Decoding the Gurus - Ken Wilber: Spiralling Upwards through a Technicolor Cosmos

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

Ken Wilber, the grand architect of Integral Theory, enters the Decoding chamber (wearing a striking but slightly unconvincing wig) as we explore a worldview that confidently absorbs every religion, philosophy, and half-remembered psychology paper into one majestic, Borg-like synthesis. Resistance, as it turns out, is not just futile... it is probably “first-tier thinking".This is a world of elaborate, baroque cosmologies. Layers within layers, quadrants within stages, spirals within states, with each offering a map of reality that grows more intricate the closer it gets to its own centre. Traditions are not debated so much as absorbed, their distinctiveness dissolved into a higher synthesis that always leads to the ultimate insight: integral theory.Get ready to experience high-level political analysis where Kamala Harris becomes a “fractured green" and Donald Trump the embodiment of a "rational orange". You will also learn how Ken is working with AI companies to help them incorporate integral thinking into their algorithms. The implications this has for human evolution are hard to fathom.Finally, in true Columbo fashion, we circle back to Matt's core philosophical system … panpsychism. Just a small detail, and also take some time to conduct a brief spiritual inquisition into Matt’s alleged Christian upbringing. Fortunately, nothing is rejected. Everything is integrated, including all possible critiques.SourcesSuma Gowda: Ken Wilber on Future of Consciousness, AI, Trump's Election: A Deep Dive into Spiral DynamicsThe Rise and Fall of Ken Wilber – Mark MansonRebel Wisdom: Interview with Ken Wilber- What Happened to Jordan PetersonDS Wilson finds wisdom in Ken's approachKen Wilber's website

Hello and welcome back to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast. We're 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 and what a great mind we have today. On Matt Brown, the psychologist with me is Chris Kavanaugh, the anthropologist. He is, gee, he's the beige to my turquoise, I would say. I think I'm much more an indigo as it happens. But, you know, I'll also have my own little comparison, which is, I am the toxicity to your snorlax. In the last supplementary material, we asked people to identify Pokemon Titan. You were fairly identified as a snorlax.

I'm a toxicity. And is the snorlax the most evolved, the most integrated? Some would say. Some would say he's got to work out. He's mostly sleeping and lying around and eating things. So yeah. Yeah, that sounds like the life.

I like that. we should all aspire to. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Well, you know, the reference to colors, Matt, people might have picked up there. And that's right. We're really one of the, you know, leading guru figures. People have requested him for quite a while. He's a well-known figure. Not really super popular at the minute. His heyday has passed. But an influence on many people that we've covered, especially sense makers. They're very fond of him. Ken Wilbur. Ken Wilbur. Yeah. Ken Wilbur. Yeah, you're right. he's not, you know, he's not in the discourse.

He's no, he's no Jordan Peterson, although his light has faded somewhat recently too. But in the sense that he's not in the discourse. But I think theoretically, you know, of incredible importance to the decoding the guru's mandate, Chris. So I think it's good we cover him. Yeah, and I actually have a little testimony to him here from somebody Mark Manson, who himself is,

a self-help offer, right? He wrote the subtle art of not giving a fuck. Everything is fucked. So on, right? A successful self-help offer. And he wrote a blog on his website called The Rise and Fall of Ken Wilbur. And it's like a personal reflection on the influence that Ken Wilbur has had on him. And it features this little paragraph that I thought I would read out.

A low flawed, Wilbur's integral perspective continues to be an inspiration in my life. I do believe he will be written about decades or centuries from now, and will be seen as one of the most brilliant minds of our generation. But as with most brilliant thinkers, his influence and ideas will be carried on by others in ways which he did not anticipate or intend. Wilbur's story is a cautionary tale. His intellectual understanding was immense, as much as I've ever. come across in a single person. He also tapped into some of the farthest

reaches of consciousness, spiritual or not, that humans have self-reported. I do believe that. But ultimately, he was done in by his pride, his need for control and well, ironically, his ego. The point is, if Wilbur can succumb to it, any of us can. No one is immune. No matter how brilliant and how enlightened we are, we are all animals. Life lessons for us all there, Matt. Well, he sounds like a veritable titan, though like all of us, he's just a man.

I have to remember that. He was flawed. He was flawed. I think he's referring to actually some of Ken Wilder's responses to people who criticized his theories. They were sometimes

perhaps not the most integrated, maybe a little bit thin-skinned. Yeah. Yeah, he does talk about some of the various controversies. The integral movement began to sputter. Rabbi Mark Gaffney, a spiritual leader with whom Wilbur aligned himself and even co-sponsored seminars, was later indicted in Israel for child molestation. Despite this, Wilbur and his movement refused to distance themselves or repudiate him. In fact, the whole integral scene doubled down, claiming that its critics were first-tier thinkers and were coming up with lies in order to attack a greater, higher level of

consciousness that it didn't understand. So there you go, Matt, the old first-tier thinkers, you know, bad faith critics, if you will, coming up with lies about child molestation to tear people down. It's funny, it's always the same playbook, you know, Russell Brown, sexual assault, all these claims about people engaging in like fraudulent or multi-level marketing or finance scams or whatever. They're always just trying to tear down these great thinkers and great men. So there's There's also, by the way, I find this quite funny that this little blog is talking about, you know, the person really got into Ken Wilbur, read all his books, thought this was incredible. You know, he lists out six of the most important insights that came from reading them. And then he attended a seminar.

And he mentions that at the weekend seminar, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were participating in Finley Veiled self-indulgence and little more. he goes on to say no no that wasn't you know it was actually it was a branding problem it was it wasn't that but i just like that for a moment you know a ray of awareness shot for and like are we all listening to a narcissist chat shit is that what we're all doing here and he's like no no can't be that that's right i've already spent so much time reading all these books and go into these courses there must be something to it yeah so i think this is an important thing to remember just to set the stage a little bit. Who is Ken Wilbur?

What is his body of work? And I guess it's at both a very broad integration of basically every, all human thought about consciousness and awareness and development and transcendence. And at the same time, there's a community that has sprung up around the author, Ken Wilbur, which is a commercial ecosystem of sorts. There's certificates and retreats. treats and, you know, all kinds of programs and stuff integrated into it. And yeah, we'll talk

about the, like, attraction, I suppose, of that kind of stuff later on. Yeah, and he's been around a long time. Like, he started off with the spectrum of consciousness in 1977. And, you know, he's published a whole bunch of books, including a pre-festy of everything, 1996. But his publishing is actually slowed down as he's gotten older, but he's been around for decades. And as a result of that, many of the people that we've covered, you know,

I mentioned the sense makers, David Fuller, was a big fan of Kim Wilbur. And actually, I think most of them, Jimmy, Williams, Jordan Hall and so on would be familiar with Ken Wilbur's output and system.

And I think his role now is often that he's regarded, like that blog post said, that he had important insights and his framework is useful, but there are limitations. That's the way that exists in, you know, most new age or third way thinking domains that interact with him, like an important thinker, but some issues. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, this kind of stuff appeals to, you know, the people who I guess intellectually ambitious, who like those sets.

sense makers think that mainstream disciplines are too narrow and siloed. And it's also connected to the experiential stuff, you know, psychedelic drugs, spiritual, meditative practices, stuff that doesn't fit with this reductive materialist worldview. And also Orthodox religions are similarly constrained by whatever, all kinds of particular assumptions and restrictions. So the sense make a reappear is that what if we took all of this the best parts of all of the scientific world, the best parts of the spiritual and psychedelic world, and all of the religions, and we put it all together to open our minds to a bigger, more abstract understanding of the world. Yeah, yeah. And those, as with many of these kind of approaches, there is a hierarchical stage. Of

It's not presented as hierarchical. It's a spiral as it happens. It's not so much a pyramid. It's a trapezoid. But we're going to get into it because it comes up in it. But just to mention, because it is helpful to orientate yourself, that Ken Wilbur has given these colors to distinctive stages. And this is things like Beage is.

the stage just concerned with survival, basic survival instincts, early humans associated with. Purple is tribal magic stage. Red, power, egocentric, orange, modern, rational, green, postmodern, pluralistic, right?

There's all these stages. And then he's added in four additional colors recently that go beyond the integral one. This is after turquoise, or after teal. No, no, there's turquoise after teal. Turquoise is still pretty good, right?

That's super integral. That's holistic, communal, seeing the world is alive and evolving. And then we have these extra tiers. Indigo, violet, ultraviolet, and clear light. That's the four additional. So these ones, if you're on those, you are, I mean, that's pretty good. Right? That's pretty good.

There's not just those tiers. There's also four quadrants. There's a bunch of different perspectives in consciousness. Like, it's kind of like all these systems really love making complicated lists and diagrams and systems of classification. You know, they're in Scientology. They're basically in most cult systems that they have these quite highly developed schematics. Yes, I described them as Baroque. These schematics.

Yeah, yeah. And most alternative therapy frameworks are similarly rich and complex, like a tapestry. So, you know, again, you can see the appeal of just of the mere complexity and evocativeness of the framework. Some might say that that complexity hides a superficial and shallow nature. Hey, hey, hey, come, come, come. You're getting ahead of yourself, Chris. You're putting the cap of photo force. Why don't we turn to the material at hand and tell us about that?

So I tried to find something that was relatively recent, just to get the most up-to-date version of the approach, right? And I found this video that was on a small YouTube channel, just 14,000 subscribers by someone called Suma Gaudra. And she is interviewing Ken, and I'm going to play a clip and you'll see the dynamic. but this is very much the disciple interviewing the master. And the title of it was Ken Wilbur on Future of Consciousness,

AI Trump's election, a deep dive into spiral dynamics. And now, if you can't see the video, I just want to give a kind of trigger warning. If you're watching the visual, you will see a elderly man, clearly elderly man, because Ken Wilver is now, she's 17. So he's, you know, an elderly man in a very unconvincing wig. He's got like a long, ill-fitting wing that is like, I can't even describe the color.

How would you describe that, Matt? What is that style? I don't know. It's indescribable. I think the best delivered at that. He's also wearing a pair of like orange-tinted glasses, which are striking. So he definitely has a look of a... like an English 1970s media personality that is now in advanced years, but is still

dressing. Yeah. And he didn't used to look like that. I mean, his signature look was a kind of bald, quite muscular, serious looking guy with glasses, like I think kind of Western Zen monk, you know, with quite a penetrating gears. That was his previous look. he's now kind of elderly Andy Warhol with colorful wigs.

And he has discussed why. And to be fair to him, his argument for why was not actually that terrible, why he's wearing these unconvincing wigs. What was it? Well, he basically just said, you know, he shaved his head, his whole life, and he got older and then was like, what would it be like to have hair? But, you know, it's annoying to grow hair and probably, I mean, he didn't. didn't mention it, but I suspected 77. You're not going to be growing, you know, luscious logs.

So his friend was like, why don't you wear? Once hair does deteriorate in its luster and quality. Trust me, Chris. Don't ask me how I know it is. So he got a, if he just bought wigs, I was like he wants to wear wig. I respect that.

That's right. We're not into looks shaming on this show. Be fabulous in your 70s. That would be my recommendation. It is a disconcerting look, though. It's disconcerting. It's disconcerting. but I respect the effort.

And there's one other habit he has that I have to mention, because again, it's just something that I don't experience much, which is he seems to, in more recent videos, have developed like a tick of licking his hands and then putting it in his hair or touching his face,

like just licking the tips of his fingers. And it's kind of hard to ignore. So I, you know, whatever. who knows why, but I'm just saying that occurs with their frequency in this material. It's an interesting point. And yeah, look, never sticks that can happen to the best of us. Okay, well, let's get into the material. So the first clip, this is the person introducing

Ken, and it will give you a little insight into how the interview is going to unfold. Hi, everyone, welcome back. Today, I'm extremely honored to introduce this special guest, Ken Wilbur, widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of our time, known as the father of integral theory. Ken has developed a groundbreaking framework that synthesizes insights from science, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and more. His work has profoundly shaped how we understand human development, consciousness, and the complexities of modern life. Can I've been waiting for this interview for such a long time. I'm deeply honored to have you on my channel. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. I know so many people who have on whom

whose spiritual journey you have been a big influence, including mine. So this interview means a lot to me because even to get to this point where to be able to have a one-on-one conversation, I feel like it's such a journey. Yes, so you can hear there the interviewer is very excited and probably more than a little nervous. A big fan of Ken Wilburne, no doubt about it. And it's quite endearing, actually, I think. Yes, I had the same reaction. Like, you know, I don't have the same appreciation of Ken Wilbur,

but I can understand somebody who's getting the opportunity to interview. review their idol and they're, you know, just like a little bit stumbling over their words and very excited and all that kind of thing. So, yes, human sympathy for the nervous nature of the questions. But fortunately for her, and I've actually never seen this, Matt, in the wave forms when we've looked at content, you know, because in the software we use, you can see who's talking. It kind of color codes it. And Ken Wilbur, it various points in this. is talking almost in-interrupted for like 10 to 15 minutes in various stretches. So she is really only there to prompt and then let him go.

So it's not like back and forth really. No, no, no. Yes. So where does it begin? Okay. Well, the first question is about weaking up, Matt, and what that means. I would love to first begin with how, what are the hallmarks or milestones do you think are in a person's waking up journey and how you experience them in your own like waking up journey? Well, for waking up, it's first of all a capacity to enter a meditative state.

Now, a meditative state means simply being aware of everything. it's arising, all your thoughts, all your feelings, all your perceptions, and you don't judge them. So you don't have a negative feeling about it, and you don't condemn them, you don't think bad things about them, nor do you like them. You're not attracted to them. You're not attached. You're just witnessing. And as the witness, you are actually what Vedanta would say, one with your higher self. Human beings, the mystical traditions, maintain have two separate selves. They have the small, egoic, relative self, and then we have the real, true, big self. And the whole point about attaching, finding your big self is it's one

with everything, including God, if you want to think about ultimate reality as a God. Your true self is one with God. The Hindus call it Brahman-Otman. Your Atman, your separate self, is one with Brahman, or the ultimate reality. So that's a pretty good first step to finding that you're one with everything. So in many respects, relatively conventional meditative self-help stuff there. However, you do notice a couple of little features already. Firstly, of course, the assumption based into the question is that Ken Wilbur himself is incredibly advanced up this hierarchy of human awareness worth noting.

And in fact, you'd have to be, wouldn't you, in order to be able to develop a framework like this. And yeah, we'll get into the way in which it might flatter the participants as well. The other thing you heard there too is that he's not a fan of that egocentric kind of thinking, but also the relativistic thinking. And I think these are a couple of references to the red stage, which is the egocentric power domination oriented. And the green one, which is the postmodern, sorry postmodernness, you guys get dinged as well. But, you know, that relativistic egalitarian, you know, the stage that doesn't like hierarchies and levels, being anti-hierarchy and stuff, that's a stage. Yeah, that is a stage.

So, yeah, I agree. There are notes there that are going to come up more. But the general thing that the outlines, as you say, is fairly generic spirituality. You have a egoic self and a more transcendental, bigger self that you can become more aware of. Ken Mowber has some issues about how that's frame. But generally, the process of waking up is about. that, right? Yeah.

Escaping this prison of relativity and subjectivity and all of these turbulent desires. Yes. So more details, Matt. Yes. Self-realization. Like some see this as either you wake up or you don't. And once you wake up, that is it. Like, there's nothing more than that.

Right. Try to pursue more, that is more like concepts of the mind. Right. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you see self-realization as just the beginning? Well, it can have degrees of depth. And the important thing is to realize your absolute oneness with everything that you're aware of right now. So you don't see the mountains, you are the mountains, you don't see the clouds, you are the clouds, you don't feel the earth, you are the earth, you don't see this computer's

you are one with this computer screen. And of course, it's all resting right where you thought your head was. But the point is that is a real self-realization. Because when you realize that unity consciousness, that is your eye as self, Brahman. And Brahmin is, of course, one with Godhead, one with Tao, one with Christ consciousness. However you want to think of that.

And that is a self-realization. Because your small self is letting go go of an identity with the ego and is realizing it's true self. So it has a self-realization. And that's a realization with this absolute oneness with everything. And you are literally one with everything. And if you realize that ultimate oneness, that is the highest realization that you can have. So you're not going to have some higher realization.

All you can have is a deepening understanding. of that oneness. So there you go. You know, again, I would say this is a fairly straightforward and typical account of self-awareness. You know, he actually references, I didn't take clips from it, but the concept of not having a head, Douglas Harding, this is a book from the 60s, which was kind of a Western Zen book, right? And Sam Harris also likes it, the notion that you can see all parts of your body, but you can't see your head. And actually inside your head, you are perceiving all of these things.

The world is being constructed, right? So you don't actually have a head. Wait, but you can feel your head. I'm feeling my head right now. Isn't feeling, isn't touch a sense, Chris? Well, yeah. Also, I mean, you can actually just video and see your own head. I'm looking at my head at this computer screen at the moment.

leave on the self-view. A mirror help. It's blowing my mind. These are the kind of like low-tier thinking, no mat, that, you know, I like this. I'm a low-tier guy. I'm a very low-tier guy. But, you know, it seems challenging, though, to sort of just be one with everything, like the computer screen and the Godhead at the same time.

That's, I could imagine it would take a lot of work. It's not a lot of work. No? Actually, what you discover, if you do it properly, is that there's no work at all, because it's the actual state of things. So you're just recognizing the true nature of existence. And once you do, there's no effort in it. So you don't need meditation cushions or anything anymore, Matt,

because you see, you know, it's like the matrix. You see through the, you know, the false image and you see things as they really are. And, you know, they're talking about how, like all of these insights about the non-dual nature of being are the same. Right. They've got different labels and different traditions. But whether it's Christ or the Tao, or Godhead. They're all talking about the same fundamental process of recognizing this universal truth.

So there's a little bit of comparative religion coming in there as well. We'll see more of that. But yeah. Yeah. I think the other interesting thing is just from a soccer social point of view, how this enterprise of going up to tears and developing this higher sense of awareness, is presented as basically the best thing you could possibly be doing. You know, you could be spending your time trying to make money,

be a big deal in the corporate world. You could be like you and me grinding away in academia, trying to get some sort of accomplishment there, or you could be sculpting your body or, you know, being beautiful. You know, there's all kinds of ways that people could be living their life and doing things that they might think is worthwhile. But actually, it's doing, this, working through this framework, working through this enterprise of ascending the levels

and developing this understanding is actually the best thing that anyone could possibly. It's the best work. It's a true work. Yes, you could live your life asleep the whole time and never come into contact with this, but that would be a wasted life. And, you know, in most systems you'll just be remanifested in a lower realm as a result of filling to do the self-work. But you made a rookie mistake there, Matt. You took the notion that there are actual stages and a hierarchy to those stages. Let's just address that because the interviewer will highlight that that's a mistake in interpretation. I had some questions about spiral dynamics.

I wanted to get into the stages of that. Before I ask those questions, one thing I've noticed in a Vedveda world is that when we talk about things like in stages, in spiral dynamics, there's a tendency to misinterpret as hierarchy and creating more like mental concepts. Like their criticism is that when we talk about things in stages, we are feeding more concepts to the mind. So how do you, how do you,

explain some people who may have those criticisms. God, that was such... Just, that was a difficult question to get out. You know their map, by the way, just that thing that people do where when they want to say something, they say some people have raised these questions. Not me. I don't have it. It's just, you know, it's a normal thing to do

when you want to present criticism, but yeah. Okay, so you're like one of those people, Matt. she's criticizing. You're like the aeromatic people that say, aren't you? I'm going to blame Ken Will, but he's got to stop talking about these things, those levels and tears. But I know from my reading, I know that technically these are not phases you pass through, but rather you could be at different levels of development on each of them. Some are definitely at a higher, more transcendent level than others, right? Turquoise is absolutely

better than beige but technically a person could be basically like 2% along turquoise I think and like 80% along with beige you know. You're very right very right actually there's a clip I have which is from later in it

which shows this being applied. I should say that when developmentalists attempt to deduce what stage a person is at They usually give it in percentages. So, like, when I first reached integral stage,

probably a developmentalist would say, well, about 20% of you was integral, and the rest hadn't reached integral yet. So you still had a fair amount of pluralistic and a lot of rationality and maybe some mythic. And they give each of those. stages of percentage. So maybe I was 10%

mythic and 15% or 20% rational and 30% green or postmodern. And so Kamala Harris was a what we call fractured green. She was generally at the green stage

which meant 30 or 40% of her was green. But she fell trapped to a lot of the problems with green. And one of the main problems with green is it looks at all of the universal rational systems that orange rationality created. By the way, Matt, he's going to go on, as we'll see later. He puts Donald Trump in the rational stage. Or he's like he's primarily in like the rational, the one that gives you science and all that kind of thing.

And I'm like, okay, I think that much. But you heard both things. You heard, you know, analysis of the percentages. But you also heard Kamala Harris is mostly green, right? Mostly postmodern. She's in the green stage. But that's only like 30 to 40 percent green. Yeah.

Like the rest of her would be distributed amongst the other colors, both higher. Yeah, but not feel or. Indigo or like she was she's nowhere near integral. Like we got to be clear there. But yeah, so that that's what you're saying about like it. I mean, it is very clearly a tiered system with like a judgment. It's very clear. Green is not as good as turquoise.

And that's one of the funny things about the system. It is self-sealing and it incorporates in it a refutation of the various criticisms that have been made. So you can criticize it on. you know, rational, empirical grounds. I think that you and I would be want to do. But you can certainly also criticize it on postmodern sort of egalitarian type grounds. And it has been done. This is what I've discovered, Chris, which is that, you know,

but basically this tiered system, it obviously puts less developed cultures, less developed societies, so to speak. Yeah, primitive ones at, like a base tier. And then, you know, you'll see. that the technological, Western ones, whatever, are, are comfortably many tears above them, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

And of course, Wilbur's particular state, he's mentioned there again, how he got into turquoise quite some time ago. I'd say he's mostly turquoise at this point, let's be honest. So what his system does,

it kind of pathologizes the point of view of the people that might criticize it. So he's basically built like a postmodern critique of his work into his own map and demoted them, basically. Oh, yeah, yeah.

He does have that. And I also think that we've heard this kind of response previously whenever you had the Ayurvedic system described by Dr. K, right, where he very clearly was applying a tripartite classification system saying vatas are like this and so on. But then also, when pushed, he would say, well, everybody is a little bit of each. and its percentages, right? So you at once get the benefit of having this clear system with structure and a relatively simple classification system.

But then you can deny that it's that simple as it appears, right? Actually, more complex. Exactly. And in effect, Wilbur's framework is much more complicated in advance. So it integrates a lot of things, and they all get pre-refuted. So Wilbur would say, yeah, it's okay to do like a feminist, way of looking in things or post-colonial studies or something, but actually

it's not as good as what he's doing. It's okay. You know, there's a place for empirical, scientific, productionist type work, sure. But it's down here at this level of understanding. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a strength of adopting this approach.

I also will mention, I have a clip that comes towards the end of this conversation. So we're going to get back to them talking about the stages, but there is a point where he mentions later, even though they've talked about all these different stages and all different things, that they haven't actually got into some of the more complicated things that can be added. And that's called cross-paradigmatic. And that's a fairly sophisticated structure of consciousness. So you can think of integral theory. It covers a lot of areas. It claims to cover major disciplines from physics to chemistry to

philosophy to religion and so on. And that's a cross-paradigmatic attempt to show how all of those disciplines fit together. And we do that using what's called quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types. And we've talked about levels, lines, and states. And we've also talked about quadrants, although I didn't label them. quadrants are first, second, third, and fourth person perspectives. And when I first drew the quadrants, I simply drew a cross like that and then listed first, second, third, and fourth person.

And it turns out to be the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective or the individual and the group. So anyway, that's a sort of a brief discussion about what the third tier is like. And the reason you can't find anything on it is there is nothing written on it except what I've written. This is connected to the post-Turquoise stages. But I just find it interesting that he's like, you know, I also have label Trink's quadrants. right? And I also have these other ways. So it's just like saying, we could make it even more complicated. Oh yeah. Well, you know, I think the thing to be aware of is that these are all,

like the quadrants is another framework in his big framework, right? So it's a separate thing. So apparently his system is called equal, equal, or quall. I think that was an older. I think spiral dynamics. As it developed since then? Well, it's in a way, the quadrants, even if it's superseded, the quadrants is a cue in that. Yes. Maybe it's superseded, but all quadrants, all levels,

all lines, states, all types. But yeah, so that's yet another framework. Eddie, he goes on at other times about the importance of pronouns, essentially. So you've got the I, which is you. Yes. Yeah, and then, you know, your subjective experience. Then you've got the it, which is in the upper right, which is your body and your behavior in objective terms.

And then you've got the we, the collective, bottom left, yep, collective shared culture. And then you've got the lower right, which is the it's, which is the actual, like, physical stuff out there, social systems, institutions, economies, all that stuff. So that quadrant thing basically encompasses the entire inner and outer. worlds, both individually and collectively. I wonder where, you know, Godhead, where that fits in there. Or maybe that's like a different... I think it's... I think that's taken care of the different.

I think you have to return back to the, what we're just talking about, those stages of development and the states of consciousness. And also, we haven't talked about it, but also multiple intelligences. That's more than... Yeah, yeah, that's... I mean, we'll get to all that, man. Let's return to the stages that aren't really stages. You can tell the difference when you're using a first person or second person or third person pronoun. So those are fairly real events.

But what you can't see is no matter how much you look within, unless you actually study something like developmental psychology and learn the stages as they unfold and then learn to apply them to yourself, wherever you might be on that stage conception, you can do that. But that's not an obvious then. And for that reason, when we talk about waking up, which is an enlightenment or awakening or self-realization experience,

that's a first-person experience. you have that if you're one if you're sitting in the forest and all of a sudden you become one with everything and love and bliss you know it it's a first person conscious experience and you directly are aware of it it fills your awareness and you know you're experiencing this oneness but if you look at the stages of what we call growing up which is different from waking up waking up is the first person direct immediate experience, but growing up consists of third-person stages of development. I remember now there's this distinction he has between waking up, which is the, you know, the kind of enlightenment or self-actualization thing, and growing up is a separate thing, which is more focused on the stages of development. Exactly, exactly. And in his little example there, he's illustrating how, you know, if you're having this

transcendental experience by yourself in a forest. He's locating that within his multi-dimensional framework. On one hand, it's in the upper left quadrant because you're having an inner subjective experience, right? Yeah, commuting with nature. Yeah, I know. You have to grade me on how well I'm doing here. At the same time, it's also a state of consciousness, right?

And he's really big on the distinction between, you know, these different states of consciousness, which, you know, just like any state, comes and goes versus a persistent kind of stage right which is you know where you've developed to at this point so um yeah so you might have for instance an amazing transcendental experience in a forest it's happening on the subjected level so you're in the upper left hand quadrant it could be like a really groovy experience a big deal but because you're at a lower level like you know down there maybe in the purple magic level right you you might sort of just basically understand that experience purely in magical, animistic types of tones.

See that? See how subtle? I mean, it's weird. This is really integral. Well, let's hear a bit more about the stages. So they're like Gene Geppser named his stages, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral. and spiral dynamics has variation on those same stages as do all developmental psychologists.

That's the interesting thing about developmental psychology is they all agree on the general nature of these stages as they unfold. So you, but you can't see those stages by themselves. I mean, it just wouldn't dawn on you to say, oh, yes, I'm aware that I have a first person stage and I'm aware of that second person stage

and I see that third person stage. That's not what it's like. They're all third person. They're all objects or things that exist in you, but you're not really that aware of them. Anything stroke you is tendentious in that, Chris? Any claim that he made there?

Well, the claim that all the developmental psychology models and things that he are referencing or outlining the same stages. I don't believe that's true. You might find some parallels in various developmental psychology frameworks, but Freudian developmental stages are different from Colbergian stages are different from

Piaget or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a developmental psychology is a whole field and various people have proposed stages of development. And, you know, there's some truth to a lot of them, but they don't even agree with each other very much. And certainly not, certainly not the Freudians. Don't even talk about the Freudians, Chris. Don't put ideas into people's heads. Yeah, well, he he also mentioned that,

you know, the archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral were names from another system that he integrated, right? Like in the spiral dynamics. But I think there's a key maneuver here that you see across a lot of this sort of integrative stuff, and I think it applies equally to his attempt there to say that his framework is a synthesis and a combination that all the developmental psychologists would agree with. It's the same as same that all of the religions of the world are basically the same. Oh, don't get ahead of us. I mean, my point is, well, first, it's just not true, but I think the maneuver can kind of because if you pick and choose and you work at this high enough level of abstraction,

then you can kind of like the Borg pretend, at least, to have ingested all of these different theories and subsume them all with your overriding framework. But it's kind of a trick of abstraction. As long as you're vague and abstract enough, then it could kind of seem plausible, but it's simply not true. Yeah, he's basically saying, you know, he's consulted all these incredible diversity and deep literatures and come up with the Ur-framework, the grammar of all these different systems.

And, you know, you can believe that. We'll see whether that's true or not. But that's the claim anyway. So let's hear a bit more. And so even all of the earliest native tribes had some sort of spiritual experience. And they would, maybe it was being one with the earth or one with the manifest,

universe, but they had that conception. And they were at least going back that we know of 50,000 years. So that's a very real realm. But growing up, these stages that we go through, archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral, those weren't discovered until around 100 years ago. because no matter how much we looked within, we couldn't see them.

We didn't even know we were going through all those stages. I remember when I first learned about what I call growing up or these developmental stages, I was just floored. I couldn't believe that I had gone through an archaic stage, a magic stage, a mythic stage, a rational stage, a pluralistic stage, and I was running into integral stages.

I was just astounded by that. Oh, so there, again, you know, you had this distinction between the waking up stage, right, which is something that is ancient, even exists in like Hunter Galler society 50,000 years ago to a certain extent. And then the, what is called growing up stages, which is a system that's only at most 100 years old, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and again with the stages, Chris, I can't leave this one alone, sorry, but he's claiming there that, you know, us Western has just kind of figured this out about a hundred years ago, realizing this truth of the stages in his framework. And it's just, again, it's so much bullshit because, yes, it's true, Western psychology is a relatively young discipline, so you can take from 100 years ago, whatever. But the various theories that apply to human development in the lifespan, right, going from an infant to an adult, are about completely different things. They're not even consistent with each other, let alone his earth theory.

So Piaget was looking at logical and mathematical development and abstraction like that. Colberg was looking at moral reasoning. Eric Erickson was doing like psychosocial type development. You know, Maslow's hierarchy, for instance, that's a little bit similar to Ken Wilbur in the sense that it's mainly based on vibes. But the point is, is that, you know, it's really an absurd claim to say that they're all different investigations into the one thing, which is his thing.

It's just not true. Yeah, well, actually, just a side point to mention, Matt, you noted that he kind of mentions that, you know, things were progressing and then there's been like a sudden speeding up right in the past hundred years and like in some respects associated with modern societies, right? You know, after industrialization and stuff like this. But he does talk about that. So listen to this. And then from 1800s to 1960 is only around three or 400 years. So you can see they're getting shorter. And we expect. that to continue.

So evolution is really very much like a spiral that gets faster and faster and faster as you get closer to the center. And what is the center? Well, the center might be a point where everybody has a

self-realization, or at least the whole culture is aware of self-realization and teaches it in its educational system and so on. But we'll find out whatever it is. But those are, that's the history of growing up. And it's very different from waking up, which had been around at least since the beginning of the magic era.

So at least 50,000 years ago. And it probably had precursors going back several hundred thousand years. but they are not the same at all. So I will also mention that, you know, we have some archaeological evidence and paleological evidence around hunter-gallers and, you know, what they were doing 50,000 years ago, but we don't know almost anything about their actual beliefs.

And, you know, obviously, because they weren't, you were just doing cave paintings or, you know. No, Chris, they had a sense of oneness with the manifest reality. That's what they had. Yeah, but I did like that things are spiraling faster. So that's his explanation why he's focusing, you know, on the contemporary period, right? It looks like he's interested in things in his lifetime, but that's because the spiral is, you know, speeding up. Except, you know, not that contemporary, too, because in addition to the fact that his alignment of all of this sort of current,

psychological stuff to his thing, it only works at this level of abstraction at which words kind of lose all meaning. Not only the fact that actually the source material that he's integrating actually explicitly disagree. But as well as that, like he's referring to a particular point in time, you know, in like 1990s and stuff like that where, you know, we had, as you know, the replication crisis and all of these things. Like the field has moved on and people out in the public and in other disciplines seem to kind of treat Sigmund Freud a bit like Karl Marx, just kind of this like eternal thinker who dropped all these truth bombs on us, which persists forever. But actually, the field is an empirical one, and most of these classic theories that he's picked and chose from have been substantially

revised in light of the often weak evidence that supported the original propositions. You could say they've been integrated, Mark. But yeah, well, you pointed out, you know, him harkening back through, you know, very big figures in the field. And he does go farther back. It really impressed me. And I started studying all the developmental models there are. And I actually wrote a book called Integral Psychology, where I listed the various stages of development.

And I had over a hundred different models of developmental psychology, a hundred that had investigated those stages. Because once we found out about them, and we found out about them because of a genius psychologist named James Mark Baldwin around 1900 discovered that all of our mental contents actually go and grow through stages. We call them the stages of growing up because of that. And James Mark Baldwin, by the way, was a good friend of William James. And William James, of course, is. considered America's greatest psychologist. And if he was, James Mark Baldwin was his second greatest psychologist. And they were friends. And what's interesting is that while James Mark Baldwin was studying what we call these structures of consciousness that go through stages,

William James was studying states of consciousness. Yeah, it's like listen to a magpie. He's going around, like finding the shiny little things. the history of the academic tradition. Yeah, it does remind me of Jordan Peterson, you know, when he's talking. Like, they always did this thing where they're like, and this person knew that guy and was like friends with him and. And he talked about states.

And I'm talking about states too. So there you go. Yeah. And do you remember we covered the philosopher who talked to Sam Harris and then kind of went on an entire world of everybody in his intellectual mind palace. And yeah, I do think there's an issue that, you know, people like to say, well, I knew this guy and I know some facts about him and he connects to this guy. And I mean, there's much more of this.

But we've described it as decorative scholarship. I think that's what it is. but also, Matt, we've made a note of the kind of appeal of complexity, right? Pseudo-complexity, you might describe it, or like intentional complexity, where the system has all these different things. You know, he mentioned he's synthesizing a hundred systems into a single system. But the single system, it's pretty complex. We've covered some of the complexities, but listen to this.

And so if you learn, let's say Gepser's archa, magic, mythic, rational, plural, and its characteristics, then you can look within and find which of those you seem to resonate with this. So you can find your stage of growing up if you study the situation and you learn what the various stages are. And again, you can use almost any model. It doesn't matter because they all generally agree on the basic stages of awareness. fairness. But those are important differences. And when I first started studying this and creating an

integral model, which is an integration or synthesis of all the various paths to wholeness, and I discovered five main paths to wholeness. So he's going to outline the five main paths to wholeness, which are not the stages, are not the quadrants, right? I could say there's always a, like, listicle, you know, can be broken down the four steps to thinking or

whatever the case might be. Yeah, yeah, like it is a rich tapestry and you can see the appeal. And of course, the appeal there too is that you can ascend to the best possible version of a human

being simply by studying this stuff. right like that's how you ascend right so so by definition he himself and he said so explicitly is right up there the tippy top of the most one of the most advanced human beings that have existed but also the the audience right the audience is generally bought into this stuff they are studying it they're going to seminars and sessions and working on themselves they themselves the better they understand his very complicated frameworks, the system, do more of a real perfected human being they become. I know fortunate that it works like that. Yeah, it is.

And he goes on to talk about intelligence, and it might be interesting to learn those multiple types of intelligence. Of course they're right. Well, we have not just one intelligence called cognitive intelligence, which most people are. aware of. It's what you're thinking right now. That's your cognitive intelligence. But we also have an emotional intelligence, an aesthetic intelligence or perception of beauty, a spiritual intelligence, a spatial intelligence, a verbal intelligence, a mathematical intelligence. And all of those are they call lines of development, but all those lines of development go through the same basic levels of development. So you can pick any and all the various psychological developmental

models generally focus on a particular line of development. So Piers-A studied cognitive development, Colbert studied moral development, Lovenger studied self-development, Maslow studied motivational development. But they all came up with very similar stages of development. So that was a big study. That was a big realization for me. And also another realization connected with that understanding was I had myself a sort of spontaneous awakening experience when I was around 13 or 14. And because of that, I started studying the world's religions. And I in particular, for some reason, began with Zen Buddhism.

and the author who wrote extensively about Zen Buddhism was called D-H-Suzuki. Now, I know you're going to love talking about Ziz Suzuki. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know you're just, just raring to get your teeth into that curse. But before you do, just let me whinge a little bit more about how psychology is being treated here. Before you do, let me just point out. He did highlight that those guys were interested in different lines of development, you know, echoing you. He noted the moral development with Colberg and the others.

So, yeah, what have you got to say for yourself? Well, I would invite the listener to notice what he's doing with all of this name dropping. You might say prestige borrowing by adjacency. Like all of these names, all of these august figures, most of it is obsolete. They were discredited. But, you know, putting that aside, the latest one, of course, is the multiple intelligences. And of course he's kind of love that because, you know, he likes his lists. You can't just have one cut of intelligence.

That's very boring. And, you know, this is something that most people in the public generally like as well. I mean, because it's a very attractive thought, right? Oh, you know, you've got your normal academic type intelligence, but then you've got emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence and... Special intelligence. Yes, kinesthetic intelligence. You know, the list grows.

The problem is it's all bullshit. And even Gardner himself has pretty much recognized. that. Yeah, the empirical basis for those multiple intelligences theories is incredibly thin. Now, Matt, I'll be the voice of the listener here. Wait a second, Professor Brown. Are you claiming that, like, the only type of intelligence is book learning and, you know, shape rotating or working out complex mathematics? Are you saying people can't excel and be geniuses at some manual skill or sport or art. What are you trying to say, Professor Warring? Right. I mean, it's hard to explain this without getting into a whole thing about it, right?

But intelligence itself is psychometrically a tricky thing and a definitional thing. It's got its own issues. But it's different from just saying people have a skill or a proficiency or a talent in a particular area. If you change the definition to describe it as that, then, sure, there's a multiplicity of everything. It's a fractal. We're all incredibly unique snowflakes in our particular spectrum of abilities. But if you're talking about the actual academic study of intelligence, yes, there are a couple of domains which shows some, I guess, statistical structure, like verbal intelligence versus the shape rotators and the, you know, the analytic type. Word sales. Yeah, word sales versus shape rotators, what you're referenced there. There's a little bit of that.

But basically those theories of multiple intelligences, including Howard Gardner, that he references there, you know, it was a nice idea, but it hasn't really been borne out. So it just follows the pattern of what he does, which is, he's picking and choosing on cool sounding stuff from the field of psychology over the last hundred years or so without really any concern or interest in the empirical support for them. Yes. And regarding Western Buddhism and Zahm, I will just mention Matt that, you know, first of all, he talked about having a spontaneous awakening in his late teens, right, a bit later than Jordan Hall in the context of his home. But that is a common thing, right, that the gurus have these moments of individual, you know, lightning bolt moments, even though they're learning from the world traditions and whatever. So he had his personal revelation in his early teens.

And then he mentions, you know, for some reason I got into Zen Buddhism. I think that reason is because it was very popular amongst counterculture people in the 60s and 70s, right? And as he mentions, D.T. Zizirki, a very famous proponent of Western Buddhism. Actually, quite a strong Japanese nationalist in Japanese. Oh. happens and a sectarian for a particular school of Zen Buddhism. Even though I have, I read, I read at least one, maybe two books by Suzuki when I was an undergraduate student. Do you think less of me?

No, I don't. I don't because the thing is that it's not surprising at all, right? And Suzuki was one of the most successful advocates of Zen Buddhism, right? But it's just that here it's presented as, you know, happenstats or whatever. But like, no, this is exactly what you would expect someone. the 60s and 70s to orientate towards. And he ended up like shaving his head,

you know, a signature look, which he said he did because, you know, we saw Zen monks shaved their head. And then later, you know, like, find the reason that, you know, monks in general do this. But I think that's just indicative. And the other point that I make is that

Western Buddhism tends to have this narrative that the people have cut through the cultural accretions of the Eastern Buddhist traditions and find the original core, which they are now practicing, and that is very much what he is claiming about all systems. So he kind of now puts Buddhism as just one particular flavor that he has absorbed. But the notion is very similar to, you know, the Western Buddhist approach. Or Buddhist modernist, if you like that. Yeah, yeah. This is a soapbox you'll never

get tired of standing on. I stand for it, Chris. But he is like the bog, isn't he? He's absorbing the distinctiveness into his collective. He doesn't matter. Here you are. He'll absorb you. I know. That's the way it goes.

Well, so, Matt, would it surprise you to know that there are 10 major stages in the Zan system and that this was appealing? Only 10? It depends which version you go. But listen to this. And I was really struck by the fact that they had 10 major stages of, developing towards this full enlightenment or full awakening. And it was fascinating to me because by this time,

I had sort of completed my first round exploration of developmental psychological models. And all Western developmental psychologists, for some reason, ignored waking up, and they just focused on growing up. So they focused on the archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral stages of structures of consciousness, and they ignored the states of consciousness, waking, dreaming, deep sleep, Turia, and Turia, Tita. And so when I started studying Zen, and as soon as I read my first book on Zen called Essays in Zen Buddhism, I was bound and determined to find a Zen master. Of course you were.

There were 10 stages. Actually, you know, Chris, I'm going to mention this now because I'm probably going to forget, but it just occurred to me that Ken Wilbur is like someone who's pathologically high on the personality trait, openness to experience. Yeah, it's like it's often kind of a good trait, you know, being interested in wild and exciting, diverse new ideas.

But, you know, he's got it to the point where he's seeing meaningful connections between completely unrelated things. and it starts generating these grand unified theories of everything. Yeah, like you can see the excitement that he has in finding these connections and trawling through all of this obscure stuff and pulling it all together into a grand synthesis. But it doesn't have any discipline or any rigor. I mean, it's not obscure.

I would point out as well. These are mainstream traditions in a lot of cases. But the other thing is that a lot of it is, you know, you say, open this to experience, but I would also say it has this aspect to it where it's, it's openness to outside information as long as it is reflected in his intuitions and experiences, right? Like, he is interacting with all this literature, but he's basically viewing it as endorsing what he already had discovered or believed from his other thing. So everything is kind of reinterpreted for his lens as adding more support for it. So it's like interacting with other

traditions, but mostly just to say, oh, this also provides support for what I, you know, already thought. Already have developed. Yeah, that's, that's right. So it's not actually, it's not a true engagement with the other stuff. I mean, this is the way in which these kinds of cosmologies that they construct. You can find heaps of examples of them in alternative therapies or in people that really into UFOs, right? They build up this incredible Baroque edifice of, you know, unsubstantiated stuff. And cosmology. Yeah, cosmology. So, so they, and you can tell that it is incredibly satisfying and enjoyable for them. They find it rich and invigorating. But it's true what you said, which is that all the raw material gets filtered and combined and slotted into the existence.

existing cosmology. So, you know, I think in that sense there is a connection between these cosmological theories for whatever, a bit of phrase, and conspiracy theories, right? Because they have the same structure, like a huge amount of diverse interests and all kinds of disparate things being brought into it. They love going away and doing the deep research and learning about things, but it's all ultimately getting slotted into their existing preconceived structure. Yeah, and, you know, if you think that Matt and I are layering our own interpretation of that, just listen to Kim Wilbur explain that exact thing. There were probably two dozen in America at the time I began looking for them.

But I finally found one, and he was a highly respected Zen master, and I started studying with him. And I was fascinated to find that Zen had these 10 states. of development towards enlightenment, because I had worked out these eight to nine to ten stages of growing up by studying 100 different models of it and seeing all. And the models themselves varied from like five stages to 12 stages.

And I sort of deduce that there were roughly eight or nine, maybe 10 stages of growing up development. And then I saw Zen had to do that. these 10 stages towards enlightenment. And I immediately thought they were referring to the same thing. And I thought, wow, these guys have the same stages that I discovered. I'm going to go down in history. I'm brilliant.

Oh, this is wild. And so I started studying all the mystical traditions. Oh, and by the way, he doesn't actually end up finishing, because I think the version of the story that he wants to get to there is, but that was a false. realization because actually there was more, but he gets sidetracked and he doesn't get to that point which you probably anticipate his coming more, but that was, you know, like a false gold, right? Yeah, I think, I think still though, he's seeing not only that these 100

psychological developmental theories that he's surveyed are all pointing to the one Earth theory that he's developed, but also that he's seeing deep synchronistic with these Eastern traditions. Yeah. And well, actually, he does kind of get to this point. So I'll take you on the journey. So of course you have the comparative religion part where all the religious traditions are essentially the same.

And it turns out that all the mystical traditions, although they were very different from their core religion, like a Christian mystic, doesn't believe very much of the Christian fundamentalist message. but they all believe that, well, as St. Paul put it, let this consciousness be in you, which was in Christ Jesus, that we all may be one. And that was a fairly good explanation of oneness, unity consciousness.

And I found that all the mystics worldwide agreed that the whole goal of life is to have this awakening experience, is to have this Satori, this Kensho. And so I was, amazed to discover that and I discovered that all of the world's mystic traditions tended to agree with those same basic stages of enlightenment. And there were stages that really were going to the basic states of consciousness because when you sit and meditate and have an immediate experience, you know it.

It's a direct first person experience. And so you're tracking that. And so you're studying your state of consciousness. And that's why they came up with about 10 stages to enlightenment. And I was thrilled with that because it seemed to match my nine or 10 stages of growing up. So I figured out I'd found this universal stage sequence. There's quite a lot of repetition, by the way. Yeah.

If you haven't noticed. Yeah, he's hammering that point. He's an older man. Yeah, that's right. I've got to give my break for that. But I think there's something there, though, isn't there, Chris? because for me, the takeaway is that if you operate at a high enough level of abstraction and the sense makers, practitioners par excellence at this,

then you can see all kinds of legitimate similarities between, say, I don't know, a monk in medieval Europe who's experiencing the agony and the ecstasy and praying and going to out-of-body experiences and Zen Buddhism and the rest. Like, if you move up the levels of abstraction, then you can connect everything together. Well, also, it is the case that, like, you know, mystics and various religious traditions, one, often do tend to be some of the more tolerant strands within those religions, right? And secondly, that there is various ways that you can highlight overlaps and the experiences they're talking about. Now, in my case, Matt, I might say that's because we're all humans dealing with

same cognitive architecture at the end of the day. So if you engage in introspective practices, you know, there are going to be inevitably certain experiences which are consistent. The way that modernist Buddhists or Western Buddhist ticket and other people interested in mystical traditions is often to say that speaks to, you know, a fundamental reality that is shared. Like all religions are grasping the elephant from a different part. But it can also simply be, there's only so many ways to skin a goose. No, I hear what you're saying. We're all fundamentally human beings,

and there's only so many different permutations you can make of some basic, not only biological, but I guess existential kind of facts of being alive, right? Right. You know, as we experienced when we looked at the Kirtzke-Sach book, essentially we are a long tube with sense organs surrounding it. That's so poetic, Chris. It's a real mystery why your perspective on the world isn't as popular as Ken Welvers.

You're basically just a long to you. There's only so much you can do. And people call you a reductionist, for sure. Yeah, well, so, okay, we've heard how things are similar, and it's very comparative religion and stuff. He's not the only one with this approach to things. But that's not where he stopped them out, unlike these other people. He noticed something else.

But the more I studied it, the more I realized they really were quite different. I mean, even if you just look at the names of them, waking up, or waking, dreaming, deep sleep, Turia and Tura, don't even sound like archa, magic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral. They don't even sound like they're dealing with the same thing. And they're not. the states are dealing with these first person immediate experiential realities that we have, which include an experience of enlightenment or awakening or opening up. But the growing up stages just take you through a series of different worldviews

or different ways you're going to interpret your experience. Yeah, so this is a theme he returns to a fair bit, which is the big distinction between states of experience. And stages or persistent traits, I suppose, is another way to put it. And, you know, like, that's not wrong on the face of it. Like standard psychology would agree with this, right? You can have state-based psychological properties or more persistent ones, which you might call them a trait.

And of course, people develop over the lifespan in many different ways. Yeah. And the development of society and culture is a different stage. you know, so you can also talk about stages there, right? Yeah. But I guess the point is that his framework has enough degrees of freedom in it. It has, like, you know, it has the different quadrants. It's got the stages.

It's got the states. It's got the multiple intelligences. It's probably got other diagrammatic kind of structures in there as well. And it's flexible enough to basically incorporate anything into it and into itself. Yeah. And, you know, remember Matt that all of this is in the frame of, it sounds like you're outlining a progressive hierarchy of things. And he was like, no, no, you know, not at all. But it does spiral.

It's a spiral. Yeah. So just to have Ken Wilburne describe that. You know, we've heard this in other words, but here it is again. We can study them and then figure out what stage you're at and so on. but they really are quite different in terms of our capacity to be aware of them. And that's why we discovered waking up at least 100,000 years ago, and we didn't discover growing up until 100 years ago. And that was a big deal.

And so for me to understand the difference between those two was a very important part of my own growth and creation of an integral framework. The integral freedom market is taking all of that stuff that we've been talking about. But let's not get bogged down, Matt, you know, trying to work out the hierarchy. As Ken says, that's not really what it's about, right? It's about integrating the knowledge. And the interviewer does have a more advanced question. Among all the stages that you discussed, some of those, the four stages, I couldn't find a lot of information.

and I couldn't find the difference nuances of each each of those stages. For example, indigo, violet, ultraviolet, and clear light, these four stages. There's not much information about them.

Can you share nuances of each of those stages? These are the stages that come after the integrated or these are the integral stages, I think, like they were added later these four. Yeah, and they are stages. They are like they are tears. Some add the ones at the top. So reductive.

And you know, and you know, it has that feature which just made me think it's quite similar to Scientology in that respect, which is that the higher up you go in these things, and Turia and Turia Tita and so on. Up from the orange and the infrared up to super my mind, the states get more and more abstract, more and more untethered from even the most tenuous connections with any kind of psychological research and goes into a kind of spiritual terminology where you're talking about phrases like, what is it, like a seamless composition of the

internal and the external, a non-dual awareness where the witness and the witness collapsed into the one presence. You know, you're talking about language like that to describe these kinds of stages. Yes, that's, that's right. And, you know, you signed disparaging our map, but that's obviously just because you're not properly. I'm just excited. I'm just enthusiastic about the topic, Chris. Okay. Well, you know, as we know, Matt, if you advance hypotheses, it's fine to say anything, because that's just, it's just hypothesizing. So Ken is doing that here. Yeah. We're not very close to those stages. And so I'm, I'm not, sort of hypothesizing what they'll look like based on what all the previous stages have in common.

So we find that each stage transcends the previous stage. In other words, it goes beyond it. So mythic went beyond magic, magic went beyond archaic. But they include it. They actually embrace it. And that transcend and include is a rule of evolution wherever we find it. So it's just in a natural world, atoms are transcended by molecules because molecules do more than atoms. They have more capacities and they're larger and so on. But they include atoms. So molecules transcendent include atoms. And then molecules are transcended and included in living cells. So every living cell includes molecules but also transcends them. They can reproduce, for example, and they're living and so on.

And multicellular animals transcend but include single cells, obviously. It continues, but I'll stop. I can imagine. Yeah. What a perfect example of pseudo-profant bullshit, Chris. Would you not agree? I mean, you know, making that incredibly loose analogy between those different levels of the physical world to.

his different stages in his theory. Yeah, and one thing that I think is worth noting here is like, so here he said, you know, he's hypothesizing about those stages, which suggests that we haven't reached it, but you have to remember the stages are not individual development. They are the stages of society, right? So society is not yet at these stages, but that doesn't mean Ken Wilver is not getting the highest stages.

So just in case you thought, he was saying, like, I don't really know, you know, what goes on at the higher stages. That's mistaking the waking up and the growing up or way right. Well, my understanding, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, is that these stages apply to both people, individuals, and sort of cultural, societal evolution as well. Yeah, but I think that's the waking up and growing up distinction, like waking up as personal based like the

developmental thing and the growing up is you know the stages of society but you're right it overlaps and it will depend on the circumstance and so on

but that's why he's saying he doesn't know and you know the spiral is speeding up so we're going to probably get into these stages soon enough just just imagine

when we all progress to that level it would be a society made of nothing but Ken Wilders and sense makers what a world that would be yeah and you know

the other thing, you pointed it out, Matt, but we've seen this with Jordan Peterson, Jordan Hall, all of them. They really do not mind belaboring metaphors for an extremely indulgent amount of time. You could give a single point about that or say it in

like one sentence, but why say it in one sentence when you can spend seven minutes saying and inside cells there are atoms and inside atoms there are quirks. You know, they go on and on and don't mind. Like Jordan Pearson is the same.

They don't seem to have any concern with just like really strongly beliebering a very basic point. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a functional reason for that, which is that the main rhetorical force for the ideas

that they're spinning come from their metaphors and analogies. Right? Yes. So the more you get people thinking about the analogy and everyone's in your agreeing, yes, molecules are comprised of atoms, Chris.

They are. And the human cell, it's comprised of molecules when you think about it. So, you know, the metaphor makes perfect, you know, it's perfectly coherent. And so that serves as the rhetorical strength of the point that they're looking to make. But there is

a fundamental mistake there, which is that a good and evocative metaphor is not evidence. It's not evidence. No. No. No. That's the constant mistake that the gurus make, or not mistake, you might describe it as tactic. But yeah, so the other thing that is, I think, an interesting tactic is that Ken Wilbur is often very clear about, you know, we've heard some uncertainties about the numbers of stages, but he also is fairly clear. It's nine or ten. And there is like a precision to the things he talks about.

There's four types of perspective and there's three ways of knowing and so on. And then in terms of the amount of people that have entered stages, which speaks to your point, Ma, it's not just the society. There is some specificity about that, too. And the reason we need to include them is virtually no developmental model anywhere in the world includes any of those stages. The 100 models that I studied only include up to what I call the turquoise or the fully integral stage. But the percent of the population that reaches that stage is 0.5 percent.

That's almost that's one person out of 200. That's not it's not exactly overflowing. So the next stages of which a very minuscule number of people are at the stage right beyond the indical stage, stage and you listed before as I've sort of described them. And the first stage, I've hypothesized that one of the things that happens as we continue to grow to these higher stages is that we become aware of states of consciousness. And so we tend to include those states. And so we include the gross or physical waking state at the first stage beyond turquoise.

And I call that the paramine. And it's para, because paramine is beside, and the paramine is beside the rational mind. And so it's a more inclusive identity. And it tends to be identified with, all of Gaia, for example, of the whole Earth. So that's a form, a beginning form of cosmic consciousness, but I believe it starts at this beginning third tier. That kind of highlights what you talked about.

Here it is individuals, right, and their level of progress. Before it was, you know, the society. But I think this is where you start to get some overlap with those cultish dynamics, right? Because just like any good cult, like Scientology, you have a mission. Part of the mission is your personal enlightenment and purity and going clear. And part of it is elevating all of humankind to eventually collect that tier. But at this point in time, Chris, just like with any good cult, it's the select few. There's one in 200 people.

Yeah, not for 500%. One and two people are operating even in the talker's levels, right? Like that's mid-tier, right? That's mid-at-best, right? But, you know, where you might be able to get to is, you know, gesturing beyond. We do know that Ken Wilbur is most definitely operating fully at that tier. And I think part of the appeal of these systems, including Scientology, is that graduated access to the higher knowledge. Like, Scientology is more harmful and more horrible in so many ways. But in terms of that structural similarity, they've got a lot in. common. You know, Scientology keeps their secrets sort of secret. You know, you've got to pay this money to get another special course to get to the ascends of the higher levels. You know, I think Wilbers is a bit less toxic and a bit less concrete. It's more abstract and therefore

less obviously wrong. But it still has that kind of cosmic spiritual thing whereby studying and reflecting and meditating and going through all the process and really embracing the framework fully, you will gradually go clear and join that select group. Yeah, and it's positioning, like you've talked about, the integral perspective is the next tier up. Like the other religious systems and stuff, they have value. They can take you up the stages,

but they are concerned with what 99.5% of people stay at because what he's talking about is a level of advancement, which is really only for the super select, right, who are able to transcend all the way up. And then there's levels beyond that. And of course, the religions haven't focused on that because less than one than 200 people will ever even touch that stage. So if you're listening to this and you're interested in those stages, that implies that you are a very special person who is, you know, If you're on the road to getting there. And in that sense, too, like Scientology, there is the preemption of criticism.

Because any alternative point of view that does not actually embrace it is actually slotted in at one of these more primitive, less developed ways of looking at the world. And Scientology famously has the concept of like oppressive. Is it oppressive? Suppressive personalities and so on. So in Wilder's cosmology, your objection reflects your developmental level. And that's where you and I are sitting very clearly. We're down there.

We're orange. I think we're orange. Orange. We're orange, which is not true. That's not a big color. No. And, you know, so that was stage one past whatever color turquoise or. Yeah.

Yeah. The mind boggles, really, when you start thinking about the next ones. Oh yeah, so here you go. And you mentioned that, you know, abstracts spirituality. Well, I mean, sort of. And then the next stage includes the dream state, which is also called the subtle state. And the subtle state is the home of subtle energies like Kundalini. A lot of people have heard of Kundalini energy.

This is energy that goes up the spine out to the crown of the head and becomes one with the entire universe. well that can occur at the second stage beyond the turquoise of the four stages you mentioned I call all of those third tier and integral stages are second tier and the first eight or so stages leading up

to second tier all called first tier so first tier is archaic magic mythic, rational and pluralistic and they all have one thing in common, which is they think that their truth is the only truth in existence. There we go, Matt. That's clearly we're first tier.

I mean, usually when you say first tier thinkers, it's kind of like a compliment. But in this system, first tier is really, you haven't even started beginning, spending multiple paradigms, right? Actually, it does remind me very much of Jordan Ball. Exactly. You don't commit to just one paradigm like we do.

in the orange paradigm of scientific rationalism. That's a mistake. You've got to be spinning all the paradigms at once, embracing them all. And that's the thing, all of those other tiers, they subsume, right? They subsume all the previous tiers. They understand all the science and stuff. They've mastered that and they're beyond that. So, of course, science would criticize them because they don't know anything about the higher tiers.

They don't even see the code anymore. It's just like, you know, woman in a red dress, that kind of thing. I see through the metrics, man. That's it. Well, now, some more details, because, you know, this is sounding a little poetic, a little bit, you know, abstract. But let's get down to the actual numbers. I want to know more about, you know, specifics and statistics.

And don't worry, Ken has it covered. But what integral stages do, they're called paradigmatic and cross paradigmatic stages. And the first stage we refer to as teal. and it is it looks at all of the systematic fragmented pieces that the earlier stages have created and it finds ways to tie them all together

into unified holes which is why it's called a paradigm is a unified whole theory that takes care of an entire range of subjects, and so it's called the paradigm. And science, according to Thomas Coon, proceeds by major discoveries of new paradigms. So as science busts into teal, it starts creating paradigms. And paradigms are broad, unified structures of consciousness that unify many separate

fragments into a unified whole. And the percent of the population at teal, or that first paradigmatic stage, is about seven to nine percent of the population is at teal. And that's very important. And then turquoise, of which there's only 0.5 percent, is called cross-paradigmatic. Because what turquoise does is even more integrative, than teal. It takes all of the paradigms that teal has discovered and brings them together into unified holes. Wow. And there's more stages.

But 10% of the population is a teal. Yeah. What was the 1 in 200 then? What's the 0.5% of the population? Yeah. Oh, sorry, sorry. You're right. It is, yeah, 10% of the population is at teal. And then turquoise, turquoise is the one at 0.5%. Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, from a little bit of looking around, I read that a lot of this is cribbed from an Indian yogi. Sri Orobindo. Oh. Oh, Arirbindo, yeah. But I don't think we can get into it. But basically, yeah, some of it, the paramount and the metamoron. mind, I think the first two of these. Oh, yeah, yeah. I recognize

those things. Yes. He's cribbing from a bunch of spiritual sources. And it's worth noting that these were addedly it, right? These didn't exist in the original framework. But implicitly, they were there. But I'm just impressed at 10% or at the, what is it, teal or turquoise

one, whatever color they're at. Yeah, I mean, we're doing all right. There's a human race. We're doing okay. And we added in paradigmatic and cross-parodermatic and non-parodermatic. So there's another free classifications for different ways of thinking. You can never be enough. No. But again, I refer to my comparison to pathological levels of openness to experience,

because this is like crack to a certain kind of person. Like it's sustainlessly fascinating. There's more terms, there's more categories. There's more subtle distinctions. And it reminds me of the sense makers and Jordan Peterson, that fascination with making those definitional distinctions between subtle graduations of categories. I mean, none of it's actually based on anything

apart from what's popping into their head at that very moment. But, you know, you can tell when you're listening to Jordan Peterson or Pajot or any of the sense makers, just how much they enjoy this activity. So, yeah, I'm seeing a lot of shades of it here too. Yes. And would you like to hear Matt about the final two stages? Of course I do, Chris. Of course. That's what I'm here. I don't know if you're ready for it. The final two stages.

Let's see what they're about. So integral theory is an example of a cross-paradigmatic turquoise theory. That is, well, the third of the third of the, the four third tier stages is where the causal or deep dreamless state tends to enter. And that's just the pure witness, pure awareness. And without any qualifications or any abstract descriptions applying to it. So it's a pure emptiness type of awareness. And that tends to unite with that third state or stage structure of awareness in the third tier.

And then the fourth, the clear light, is Turiatita, which is just the pure non-dual unity of the witness with everything that's witnessed. the reason that no other developmental model in the world includes any of those stages, the highest any of them go to is the turquoise stage. The reason none of them go any higher is there's only 0.5% of the population at turquoise. We got that chance. Yeah, we got that. Now, Chris, I have to tell you something. from looking at the text of an interview on a website called Integral Life,

an interview with Ken Wilbur, there was some Q&As. And one of the questions Wilbur was asked by his students was to please describe how he uses these four stages in this third tier in his day-to-day life. Okay, great. So his personal day-to-day experience of being a supermind an overmind or something like that. What does he do?

Well, I mean, I stopped reading then. But I, because for me, the important point was that, in case there's any doubt, he's operating at this level. This level is virtually. Oh, he's in fair white? He's, he's up there, man. He's there. And that is, um, the assumption of his students.

So yeah, just to be clear. Just to be clear. I mean, he, he doesn't speak like, he's operating on that level. it just sounds like it's a very cognitively demanding task to remember which tier. I have subsistency for him there because there's a lot of tears. And I think if I was 80 something or 70 something, I'd have trouble keeping everything straight myself. Yeah.

And like, you know, he says, what, nobody's ever documented these tears or whatever. But like what he's talking about, like non-dullistic awareness and all that, these stages exist in like traditional Buddhist systems and stuff. as well, you know, Taoist systems, all sorts of systems have stages which sound remarkably similar to what he's describing that nobody is ever detailed before, right? So yeah, it's not, it's not really like a creative enterprise where he's summoning up all of this out of nothing.

He's picking and choosing from a wide, wide variety of traditional, metaphysical lines of thought. Yeah. And, you know, we already heard about what happens when you add quadrants. That's where this came about, right? Like, it's about understanding all the previous systems of philosophy and psychology and religion. And the interviewer does ask, Matt, about how the stages interact, how blue interacts with turquoise, how turquoise interacts with orange. You know, how does.

That's a lot of interactions. That's huge scope for complexity there. And here's his answer. Right. Well, the higher you go, remember, each stage transcends but includes his predisposed. And as we become self-conscious or able to reflect on our separate selves, which happens at rationality, then we start to sort of self-consciously include our including act. We tend to become aware of it.

So rationality, for example, comes up with things like philosophy and modern sciences and so on. But certain types of philosophy attempt to integrate all schools of philosophy because they can do that. And even more so pluralistic and especially integral stages. So integral is teal and turquoise and they will reach down and in. grace pluralism and rationality and mythic to some extent, magic to a little bit. So that's what we see as we get higher and higher stages, is that embracing tendency. And so whenever I first hit the integral stages of development, I started pulling together all the various schools of philosophy. and psychology and sociology and religion.

And that was what I was trying to. I was explicitly trying to tie them all together. That's what I wanted to do. And so that was a conscious aim of mind. And looking back on it, if I really was pushing an integral stage, is that's exactly what you would expect somebody at an integral stage would start doing, is trying to integrate everything. And that's certainly what I was trying to do.

There's a beautiful logic to this, isn't there? Okay, so the high you go up the stages. Not only do they subsume and encompass all the previous stages. But you start getting up to the integral stages. And the kind of thing that a person who has achieved that level of awareness, of consciousness or whatever, is to develop exactly the theory that Ken will be created.

That's the sign of being in the case. I know. You know, the funny thing though, Matt, is like, you know, it's like the SIF in Star Wars. This system has the seeds of its own destruction within it. Because by teaching people this, right, that's like to get higher, you take the system that took you there

and then you transcend it. This is what will leave. to the integral community, eventually believing that they transcend, you know, integral is useful, but it's actually just a perspective on the way. And I think that's what we kind of encountered with various sense makers, where they say, oh, Ken Wilbur, you know, I got some value from his system. And I think, you know, there's a lot there. But it's a big bat, which is how they've basically leveraged leapfrogged from that lily pad up to. a more inclusive or more all-embracing and more subtle kind of.

Yeah, no, and that does ring true because a lot of the people that seem to like and Wilbur stuff have in fact moved on to their own bespoke cosmology. Yeah, and, you know, it reminds me, Matt, that every time we've interacted with people that are sense-meeting and client, there is the impression that they kind of pity you. for feeling to appreciate you know, you're stuck in tier one thinking, right? You think scientific evidence

and all that is what really matters. And you think egregors can be reduced on to do they exist or not, which is a very tier one way to look at the world. So it's, yeah, it's just funny that, you know, like you said, the logic is built into it where if you disagree or don't find it profound, well, of course you would because you're not high enough

Yeah. I know. And, you know, so, you know, they've studied this a lot. And again, the parallel with conspiracy theories is strong because conspiracy theories famously have the refutation of criticism baked into them. Any evidence that comes along against the theory or people that are criticizing their theory are lumped in as part of the conspiracy. So it is a feature of, you know, I guess pathological belief systems.

Yes. Now, Matt, we've been up in the clouds here for a long time, going through the stages and the beyond the traditional stages. But as you mentioned, you know, applying this to actual concrete reality, like analyzing the world around us. What would that look like? And if we have to apply this model to the current times, like, for example, the recent, um, election results, how the reaction has been polarizing. There has been like striking divide between left and right. If you have to look at, try to interpret this from this different levels, tiers of thinking, first level, second level and third level tier of thinking, how would each tier look at what happened with the election results and potentially the divide, a societal divide.

That's how that could happen. Okay, again, the question a little bit struggling to emerge there, but we've got the question. And we did hear, you know, I played a clip before, where, you know, Kamala Harris was a fractured green, 10%, MIPA, 50% percent,

rational. So you've heard that analysis, right? But it continues to Trump and Kamala and comparing them. So let's hear that. And that tended to be Kamala Harris's problem. She had a great deal of difficulty giving unified answers to her questions. And a lot of people just interpreted that as she can't answer questions at all. But what she couldn't do is she couldn't pull together all of the differentiations that she saw in her mind's eye.

and that meant that she would just sort of stumble or bumble or say sort of work they call it word salad a lot and that's what she did now trump was very orange a very orange rational guy but he still had a lot of mythic and even magic in him and particular magic and mythic are marked by stages that are also called narcissistic. And that's the person gives a very high self-esteem. They have a great wonder at being themselves. They're amazing. And Trump just, I mean,

I once sat down and tried to write down how many narcissistic statements he said in a typical 20-minute speech. And I got to 30 of them, and he wasn't even halfway through his speech.

Every other sentence was, well, I'm associated with this guy, and this guy is the greatest in the world. And I'm pretty great to recognize this guy, of course. And he just, it was one narcissistic statement after another after another. I was really kind of shocked at how many of his statements were narcissistic. Important insights, though, Ma. Important insights. Yes, yes.

Trump is a narcissistic person. We're in hard agreement on that one. I don't like being placed to the same color category as Donald Trump. I think he's wrong there about him being a rational scientific thinker. Yeah, I mean, it's quite funny that you put Trump in the orange category, right?

Like, it's just, you know, but also, like to the extent that there is, you know, as is often the case, the banal thing, Trump is narcissistic, that I mean, is Kim Wilbur. Everybody already knows that. It's very obvious, right? And to the extent that he's saying something unique, it's that Trump is rational and scientific,

that he is magic and mythic as well, right? Like, no, he's not a rational, scientific type person. And actually, he elaborates on what he means here. So, oh, and in his model, Kamala Harris is postmodern, by the way, she's green. He's green. That's right. He's not a fan of green either. He's not a fan.

We'll hear his opinion on postmodern, and it's fairly predictable. But, yeah, so listen to this. And so he's very businesslike, and that's what Trump is. And somebody like Trump has no trouble sort of in the debate, prouncing somebody like Kamala. Because Kamala's having a hard time pulling her own ideas together. And so when she's attacked from the outside, she really doesn't respond very well.

She'll say, oh, I love you or something like that, but that doesn't count when you're having an actual rational argument. So that's the basic battle that we had was orange versus green, rational versus pluralistic postmodern. And Trump is not only not postmodern, he attacks postmodern. modernism because postmodernism also goes under the name wokeism. So we have all this woke philosophy and it's pure pluralistic nonsense, most of it. So it's always contradicting itself. It'll say there is no such thing as objective truth. And what they really mean is it's objectively true that there is no objective truth. And they just contradict themselves like that all the time. and that's a real problem

and that's why postmodernism as the philosophy is sort of falling apart it made some important introductions about there are multiple interpretations of the world and so on but it couldn't tie them together it couldn't explain how they're unified so that they can be part of a single

collective thought some fantastic analysis there both psychological and cultural through the lens political as well. This is the power of integral theory. Integral theory. Camilla Harris, her problem with the debate,

she just kept saying, I love you? That's what happened. That's what definitely happened. Defeated by rational Trump. He was just pure business. He's pure business all the time. He doesn't be under around points or contradict himself. No, like he knew always what he was saying.

Pure rational thinking. That's what I think of what I think of Trump. And post-modernism are, I mean, you know, you and I are not huge fans of that general approach to philosophize. Yeah, at least that it's popular culture. In its popular version, yes. But like his point there, there's an inherent contradiction by them saying there is no objective truth. They're actually making it. It's incredibly, it's obviously an incredibly facile. Like critique, right? Well, that's why I fell apart. That contradiction.

Yeah, they just, they didn't, they didn't realize where they were in the levels. And they were just, they were just a stage towards a higher synthesis. That's where they went wrong. Like you say, Matt, it's just, it's so superficial and shallow and silly. And like, you know, if you want to point out that Kamala Harris took contradictory positions or wasn't very good at spelling out something to distinguish yourself from Biden, or whatever. You don't need to make reference the green and orange.

You don't need any fucking color. You don't need colors to make these critiques. Trump is not an opponent of postmodernism. He is a postmodern conservative in many ways. He's an opponent of arts and humanities, like academic type stuff. But he has no

problem invoking you know, post-truth politics and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. He's the archetypal implementer of flooding the zone with bullshit. where words have no meaning and there is a disconnect from reality. He's a perfect. So anyway, just stupid analysis.

Let's leave it at that. Well, yeah. So they do talk about what a good leader would be like. You know, they don't really like. I mean, it's quite clear. I think they like Donald Trump more than he likes Kamala Harris from the way that he describes him. But him and the interviewer do talk about, you know, how you can apply integral approaches

as a world leader. And it sounds like this. So it seems like maybe to. make valuable use of some of those ideas in green. One may have to get into yellow to be able to actually apply them in a more practical manner. Who can apply them? I meant yellow or in your model it would be teal.

The teal. The teal stage is. The teal stage is what spiral dynamics called yellow. Yeah. Like, for example, in the green stage, there's a lot of confusion about how to integrate these ideas. There are like, theoretically, it sounds good, but there's no practical application. Whereas maybe advancing into teal stage, moving up to teal stage, would, you may see leaders

at that stage to be able to then be able to apply some of these ideas in a practical. Right, and that's green moving to where? Teal. Peel. Yes, that's exactly right. And that's what teal is designed to do, is it looks at all of the multiple universe, multicultural ideas that green has come up with. It emphasizes them.

Yes, we get it. Yep, we get it. It feels like we've, are we approaching saturation, as the qualitative researchers like to say. have we plumbed all of the books and crevices of Willisthor? I mean, I could go on, Matt. I could go on.

There's a very specific question, which is, you know, what about mainstream media as the source of truth that we can't trust anymore? So this is the usual, you know, heterodox thing. Now that the institutions are filled, what can we turn to? And another thing that came up during this recent event was the nature of like mainstream, media as source of truth. Like some see mainstream media as source of truth, whereas there are some who see it as manipulative or deeply biased.

I would love to understand with each tier, how does the role of mainstream media as well as the nature of truth changes in each of these tier? But Ken Wilbur answers it by just explaining the stages. Again. Yeah, and talks about how Teal Univized Paradigms and doesn't mention anything about media. And then the interview of response said, thank you for sharing. And I'm like, that's not fair. So that does occur.

And that's what happens when you get from pluralistic to Teal. Teal takes all of the separate fragments and pulls them together into unified paradigms or unified holes. And a paradigm includes an enormous number of the previously fragmented truths. And then turquoise, which is cross-paradigmatic, takes all of the previous paradigms and ties all of them together into a very encompassing truth. So you can see how truth sort of gets more and more encompassing, more inclusive, the higher the stage you go. Thank you for sharing that. There is one last section, and we'll finish with this while, which is in your Bollywick, I'm afraid. A.I.

Ken Wilburne. You're okay. Hold on to the seats, everybody. Yeah. So a hot topic of the moment, AI. What does Ken have to say? So here's the question. Another aspect I wanted to add to understanding what's going on currently in our society is,

how does AI factor into some of these models of thinking? Does it, would it accelerate our growth even more? Do you see that happening because of AI? So let's first of all just hear Ken's initial response. Like, what does he think about that? That's a straightforward question. How does AI play in today? Let's see what Ken says.

Yes. I'm by the way, four of the largest AI, three or four of the largest AI companies in America have contacted me to include an integral approach to what they're doing. So I'm working with several AI companies in order to bring an integral viewpoint to bear on AI. and AI is also pursuing a sort of its own type of integral approach in that each algorithm in an AI system takes includes other algorithms and so they're they're transcending and including as they go along and that's what the really great AI programmers do is they take an algorithm and and they include in that algorithm, yet other algorithms. So they're transcending and including as well.

And I'm particularly impressed by one of the companies I'm working with because what they want to do is have each stage of development that's built by their AI system. they want to have it transcend and include its predecessor. So there's the first step, Mark. This is the first step. So what do you think? I mean, there's quite a lot of insights there. It's amazing stuff.

I think that's the most cogent explanation of AI that I've heard today. Can you believe three of the four AI companies are working with Cannes? Well, of course they are. That makes perfect sense. That's right. I mean, you're going to need an integral perspective if you're going to build an AI. This is obvious. Imagine an AI just operating down there at Orange.

Yeah. And the best AI programmers like there, they're not just built the algorithms. They're putting algorithms inside other. And that's integral theory. Anytime you put anything inside something else, Chris, that's integral theory. That's integral. Yeah. That's really incredible so far.

So there we go. Just, you know, unlike Eric, the phone is ringing for Ken. And this is important. And there's one company. He doesn't mention which one. But, you know, it's more integral than the other ones. But that's not all that. AI, it can even perhaps go further than that.

They seem to be doing a pretty good job with it. So I'm excited. if we ever got an AI system that actually used an integral approach, it would of course be an enormous boon for the integral theory. Right now we have sort of every major university in the country has one or two professors that know about integral and usually one of them will actually teach a class on integral. But it's not an ever.

everyday understanding. It would become an everyday understanding if AI included it. And every time you bought a program that had an AI chat room or an AI, whatever, you'd be learning an integral approach. So that would be very cool. An AI in itself could have its own stages of development. AI could have its own stages of development, but they would stay within the guidelines that were put in their algorithm. So they could create, I mean, supposedly the same algorithm that told it to transcend and include could include several different ways to transcend and include. And they wouldn't know which one to choose. So you could get the same stage as occurring up to a point. And then its algorithm starts, finds it has four different directions it could go.

Oh, my God, you know, you thought you were at the cutting edge of AI understanding. Yeah. Had your mask been blown? Yeah, yeah. It is amazing to think about. And I didn't even know that they were teaching intercrow theory at all the major universities. Well, you must have one or two integral. professors in your...

We must. They're just keeping quiet. Like, they're not... Well, they're not teaching school courses. They're just teaching classes, like, you know, integral. One or two in most departments, right? We'll know about integral theory. Well, I could be one of them because I know integral theory now, so I'm representing...

But I'm not a bit confused because he's talking about, you know, the possibility of the integral theory and the AI, but didn't he say they're all currently doing that and interested in it? Isn't it revolution already happening? I think so, but you know, fully, fully actualized, you know. Like a TLAI? Yeah, a TLAI. Just wrap your head around that.

That would be amazing. I think we're poor old Ken Will, but nobody should be asking a 70-something-year-old about what they think about AI. Unless they're, you know, there are well-versed 70-year-olds. Like I feel there are 70-year-olds that their head around this. That's true. That's true. But can you imagine someone like Ken Wilbur?

Or who was the other guru we covered who was talking about AI as well at the end of her? Tearswan. Yes, the two of them and dialogue. Yeah, Teal Swam. Teal, great name, great name. Oh, yes. Yeah, she had big ideas about AI too. And yeah, pretty much on the same level with Ken Wilvers.

Yeah, I think she might have been a little bit more reasonable. But I mean, in her version, AI is a. It was an alien, Chris. It was no more reasonable. Don't you get him over dirty like that. Come on. I mean, they're both pretty bad. The last clip, Matt, it reaches for the stars, just like Teas Swan.

So what you heard, you might regard it as somewhat speculative with a lack of grinding in understanding what AI is. But what about this, Matt? And again, that's just stupid. I mean, we have these stages and they're given. They're what we are. It's like studying an embryo and not realizing that it's going to have 208 bones. It is.

Well, some people say men have 208 bones and women have 207 bones. And Christians say that's right because Eve was created with the rib of Adam. so Adam has to have one less bone. I doubt that's the explanation. But you get the point, it would be like somebody ignoring the fact that we're going to have 207 or 208 bones and we're going to have one heart and two kidneys and one stomach and so on. I mean, these are given structures of a human being and they're there and we can't avoid them. And the same is true of the stages of development, at least as they've experienced,

extended beyond where the average person is now. And that includes at least the pluralistic stage, the teal stage, and the turquoise stage. Those are real structures. They exist in the blueprints of being a human being. And so if you build a human being, you're building these future stages into them, just as they're going to be born at an archaic stage.

And all of them are going to evolve into a magic. stage and all of those are going to evolve into a mythic stage. And there's just no exceptions that we're aware of to any of those types of structures. Well, there you go. Integral theory is as much a part of our nature as the number of bones in our body. It's just a brute fact of existence. Although he gets a number wrong. And that thing about, you know, women and men have a different number of bone.

Not true. Not true. He said, some people say it, but no. It's not true, Kent. It's 206, which we all have. Yeah, he's not safe from the fact-checking. I didn't know how many bones being the human body. There you go, 206, not 207 or 208.

Fine. But this was in relation to a question about the future of humanity and... Well, are we going to merge with AI or Transcenda or AI? But the answer is, you know, humans are humans, but you can't, the universe operates by the integral stages. You can never prevent that from happening, right? Like, that's where. All you can do is increase your awareness of who you truly are, who we truly are.

There you go. Well, that's a good note to end on. I'm glad he didn't try to speculate about the merging of the human and AI intelligence because that could have gone sideways. I'd like where we left it. Yeah, yeah. And it was just one more little thing there, Mr. Brown, before you go, Professor. Just one more.

Little clip I've got for you. I'd like to see what you think about this. Just my wife was asking me, you know. Oh, you're colomboing me, huh? Okay. That's right. That's right. I do have a final clip.

And it is relevant to you, Ma. And I think this might change your whole opinion on what you've heard. You don't seem like you've been completely on board with spiral dynamics, but perhaps this will. So the point is, how does a mind interact with a body or specifically a brain? And intical theory handles that in a very simplified fashion, following a lot of the so-called panpsychists, and I don't like that term, but a panpsychist represents about half of modern West

philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead. And what a panpsychist believes is pan means everywhere and psyche means mind. And so they think that mind is everywhere in the universe. Some sort of consciousness or awareness is all present. I don't like the term because psyche seems to be a bit too complex an idea for an atom to have a psyche. An atom can have sort of what why they'd call prehension, which is a very rudimentary sense of touching and awareness. And I agree with that. So I maintain that even an atom, as why they maintain, has a bit of prehension.

And then it has an exterior, and that's its interior. And its exterior is some form of mass and energy. And they both the interior and the exterior evolve. So as interior prehension becomes more evolved and to evolve members to transcend and include, so it's becoming larger, more inclusive, more embracing. And so our awareness goes from just very simplistic sensations and rudimentary awarenesses and feelings. Okay, okay. All right.

I mean, if I'd let him go on there, he would have told you, about, you know, the sense organs and what kind of things might you can sense with the sense organs. So, yeah, better to stop that. But you got the thing. He's a panpsychist like you, but he doesn't, you know, a special kind. But yeah. Yeah, and I didn't get the way in which integral theory handles panpsychism so elegantly

or simplistically in his words. And I don't think also the 50% of philosophers are basically panpsychism. are basically pan-psychists. I don't think that's true. Do you think atoms are apprehending or pre-handing? You know, they've got touch by and awareness. Yeah, yeah, they can bounce up other atoms with the strong force or the weak force. So, yeah. You know, every clip that I hear of this, it keeps making me think of, you know, when they start talking about embracing and integrating and spinning and turning, it reminds me of that like Simpson's clip where Kodos was giving a speech right and was saying tonight I say we must move forward not backward upward upward not forward and always

twirling twirling towards you know yes it's very much along those lines isn't it he's using a lot of words to you know to do something it wasn't clear to me what what he was trying to put together there but you know you heard again the name dropping of course so I I don't know whether or not Alfred Lord Whitehead was a panpsychist probably, I'm sure he's correct there. But, you know, he sprinkles those references to, you know, august personages liberally throughout everything. And, you know, I think that gives what he's saying a sense of gravitas that is perhaps unearned. Maybe so, maybe so. Well, I promised you Matt, that was the last and that is the last.

So what do you have for big thoughts on Kim Wilburne? Let me ask you this, man. Is he a secular guru as we have to find it? Is Ken Wilbur a secular guru? Yes. He is. He is. He's definitively one.

He fits squarely, squarely within our definition. He's an exemplar of the form. Yes. And actually, the interesting thing is people might get a little bit caught up. because, well, but hold on, he's talking about spirituality and religion and, you know, I'm sure he's in the egregor's and various other things as well. Yes, yes, but his understanding of it is that is all incomplete forms of knowledge that he has transcended and combined into a meta science, right? So, yeah. And very importantly, it's not just spirituality and religious traditions that he has

incorporated into his thing. It is all of science and all the philosophy and everything. Yeah. Yeah. And actually also with religion, although there is, you know, mention of magic and these kind of, you know, supernatural powers or whatever, that is regarded as not as refined as the comparative religious approach, which, you know, the mystic, introspective insights from the different religious traditions. So it is the more intellectualized versions that are of interest. But I do think that for me, one telling point of this, is the last couple of clips we heard there were, you know, the rhetoric is ground and soaring and complex in the system is very baroque. And then when you actually apply it to things like AI and politics, it reviews just how shallow

and superficial it always and how little insight it offers. actually, yes. Like when he applies it to atoms just there, for instance, you know, and connecting it to panpsychism, it was hard to follow what he was trying to say, but it was pretty clear it was a very shallow type of application. So, yeah, I think you're completely right there. I mean, that's the thing with these Baroque self-sealing cosmologies, which is, they seem so fascinating and so rich. And they're certainly rich in kind of generating more internal details building castles in the sky. as we like to say, but incredibly poor at actually being useful at doing something in the real world.

They give that feeling of truthiness, of course. You know, the people who are right into it would definitely argue that they feel as though they are getting all kinds of insights and making all kinds of intellectual and spiritual progress. But I think you and I would argue that that's a mirage. Hmm. Well, there we have a... We are the meta thinkers. We're beyond.

We've transcended the integral and spiral dynamic framework. We're operating in a... What's Beyond Pure White? Have we transcended the light to the darkness? Are we back in the darkness? I know. What's Beyond Pure Clear? It could be darkness. It could be black.

But he's an interesting character. Like, I think the personality and yeah, the personality or cognitive style of both the gurus in this field and the people that are really attracted to this kind of thing is interesting to me because, you know, he's obviously like in a sense, by his own lights, he's a curious person, right? He's interested in a whole wide range of things. You know, I'm sure he's read widely and he's, you know, pondered and speculated on connections between everything.

So he's not a fool. Right. But he clearly has been huffing his own farts for decades. And this is this is where you end up. Yeah. And, you know, actually, Matt, as you mentioned, like there is a genuine limited engagement with non-Western spiritual traditions and different systems of philosophy and that kind of thing. And actually, one of the interviews that I looked at in preparation for this was the philosophical. society, right? Yeah, we're interviewing him. And that is squarely where I would put this, you know, like, I know that we make the secular distinction, right? But the the the philosophers in a similar sort of way, even though they had interest in the magical side of things, they were also about, you know, systemizing and categorizing and so on. So he has a very friendly conversation with the modern day philosophers. And yeah, he is in a lot of

lot of ways a modernized version of theosophy. Yeah, in a way he's part of a tradition, isn't he? Like the alchemists had similar cosmologies and but you know they they with a lot more I guess justification really, right? Pre proper chemical theory they were doing the best they could and they actually did do some useful empirical work that led to proper chemistry. But there's also been a tradition even in sort of Victorian era and I guess the theosophists or an example of this where, you know, there was a great deal of interest in science and, you know,

Darwinian theories and all kinds of stuff. But then there was also an interest in like the occult and the various religious things. And sort of there were a certain kind of person who was looking to bring it all together. And yeah, and I think he's sort of part of that tradition. And I can see why Ken Wilbur, if people came across his books when there were teenagers, and it introduced them to this wide array of literature and a very complex system that is saying, you know, everybody has a part of the puzzle, but they are not putting it all together. And it's explicitly endorsing, you know, science and rationalism as an important framework, but just not the only framework. So I can see how that would appeal and why he is such a

significant figure in the backgrounds of a lot of people that we've covered, especially the sense makers. Because, you know, you mentioned Matt that the thing, the last kind of clip, understanding this point is a little difficult. But I think as with the sense makers, his point revolves around how you define a specific word, right? He takes psyche to refer to a specific kind of thought. And he wants to argue that like his word prehension or apprehension or whatever he said is a better thing for the kind of mental activity. that an atom is capable of. But like, that's only a distinction that is meaningful to Ken Wilbur and other sense speakers,

because they're still all agreeing that atoms are, you know, conscious units and stuff. So, like, the debate is around which label should we use for that and, you know, what's the exact property? But they share that, like, they think it's very important to determine which word to use and how many layers or levels of each word there are and so on. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to categorize this stuff, and I include sense making and cosmologies like Ken Wilders in that stuff.

But it is kind of like a folk philosophy, maybe, you know? Yeah, and folk science. Yeah, folk science. Just sort of, you know, in a recreational, you know, unsurious kind of way, touring around and pulling all the things together and build. you know, I see the fun in that. And it's like for genuine philosophers or scientists or, you know, investigators or researchers of any kind, that is part of the enjoyment of the job. But it's usually followed by a lot of other less fun critique and rigor and, you know, empirical testing and counter examples

and a whole bunch of mechanisms that are there that enforces some kind of restraint on just unbridled, theory building and I feel like the recreational version is just it's just like the fun bit without any of the less pleasant work and I think I'm not going to reprise all the comments we made throughout this but I will reprise just one of them Chris because it does stick in my throat which is the way in which it is designed like the actual theory the actual framework is one that puts itself at the tippy top of the apex of the thing. It's like a self-justifying theory. And that is something that makes it special. It's obviously kind of annoying. And we saw this when talking to sense makers and stuff too.

They kind of have a slightly condescending. I mean, we'd probably be accused of incandesending too. But to me, they come across as a bit condescending because I go, oh yes, you know, look at you. You're materialist, scientific reductionist. You know, you're sitting down here. and are working at this at this higher level, which is, I guess, a convenient point of view, but I'm going to return to my rejoinder that I've made before, which is like, just point to me to some real verifiable things that your amazing alternative epistemology has produced because I may be a representative of this close-minded reductionist kind of from here. But I could point to a bunch of things from cosmology, you know, like real cosmology, like astronomy or understanding evolution or all of the amazing technological advances.

I could point to a bunch of real things. And I think if you ask someone who was into integral theory to point to the concrete contributions and things that it's produced, I think that would all be like self-referential contributions. you know, ways in which they subjectively feel that they are now a more attuned and enlightened person than they were before encountering this theory. But really, to my mind, it's a theory that actually is one that kind of narcissistically caters to your own specialness. You know, like that's the main drawcard. Yeah, well, actually, I did come across before Matt, you know, there's a, a sense. semi-controversial evolutionary theorist. Do you know David Sloan Wilson?

Yes, I do. Yes, he often courts controversy because of his attempt to rescue group selection, right? But a lot of it comes down to definitions as it happens. And he actually met Ken Wilbur at some event that he attended to and was saying that he was one of the most insightful fingers on evolution that he'd ever met. And I thought, actually, that makes sense. Like you are a big idea evolution. guy who thinks the standard model is like kind of missing these important parts. So he didn't seem to pick up on the pseudoscientific aspects of came over,

just like he found, you know, the whole system he had is very fascinating and this kind of thing. So it can appeal to people who, you know, are actual academics and doing research as well. So I think it just depends. What kind of academic are you? that's the question. Yeah. I think if you have a tendency to wander up into higher levels of abstraction, then it can seem quite appealing, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's Cam Wilbur. He's been decoded now, Matt. All the remains is to put him into the grometer, which we'll do it a later date. We'd like to let these things do purculate, if you will. but we do need to give a little nod,

just a little hot tip to our very fine Patrions. Would you take, did you take issue for that, Matt? Would you refuse them a few kind words from us? God forbid. God forbid. No, I stand for it, Chris. I fully support.

Well, can I also mention Matt that, you know, what we have on the Patreon, you know, I feel like people understand what is on a Patreon. There's bonus material. There's a supplementary material episodes, you know, the full version, Grometer episodes, so on.

But we also have a fairly lively discussion community there. We have, you know, the chat function on Patreon where people talk about, you know, clips and stuff that they've seen related to gurus and so on. But also, people are sharing pictures of their food in Matt's Friy Corner, exercise videos in the monastery of modest effort. That is content you cannot get anywhere else on the internet.

No, you can't get that anywhere else. You cannot get this kind of thing. And Patreon's fairly lackluster functionality actually works well. It's like going back in time through the old days where, you know, it's not all discords and weird things. So, you know, I'm just saying if you are interested in that kind of. thing if you like the podcast there are people discussing episodes and arguing about um horseshoe theory mainly on the on the patreon chat so that's that's our i don't think we've ever mentioned that there is like a a chat thing that people use but it is there yeah yeah it's quite active and

it's a good it's a good little community they're pretty normal people they're not they're not terminally online mostly normal they're less terminally online than you and me so that's um most of them Yes, that's right. But if you want to join them, you can be like these people, Matt, on the Patreon. I'm going to give a shout out to a bunch of revolutionary geniuses first. Okay. And these include prefrontal, kleptomantha, Casey Hartnett, Peter Jensen, Nick Schmidt, Boltzman One, David Southgate, Paul Reins, Raz Dillon, Eric Weimmeister, Jeremy, Lee Goldman, Simon Lewis,

No Flux Given, Rocky R, Pat, Radindip Singh, TLS, Lewis Kahn, Matrix Santa, or Matric Santa, Andrea Zuxestra, Pete Stanton, Andrew Heury, Jan Maris Sonigal, Olsen and Ryan Weeks. and values soup. Those are our revolutionary geniuses wonderful. This week. Thank you. Thank you all. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.

And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia, is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess. And it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. I love, I'll never get tired of the 30 or 40 different paradigms. That's a man that has read Ken Wilburne, that's for sure, and gone beyond it. That's right. That's right. Well, now I'm at the Galaxy

Brain Gurus, rare to spot, you know, in general, they're like Bigfoot, right? You see one, and it's just starting behind a bush Lurganesiams. But they are the people that can join the live monthly stream. What do you call that? The live stream that we do, the Q&A type of hangout thing. And they include Tuckness Bibi,

Brackie Dian, David Tinhammer, Doudnaw, Leanne Barlow, Madeline Reed, Big Beef Company, Cindy S. Curtis Freeman, John Michael Turner and Lorenzo Servici. Okay. Excellent. Thank you.

Good bunch of guys and gals there. We have a bunch of people. Hello there, you awakening wonders. You may not be aware that your entire reality is being manipulated. Become part of our community or free. speakers, we are still allowed to say stuff like this. Science is failing. It's failing right in front of our eyes and no one's doing anything about it. I'm a chill for no one. More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber. In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone. Yeah. Sabine, Sabine Hussenfeldar. You know, she posted another one of those tweets about how science is failing. And this one was sort of framed

a little bit more conservatively. She's saying, well, even if science isn't failing, the fact that so many people think that should give you good cause for concern and deep reflection of something like that. Yeah, I mean, it's almost as if there's high-profile YouTubers who are constantly saying. It's really like that, you know,

I wonder where people got that idea from. But yeah, well, there they are my. And, you know, the funny thing is that while Jordan Hall in the previous warned us about collapsing things down to a master paradigm, he has, of course, subsequently become a Christian. And now he probably would collapse things down to a master paradigm. He became a Christian too, did he? I missed that one.

Yeah, he had a Christian thing. But I don't know if it's stuck. You know, you never know how long these things will last. but last I heard he was talking about his conversion to Christianity. God bless them all, Ma. I was doing that long before. They had any notion about that. I bring the mask more times than they can count.

So hot right now. So hot right now. It's interesting because the guru is really bucked the trend. Like, you know, Christianian English-speaking countries is on the decline, even in the most Christian of all nations, the United States. Yeah. But the guru is as is they want going in another direction. Well, actually, yeah, and in general, this is a good reminder that, like, the discourse does not reflect the representative reality in the actual country, right? So there's all these articles about the resurgence of religiosity. You know, the free press and Fox News or Collette will be talking about, you know, so many people are becoming religious and whatnot.

But like the actual population trends continue to follow the broad secularization. And that's even with the case, man. I know all the arguments about alternative forms of religiosity and spiritual but not religious, but the metrics, they don't lie. So, yeah. Yeah, yep, yep. Anyway, you probably won't be seeing a religious turn on this podcast. I don't know.

I'd be surprised. Maybe Chris will rediscover his Catholic roots figure out that the incense and all of the, I don't know. What else do Catholics do? Yeah, you've got a lot of familiarity with church. I can tell the incense and was there a pope in your church? What did you guys do? What did you guys do? Peace be with you, Ma.

Peace be with you. That's what I want to say to you. What would you say? If I say peace be with you, what do you think the appropriate response is? Thank you. No. No, I know. No, I know the answer to that one.

Yeah, and also with you. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Not that much of a heaveen. I'm still connected to my roots. That's like my Irish roots. They're deep.

The Catholic roots and the Irish roots are deep and strong. And, you know, I might look like an atheist living here in Australia, but deep down. I did have a... an academic visit who was telling me that, you know, he went to a Catholic church, but he wasn't really as Catholic. And he didn't know what the thing is when they give you to the Eucharist. And they say, body of Christ. And he, he didn't say anything.

They stopped and were like, they were like, you have to say the thing. And he was like, what? And then they were like, why do you not know the, apparently it caused, you know, breaking the script. And then he was like, I thought it would be a man. Like, it's usually a man, but I didn't know. And I was like, yeah, you should just always go over a band. Like, it's good, I'm fine.

I have this vague memory as a child, Chris. Like, I have to ask my mom about this because she's visiting at the moment. But I remember being taken. I think she was trying to get me into a Catholic school. I think she wanted me to go to a Catholic school. All the best people have went to them. So that makes sense. Yeah.

But there were these rules around, you know. And I remember having to put on a nice shirt and stuff and then go and I remember talking to basically some sort of priest person who was basically sniffing us out to check out whether we're like the inquisition. And I think we failed that

test Chris. I think if I were to give you this piece of wafer, what would you say? I held this up in front of you. What would you say thank you? And then she ended up in rolling me in a What do they call? Church of England type rip-off.

They didn't give it. They didn't give it shit about anything. Can you pay the money? Sounds like Church of England, Matt. Yeah. Sounds like Church of England. Yeah. Yeah.

Sounds like them. Well, with that heretical discussion, I think we'll bring this podcast to Toulosma. We'll end it here. We'll leave it. We'll leave it. Okay. Yeah.

Just leave it, man. Let's just stop. We'll just stop now. But no, I've got to say one more thing. It says I enjoyed this. I enjoyed Kevin Welber's cosmology. And I want to do more bespoke cosmologies, Chris. I don't know how it can happen, but just make it happen for me.

Well, I'm thinking about Ian McGilchrist for the next person, the two hemisphere guys. Does that count? They could. Yeah, right. What's the deal with the two hemispheres? Well, you'll find out. You'll find out a lot of things from the two hemispheres. You're the neuroscience guy, Matt.

Not me, so you should know already. Do you know what the thing is called that connects the two hemispheres? The information superhighway? No, uh-uh. What's it called? I do know it. I've heard it before, but I can't remember the name. What's it called?

The colostrum? The corpus callosome. The corpus callosum. Okay, close of that. Not the colostrum. All right. The corpus callosolome. Now we've established,

knows what and who's the expert of which now we can draw a close. Okay, we look forward to your fact checks on Emma Gilchus next time. All right, Arrividachi. Bye-bye.