follow this, accept academic philosophy at the time, after first year, stops talking about wisdom and the love of wisdom. And you get into all of these arguments about meta-ethics and meta-epistemology. And those are useful tools. They're useful for science. And so I kept going on for that reason. But this hunger was not being satisfied.

So literally down the street for me, there was a Tai Chi meditation center. So I went there because I decided to give Eastern philosophy because I'd been reading some Hermes and Essa a chance. And I started doing, practicing Tai Chi Chuan and practicing the Pasana Metta. I was introduced to Lao Tse. I was introduced to Siddhartha. And so these things opened me up. And around that time, I started to read Pierre Haddow and how our ancient philosophy, the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists and the skeptics, they also practice philosophy as a way of life. And then I started to realize how much this overlapped with early Christianity and some

forms of existing Christianity. It started to help me, I remember pro-Schmott to Christianity and some forms of existing Christianity, it started to help me. I remember pro-Schmott to Christianity and to religion because I became very, I became very... Well, you've always, you've always struck me at your core as a, as a religious thinker. Correct, Jordan. Correct. Correct.

Yeah. I mean, you know, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, know, for Vavacky, as you said, we're not doing any interpretation here. They're being quite explicit about the motivations. The thing about philosophy that really, really filled that meaning crisis hole for Vavacky was Socrates as this Christ-like figure, but bringing in these nice philosophical ideas of rationality and seeking the truths and so on. Along with Eastern spirituality and traditions, right? Yeah, exactly. And the syncretic religious approach. Exactly. And when the curriculum of the philosophy degree moved beyond that more sort of elementary or historical stuff into more technical issues.

Well, I have sympathy for him there getting a note of meta-evidence. I don't want to study it either. So we're on the same page. Yeah, it really gives some good insight into... And it's not a criticism. We're not criticizing anyone here. In fact, it gives you a lot more empathy for where the VAC is coming from, even though I don't have the same needs. So this is the bit where my criticism comes where I opened up that framing with that. Because everything that's described here, like we say, not for you or me necessarily, but, you know, an intellectual journey and I think correctly talking about,

you know, the motivations and whatnot, even if they don't emphasize them in all settings. But the bit that I feel is a bit inaccurate and Jordan Peterson does this too. And so does others that like. There was an appeal to, I was a hard-nosed atheist, rationalist, new, if you're sceptic, and I went through that and then I came out on the other edge. And I don't doubt that there is a period of that, like the kind of rebellion against a religious upbringing and you hate Christianity and all that. But like given the timeline that he's laid out, there's a very short period for that to occur because in his first year of university, he's already found Socrates.

He's going to the Tai Chi center and, you know, counting Eastern spirituality. And so assuming that he went to university at a relatively young age and he was raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment, right? There's not many years there for the deep commitment to secular atheists. And he also already talked about how he was attracted to Hinduism and science fiction that was talking about, you know, these kinds of concepts from Eastern traditions and whatnot. So like, I think there's a bit of a misrepresentation where people overemphasize how much they were these kinds of rational atheists. And then they came to see the hollowness of that worldview because it sounds like actually you were almost always a seeker and you moved from one tradition

and now you select a tradition, which is a benefit for you more aligned with your values and like a philosophically deep consideration and you've built your own worldview, perfectly fine. But it's often done on the back of, well, I explored the other, you know, reductionist materialist and it was just empty. There was nothing there was meaningless. It didn't provide any account.

So I fully explored that. And then I went and it just feels a little bit like, or did you? And I'm not saying they need to become atheist or secular rationalist reductions, because I don't think that fits everybody's, you know, intuitions and, and like personality type and whatnot, but it's that they kind of present that as the enlightened position that you, you might go through a stage of, you know, uh, reductionist materialism, but you will quickly realize how unfulfilling and silly that point of view is.

And you're like, so someone like Richard Dawkins, or even you and me are kind of trapped in an adolescent, even to a stage of spiritual development. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, I think there is a rhetorical power to, um, leaning into that idea that you've been redeemed or something. You were fully on board with, with the opposite of what you're committed to now. Um, like it kind of explains why a lot of our gurus who are, you know, basically conservative, somewhat reactionary, traditionalist types, they often misrepresent themselves like Bret and and Heather do, as disillusioned true progressives.

But it's really hard to detect any genuine progressive sentiments in them. But you can see the rhetorical power that it has that you've fully considered, you've fully bought into this wrong point of view, and you are better informed about how wrong it is than anyone else. Yeah, and there was a bit, I feel a little bit cruel in highlighting this, but I think it speaks to that exact sentiment, right? So we were talking about the presentation that, you know,

you have looked at some other philosophy or whatever, and it's not for you, but you might understand it in a way better than the people that got stuck in that phase. It's a common thing. I would even say applying it from my point of view, I became interested in Buddhism and Eastern traditions and from the point of view of like a Vervecki or Sam Harris, you know, seen as an alternative to the Western religion that I've been brought up in, I find that all very attractive.

And then I studied the history of British University and I was kind of, what's the word? Disillusioned slightly? Yeah, well, it's more like my unrealistic image kind of crashed against the reality. But I find the reality like more interesting. And so I feel a little bit like an Evan Thompson. I feel I can ship him in a way that he also has an interest in all these things.

He's a professor in the philosophy of Buddhism or whatever his particular thing is. But he also released the book Why I'm Not a Buddhist, because he thinks there's metaphysics in it, which isn't justified. So he finds it all interesting, but he's not done with the metaphysics. In that sense, you can see a parallel where I'm saying, well, look, I've explored these various things and I didn't end up getting caught in the practitioner thing. But from the point of view of a practitioner, I probably fell in some like early stage where you're, you're supposed to persevere beyond that.

Right. So everyone is always casting themselves as they are, you know, looking from the lofty position, right? Like I said, I think, I think it's a natural inclination. And I don't mean it like that. You're looking down on people, but more. Yeah. Yeah. You've experienced it. Yeah.

That's why you've reached that point. But there's a clip that speaks to this and it's not about Buddhism. It's about Christianity. So listen to this. And precisely. And so, and my partner, Sarah, who's not a Christian, right? And I don't profess to be one, but she took me aside at one point and she said, and I want this understood that I'm saying this at an arm's length, okay? And you're a good friend, so I'll trust you for that. But she said, you're actually the only real Christian

I've ever met. What did she mean by that? And well, of course I asked her. And she said, because you, you know, she said, I get it, you don't identify with a set of doctrines, but you try to live agape and you try to follow the logos. And you've structured your whole life and the cultivation of your character around that. Well, that's what belief...

Believing to give your heart to. That's what the original meaning is. My wife has never said anything that nice about me, I don't think. Like there's again, you know, I'm speaking about the structural component here, but there's this bit of like, look, I'm going to say this and you will understand that I'm not putting anyone down. This is me relating to you, Jordan Peterson, my friend, something that my wife said to me. And I'm not saying it right about myself. I'm telling you what someone else said about me. But the thing is, this isn't a private conversation. This is a conversation

going out again to hundreds of thousands of billions of people. And isn't perfectly saying somebody said I'm a better Christian than normal Christians because I embody the values more. And it's just odd to me that you would tell that. Yeah. I mean, I actually don't necessarily doubt that it's perfectly true, right? Yeah, yeah, I suspect it's true. I'm sure his wife is very keen on it. I remember one time my mom told me I was the best boy in the school. She is my mom, so you know. I know, it does sound a bit mean. Like I said, I feel mean for pointing out this exchange, right?

But the point is it's released publicly, right? It isn't a private conversation with your friend who will just interpret this in this way. It's to this big audience and to us, right? I mean, it's a little bit similar to their talk before about just lavishing the praise on how amazing the tool was and how amazing Jordan is, how amazing the Academy is. I mean, that's one thing. Like if you and I went on a thing and we spoke about a process, I just had such a great time with you, Chris, just heart to heart.

I really enjoyed spending time with you. That's one thing. Doing it on the podcast, there is an audience, right? And you are speaking for other people. So it is a big. Cringe, I guess. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, but it speaks to, I think, right. Jordan and for Vicky and other people in the sense making ecosystem, I would put

Jordan Hall or whatever, and Russell Brand, even in a, in a sense in this way, we're like, it's not the Christianity of your bulk standard Catholics. Like, you know, the people who just go and do the thing, and it isn't like this big theological or existential thing for them. It's a tradition that they're a part of and whatnot. This is a little bit setting yourself up as that you are in this more refined. You're a more highly evolved form of Christian. It's the it's the syncretic thing, isn't it?

You sort of draw upon all of the religions and you draw upon Jungian things. Or, you know, to express a criticism of someone else that I think is similar. It's like what Sam Harris says about he understands the teachings of Jesus, right? In a way that people who haven't done meditation and had the introspective insights that he's had, they don't really like properly get it. And that's a feeling that lots of people have. And they are not necessarily people who would identify, you know, like Sam Harris doesn't identify as Christian, but he thinks that he understands

the insights of Jesus better than lots of adherents of Christianity. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I think that's just an accurate description of where they position themselves. You know, it's this, it's this nexus of philosophy, spirituality and religion. It's a highly abstracted, rarefied form of thought. My fundamental issue, Chris, I've been wondering when is the best place to say this, but where mean, like where I'm just so different from these guys and I think where I tend to criticize them is not for a specific thing that they're saying necessarily

or that they're religious or they're not religious or they like this kind of philosophy or that. It's just that they seem so comfortable with the use of language that to me is completely meaningless. So when for Vackaki or Jordan say to one another that the fullest expression of the dialectic is a manifestation of the logos, or words, or something like that, like all of the writing, we could cite innumerable cases of them

saying stuff like that. I literally don't know what it means. There are two intangible, unmeasurable, unverifiable concepts that they're still struggling to define. Most of the conversations are working on defining what is the logos, what is the dialectic, what is the meaning crisis. And then they connect them together through these heuristic, intuitive associations. And I understand that to them, that is a very meaningful activity. And for me, it means absolutely nothing, nothing at all.

See, that's interesting because I'm probably in the middle in the sense that like, I don't find it that hard in general to follow like what they're flowing to from one to the next. And I understand why they invest it with profundity, right? And I even can kind of like, sympathize if I turn off the critical side of my brain, but I need to do that. Right. Like I need to turn off the thing about, so like, what is the exact concept? I'm rather go with the vibe, right? That like, ah, yeah. So that's connecting this concept to that one.

And I, I think that is a little bit around just, you know, like personality. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I hear you. Yeah, I hear you. I think it is like that. I mean, you've had more experience like reading this kind of thing, you know, in your explorations of Buddhism and stuff. And I've, I've had very little throughout my entire life. Absolutely no religious background, nothing in the family, no real study of this kind

of philosophy or, or theology, um, no real study of this kind of philosophy or theology. Never had an interest in it. So to me, for me, it is just like nothing. But I think it also speaks to just the personality type. And it actually gives me more sympathy for both of them, just in this particular stuff. Not sympathy for Jordan's other activities. But I have more sympathy for them because it sort of speaks to the point that they could do no other. Like this is how their minds work. This is what resonates with them. For them, this kind of talk is extremely meaningful and they're not lying. This is just how their minds work and it's just very different from how mine does.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, that's okay very different from how mine does. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, that's okay. People can have different interests and stuff like this. And I actually think this side of things is probably the component of Jordan's output that is least objectionable, right? Like I still think it is very indulgent and has the issues that we talked about with the sloppy thinking and the kind of, you know, that it essentially just wordplay in lots of occasions.

But you know, each to their own, you want to do like indulgent wordplay jazz with people, you know, whatever. That's fine. The issue is with Jordan, primarily, is the other stuff, the attachment of this onto his conspiratorial and hardline conservative polemical politics, right? Which he does. And he does it every day on his Twitter feed, but he does it in interviews constantly all the time. And so, like you said, there's kind of a studied ignorance that Jordan is putting this to justify a political worldview and like an ideological project, which he claims is non-ideological, but you can see it in the figures that surround him and that kind of thing.

And I feel like Vervecky doesn't strike me as someone that obviously has that same political agenda, even if he has some sympathy for whatever, like certain conservative values or that kind of thing. But I think as a result, he just ignores the conspiratorial output of Pajot and Jordan or their like endless polemical stuff. And I think if you do that, you're not actually taking a full view of a person. You're constraining the thing to like the part that won't cause you a big amount of dissonance or any conflict. And to me, that's something that the sense making sphere does a lot of. Like when we talk to Jimmy Weel, when we talk to David Fuller in the past about it.

This is a part where they're quite comfortable to just constantly avoid that. And like, for example, when David Fuller wanted to arrange a conversation between me and Jonathan Pageau, I said, fine, I'll talk to him. And we could talk about rituals and whatnot. But I said, but I will bring up the stuff about conspiracism and the things he said about Alex Jones and the things about theocratic governments and whatnot. And, and then he didn't want to do it, right? Like because

it would be unpleasant. Yeah. And it would be fractious. Yeah. But if we did like a yes. And yeah, it would be fractious. Yeah. But if we did like a yes, and in conversation about ritual cognition, then fine. It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be hard to just take a very like symbolic and academically dense Omega ruled conversation and have that thing. So that's, that's the bit where I feel like I have criticism of the approach that John and others apply. But I think it is just, it's their values, you know, like they don't see that as a priority and. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, early on in the podcast, Chris, we, we said one of

the, one way to think about what gurus do is the secular gurus, is that they provide an elaborate and complex mental cognitive framework that kind of provides a rationale or a justification for what is a pretty base red meat emotive kind of impulses. And sometimes those impulses are like political ones, like you just don't like foreigners and you want to return to, you know, traditional values where men were men, whatever, right? Or they could be like existential impulses, right? But the point is they're sort of gut kind of needs or gut kind of things that you need satisfying. None of us like to think of ourselves as sort of animalistic people following our urges around. We like to think that we're very

rational and considered and so on. So you know part of what secular gurus do is that they provide all of that. And Jordan is obviously an ultimate example who plays both sides of it. Here we see the rarefied, very intellectual, thoughtful, and it sounds very nice a lot of the things that he's talking about, right? The dialogus and universal love and things like that. But it does stand in stark contrast to the other things. What Jordan does. And for the people who are fully on board with this, you tend to see that they get it both ways, right? They're fully on board with some pretty unpleasant political messaging and really kind of like demonizing out groups, you know?

I mean, these people are the worst people and so on. And at the same time, you can think of yourself as just like the best possible person, like exploring the limits of the dialectic and trying to find deeper truth and meaning. And, you know, if I do have a criticism of the VACI, it's just that he's, he's participating in one, in one side of that. And though he might not be directly doing the other thing, he's definitely a big participant in helping Jordan Peterson flesh out one side of that coin. Yeah, yeah. And I guess if we were looking at John from the secular guru

Templar, I think that he would score low in a bunch of significant characteristics like excessive profiteering, conspiracy-mongering, and the establishmentarianism. Like I don't think he does a bunch of those, but the bits where he does is the, I feel a bit mean saying pseudo profundity, but I'm not saying like none of his message has any depth to it. I just mean that there is a lot of the accoutrements that would lead someone to perceive profundity. I think I can help you out there a little bit. It's a kind of like pseudo phenomenology, you know, the very abstracted,

mystical version of philosophy, where it is infused with heaps of pseudo profound bullshit in the sense that, you know, using really complex words when you could use a simple word, you know, linking together all of these jargons. I mean, we could read out quotes from papers where he is guilty of that kind of obscurantism. Now, actually, he's not alone in doing that. No, there's entire areas and fields.

Yeah, dedicated to this. So this isn't really a particularly nasty thing. He just is part of a discipline which you and I would diagnose as not very good. So, yeah. Well, look, Matt, to put it in a low way, I would say that he would object to that characterization of what he's doing, but I think that there could be a bunch of value in his work. And you could also detect those like kind of, you know, if you put it into a chat GBT and said,

like, highlight the things that academics are criticized for doing in this paper, and it would correctly identify a lot of this seems like incredibly complex linguistics to express fairly straightforward. Well, I mean, Yeah, just basic things like using Greek variations of ordinary words, like communitas, right? All our sense makers like doing that. Instead of saying community or like inventing phrases like dialectic into dialogos and things like that. Like in very basic terms, it is sort of profound bullshit.

I'm sorry. But that, yeah, but that comes from the love of Socrates and Plato and you know. I've read Socrates. It's pretty clear. It's pretty straightforward. Okay. Okay. Well, you know, so this was an interesting episode in a way because I think it is a nologeant into the sense-making sphere, but it's from one of the much less objectionable members of that sphere, I would say. But it's interesting to see the kind of features of those competitions, right? And maybe you really dig them and you're not like me and Matt or-

Poor, like me and Matt's stunted empty husks of humans. Yeah, yeah. Philosophers tell us all the time that we are, right? So there will be people that agree, but maybe this also helps flesh out some of the points that we're making about why we're critical of those kinds of conversations and why we detect a potential religious impulse that people universalize to everyone, where I don't think that is actually the case. Some of us just don't have it. Oh, and I will also add in just as like a final slam, while extending charity in the omega way

that I have been, the fact that there's all the cruise chat and how great the Peterson Academy is and whatnot. And what was it? Responsible man vitamins? Like you have to factor that in too, right? Like, yes, we're up in the lofty philosophers thing, but responsible man, multi-vitamins pulled us right down. And the plan cruises. So, you know, I think there is things that you can criticize, even if you disagree with all the stuff about the philosophical chat. Yeah.

If you want to be a public philosopher, a public meaning maker, you know, you don't have to have those ads for overpriced multivitamins in there. I mean, we don't have them. You do if you want to fight the culture war, Matt. If you want to stock up your energy and be like a responsible man. Responsible man vitamins.

Two on the nose. Actually, I don't usually take vitamins, but I thought it might help. So I'm taking my wife's vitamins, so they're for women. And I'm thinking, well, you know, women and men, how different can we be? What's so that's what I'm taking. I'm taking women's vitamins. Oh, fortunately they don't generally do much. That's not true.

That's not true because my urine has definitely changed color. Oh, well, yeah. So yes. And before people say aren't supplements and if you're vitamin C deficient, yes, yes, yes. We know, we know what used multivitamins are and yeah. So, Matt, we're done, we're finished. But this is a decoding episode. This has an outro bit.

I have reviews for us, just two, just two for this week, just to finish us off. We've got a review of reviews segment. We're engaging in asynchronous dialogs with our listeners. And as I like to, I select a fine grade criticism, criticism that is not cruel and demeaning, but carries value with it. It has a message in it, Matt. It's spoken in the true spirit of Christ. And here is a review by Moneybirdy from Australia.

Smarmy but enjoyable in small doses. Y'all are so smug when it comes to taking down Sam Harris. You're so smug when it comes to taking down Sam Harris. You can't hide your enjoyment at any sign of less than perfect reasoning. The man is human. The man has biases. He wants to believe the best of his friends and associates. Why not approach your criticism in a way that allows for him to be an actual human with good intentions, waiting for your take down of Ezra Klein, Roxanne Gay, Ibram X. Kendi, Nicole Hannah Jones or Ta Nevis Coates, but he means Ta Nahasi Coates.

So yeah, man, you can't hide your smarmy enjoyment of tearing down Persam. He's a good man. He just likes his friends. Okay. Just. That's fair. And how many stars did you say? Four, four out of five.

So it's good, good quality, high quality criticism. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll take it. And if Money Birdie, you are a bit more, you know, observant, you might have noticed we have done Ibromax Candy. Okay. So, yeah, we'll get to the other ones.

All right. Tana has the codes, whatever. Just give us time. All right. So what has a coach, whatever. Just give us time. All right. So what's this guy called again? Early birdie? What's his name? Bird Brian.

Money. Money birdie. Money birdie. You know, I think I think his comment, what he fails to understand is that like our criticism of Sam was like, it was a form of dialectic cultivating the perspective or stereoscopy in our criticisms, we were actually identifying with him We were feeling a form of contradictory self-identity functioning is an important process that results into an implicit signal So the depth of being that I think he he missed it all went over his head

well what we did as well Matt which is important like if you think about the concept of feedback right feed and back, like on someone's back and you feed them, you make an offering to them and they consume it, right? So we offered feedback to Sam from the back, but going to his front. And in that way, he... Can't hear. That's exactly what I was saying.

That's what I was saying. It's a dialectic process, right? He made an offering to us with his feed back and we've in turn, you know, christened it, sanctified it and offered it back to him in return and together built something beautiful. Totally, totally. And you often say that and you often say that and I often agree. That's right. Very astute of you when you do.

Yeah. Yeah. But so another review, Matt, from somebody that might get things a bit better, you know, might have a bit more of a, they're approaching criticism at a higher level. And they said 2020s time for the gurus. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, life without pain has no meaning. So if you wish to give your life meaning, listening to these two gentlemen discuss gurus is the self-flagellation you've been searching for. And that is from Finnish in Japan. Nice. I would describe this as self-flagellation. Well, you know, I think what you do, Chris, with the research for this is this self-flagellation and the rest of us are kind of getting off on... Along for the ride.

Along for the ride, sort of enjoying your pain. What did you call that? It's a prurient kind of observational sexual thing. So you guys are the sickles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're like the little guy pressed up in the meme at the window. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Or the Emperor, you know, I feel your hatred. It makes you strong. So yeah, well, that is what it is. No, I'm not. People pay us for this. They pay us to go into the sense-making realm to be critical. We are the fly in the soup of the sense-makers free course meal. We are the grit in their oyster salad.

We love saying that they're romantic interlude at the beach. Yes, that's right. We're the Jar Jar Binks in our sequel trilogy. And yet people reward us for that and we tried them out. And I do that now, Matt. I do that now with no hesitation, no delay, no stalling to get names up or anything like that. I don't do that kind of thing. So let's go conspiracy Hypothesizers, I'll start there Ben Goddard Clark Killian McCarter Mike Craig a green bang crook Hope you're not a crook McCoy Colin Farty is the Jordan McCoy. Colin Fardy. He's the real McCoy.

Let's see if we can think of a riff for every single name. Next one. Jeremiah Syropoulos. It's like the first name and the last name don't go well together. Is the last one Greek? And the first one sounds like it's from Oklahoma. Jeremiah? That's an Oklahoma type.

He's here all week, folks. He's here all week. Lisa? Is that it? Lisa? That's not much to go on. Come on. Give us more than that. We can't... Get a better name. Give us a name we can riff on. Simpsons? All right. You've been at a Kensington. Oh, that's another Scandinavian. We don't want that like up there. They listen to us because there's nothing else to do for like nine months of the year. Except drink and or listen to Dakota and the Gurus.

Yeah, or Dag Sauras, the comedian who likes us. So they should listen to him. Yeah. Charles Iyoma Muri. Iyoma, Lord of the Rings. A heroic name. Love that name. Probably named after that. Sol Kushti.

Medical Sol. Medical Sol. Call him after you got a problem. Kirsten Budig. Kirsten Budig. I got nothing. You got something? No, I didn't expect you to throw it back to me. What kind of sense making is this? Sorry Kirsten. You got a nice name. 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, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. He's moved well on from hypotheses now. Yeah, that's right. He's graduated.

It's freaking traps, traps within traps. So revolutionary geniuses, Matt, we have some of them. These are the people, by the way, that get access to decoding academia. Fantastic series. You can only get this revolutionary genius in the above tier. Just letting people know. Yes. You know, don't make that mistake. Don't be like the thousands of others.

That's right. They're missing out. That's right. It's a spin off series that in some ways has surpassed the original one. It's like the better Call Saul to Breaking Bad. Both excellent shows, just like ours, are both good. But I like Breaking Bad better. But I like Breaking Bad better? Come on. Yeah, of course.

Well, actually it's better. Okay. It's more epic. It is a bit better, but I like Better Call Saul too. It was good too. It was good too. Okay. So people in that tier are Thomas Stechbeck, Keith Miller,

J.R. 5,000, Karen Scanlon, Josh. Could be Josh Epps, Stuart Cunningham. Christine Ulloa. Mandy, Andrew McCrae, Fred Dyer, Paul Vander Heiden, Gerpeterz, and Robert Hannan. Gerpeterz. I like that one. Gerpeterz. Oh, also Old Timey Bomb, Space Iguana, and Eric Kainz.

Space Iguana is another good one. I can never think of a good handle. I know. I can understand space iguana. Yeah, space iguana is good. I think this is the same part of the brain that understands what vivaki is. Sense makers are totally right. Sense makers love to. This is the part of the brain that can think of good handles because I'm incapable of both. Well, fortunately, revolutionary geniuses probably don't like that part of the brain. So here's their thank you.

I'm usually running, I don't know don't like that part of the brain. So here's their thank you. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And it 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. Remarkable thing is that Sam talking about hospitals killing. Which Jordan Peterson has brought up again recently. Recently. He's even more certain of it now without ever having looked into it. But it's it's stewed in his brain long enough.

So now he's certain of it. No, it's like more things are added in that are deadly. Like it's it's all of medicine and it's drugs and everything. So therapy. Yeah. Yeah. For Galaxy being Gourgeman, I'm only going to thank one person. Almost as if there's only one on the sheet to them and that the thank you and the you get a special show that i'm sorry thank you and the. Yeah she deserves our full attention we tried to warn people yeah what was coming. How it was going to come in the fact that it was everywhere and everything considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile.

Think again, sunshine. Yeah, I do like that juxtaposition, I have to say. And it isn't that we only have one new galaxy ream Pidron. It's just that this particular way that they're laid out on the sheet makes it very hard to find them. So gotta be a better better system I've been thinking the way for years but got the got the get on top of this so yeah we're gonna revise the shutouts will let you know what we come up with. Are we. I don't know, because we're never going to get through the role. It's never going to. It's only going to get worse. It's going to get worse as time goes on.

So I'll come up with a system that I'm going to put my intellect towards and we'll see if it. But yeah, there we go. So an enjoyable one. Dare I say one that contributes to the universal logos that has been bubbling since the first Adams banged the Geller in the dark emptiness of Spiers. And here we are talking about sense makers and a podcast, Two Man. And doesn't that say something?

Makes you think. Yeah. Vavaki and Peterson gave us an offering. Also two men. They made us a discursive offering and we chewed it up. Gobbled it up. Gobbled it up. No, no, no.

Spat it out. Yeah. Well, we look forward to their return gobbling of us. Maybe two other men can someday. Only men. Only men can do it. Only men in the South African ecosystem. No women allowed. It's not for you. I'm sorry. So yeah, there is a lot of testicular people. No, no, there's just a lot of people with testicles in the podcast world. Um, almost as if men are prone to indulgent chat.

It does seem like that, doesn't it? Maybe we were just incapable of sense making at this refined level. Maybe that's it. That's it. That's the, what the problem is. It's not that men have a higher tendency to think what they're saying is profound. Great. Deos bullshit is now wouldn't be that. No, anyway, that's all gender essentialism and whatnot. Forget about it. No, forget about it.

You didn't hear anything. We were just joking. We're just joking. It's irony. All right. Well, about it you didn't hear anything we were just joking we're just joking it's irony it's irony yeah all right well uh bye bye matt and i'll see you soon for more like we're gonna get in to some people right we're gonna get into detail we're gonna get in kardash arvin we're gonna go into a little left wing season maybe some left wing figures. This was a holiday. This is a holiday. We're getting back to the grind next time. Bye. Bye. I'm going to be back. Matt, don't squeak your chair.

Don't move. I can't stop it. It will not stop.