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May 10, 2024 - Decoding the Gurus
49:20
Supplementary Materials 6: Christian Sensemaking, Hipster Race Realists, & Marijuana Pseudoscience

We shake our heads in despair at some truly terrible Guru crossovers:Old Man Health Routines: Jogging, Diets, and the Pursuit of 'Wellness'Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand offer the apotheosis of indulgent Christian-themed sensemakingTaylor Lorenz and activist journalismAre Twitch Streamers the Future of Journalism? No.Huberman gets himself in hot water over Marijuana episodeThe Value of Debating Pseudoscience with HubermanCasey Means: Cramming all the pseudoscience red flags into a single TweetWhen Red Scare met Steve Sailer: Ironic Hipsterism X Old Skool Scientific RacismLinksJBP Podcast: The Collective Unconscious, Christ, and the Covenant | Russell Brand | EP 444Washington Post: Twitch streamers become go-to news source for campus protest coverage (Taylor Lorenz)Red Scare: Sailer Socialism w/ Steve SailerHuberman Lab: Dr. Casey Means: Transform Your Health by Improving Metabolism, Hormone & Blood Sugar RegulationCasey Means Red Flag filled Pinned TweetNew York Magazine: The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the Far RightThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1 hr 43 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

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Time Text
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplementary materials, sixth edition, the sixth version of the popular supplementary material show.
Now, Matt, even before we started here, you've been complaining, you've been demanding schedules, time frames, you've been saying, what's each clip?
How exactly as long is each clip?
What segment's going to take?
I'm just here to say, just relax.
Just relax.
Just things will come, will go.
This isn't a normal decoding episode.
It's more go with the flow.
Things can change.
Maybe another clip will just come in during the recording.
You're right.
You're right.
I had the wrong attitude.
It's a bad attitude.
I've got meetings.
I've got other work to do.
I was trying to make this whole business.
Like, this is a safe space for us.
I'm just chatting with Chris.
We're just talking about some things that have gone down.
I'm going to relax.
I'm going to enjoy myself.
I'm going to have a nice time.
That's the main thing.
You're not.
You're really not.
Not with the clips I have.
But anyway, we'll see what we can do.
And actually, I was supposed to not clip stuff.
That much stuff for this thing.
But I've ended up listening to more nonsense as a result of it.
Although I don't know if that's fair.
Because I probably would be listening to it anyway.
And then just throwing it in my head instead of mentally releasing it.
Now I know.
You've told me the agenda because I demanded it.
And there is way too much stuff, I think, for one episode.
Too much awful things have happened out there in the discourse.
And you said we wouldn't have time.
You were going to relegate it to the very end.
But I think we should talk about our old man health problems and efforts to remediate them.
Front and center.
I think it's important.
I mean, this is top billing.
This is what the people want.
They want to know.
Is it?
Yeah, that's the gold tier content.
Like, middle-aged man's health regimes.
I think so.
I mean, I've been jogging.
You can tell by my lively, effervescent, sprightly manner that I've been jogging.
It's a podcast.
Yeah, I've been forgoing the whiskey and I've been taking up the jogging.
Six o 'clock in the morning, I've got knee things on to support my knees.
I've got a little fanny pack to put my phone and keys in.
I've got running shoes and I'm choosing life, Chris.
I'm choosing life.
You know, you should do that.
Why the hell have you got knee pads on for running?
This sounds like you're preparing to go in the battle.
That's an appropriate metaphor for an old man's legs and the hard pavement, Chris.
I'm not yet at the point where I'm actually getting any cardiovascular exercise because...
The first thing that gives out is my knees and my ankles and various other parts.
No, I've got that in spades, but the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak and bruised and sore.
But, you know, I'm taking in baby steps every morning, a little bit better.
Yeah, I'll report back in a couple of weeks.
But, you know, people should also know that you, you bastard, you send me photographs of all the food you eat.
In Japan.
Not all the food.
I eat much more food than you can see.
He sent me a lot of pictures.
And while you were away on your little trip, I was getting your pictures of the sushi and the lovely deep red chicken and all the gorgeous things and the gorgeous little bowls and so on.
And I was driving my car eating a Whopper from Hungry Jack's.
For Americans, that's Burger King.
And you made me feel bad about myself, Chris.
You made me feel bad about my lifestyle, about what I was living.
Yeah.
But this is why we've turned over a new leaf.
This is what we're reporting, right?
We're doing this thing.
I was seeing this little thing about atomic habits, which I think is only 50% complete pseudoscience.
But one thing was, you know, accountability.
Let people know what you're doing.
So when you feel that this shame makes you not do it.
So we are both...
You know, we've got goals.
We're going to be healthier.
And I have developed my plan, which is not to eat lunch.
That's it.
I'm just cutting out.
I'm cutting out my lunch.
Hey, that's going to do it.
I mean, I'm going to do exercise and stuff as well, but cutting out lunch, and I'm replacing that with miso soup.
Yep.
Which I can get from the...
And Matt informed me that this plan of mine is what...
Japanese peasants used to do to stave off farming or whatever.
Because we sell soup, especially from the convenience store in Japan, it's actually very tasty.
And because it's, you know, watery soup-like thing, it tricks your body into feeling that you're eating something substantial.
It has no calories, but it feels like it has calories.
It's tasty.
Very much like you and I, we're in sync.
We follow parallel paths to life, as you know.
I have a packet of dry powder that you mix with water and it's called a Man Shake.
That's the brand.
So I'm drinking Man Shakes for lunch as a meal replacement as well.
Well, that's an overstatement.
I drank it once and I decided I really don't like it.
So I don't know if I'm going to keep up with that.
Second to last.
I do agree with your point about the sharing of the micro-achievements and sharing when you fail.
Because the shame and the stigma, I think, is really important.
I mean, there's a big thing in psychology where we want to avoid stigma, avoid shame.
But speaking for myself personally, it's the only thing that gets me doing anything, whether it's replying to emails or drinking a man shake.
We're jogging in the morning.
It's really shame that it gets me out of bed in the morning.
I don't know how...
I couldn't live without it.
It's my primary motivating factor.
I mean, fuck accomplishment or goals and things like that.
It's just shame.
Shame, yeah.
I like that.
Catholics have been...
Using that for centuries to get things done.
So, I'm done with it.
So, look, Matt, you know, I wanted to put this at the end, where there were only people left who, you know, they've heard all the other things.
You're not the boss of this podcast.
You're right.
Address it to Matt, okay?
He demanded that it goes first.
So that's it.
This is one way to weed out the people before they hear anything about Guru.
Only the true believers are still with us, so now we can say what we want.
Okay, no, no, enough of that chit-chat.
We will get into the content.
You've got this so much, but you're going to start us off with Jordan Peterson and a certain English comedian.
That's right.
Yes, so there was something, there was an annoyance in the guru sphere, which was Jordan Peterson hosting Russell Brand on his podcast, and primarily to talk about Russell Brand's newfound Christianity,
right?
He's converted and adopted Christ, he's been baptized, and that's fine, that's fine.
You know, convert to whatever religion you like.
But it being Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand, of course, they must dramatically over-intellectualize and also make this into indulgent guru by monologuing at each other.
And just to give a taste, here's Russell talking about...
His interest in Jesus and how it's kind of similar to an interest in quantum physics.
Has there been a significant reversal of charge?
And what is that charge?
How are we endowed with that charge now?
At the point when you have Richard Dawkins saying, I am culturally Christian, are people starting to recognise that this is not just a remnant?
Ideology!
This is a living thing that has been discarded.
I listened to that Bishop Barron who you had on your show the other day talking about ethereal angels and I thought, yes, the religion that I am interested in is not a precursor and a parallel to psychotherapy.
It is a precursor and parallel to quantum physics helping me to understand what do you mean when you say self?
Who is this self?
What do you mean?
What do you mean when you say reality?
When you say reality, what are you talking about?
And is it possible that reality is something that we...
Conjure here as vessels and conduits of the divine if we have the capacity to somehow in the moment through practice disavow the strong gravitational, literally, pull of the material and the unconscious ethos with which we are continually inculcated by the insidious,
nihilistic...
Or be it glistening culture that attempts to make us all devotees of this new banality.
Right, right.
There you go.
Okay, so Russell Brand has become interested in Christianity.
Huberman also has expressed an interest.
Both of them had...
I mean, it's hard not to be just a tiny bit cynical.
I've had the timing.
Both had these sexual...
Misconduct allegations against them and they find Jesus shortly afterwards.
But there has been a Jesus-ward turn of a lot of opinionators, nominally secular gurus.
Russell Brand is putting his particular lyrical spin on it, of course.
Loquitious.
Loquitious stamp.
The thing that gets me with all of this is they can't just find something that they like.
That gels with them.
It has to be that, you know, the world has failed to properly appreciate or like, you know, the universe is now humming along to appreciate the true wisdom of Christianity, which was there.
And like, it's a precursor to quantum physics.
And so it can never be that just this appeals to them because of particular circumstances that they...
And particular proclivities they have.
It is more like this is the key to unlocking the true meaning of the universe.
And it just so happens that it corresponds with all of the things that they were already talking about and interested in.
Yeah.
I mean, do you really believe it?
Do you think Russell Brand has really developed a genuine interest in Christianity?
Or is this just stuff that he's saying?
Now, it is part of a new line of rhetoric.
Yeah, I mean, it is, but I think it's just essentially, Rosalind always talks exactly like this about every topic that he talks about, and he's now relying on a particular kind of vocabulary more, the kind of traditional Christian vocabulary.
But you can hear him weaving in all of the usual stuff that he does, right?
Yeah.
Well, he has these enthusiasms, right?
Like, one of his earlier enthusiasms was towards, like, socialist revolution, and then he had an enthusiasm for, like, battling addiction through spiritual awakening, and now he has an enthusiasm for this version of Christianity,
supposedly.
But, yeah, I know what you mean.
It's just like a different, hey, this is the new reinvented Russell Brand with this new bladder.
I refer to this as like the apophysis of indulgent religious monologuing, right?
And part of the reason is, so his other person that he's conversing with is Jordan Peterson.
So here's Jordan Peterson belaboring a point, as he often does, and this is just the start of him outlaying a conceptual framework, Matt.
So see if you can follow the thread of what he's arguing here.
So let me lay out the idea, and you tell me what you think about it.
So, what these models do is map the statistical relationship between, you might say, markers.
And so, imagine that you can tell the difference between a word like, imagine a word B-I-N-T, which isn't a word, but it's kind of a plausible non-word.
And it's a plausible non-word because the statistical relationship between the letters mimics the likely statistical relationship between letters in a real English word.
So it's much more of a word than Q-N-Z-T.
Okay, so now there are statistical regularities between letters that enable us to identify words.
And then there are...
Statistical regularities between words in phrases that make sense.
And then there are statistical regularities between phrases in sentences and sentences in relationship to one another.
And then, say, within paragraphs.
And then paragraphs in relationship to one another.
And the large language models are trained to map all that.
So what that implies, obviously, is something like...
Any given idea is statistically likely to exist in relationship to a certain set of other ideas and not distal ideas.
And so, if I throw an idea at you, I'm also throwing a network of associated co-ideas at you at the same time.
And then out farther in the penumbra are even more distantly associated ideas.
And more creative people are going to be able to leap from the center to the distal ideas.
We already know that from studying creativity.
Let's give you a break there.
So could you process that high-level idea about semantic networks?
Did it require that level of letters and words and phrases and phrases?
And actually, the funny thing is the example he gave, B-I-N-T, Bint.
Do you know Bint is a word?
It's a slang word in English?
Yeah, yeah.
It means like a derogatory term for like a girl or woman, right?
A Bint.
Yes, yes.
I'm surprised Russell Brand didn't pull him up on that.
You know, this known word, B-I-N-T, which means nothing.
And like, yeah, it does mean something.
Anyway, that was just...
That was the start, Matt.
So you've got that.
Things exist in semantic networks, and you can hear it's kind of riffing on LLM.
So a little bit more, the next stage of this.
So the large language models map the statistical association between sets of ideas.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
You can imagine the same thing happens with images.
So if you bring to mind the image of a witch...
You're much more likely to bring to mind the image of a cauldron and a black cat, for example, maybe a spider, maybe a pumpkin.
So the collective unconscious would be, take a given culture, the collective unconscious would be the statistical association between ideas insofar as that culture has represented the ideas.
And that's mappable mathematically.
And so a symbol would be...
Something like a set of statistically associated concepts.
Right?
Especially image-laden concepts in particular with regards to symbol.
So, it's a weight.
What the collective unconscious seems to be is the system of weights between concepts through which we see the world.
So...
And that makes it a real thing.
It makes symbols real because a symbol is a network of ideas with a core idea at the center.
So, yeah, he took a leap there, didn't he?
And by the way, for people, you know, up to a certain point, none of this is objectionable or interesting, frankly, that, you know, words and even little visual features tend to be correlated with one another.
It's semiotics, in a way.
Like, he's just restating semiotics, but really slowly.
But he took a jump there, Chris, when he went to the collective unconscious.
And so he's defined this thing as, like, the symbols are real.
Like, follow the logic there, right?
Well, he also took that jump to say, like, symbols are real.
Now, if you ask him if Jesus was real, he would say, well, it depends what you mean.
By real.
But right, he has no problem saying symbols are real.
And of course symbols are real.
Like, because the freaking bear, right?
Like, a flag is a symbol.
But anyway, I'm just saying he would take issue with any declarative statement made.
But he doesn't mind when he says it.
So, symbols are real, which I think everybody would agree with.
But he means they're real because they're embedded in a network of semiotic associations.
Yeah.
I know.
So he wants to mean the kind of abstract concept is real because it has a statistic regularity in the way that it's understood and mapped in a given cultural.
Which is so much.
It sounds profound.
It's like saying like the word dog is real, right?
Because it's associated with leashes and dog food and stuff like that.
And that has meaning to everyone.
It's like, you know.
Yes.
And if you say the word dog, dog food comes to mind and fur comes to mind.
And isn't that shocking?
Like, yeah, I guess.
It's the power of symbols over your mind, Chris.
Yeah.
So he's wanting to say that, like, LLMs have kind of peeled back the curtain and revealed that, like, statistical relationships between words can be mapped and things can be predicted.
And there is, like, you know, a deep reality to concepts and metaphors, which is all...
Linked into his stuff with maps of meaning.
The main thing I want to make here is that it takes him so long.
To belabor fairly straightforward concepts.
But it's not even accurate.
You know what I mean?
He has the most shallow understanding of LLMs.
You can tell by the way he talks about them.
And for instance, that aspect about embedding a word into a point in that semantic space, that doesn't even happen in the deep learning part of it.
That's done through a pre-processing step, which is basic matrix algebra, which, yes, he's right, it's all about correlations and stuff, but that's why you can do things in that space.
Like, you can say, take the word king or the concept of king.
It gets mapped to that space.
You can subtract man from that and you'll literally get queen, right?
It's all very cool.
It's very interesting.
But based on statistical associations, you can place words into a kind of a concept space.
It's great.
But that's not LLMs, is my point, right?
That's quite a simple bit of matrix algebra that can detect those correlations and do that.
Matrix.
Matrix.
I'll never change.
I'll never change.
You didn't correct it.
You didn't correct it, but that's fine.
So I agree that he's got a, you know, like he has a shallow understanding of LLMs.
He has perhaps a deeper...
Interest in semiotics and like interpretivism, Jungian symbolism, all that stuff.
We all know he loves this, right?
But so this was just as I introduce you to this is, you know, him looks like, you know, layering up the build up thing.
Russell Brand responds to this and adds in another thing that we should consider alongside these like statistical associations between words.
Yes.
How beautiful.
Firstly, I wonder some of the areas we might At least it seems to me that I ought address as occurring are the difference between signifiers that are,
of course, according to post-structuralist and to much of the work done within semiotics, arbitrary and potentially universal, natural or at least practical.
I wonder, for example, about the idea that is it a type of language that a barn full of chicks will respond to?
To the silhouette of a bird when it travels above their heads on a wire in one direction because when travelling from north to south the silhouette resembles that of a hawk but when it travels back along the same trajectory but in reverse they do not respond because it no longer resembles the silhouette of a hawk.
A hawk does not travel in that formation.
That is a type of language.
There is language within nature.
This is the first thought.
So you're referring to something.
Yeah, okay.
So that adds an additional dimension to the model.
So then you might say that there are co-occurring patterns of regularity with biological significance that exist in some real sense outside the merely conceptual.
And those are probably marked in the fundamental analysis by death.
Right.
What?
Death?
Yeah.
What death?
Yeah, there is more that comes up there.
Well, so what he wants to say is, like, because the hawk is a predator and the response to the silhouette, like, you know, the kind of thing about humans respond to hearing a sound in the bush because it might be a predator,
right?
So evolution makes death like a more functional.
But like, so you heard that.
This is like the most shallow and also obscure version of what Kevin Mitchell talked about very cogently and wrote about agency and evolution and the biology of how that stuff works.
This is like that, but just a really bad version of it, right?
Well, not only that, Matt, but do you know the experiment that...
Russell Brand is talking about.
I don't understand why a hawk would not trigger the...
I looked it up, and he's retelling something, but he's got it wrong.
He's saying it's because north to south versus south to north wouldn't trigger the response.
That doesn't seem sensible, because a hawk ship, surely they could turn.
The actual experiment is called the hawk-goose.
And it's basically like the silhouette in one direction resembles a hawk because the wings are up closer.
And then there's a long tail.
But if you do it the other way, it's like a goose.
The silhouette goes backwards.
Yeah, it's a goose.
Yeah, so they don't respond.
And they were showing that birds respond to this silhouette without instruction in some species, right?
Like it's biologically inbuilt.
But that's different, right?
So he gets the example wrong, and then he wants to introduce that as like, you know, like another form of life.
It's like adding on to Jordan's theorizing, right?
This is adding another level, the visual evolutionary level.
And then Jordan is like, that's interesting.
Yes, we do need to.
And this encapsulates the notion of death.
So now we've got, you know, silhouette language added, and now...
Like, the imagery of depth.
And this continues on.
Like, essentially, we've talked about it before, but it gives the impression about, you know, that there's a theory being developed and, like, this is great minds, like, kind of adding different components to what it's really waffling and just riffing.
on research half remembered and big ideas.
Yeah, I mean, I can understand why people get into it, because it has the appearance of profundity and depth.
It is the guru effect, right?
Everything that's been said is referencing complex ideas and research and stuff, but it's fundamentally either straightforward or not as profound, at least, as is being presented.
Yeah, I get what you're saying.
They're kind of going through a pantomime of two people that are so brilliant that they're actually developing a whole new theory of language, the unconscious, society, symbols, animals, death, Jungianism.
They're creating this grand theory on the fly, live, in this podcast, except, of course, they're not.
As you said, they're reprising some half-remembered, poorly expressed ideas that have just been around since forever and have been set out much more clearly by other people.
And then just randomly throwing in a thing like, well, there you go.
So, you know, the hawk might eat the chickens and they're censored to that.
So now we need Jung and the archetype of death, right?
And then it'll go off on that.
And so it's a very bad...
Theory, to call it that, that they're developing.
But, you know, it's a pandemon, you know?
It gives you the feeling of getting somewhere.
Yeah, so you asked, you know, about death, and I mentioned that Jordan had said that symbols are real, but just to highlight, you know, how this connects together, and maybe it was too quick to talk about things being real.
Because one of the other things I've been thinking about is that people ask me questions like, you know, Do you think God is real?
And a question like that always begs the question for me.
It's like, well, what the hell do you mean real?
Like, what makes something real?
And, you know, you could say tangibility, although that's only one dimension of what makes something real.
It's like, I think what makes things real in the final analysis is probably death.
And in the example you used of the silhouette, This is a very famous example with regard to birds.
The silhouette traveling in one direction, that signifies death, reliably, right?
Over a very long span of evolutionary history, and any creature that didn't respond to that silhouette was at a much higher probability of being picked off.
So then, one of the things you might note, and this is where the postmodernists got things dreadfully wrong, and where the large language models have drifted into insanity, So imagine that there's a statistical relationship between concepts.
Okay, so then you might say, well, what gives that statistical relationship reality?
And the postmodern types would say, well, it's just arbitrary cultural construction.
But it's not, because there are patterns of relationships between events that are part and parcel of the world per se.
And some of those need to be accurately mapped by the conceptual system or you die.
And so I would say the ideas that ring most true to us, that grip us in this sort of archetypal way, are ideas that bear directly on our survival, whether we recognize it or not.
They strike a chord within us.
Yeah, I mean...
Fair enough.
That's fine.
I mean, I think everyone agrees, don't they, Chris, that any kind of signaling or a language, symbolic system, if it's not grounded in reality somewhere, like that's pretty basic sort of AI stuff.
Well, yeah, like the notion that things are not completely, entirely arbitrary.
About the concepts that people construct in the world.
They are tied to material reality.
Like, of course.
Of course, that's the key.
Yeah, because if it wasn't, you would have no way of mapping concepts that are useful in the actual world.
But he wants to say there that, like, one, I just want to highlight that there he's suddenly concerned about what real means.
He wasn't when he used it earlier, but, like, here, you know, it comes to God.
It's very important.
If you're asking about God, then suddenly...
Yeah, I know.
Tables are only real to us in the sense that they help prevent me from dying because my coffee is sitting on it and if I don't drink that coffee, it's going to feel like I'm dying.
Yeah, I mean, there's a really boring way in which that's all true, right?
In that things that are relevant or significant to us are often...
Because it has some functional relevance to us, right?
But it does.
I mean, it's obvious that there are lots of things that relate to survival or that kind of thing, which will be more relevant.
But also, Jordan has this habit of really stretching things.
Remember, he had this metaphor where he took a glass and he was like, the reason you can pick out a glass is because it can contain water.
And you need water.
And you're like, nah, that's not, like, the correct explanation.
But, like, he's pointing at something that, you know, object mapping and whatnot is, like, you know, you can tie in all the basic processes.
But the fact that, like, a container can be filled with water is not the reason that you can distinguish, like, an object on the table.
But it's not completely wrong, Eli.
Well, I would say in a specific sense, because...
If you were a photorealist painter, you could spend a month painting all the reflections on that glass.
It's a very complex thing to perceive.
But you perceive it as a unity, and we know this neuropsychologically.
We know this scientifically.
You perceive it as a unity because you can grip it.
And because you can raise it to your lips, and because you can drink it, and because you need to drink water to survive, and you are willing to drink water to survive because you believe emotionally and motivationally and perhaps rationally that survival is a good, and that's dependent on your belief that human existence in some sense is a good,
and that it's striving towards some sort of higher unified order.
And you might think, well, you don't need all that to perceive the glass.
And the answer is, yeah, as a matter of fact, you need all of that.
To perceive the glass.
And if you lose some of that because of various forms of cortical damage, let's say, you enter into the realm of all sorts of bizarre blindnesses.
And so that point you make about the is being dependent on the ought is also extremely interesting because if the world is infinitely complex, which seems to be the case or close enough, the hierarchy of attention you bring to bear on it and so your intent...
It determines in no small part the array of manifestations that that infinity will produce in your field of apprehension.
And that does determine to some degree at least what elements of the object you have access to.
So I just want to say it's like, and I've got another example to illustrate this, but so he's basically been saying death is everything.
And if we go back, he was talking about how, you know, the kind of interconnection of words is everything.
And Russell said maybe the ability...
The perceived visual hook cues is everything.
And here's another thing that's everything.
One of the striking meta-themes of the biblical library is the necessity of sacrifice, right?
And so I've been trying to understand, first of all, what it means to sacrifice.
It means to give up something that's desirable.
For something that's more desirable.
It's something like that.
It's something higher.
And it's higher because it extends over a longer period of time, and it includes more people.
And so, sacrifice is the basis of community.
Well, why?
Well, it's obvious, Russell, as far as I can tell.
It's like, if you're in a communal relationship...
Which is any relationship, obviously, then you're giving something up that's immediate to you to establish and maintain the relationship, right?
So it's a sacrificial gesture.
And once you understand that, once you understand that sacrifice is at the basis of community, the question immediately arises, which is, well, what's the most effective form of sacrifice?
And this biblical story, Old and New Testament together, is actually an examination of sacrifice per se.
It's an attempt to spiral down to the core of what constitutes, well, you might say the sacrifice that's maximally effective, maximally acceptable to God.
But it's something like what sacrifice is by necessity at the core of community.
I also don't think there's any difference between that and cortical maturation, by the way.
Oh gosh, it's so much work to follow along, but I kind of did.
So Chris, what do you think?
I mean, so at first he kind of references giving up things over time, right?
So, you know, the classic example is the little, you know, the delayed gratification cookie experiments they did with kids.
Can you sacrifice the cookie now in exchange for more cookies later on?
You know, I guess you can extend that idea of kind of giving up an immediate reward in favor of some sort of less tangible, more abstract reward.
And you could, you know, pro-sociality and not altruism, but, you know, basically cultivating good relationships with other people might cost you something in the short term, but you get reputational.
So you're going to get a long-term benefit.
And, you know, I guess he's kind of right in the sense that it has got to do with cortical maturation in the sense that there is a thing called, like, impulsive sensation seeking where as you get older and, you know, you are better at foregoing immediate gratification.
So, fine.
Why not grind that?
Like, if you're going to say, well, that's fundamentally the core of that, the key to understanding everything is sacrifice, right?
Sacrifice.
Can't you just equally say, It's reciprocity or it's cooperation.
Yeah, cooperation, reciprocity, or delayed gratification, right?
You don't need to resort to a biblical term.
Or empathy.
Yeah.
You can pick any term.
I guess, Jordan, we're here.
He'd say that the Bible encodes, like science is rediscovering these terms, right?
Which you just listed off.
But the Bible encodes a deep truth there about delayed gratification and reciprocity.
And it's all there in the Bible stories about sacrifice.
All right, but Matt, just again, just to point something out, like Jordan always makes this thing about how the Bible is the absolute pinnacle of stories of sacrifice, right?
Like the Bible story is one where God sacrifices his own son to save humanity, right?
Like Jesus, the resurrection and all that.
But like in Buddhism...
There's these things called the Jataka Tales, right, which tell the life of the Buddha before he became the Buddha because of the system of reincarnation.
And they're talking about his previous lives and what he did.
And most of them involve sacrifice.
Just for example, there was one where he was Prince Mahasattva and there was a hungry tigress that was going to eat its children because it was starving.
So Prince Mahasatva gets left alone and decides to try and offer himself to the tiger.
The tiger won't eat him initially.
So he goes to the edge of a cliff, cuts his neck open and throws himself off the ledge.
So he lands up front of the tiger like all bloodied and stuff.
And then the tiger eats him.
Right.
That's a pretty significant sacrifice.
And it's in a completely...
And like Jordan would say, yes, you know, that's the kind of thing.
But like he always focuses on the Christian.
And Jesus, I'm just saying, there are many, many narratives about sacrifice or about, you know, being kind to neighbors or whatever in all traditions.
And Jordan shows generally not very much interest in them.
It's Christianity.
Well, likewise, you could, you know, themes of sacrifice feature in a lot of Hollywood films and a lot of ripping yarns generally.
And I guess he would say that the Bible is the wellspring.
For all of that popular culture, all of that literary culture.
So why is the Bible the wellspring when it comes after various things or in completely different cultural contexts?
Like, it's not like the Jannica stories are based on the Old Testament, right?
They're not.
So it almost suggests that, you know, Jordan's claims that all literature comes from the Bible is overstated.
I agree.
He's obviously starting from the point of there's significant things in the Bible.
And then working forwards from there.
And if you take a broad enough point of view that people respond to stories of sacrifice or if there is a genuine sort of cognitive, pro-social, longer-term thinking kind of developmental thing that tends to occur in human psychology,
you can forge links between that and the pro-sociality that Christianity encourages.
Yeah, it's just centering the Bible and Christianity at the nexus of a whole bunch of random disparate ideas.
So, I mean, the thing where I always land with Jordan is that if you really concentrate hard, you could go through all the obscurantism and you could find the reasonable version of what he's saying.
But it's a very poor...
Explanation of that.
It completely ignores all of the stuff that is known in science and academia and everything, basically, and presents it as though he's figuring it all out off the cuff.
And then he links it to Jungianism or to the Bible, and you get the kind of wow, deep kind of moment.
I think what you mean is, like, not that he ignores, because he does reference all these big thinkers and whatnot that exist, but his presentation is very much like, here's the idea I've had, which is putting these concepts together in a novel and unique way.
And Jordan's examples, almost always, the logic, you can be charitable and, you know, extend it to a reasonable version, but there are often examples given that are...
Contradictory or there's inconsistencies, right?
Like I remember the time he was talking about the fact that people want to see religious iconography in museums shows that there's something deep and fundamental to it.
But like the fact that people want to see the lobster foam in museums or modern art, does that suggest that there...
No, he doesn't extend that logic.
And so we've heard Jordan Peterson and the way that people normally interact is...
You know, in podcast land, things are different because people do talk for blocks and then pass over to the next person or whatever.
But in any case, talking in eight-minute blocks is very unusual, right?
That's a long time to talk without another person speaking.
And Jordan and Brian talk in that kind of way.
Eight minutes, six minutes, 30. Six minutes, 55 response, seven minutes.
So they're just exchanging soliloquies at each other and they make reference.
You know, to each other's ideas, but it's very much you get the impression that they're just, like, reading, okay, this guy has now presented something, so let me go on my riff.
And this was Jordan's riff.
Here's Bran's.
And now, this is two minutes, Matt, so I'm sorry for that, but I feel you have to hear it in a long stretch to get, you know, the kind of flow of what Russell is like and how his reasoning works.
And you'll hear also the standard, like, Guru Priya shit going on, so listen to this.
God.
Now, there's a lot of Jordan Peterson 101.
There's a lot of hits running simultaneously here, JP, because we've already touched on the idea of chaos and the necessary inevitable emergence of patterns within chaos.
And it seems that you are positing to a degree that this chaos is analogous to perhaps the collective...
Unconscious and some of the patterns that are emerging in AI models, even with the biases evident within them, are an indicator of how these patterns emerge within a container.
And I suppose to say a container is to indicate that we are acknowledging an absolute.
We've moved from this idea of a collective unconscious and patterns emerging within chaos.
Into sacrifice, which is obviously another great Jordan Peterson theme, and as you say, perhaps the overarching theme of the Bible.
My contribution to this incredible amount of information that you are relaying, it has to do with where might one's intention carry you, in so much as...
It seems that in this process of maturation and a personal relationship with sacrifice, how that develops and evolves, it seems to me, is when one starts to acknowledge That there is not, when you use the phrase, immediately beneficial.
That when we're referring to immediacy, we are talking about both spatial and temporal immediacy.
And we might have to consider that when dealing with the sublime as surely the Bible is, that even these categories are called into question.
The most basic and taken for granted.
Categories of any temporal creature will have to be challenged.
This perhaps helps me to understand how the ultimate sacrifice as rendered in the New Testament, and most I suppose would regard as the defining Christian image, the image of sacrifice, can tackle the complex idea of the pact that is made by the sacrifice of the man-god.
That's his contribution.
What's he saying there?
It goes on.
I cut it off there, but...
Yeah.
It's just that, you know, one, you got to hear, like I said, the guru dynamics of Jordan, you know, you've dropped incredible.
Let me add, like, my...
It's the same when he engages with Brett Weinstein, where they're just constantly saying, okay, but what, you know, the temporal, have we considered the temporal and the special, those concepts might not apply in the same way when we consider the sublime as an aspect of the divine,
and the incarnation of the nature of man in the Bible, which...
It's just like, oh God, I understand there are people that really enjoy this.
And to some extent, it is, you know, like maybe theologians would take this as insulting, but I think there is an aspect where this reflects what I often feel like listening to people have theological debates where they are sure that they're communicating very deep,
sublime, important things.
And to me, it just feels a lot like indulgent.
Waffle.
Because, like, the basic thing he's saying is what you just, what Jordan already said and what you summarized, Matt, which was as you get older, you become more mature, less egocentric, theoretically, as things mature, you're better at, like, delaying gratification and maybe the Bible has things to say about this.
That's, like...
Yeah.
Just, like, heaps and heaps of other cultural artifacts and stories and...
Yeah, and completely non-religious.
Morals also suggest not being selfish.
That's right.
The part that they refer to that is real is really pretty boring.
Like this morning I was talking about forcing myself to go for a jog even though my knees and my ankles are hurting, right?
My instinct is to just not do that.
Because the immediate gratification would be to stop the pain.
But to my credit, I am able to think in the long term and force myself to go jogging because I know it's doing me some good.
Like, that's not a profound observation.
It shouldn't be to anyone.
And it's not the basis for a soliloquy about religion and meaning and spirituality.
I guess, what was he trying to say there?
He was saying, okay, Jordan, you've talked about...
You know, the temporal, we're just like mortal beings.
Yeah.
He wants to say about, you know, like...
What about the ultimate?
Given that the message of Christianity resonates across time and all that, and there are mystical essences about, you know, the Trinity and all this, so it...
Well, I actually had a...
I actually had a reading.
It might be too flattering to brand, but I took his meaning to mean, hey, Jordan, you've been talking about essentially delayed gratification or, like you said, cooperative behavior.
But what about the ultimate sacrifice where you do something that's clearly detrimental to you materially, like Jesus did, but it's for this greater good and whatever?
How about that?
And it's kind of right in a way that doesn't fit, right?
Jordan's attempt to relate these two.
It actually doesn't.
Oh, because you're like in reciprocal altruism, right?
Like eventually you get paid back.
Yeah, so I have a clip that might speak to that.
Let's see what you interpret his point to be from this.
This is Brandy and Waffle again.
It's kind of on the same point, but just listen.
that when you were saying that, of course, when we default to making the self our deity, the sovereign being that which is currently charged, whichever instinct is at the wheel, whichever instinct
is in the driving seat, that will become sovereign at that moment.
If you have no recourse against that, if you have no principle, if you have no path, if you have no doubt, if you have no Christ, if you have no way of breathing and living God into God.
If you have no doubt, if you have no doubt, if you have no Christ, if you have no way of breathing and living God into God.
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