Decoding the Gurus - Right to Reply: A Dialogos about Sensemaking with Alexander Biener

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

We are joined by Alexander Beiner, current founder of Kainos and former co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, to grapple with that eternally slippery concept: sensemaking. Naturally, this leads us through interdisciplinary adventurism, reflections on the (il)legitimacy of academia, and the recurring “meaning crisis” that haunts our times. Sense will be made, unmade, and possibly reinvented along the way.LinksAlexander's Substack: KainosAlexander's recent documentary: LeviathanOur original episode that mentions KainosA related discussion we had a while back on the StoaOur previous episode with Jamie Wheal

Hello and welcome to the coding the gurus with the gurus with me and welcome to the coding the gurus with me The cognitive anthropologist, Chris Kavana and him, the psychologist of some description slash statistician, Matthew Bryan. We are here today not doing a decoding or supplementary material. We're doing one of the relatively rare interview slash discussions that we occasionally do. And this one was at the suggestion of a listener to our podcast, Jay Waller, who also is a listener to, or a reader, an interactor with the content of the guests that we have. And it relates to the topic of sensemaking, which has come up quite a lot on the podcast, especially as of late.

And we are talking with Alexander Bainer, who is currently the founder of Kynos, and previously also involved with rebel wisdom, we had interactions, well, I had interactions with David Fuller. Previously, I don't think I spoke to Alexander, but he kindly agreed to come on and talk to us about, you know, maybe our perspective on sense-making criticisms that we have of that approach and perhaps criticisms he might have of our approach or, yeah, differences opinion. So thank you for agreeing to come on, Alexander. Yeah, thanks for having me and thanks for doing sort of a right to reply as a journalist. It makes me happy.

I think it's good and hopefully it gets us to sort of interesting, fruitful, new intellectual territory together. Yeah. So we did briefly cover the kind of rebranding or launch of the Kynos. My son's name is Kai, by the way. So this is an easy way for me to remember. but on the supplementary material episode, yes. And I think at the start, you mentioned that we got some things wrong.

And maybe you don't remember now. No, no, I did. Earlier on, I sort of revisited a little bit. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think it's probably a good place to start. I mean, so the first off, I mean, just to give people a bit of context. So David Fuller and I founded Rebel Wisdom in like 2017. And then we ended in November,

2022. So Kynos, my new project, started about two years after Rebel Wisdom had ended. So that's just to kind of clarify that. It's not really a rebrand, but I understand why on first glance it might look like that. Because I did call the piece announcing Kynos from Rebel Wisdom to Kynos, partly because of my own journey, you know, through kind of, yeah, quite a big process of ending one project. And then there was two years where my book came out and I was writing essays on the substack and then it was more of a kind of okay right I want to do something a bit more considered and a bit more focused and so that was really what what kindness was about so just that's one clarification you guys did get a few things wrong in terms of you know the the general thrust of it and who we had coming on that like smaller things like that but that's um maybe we can get into that but I think the The interesting thing I think is that, you know, when I was listening to that episode, I thought, like, on one point, kind of funny, like, fair enough, it was quite a flowery piece I wrote. That is, you know, that was kind of intentional.

And that's something would be interesting to get into, like, the, you know, the response that that Matt in particular had to phrase is like, you know, dancing our way out of crisis, you know, and your guest, whose name I forget, I get into that in a bit, perhaps we could explore that. Twirling, twirling towards freedom. Swirling towards freedom. Absolutely. You know, and it's, I 100% stand by that. It's, of course, metaphorical and an aesthetic choice, and that's an interesting kind of place we could explore. But I think a broader question I have is whether there is such a thing as a sort of

sense-making space, which I don't say it as a kind of cop-out, right? But in a sense of sometimes, I think, when I've listened to a few of your pieces around the sense-making, from what I remember back when we were doing Rebel We, There is, it is sort of on one hand, I think, accurate to say there is kind of a space of people who are, you know, referring to themselves as sense makers, trying to make sense of, uh, what's going on in the world. Um, I'm not entirely sure that that's still true. Um, and I think there is, you know, um, there's, there's, for example, things like the Keneffin model of Dave Snowden. And he, he uses the term sense making in a very particular way of navigating complexity. I use it as a term to combine sort of the need to navigate complex environments in new ways with ways of understanding and knowing that are very multidisciplinary. And I know, Matt, that's something that you spoke to in that, which I'd love to get into as well, because I think that's probably the main differing point.

And I have a few nuances on that. And then finally, let me just check my notes. Yeah, and I think the, I think there's somewhat, okay, let's let's let's to be generous and say there is such a category as the sense making community, you know, in so far as there's any kind of consensus about what that means. I think you guys have maybe oversimplified some of that. And I think yeah, so that's something I could get into. But yeah, that's that's that was my main kind of stuff when I first listened to it. Yeah. So that's that's that's good context. I think. I think. In regards to like the sense-making term, to a certain extent, I don't really mind the label that is used. I think there's a fair amount of content that emically, if you like, uses the term sense-making. And famously for our audience, we listen to a free-hour conversation that was sense-making about sense-making. Yeah, absolutely. sense making cubed, if you like.

So I think in general, it also dovetails in with things like Game B. And in general, people talking about the meaning crisis or that whole area, right? But there definitely is divisions and overlaps with things around other spaces like rationalists and this kind of movement, right? Alternative media and so on. So yes, there will be divisions of people that don't identify with the term and differences in between it. But maybe there's a whole bunch of places that we could go for. But I think a good one to start with since you raised it.

And I know Matt has opinions on that as well. So on the subject of interdisciplinary issues, so maybe it's good for you, Alexander, to start with what your perspective is on that. And what you think our perspective is on that. And Matt, maybe you can respond and say what you agree or disagree with. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. I think I would maybe go back a few steps because it's important context. I think, I think, Chris, basically what you outlined about, you know, a space of people interested in the meta crisis, meaning crisis, etc.

Game B is sort of, yeah, sure. It's all kind of in the similar tent. And I'd say the academic discipline I gravitate to most as sociology. So I'm quite interested in looking at, okay, why did something like that spring up at the time it did from, let's say, I don't know, like 2017 to now? Why is why there are so many, you know, why are their podcasts and thinkers trying to carve out a different space of understanding and navigating what's going on in the world? because journalism and academia used to play that role and to a lesser extent, perhaps, you know, aspects of popular culture. And I think the reason that I find it important is that there is a kind of, you know, legitimation crisis going on in society of which academia is a large part. Like academic legitimacy is eroding, I would say, for various reasons.

I was actually at a filming a film at a conference yesterday around academic freedom and free speech. But those kind of different things. I actually met Richard Dawkins, who in my mind that you might have like a Richard Dawkins poster on your wall sort of just out of shot. I don't know. That's interesting. That whole world also sort of intersects with stuff I'm interested in. I have issues with it as well, but that's another story. but you know so so that there's certainly a crisis of legitimacy in academia and in journalism as well you know perhaps even more so in journalism and because of that naturally that there's a you know new new ways of seeing the world and new attempts to get closer to some kind of shared truth or consensus kind of naturally spring up and I would say that what I've been doing for the last I don't know eight or nine years probably fits into that that mold and so there

the interdisciplinary aspect of it is really, really crucial. It's a really an important aspect of it because one of the critiques that I certainly have is that the, okay, so aside from, you know, replication crises and the influence of the profit motive into academia and journalism, there is a need for, well, let's say, I would say that they those the institutions as I stand aren't really complex enough or don't hold enough complexity to help us make sense of things like um the rise of AI or the rise of the far right because these can't be just rationally sort of quantified and look you can do it we can do surveys and I read a lot of sociology like this you can do surveys of what's going on and we can really

gain a good amount of understanding through the traditional academic method however I think to really understand it, we need to bring in, you know, in my opinion, the unconscious, so psychoanalysis, need to bring in philosophy. We need to look at very seriously what are the metaphysical assumptions underlying what's going on, all of those. So the more perspectives we can bring in, and I'm going to caveat this, because I know that, Matt, you made a critique of this. So the more perspectives we can bring in coherently and accurately, or as accurately as possible the closer to a, let's say, a useful shared truth we get. So my issue is that the siloing in academia means that it's that classic, you know, thought experiment of loads of people,

blind people touching an elephant and one person thinks it's a snake and one person thinks it's a tree, etc. That without that interdisciplinary communication, we don't actually get an accurate enough picture to do anything useful or to make new policies or to to transform institutions or to build new institutions. And I think that for, you know, for better or worse, and obviously it's not perfect, the different attempts at trying to create a more complex way of seeing the world, which, you know, often involves many academics. I, you know, much of my work involves interviewing academics and then trying to blend, yes, certainly blend their ideas together in such a way that new ideas come out of it. And Matt, I think you mentioned that that kind of, that's like

kind of a muddy water. You mix all the colors together and you get kind of a muddy brown. That's where I would disagree. And I'll end here just so you can respond. So where I would disagree is that I think you get a muddy brown if you do that in a very uncareful way and you're not checking back against reality or against other people's opinions while you do it, if you're just like, wow, we're going to blend interpretive dance with physics and we're going to have a new way of knowing and understanding the world, you might, but you know, it's got to, it's got to have some kind of utility, it's got to be useful, it's got to be verifiable in some way, not just rationally, which we can get onto. And so I would say it's, it's what I would, is what Ken Wilbur would call

a pre-trans fallacy, where the pre-rational tradition. position is it's a muddy brown and way whatever it's great to blend physics and dancing together now we're getting to some truth which you get in the new age you get in the maha kind of conspiracy theory worlds the rational position is like no you don't do that because we need the silos we need to these things don't blend together because they're not of the same substance and then the trans rational position would be a yes and of yes actually you can blend these things together and you need to maintain some aspect of those silos so that you don't get into kind of nonsense space so that's that's my position on it yeah okay um before i replied let me put you on the spot just to how good

was your opposition research did did you check about my background and what i research on and stuff like that no show me if you didn't just checking no no my my uh opposition research was not great uh because your guys wasn't great in the original one as well no i would have actually i quite like to, but I didn't have a huge amount of time before this. But yes, but do, I mean, if you don't mind going into a little bit of it, that would be perhaps useful. Maybe boring for listeners, but yeah, perhaps useful. Yeah, I'll try to be quick because, yeah, it's certainly not the case that I think that interdisciplinary research and scholarship is about idea. In fact, most of my research funding

and most of my career has been based in the field of gambling studies, which involves addiction and all kinds of issues, social and economic associated with gambling, are pretty well established in that field and pretty well known in that area. Now, it's an interesting topic, I think, because it's a good example of the ultimate interdisciplinary academic investigation. So you have the cognitive approaches, you know, biases and impulsivity, you've got a psychiatric approach where you can look at people that have got gambling problems. And then you've got the economics and the behavioral economics associated with it, right?

So, you know, people don't like rational decision making, right? Theoretically, people make purchases, hedonic purchases that are going to raise their utility. But things like gambling or other addictive products are actually designed to actually promote that. So it crosses over with economics and that all comes into it. As well as that you have this sort of public policy aspect to it. And you have people who are kind of like socialists or stuff like that or look at things through like a lens of who's getting exploited and the systems and stuff at play. And you can look at it through that angle too and I've collaborated with those people. And then there's the main thing that I'm known for, which is the crossover with public health, which is looking at it as as a threat to public health.

So analogous to alcohol or tobacco. And in fact, most of the stuff that I've done has been working on these things called health utility metrics like health-related quality of life decrements. and it's that's stuff that's mainly done through the World Health Organization and stuff, which they sort of measure the impact of stuff like malaria, and we're extending that to bring gambling into that. So I'll stop going on about it to make the point. But this is for me a good example of interdisciplinary research, which spans the topics, the whole disciplines that I mentioned,

but also other ones that I won't go into. And that's pretty normal. Like this sort of stereotype at academia is these silo academics who are just in their own little world that aren't collaborating with anyone else just isn't true. So that form of interdisciplinary stuff I'm all for. What I'm against is not just the sense-making version of blending together philosophy and art and, you know, a smattering of empirical psychology and sociology or anthropology in there, and blending it all up with spirituality and maybe a bit of dance and drum circles as well. You know, but, you know, like there are other examples of non-profitable interdisciplinary stuff, like blending stuff that just doesn't go together.

And I don't think sense makers are the only group that are guilty of this. I could give you examples within academia where I just think they shouldn't be doing it. Like, for example, that kind of critical theory stuff. They often use a lot of jargon. It's actually really similar, right? It's very dense. It's kind of impenetrable. There's a lot of big words and very little imperacism.

And it's almost treated as like an artistic philosophical exercise applied to psychology or social psychology. And my personal opinion is I think that's a bit of a waste of time as well. So, yeah, I think it's just a matter about, yeah, doing stuff. that is profitable, that actually yields tangible outcomes. I've published about 300 papers during my career. Much of my research has been cited in, like, submissions to Parliament, all kinds of advocates and people use it, it's using government reports and stuff like that. I mean, this is what we do.

We write stuff, we write academic papers, we write research reports, and then that stuff gets used for some purpose, maybe for more research or maybe for public policy or some kind of advocacy or people doing something, you know. So, yeah, I guess I'd just challenge you to say, well, look at what the sense makings have been doing and just maybe give me some concrete examples of how it's been profitable and how it's been used for something pragmatically useful. Because, you know, I haven't looked into it super deeply, but I confess I haven't seen it. Alexander, before you respond, can I just add a quick footnote so you can deal with the other point before we end up going on to another topic?

I just want to add in to my point that, like, in my case, I work primarily in the cognitive sense of religion field, and that in itself is hugely interdisciplinary. The Jonathan Haid, Moral Foundation's thing, which you cite on occasion, I've done cross cultural research on that model. And on top of that, my background is in anthropology, social anthropology and cultural anthropology. And then I moved into cognitive anthropology and now I teach social psychology. So I teach quite a lot of courses about like the pros and cons of different methods, qualitative approaches and quantitative approaches. And I don't have any issue with that. But I lean towards Matt's point that you have to be careful.

in what you're doing that. I mean, people can do whatever they want in terms of everybody is free to pursue whatever kind of philosophy or personal interest or academic interest they want. But there are more and less productive avenues for it. And when you mentioned like the replication crisis, for example, I'm quite an advocate, quite involved to a certain extent with the open science and methodological reform movement and have written papers on it and promoted it. And I see lots of people in the sense-making space, for example, when they reference research in that area or the replication crisis, to me, it feels a bit like stolen valor, because they're very, very rarely involved with any of the research around the replication crisis or the reform movement,

but they kind of cited as undermining academic authority. But in actual fact, that's science working and the people who are coming up with the open science and open science foundation or pre-registration registered reports all these things that are making science better are psychologists and scientists and they're not the people in the critique sensemaker space so this is this is like just a footnote to Matt's point that I guess it's a challenge that I've listened to lots of conversations with Jordan Hall John Verveke who's in academia Jordan Peterson you know, any number of fingers. And I don't see it having much impact outside of producing more

podcast conversations or like workshops. So what would you say to all of that? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think that last point is something I share, which is why Kynos exists and why I work with, actually, Australian organization called Small Giants Academy, who I partnered with, who are very much focused on how do you turn systems change ideas into impact? And so I can talk about that in a bit, because I care a lot about that. I agree. I think, well, I would say, just as a side note, before getting to the meat audit, you could make the same argument about what's the purpose of nonfiction books or novels or journalism, right? We're talking about a different kind of impact, which is an impact on how people perceive,

how they act, how they interact with each other, which is more qualitative, and that's something I'll get on to. So I think, Matt, my, I'm completely aware of the interdisciplinary nature of academia. You know, I'm a director of a charity in the UK. We put on Europe's largest academic conference on psychedelic medicine, and so, you know, that involves sitting with colleagues, you know, some of whom are academics themselves and, you know, crawling through four or five hundred submissions, mainly from, in fact, not exclusively from either academics or clinicians,

and going through the process of like, we've got four things on, we've got four submissions on psilocybin and OCD, which one is strongest. And so I'm pretty familiar with, you know, some aspects of that process. I'm familiar with people, you know, being part of multidisciplinary teams. everything you listed there in the gambling, cognitive, you know, cognitive science, behavioral economics, psychology, power, public health, all great. My critique would be that they all share the same metaphysical underlying assumptions. And they're all part of similar social structures at the whim of similar cultural forces and profit motives. What my work focuses on and what I'm interested in, and I think a lot of the, you know, the more people out there,

people that, you know, I've spoken to is going up a level to go, okay, well, hang on. I don't know how many pokey's there are in Australia, Matt, or how gambling addiction has been affected. But I'm sure that this research is helpful. But in the same vein, we've got a huge amount of climate change research and a huge amount of stuff going on. We've got, you know, loads of gatherings completely largely ineffective, right? Because for many, many reasons, you know, that there's so many overlapping kind of forces at play. And getting people to behave differently or see the world differently is not a rational process. It might involve rationality in the way we understand it, but it involves ways of perceiving

and ways of engaging in the world which are qualitative, not quantitative. So trying to use quantitative methods to understand those is useful insofar as it tells us that, right, okay, we can see larger patterns, but I think is empirically flawed at a very deep level. You know, I can give an example. I was a healthy volunteer in a psychedelic study where we were injected with DMT for 40 minutes, so continuous infusion DMT, which I talk about in my book a bit as well. And it was very interesting to kind of go through a very profound experience, which is qualitative, first and foremost, and a lot of wisdom traditions do. have, as Chris, you might be probably aware, do have pretty solid systems of knowledge to go,

how can we make sure this isn't complete nonsense? Can we verify that there's some kind of signal in the noise here? But what happens in the study of, you know, psychedelic research is I got handed an iPad to do a metaphysical beliefs questionnaire to go from zero to 10, how much do you feel you became one with everything? From zero to 10, how much did you feel, you know? And so sure, that's somewhat useful, and they can look at a correlate of my experience in the EEG helmet I was wearing, that tells us very little about the experience or how that experience might shift people's minds. I'll pause there, Max, so you want to say to me? Yeah, sorry, I should interject there because I'm afraid it's a bit of a false premise, which is that our research is principally

quantitative. I've done a huge amount of qualitative research as well, and I completely agree. For instance, the lived experience of people, like we have are actually well known for quantitative measures of gambling harm and mapping those to quantitative measures of health utility and stuff. That has its place. It's very useful. But we put a lot of effort into grounding that into extensive interviews with people at differing levels on the spectrum. I mean, that's just one example. But I know I won't take up too much time, but I just want to say that, you know, I'd say my research is maybe 60% quantiters and maybe 40% qualitative.

But, yeah, and so thank you for the clarification. What I'm, the point I'm trying to get to is when that research goes to policymakers or it goes to local government or goes wherever it's going, which is seen as more true or valuable, quantitative data or qualitative experience? I mean, they commission a lot of these reports. And I can tell you that they do, they do actually value both. My colleague narrowly hin, I do a focus on gambling studies. It's just an example, right?

Yeah, that's fine. Of academic. Yeah, something concrete. You know, my colleague, Nerily Hing in our laboratory, she basically only does qualitative work. And, you know, they commission it. They pay for it. They ask for it.

And she does it. So, yeah, you know, look, obviously there's a sense in which quantitative stuff, stuff is preferable, but there is also ways in which qualitative stuff is necessary in the social sciences. Chris being an anthropologist is also obviously on board with this a lot, because yeah, they're right into that kind of thing. Chris, do you want to pick up on that at all? Yeah, so I guess maybe I don't know if I'm sliding onto a different topic, so feel free to slide off it if you prefer after. But in regards the point that you raised about the kind of metaphysical potential component, right, or that like a lot of the

approaches that Matt is talking about are grinding things in a, you know, like a secular rational framework, if you want to put it like that, a materialist one, right? And I think that's fair to say that Matt and I, in general, are advocates for a kind of secular materialist approach to things if you want to say that you're doing science. That's the caveat. If you you are approaching things from the point of view of you are doing introspective practice or spiritual exercises or so on. I think, you know, knock yourself out. The issue for me comes when one is presented as the other or there's kind of like a lack of demarcation between them. Because like when I take someone like Ken Wilbur, for example, who I know David was

phoned off and I think you also have interest in integrated, integrated theory. Isn't that Integral. Integral. Thank you. Yeah. So the color system and that kind of thing. To me, that seems more like there isn't a way to prove that it is any better or worse than the framework of Scientology or the framework of Deepak Chopra or the framework of the Catholic Church or whichever one because the standards are internal and rely more on accepting the kind of metaphysical framework. And there's a lot of things like piled in when Ken Wilbur is talking about evolution or talking about cognitive science and so on, insofar as I recognize the topics that he's talking about, it's to me misrepresenting what that research shows. Like, I mean, his comments on

evolution, for example, endorsed the kind of intelligent design, which indicates a lack of understanding of the basics of evolution, but he talked a lot about. evolution that that's interesting yeah okay I'll just pick up on that one I want to get to Matt's point as well that I think is probably a mischaracterization of integral I'm not a sort of massive integral head it was very influential on my my thinking but I agree there's a lot of flaws in that and there's probably a lot of there's overreach but I think the issue with that is that I don't think Wilbur others in that space make a metaphysical make metaphysical claims the center of it it's more a map that takes different domains.

And in fact, Wilbur specifically argues what you were just arguing, that I can't, you can't cross domains. I can't go, I had a, I just had a vision of a purple elephant. Therefore, purple elephants are real, that they've popped into reality. And you didn't see it, but it's real. No, I had an internal experience. There's different ways of interpreting and understanding that internal experience. I might, for example, look at it symbolically.

I might look at it in any number of ways. and likewise the psychedelic researchers who were doing the research I was involved in can't say this is the psychedelic experience right this data this quantitative data so that's kind of the point I think that they would make that point but I think the yeah I mean I want to just jump back to I think the reason there's kind of a well not a tangle but I think that the point I've been trying to get to is that everything we've been talking about and from what I understand that the kind of work you guys do and the critiques you have of, you know, the sense-making space are, you know, coming from a rationalist, materialist, metaphysics,

primarily. I would say that, Chris, like, you, I don't think you can really make the claim that it's impossible to show some kind of teleology or directionality or intelligence in evolution definitively based on the empirical data. If you do, then I would say that it's basically you've zoomed in so far that, that you're making a claim that can't be defended if you zoom out further. We just don't know. We don't know, right?

Like that's, I think the solid position is we don't know. Because we're looking at a process unfold. I'm not saying intelligent design in the way that Christians might see it, but if you're looking at a process unfold through its mechanisms and testing that, okay, well, this happens here. I mean, look at the study of plant intelligence, for example, and the amount of vitriol there is in that field when people even use the word plant behavior. even though there's a lot of evidence that plants act in fairly intelligent ways to protect

themselves, to find new territory. And so that's what I'm talking about. There is a, the more rationalist you get, the more you miss out. The more woo you get, the more you miss out as well, right? So that's just a point I'd kind of, yeah, make there. I mean, I guess it depends on what we're talking about. But like I would say, if you're talking about any of the biological fields that specialize in evolution. There's no, like, there's no debate about whether there's a teleological force amongst mainstream scientists or some that are more fringe theories that take that position. But like, even if you take somebody like an arch reductionist like Richard Dawkins, right, for example, I mean, he wrote the selfish gene and there you're using, you know,

eugenic language to describe, you know, the gene. But there isn't, an implication in that, nor in most of the evolutionary theory, that you need a guiding teleological principle. Now, you can talk about there being one, but in that context, you are usually introducing a metaphysics, which isn't there in terms of like the biological evidence, because the processes of evolution don't require a teleological framework to function, right? Well, you don't know. No, I mean, sure, in the way that they're being looked at, you don't need to interject that. You don't need to, like, break Occam's razor, although there are others who would argue that there's phenomena that arise that don't fit that paradigm.

So it's like kind of the Cooneyan paradigm thing. Basically, what I'm arguing for is that the very same arguments that you guys have against the sense-making community are, I think, violated regularly, especially on the cultural level by rationalist scientists, because they don't stay in their lane either. there is a kind of general cultural expectation that of you know science plays the role for many people in the secular West of God right increasingly less so because it's not really its domain and it can't really do that very well which is why I'm I find humanism a really pernicious and ineffective cultural

force for for meaning-making or belonging with that like another point but the I think the the the valid position a scientist can hold around, say, the teleology of evolution is, from the way we're looking at it, it doesn't seem to be needed, but we can't make the claim that it's not there. That, I think, would be a more solid empirical claim than what many would make, which is that we can't see it's needed, therefore it's not there. I think, Matt and I would also agree with you that, like, you shouldn't be looking to scientists or basically, you know, people who are specialists in one particular area or have

a particular expertise, they have a Nobel Prize or something like that. It doesn't guarantee in any way that they're going to be good guides for how to live your life or, you know, to give you a meaningful philosophy or that kind of thing. So just to be clear, like I do agree on the point that like there is a tendency. Helen Lewis, we reviewed a book recently was this book called The Genius Myth, where people over extrapolate from like competence in one area into that people are able to be competent in every area. So I agree that that is the case, that there are scientists who make statements about things

like neither grass Tyson saying philosophy is useless or this kind of thing, right? Like that's an issue. But anyway, Matt, on evolution. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to quibble about specific claims and things, but I've probably better to try to look at the big picture, right? I suppose in talking to you, Alexander, I kind of feel like in a position of someone talking to someone who is a, say, a devout Catholic or something like

that, you know, like, I'm not saying you are a devout Catholic. I'm saying that we're coming from completely different premises, you know, so I accept that for you, you know, the premises I might be working from are limited and, you know, not, don't encompass this enough things. And for me, I just don't accept a lot of the premises you have. So, and this, This applies to, I think, accepting that there is a meaning crisis, for instance, accepting that there is some need to seriously consider something like teleology in evolution when there is just no, there is no reason to, like there is no evidence, no sort of theoretical reason why it should be necessary. It's like accepting the existence of, I don't know, a spaghetti monster around Jupiter because we haven't looked to show that it's not there. could be there, as you say, but, you know, I see no reason to take it seriously, unless I've got better reasons for it.

Similarly with Ken Wilbur and the integral theory, like, it is something for me that just, you know, doesn't need any of the basic criteria of science isn't falsifiable, is basically a pseudoscientific theory in the sense that it adopts a lot of the sort of language and, you know, technical figures and things like that, jargon of sort of scientific and rigorous inquiry while being basically, you know, a big speculative framework, very somewhat of Scientology, as Chris sort of mentioned. So, yeah, I guess that's the challenge. Yeah, different premises.

Yeah, but I would say that there's a different level of it because I think there's an assumption of, for my view, there's an assumption of legitimacy that you guys are both bringing as academics in doing this show and like you know decoding the gurus right so on the one hand yes i agree that if if people are doing like you know like ivermectin you know blah blah blah during covid and like people are trying to talk about you know stuff that is really out of their domain fair enough but i think there's kind of a conceit in this where in a way there is an overstepping of your own domains, right? Because I've, you know, very, the people you've mentioned don't really claim to be, you know, some of the people I, you know, whose work I admire,

like John Verveke, would claim to be a scientist, you know, and I think I would have a fairly legitimate claim to that. But I think there is a, there's a kind of discounting of anything outside of a rationalist, materialist framework as inherently inferior, not just method methodologically inferior, but on a reality level, like that the materialist framework that you're using, which relies on a level of constant verification as does science, science being the method of inquiry, which I'm not critiquing, I'm critiquing the underlying met of the ontology of it. So that is a huge assumption, right? And so, for example, and it's not really how we tend to live our lives because, for example, I'm guessing you guys have been in love before, right?

And now, could you decide between you which of your love was bigger, right? Obviously, not. This is a qualitative first person experience. My position is that there's two things I want to bring up. Actually, the first one is that you talked about the efficacy, Matt, earlier, about like, what's the point of all this stuff, right? my position on that is that the current models we have, and very in particular, a sort of hyper-rationalist, materialist framework, are completely inadequate at meeting the challenges that we face right now. Let me take immigration as one example. The kind of technocratic humanist approach being taken by politicians in the EU and the UK towards immigration are failing across the board. So Nigel Farage is probably going to come in in the UK, Reform Party, quite anti-immigrant. It's happening in Holland. It's happening in Germany.

It's happening in Ireland. Like, it's happening across Europe. And that old system of understanding people as a kind of behavioral unit and, well, if we just give them more of this and if we just send this message, we just do this, it's not working because WhatsApp play is something much more powerful, a qualitative, an aspect of humans that can't be quantitative. and can't be put into a materialist framework or could, but not in a way that it becomes particularly effective to make policy around it, which is this is about status, it's about belonging, it's about connection, it's about the need for ritual, it's all of these things that get completely discounted from a hyper-rationalist worldview, and the efficacy of that worldview, particularly with something like immigration, is absolutely failing. And so if we want

to avoid the rise of a far right, which use all of those techniques of ritual and this is your land and scapegoating, we're going to need to reclaim those ways of understanding humans, which go beyond the rational, and use them towards for more pro-social purpose. That's kind of my position on it. So I would say that that's where the efficacy comes in. Hard to do. That's by kind of what I'm attempting to do with others, but culture change. Yeah. Yeah, look, I mean, it's important to remember that in human society, there is a lot more going on than science and academia, right?

So you had journalism, you have politics, you have the arts, you have all kinds of things going on, people activating for all kinds of causes and having robust discussions about what we, you know, what kind of society do we want? Do we want to live in a, like, an ethno state where we're all culturally the same, or are we in favor of multiculturalism? People argue about these things, and a lot of them come down to values. And I'll be the first one to admit, right? These are ultimately questions, I mean, as well as being a scientist, I'm also a Democrat.

So I kind of believe that these are democratic processes where basically what the majority of people want is to a large degree valid. But, I mean, that's not to say, though, and I think you sort of slipped into a bit of a strong man there, that that academia sort of has this sort of technocratic sort of view of these topics that cannot inform any of that, except in a very limited way. Because if you just take immigration as an example, yes, you've got the economic lens, and a country like Australia imports huge numbers of skilled young people because demographically and economically, they're incredibly helpful. But you have the sociologists who are coming to play and looking at how immigrants integrate in communities, stuff like that. They have political scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists and demographers and geographers and geographers all with their different lenses. Now, you know, I think one of the interesting things about academic and scientific inquiry is that it doesn't really tell you what you ought to do. So, again, I'm making space for other things, right? It doesn't tell you what you ought to do.

I need to go back to my gambling study because it's what I know and love. But, you know, I mean, unknown for, you know, mapping links to gambling, dangerous gambling products causes this amount of harm, quantifying, measuring the amount of harm, comparing it to other diseases, that kind of thing. But all of that isn't telling politicians what they have to do, right? Ultimately, that's a democratic decision. Hopefully, it's not going to be influenced by lobbyists and various.

political interest that will be a democratic kind of decision. But it's actually, I philosophically believe that it's not my decision. It's ultimately the decision of a democratically elected government to do those things. Then everyone has a right to voice their opinion about these topics. And they certainly do. So, you know, that's where I see our thing, where it plays. I mean, we're against crossing the streams. I mean, again, we're the first ones for me. We have own personal tastes. I do enjoy stuff like abstract art and abstract jazz. I enjoy this kind of wild imaginative stuff as well. I like to keep it separate from my view of the actual real world and what is actually there. I don't think jazz or abstract art is going to help

you understand it. So I sort of agree with your point there about you're sort of hinting at non-overlapping Magisteria. You know, I think there's some sort of. some truth to that. Yeah, you know, academia and science can inform. It can give us an accurate view about something like climate change and say, look, this is definitely happening, carbon dioxide emissions, monitoring temperatures, bloody blah, all right, all right, all the models are pretty than this. It doesn't actually say, oh, well, that means you have to do why, you know, X or why. Ultimately, humanity can decide, look, we're okay with global warming. You know, we want to have our economy booming and we're okay with the temperature going up for five degrees.

That's ultimately a values-based decision. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a conciliatory kind of statement, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've largely agree with much of that. Chris, I saw you wanted to say something, so I'll just pause. Oh, yeah, I was going to let you respond first. But so on the URI is the like specter of, you know, the kind of populist, right, and anti-immigrant sentiment growing and that kind of thing.

And the fact that like the technocratic, moderate liberal consensus, 1990s consensus, right, is very strongly criticized at the minute and for lots of good reasons, right? But there I would say that, like Matt said, in terms of the best way to address things like immigration and integration and so on. I think there's lots of different positions that people can take and, you know, there are a right-wing positions and left-wing positions and argue it out in the, you know, the political arena and the public opinion arena. But when it comes to dealing with that, so in my observations of the sense-making arena, and I would include in that, for example,

that most of the, not most of the people, but a lot of the larger figures around there, for example, would be very fondly disposed to Jordan Peterson and would be also fondly disposed to Elon Musk. I hear a lot of positive mentions towards figures like Elon Musk, and you have the tech-sing overlap there, including that many of the people that are active in Silicon Valley also like to present themselves as kind of technical ones. if you like, like Jack Dorsey or this kind of approach. And to me, it seems like as opposed to being a solution to that,

if you look at Jordan Peterson's output in politics, it is absolutely endorsing, supporting, promoting the nationalism, the conspiratorial reasoning. He made a video that was talking about how the Trump administration are all superheroes of old, they're X-Men. It was the most propagandist piece I've ever seen. And then when I hear him interact with Jordan Hall or Joan Verviki and so on, they decry that there's like so much populist rhetoric around and that there's like

conspiracism and there's lack of trust in institutions. And to me, I hear people making that point while at the same time being the very people that are undermining faith in institutions. attacking it, saying scientists are liars, saying it's all discourse, it's all narratives. And in that respect, they take a position that is very similar to the kind of postmodern approach of saying, it's all discourse. It's all narratives, competing narratives, and fundamentally, you just pick the narrative that you're lying. But I think when it comes to stuff like conspiracy theories and what medicines actually work and the actual threat that immigrants

pose, the levels of crime. and those kind of things. There are actual facts out there in the world, and there is rhetoric, right? And so to me, I see an issue that if it's presented, that the sense-making is, gives a better solution, it seems odd to me that there is so much sympathical towards a particular arena. And I will just mention, like, a couple of the tropes, and you can say, well, you know, you think this is fair or not. But I would say conspiratorial tropes are common.

Conspiratuality, if you like, you know, the kind of overlap between right-wing populism and conspirituality, the demonization of modernity, media and academia, and science as untrustworthy. Basically, any mainstream institution epistemics as being flawed, no longer trustworthy, that we need to now adopt alternative frameworks to deal with it. And the alternative frameworks tend to push towards the figures that we cover who are modern day gurus. And most of the time, what they're doing is claiming they're solving this pressing meaning crisis. They're addressing real world problems. But in reality, all the tends to happen is they get a bigger audience, they get more subscribers, they get rich, they go on podcasts or news shows, and they kind of speak very confidently and very sweepingly.

often very polemically about and various political topics. So to me, that's an issue that is not contended with. And it's part of the main thing that we critique when we listen to the conversations. Because one of the things we do is we sit and we listen to three or four hours of people talking about, you know, very weighty issues and never once addressing, like I've never heard anybody challenged Jordan Peterson about his like level of conspiracism or polemish. whenever he's dealing with that. And that to me would be like the elephant in the room that all the blind people grasping are deliberately choosing not to grasp because it's less beneficial for their

own growth as a creator. A hundred percent agree with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, guys, I'm completely only on the same page with that. And I think one of the issues is that you've scooped me into a net that I haven't really been covering journalistically or since like 2019. And even on Rebel Wisdom, And we raised a lot of these issues of Peterson quite early and really moved on our focus. So I mean David David was very critical. I'll also give, you know, credit. He did. Yeah, yeah. And also very obsessed at the beginning as well, you know, so he had both, he went through a kind of a journey with that. And, you know, I found I found Peterson's, but I'm very youngian. So I was like, great. There's someone bringing young into the mainstream, you know.

So, and then that quickly changed. And so I would say, yeah. I'm with you on that. I mean, the thing is my, my work, which was a bit, this is kind of what bothered me about, what you guys put out about my, so an announcement email is I was like, my work, when I'm, I write features largely, right, on my substack. I write features about, like, say, why is the far right winning, or I do a kind of analysis of, you know, I did a piece around Barbenheimer, what's the saying about the cultural relationship between men and women?

I do all sorts of things. When I'm researching, I'm largely looking at academic pages. when I'm researching. I'm reading sociology books. I'm looking at papers for the far right one, because I'm half, I'm half German and half Northern Irish. I read a book written by two German sociologists about the Reichsburger, who is a whole other story. But you guys should check them out. They're all in jail now, I think. But, you know, this is that kind of conspiracy over to the German government? So that's the kind of research that I'm interested in. And if I'm putting something out journalistically, I'm like, it better be accurate and checked. And sometimes I'll write to an academic, but is this? you know, true of what you've said. So that is a choice of journalistic ethics. You know, I could have, I mean, so I've, you know, I've got a decently sized following on Instagram and TikTok from pieces I put out when my book came out around psychedelics. Now, it would have been very easy at that point to have, get up to like a million views, but just by putting out utter shite, right? I've just had a, I've just basically, but I didn't because I, it's not where I'm coming from,

right? And so this kind of speaks to a bigger thing where perhaps there. is a place to meet in this conversation. My issue is not with the practice of academia or the skills. I find those incredibly valuable. In fact, I was quite seriously considering doing a sociology PhD a couple of years ago. I thought I would actually quite like to get better research methods. But I found, I mean, I just found the whole thing really obtuse of like, how do you get it? You have to find someone who's going to be your supervisor. Like, how do you find that? I just have to sort of like, you feel read about, it's just a really weird process. I think I'll try and get the research methods from someone else.

But, you know, it's not off the table, you know, but, and a lot of my academic friends warned me off. They're like, no, run, don't do. I think it's an interesting one. But my point is, what I'm interested in is, okay, if a lot of our institutions aren't working in the way they could, and I'm not saying they're not working at all. I don't fall into that camp where I'm like, you know, like the kind of maha, like, yeah, it's all a conspiracy. I think that's ludicrous. I think a lot of my work is around complexity. How do we hold the complexity of, like, probably the best skills in the world are in those

institutions at the moment. And there is a peer review process. And it's better than Joe Rogan farting on about something. For sure, it's better than that. It's also limited in its own way. The alternative media space is limited in many ways. It relies on, like any self-regulated area, someone caring enough about value. and truth-seeking to go, right, I'll ask for a right of reply, I'll do this, I'll do that.

So that's kind of where I sit on it. I just had a long argument on somebody else's Instagram. He's this Nordic guy who does the sort of like Nordic return to your roots thing. And he put out, I don't know who he is, but he came up in my feed. He put out a video which said Europe had its own ayahuasca. And it was like this kind of drawing on, you know, I know. I know this space inside out. I've written a book on psychedelic science. I was like, that's nonsense. No, we didn't. And that got into a whole argument with like five different people on his thread. They're being like,

yeah, but we know, maybe we just like, there's no evidence that Europeans ever use psychedelic ceremonially. As much as it would be great if there was and it would give us a sense of belonging. There's no evidence for it. We can't really say that. What we can say is there were a lot of psychedelic plants. It's very possible. But I really with, you know, I'm sure we meet in a in a hatred of bull shit and unexamined premises. I'm totally with you on that. And at the same time, I think it's very fruitful to explore where the gaps are. And to bring in some dancing mixed with physics, mixed with sociology. I actually am fully up for that. Not to be like this is going to get, you know, see what happens. See what happens. Yeah, I mean, like any social institution,

any human institution, academia is deeply short. Right. Chris, And if we had two more hours, Chris and I could really still that time talking about all the things that we think are wrong and could be better, et cetera. But, you know, it's a little bit like the perfect being, the enemy of the group, right? And at the same time, you have these forces, you know, mainly these populist forces like Maha and someone that you mentioned, or the people that want to deny climate change, you know, who are actively like undermining these institutions, right? not just rhetorically, but actually, you know, actually in a very tangible way. And, you know, so despite all its flaws, as we said, it is, in a way, the only game in town. Like, in terms of a certain materialist reductionist domain, right? If you want to have drum circles and stuff, academia's not going to help you.

If you want to do really cool abstract expressionist art, then, you know, you don't need academia for that. You know what I mean? You want to listen to some cool jazz or whatever. That's not the job of academia. But whenever I hear talk about, you know, academia is broken or whatever. Like, you know, they discovered the Higgs-Bosoph, you know, in 2012, you know, gravitational ways. The whole deep learning AI revolution came out of academia, right? And it did what academia does.

It does the foundational research and passes it on to, you know, commercial enterprises who then pick up the ball. You know, alpha-fold, like genetic engineering, the MRNA technology is. that went into those vaccines, you know, like, that's where it comes from. It's not going to come from podcasts where, you know, we're podcasts as well, but it's purely for entertainment value, right? We're not going to do any CRISPR here. And, you know, it's not going to come from these other sources. So, yeah, you know, if, and you know, as Chris said, like, you know,

there are one of the problems that people like to mention is the replication crisis, which was a very genuine and deeply embarrassing thing for me as a psychologist. But that was some time ago now, like over a decade. And as Chris said, a lot of us took that on board, right? And there's this self-correcting thing that has occurred. And, you know, it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years. But, you know, that was a cultural thing that was found out to be broken by empirical replications, by academic researchers finding out that these things didn't replicate,

that instigated better processes. So, yeah, I mean, if there is anyone out there that genuinely wants to make research in academia better and in terms of producing actual products that can, like, make the world better for everyone, then, yeah, I mean, we're all for it. And we'll happily bash academia. But, you know, when we hear a Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein or any of these other people, now Sabine, Hossentfelder and others have got it, you don't know, like, it is a very popular thing. right? Amongst a certain kind of...

Oh, yeah, yeah, completely. You can see what's appealing, right? All of these egg heads out there, you know, they think they know everything, you know? Yeah, it's the lower resolution end of a response to a legitimation crisis, I would say. It's the dumb end in some way. Sometimes they're smart, but there's a kind of...

I mean, to be fair, Eric Weinstein has a theory of everything. He just can't find where he wrote it down. It's just... But when he gets... He's published it. Oh, he did... Oh, he did publish it. yeah yeah anyway like that's a whole other thing you get someone who you know like it has

intelligent things to say in other areas but you know so anyway that's a whole other topic but i would say that the work of like looking at the complexity of these different um yeah everything we've just talked about look bits of academia are broken and yet at the same time yeah pigs bow's on that's where i'm going to go if i want a vaccine completely completely and simultaneously, I don't want to be in a world where we have the Higgs boson, but we're ruled by some far-right group. And I know you're also saying it's not academia's place necessarily. Well, I mean, it's perhaps not science's place to... Sciences. Yes. Sciences place. But, you know, you could argue that there is a role for academics to play a role in society where they are

providing information and perspective that does make sure we don't. Yeah, exactly. It's informing, not not making policy like in sort of Soviet. Russia, but like informing. Yeah. And so yeah, I'm with you on that for sure. The people you're talking about, I would say a lot of them are audience captured. A lot of them are chasing a revenue stream which requires basically going lowest common denominator. And that's a real indicator of perhaps a lack of character, perhaps a kind of lostness in a kind of in a version of like fantasy like with Brett Weinstein you know that's a but and sometimes it's the best meaning people and they just aren't really prepared for the dynamics of the internet well yeah i mean there's

the structural incentives of course too you know that there are bad incentives in every area but um yeah oh my god the incentives amongst people whose livelihood relies on youtube clicks um they're pretty clear yeah it's not just revenue it's status as well it's a huge status driver. You're going to lose status if you piss off your audience. Yeah. There's a bit for me, Alexander, that I guess like in the alternative media space and like critics of mainstream approaches in general, right, that sometimes it's presented as nobody wants to hear, you know, these hard truths. We're going to give it. But in actual fact, like bashing institutions is a great thing. Like everyone loves it. Like, you know, have you,

go on YouTube, no, like I just saw, for example, Janus Veracus and Tim Neum having a discussion that let the light in Institute of Ideas or whatever, you know, that conference in the UK that they have. And whatever you're positioned about their debate, right, they're kind of debating about Google and big data and Veraccus obviously has like, you know, the techno feudalism, very critical approach and Tim Neum works for Google. Now, in that conference, If you look at the comments on YouTube, obviously nobody, even though they're using YouTube to express this, it's very much a cynical position, right? And I'm not saying, oh, therefore, you know, we should all trust Google and they're all doing great. But I'm just saying it's actually not an unpopular position to bash Google or to talk about algorithms or to, like, say the billionaires are screwing over society.

This is, it's not only common, it is the unifying talking point across the political spectrum, and it is the unifying, like, position of populists throughout the ages. And that kind of also dove deals with a point I want to read is about the meaning crisis, because I hear a lot about the meaning crisis and the content we listen to. It's a lot there. And it's certainly the case that particularly if you focus on Western countries, that there are statistics that you can point to, right, that show people feeling a bit lost in younger generations and whatnot.

But I would challenge anyone to locate a generation in history where that narrative was not the case, where there was not a feeling that the previous generation had a sense of meaning, had a mission, and it's now being lost by this generation. Because, like, in the 60s, you had the hippies, you had the new thought movement. If you go way back in history, most of the religious movements are critiquing existing

authorities, right? Like the Vedic system or the Jewish system or like all throughout history, any history that you look, there are these movements where people are saying life in the past was like deep and meaningful and people were real rounded people. They were killing the soil and they had meaningful relationships. And now us, you know, Max Weber was writing about it in the 1920s and I think that humans in general are in a perpetual meaning crisis that they want fulfilling meanings and you know if you look at the I was talking about about this before but like

death of a salesman that's published in the 1940s or a street car named desire are they presenting it that like everybody in society is unified the American dream is great we all live in a unified society where we accept the same things. No, they're talking about the breakdown of society and the fact that you can't afford things and that there's class divisions. And then you have, you know, the Cold War immediately after World War II. In Northern Ireland, like you mentioned, there's no trust of authorities there. Where I grew up, there's an entire community that doesn't trust the police, right? Or in other countries, you have civil wars, you have post-colonial movements. So I feel that there's like this kind of simple narrative where in the past, everybody

had things and their life was simple and they had like a narrative. And now us in the modern era, we've made it complicated or we've forgotten the meaningful things. But if you go back to China, that's what the powers are trying to tell people how you should live in alliance with the Tao in order to be a good ruler. Right. And the point is, when you live, look back at the historical rulers, the golden emperor and whatnot, he was doing it. Right. So what about that? That like, is there an issue that there is constantly a marketable meaning crisis, which gives people, you know, an arena to offer solutions perpetually. But yet there will never ever be a solution as long as humans are social primates that feel dissatisfied with

things in general. Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, like, I think we, I think we, I think you could argue that we are perpetually in a meaning crisis from the moment we're born through gen i mean buddha was in a meaning crisis right so it's uh and then just how we get but i think where where i would differ i think that if we're taking the term from john raveki's work there's a lot more to it than that than then just a sense of things were better in the in fact i wouldn't say verviki would even make the argument things were better in the past um i do make a version of that argument where I say that there are aspects of our Paleolithic biology that the modern world completely strips away and that in that we suffer, right? And I'm not saying we need to go back

to a Paleolithic reality, but I'm saying that there are pretty simple things that make human beings feel connected to the world and connected to one another and belong. And of course, arguing on social media in a sort of disembodied realm of abstraction is not one of those things, but sitting face to face to someone having a meal together and having a chat is one of those things. And I think most people would be like, yeah, I would rather do the other one, right? And so in that sense, I think there are human, biological, biopsychosocial things that we could largely agree across disciplines are better for humans and other things. And I think part of the way I understand the meaning crisis is through that lens of how do we return

to what we need without some imagined fantasy of like let's go back to the last time things were good because I agree with you like there is not really a last time things were good and I think in many ways I'm not like Stephen Pinker but you know in many aspects this is a very very good time to be alive and in other aspects that might be a temporary blip and it'll get a bit more like children of men in a few years you know sort of like that's how I see that's That's my version. It's sort of like a slightly crapper version of now. It's more authoritarian.

Hopefully people who still have babies. But yeah. Yeah, I think that's an excellent note to wrap up on. Because on one hand, I'm with you on the evolved psychology of human beings, right? We are biological creatures and we have to take that into account. And the second way, which I agree with you, is that sitting around and having a meal with your family that's super important that more important some would say than arguing with people on the internet and i definitely need to do that in the next 10 minutes or so uh so um but yeah look this was

this is really interesting um alexander thanks thanks for coming on having a chat and i'll also just note alexander that i i've taken up bouldering in the past year and a half or so where i i go with my son i go by myself he's getting in touch with his monkey Yeah, that's it. You know, social primate climbing up a wall, it's very enjoyable. I agree. I promote that people should try it. Same thing, you know, Brazil Jitsu had this moment with the same reason.

But yeah, they're definitely, the fact that we are ultimately social primates, it is something that I think people should bear in mind and should factor in. And for the same reason, not find it so surprising that we're, you know, we're influenced by emotion and powerful rhetoric and maybe a little bit sometimes too swayed by interpersonal connections or whatnot. But yeah, maybe Matt and I have a notion that like the level of attention, you know, that the social media current ecosystem provides. That is something perhaps, which is somewhat the ranging of social primates that are seeking our status and attention. So yeah, we can agree with that. And, you know, everything else, we appreciate the exchange

and the willingness to come on and yeah so if people want to check out more of Alexander's work there's also a documentary right Leviathan which is up on the sub side so yeah there you go and thank you for coming on and everybody enjoy their dinners i'm gonna go eat a banana i've got a real hankering for banana now they tap into my roots but yeah thanks guys awesome it had a lot of fun Take care. Thank you.