John Vervaeke and Jordan Peterson: Word Worshipers
That's right—we’re back in the heady world of sense-making, but don't worry, we're just in time to witness the final resolution of the ever-looming 'Meaning Crisis.'Join Matt and Chris as they embark on an epic journey with the cognitively inclined philosopher John Vervaeke and none other than the uber-guru, Jordan Peterson, himself. Together, they navigate a vast semantic web of meaning that spans discussions of Power, Beauty, Love, Religion, and, of course... the Logos!Along the way, we'll probe the limits of complex wordplay and autodidactic insights, consider the ancient art of delegation, and ponder how the religious-shaped void might just be filled with engagement in Dialogos. On the more mundane level, we'll also explore the inner workings of Jordisan Academy, the logistics of the 'We Who Wrestle with God' tour, upcoming Sensemaking cruises, and the vital multivitamins every Responsible Man should be taking.So come along as Matt and Chris grapple with the Omega Rule, cast aside their reductive materialism, and bow down in horror and awe to worship the words that the eternal Logos issues forth.LinksThe Meaning Crisis: Resolution | Dr. John Vervaeke | EP 482The Stoa: Wisdom Signalling & the Wisdom of Criticism w/ John Veraveke, Chris M, Chris Kavanagh, & Matt BrowneA Bit of Fry and Laurie: A Bit of Fry & Laurie Concerning LanguageJohn Vervaeke: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh.
He is the Gimli to my Lagolas.
Maybe he's the Frodo to my Sam.
Which one would you prefer, Chris?
Which Lord of the Rings duo would you like to be?
Well, Matt, can I just add a meta comment before I answer that?
I believe you've used those comparisons before in your old age.
Your senility, you've forgotten.
I didn't do Gimli in Legolas.
That was new.
Are you sure?
I'm pretty sure I remember being compared to...
Obviously, I'm Gimli in that equation.
Yeah.
Do you see yourself as more the Frodo or the Sam in our little guru's quest?
I'm Frodo.
You are Frodo.
But I'm more Gimli than Legolas.
So that's the trade-off, right?
Only Frodo because of the temptation, Matt.
You would have no temptation.
You're just stalwart.
The dark side tempts me.
That's right.
Frodo is carrying the weight.
Frodo has seen the eye.
Whereas Sam's kind of along for the ride, helping out.
Sam was a ring bearer.
He was a ring bearer, Matt.
He got the goal.
Didn't he get the goal?
He was like an emotional support friend, let's be honest.
That's what I am.
Didn't he get to go to the West eventually?
Like, I'm not talking about, you know, Kissing the West.
No, he didn't go to the West.
No, he stayed with the lovely Hobbit lady.
They had many children.
I forget her name.
What was it, like Thornberry or Juicy?
I was going to say Juicy.
Juicy.
No, that's not good.
Yeah, but it was something like that, you know, Daisy Milk or whatever.
Yeah, a good Hobbitown name.
Well, good.
Well, that's settled.
Yeah, that's it.
We're glad we got that out of the way.
But yeah, so we're here today, Matt.
And well, we have a lot of people that are on the docket for us to cover a lot of heavy topics.
And we just recently finished, you know, the Omnibus episodes on Dr. K, right?
So we decided...
We know what people wanted.
I asked them on the Patreon.
I know the feedback.
I know you want us to do Peter Thiel and Curtis Jarvin, some left-wing figures, Michael Hobbs and Naomi Klein, right?
These are all figures.
We're going to get them.
We're going to get them, okay?
But this is an indulgent episode for us because we enjoy sense making.
That's what we like to do.
So we decided to take like a little holiday in...
The sense-making realm.
And there was some sense-making content released.
Is that not true, Matt?
Did you not enjoy some sense-making?
I do.
I do think of sense-making as a little intellectual holiday.
You can float around in the great big sense-making ocean.
It's relaxing.
I could listen to it as I went to sleep.
Jordan Peterson, obviously, he's many things.
But one of the things he is, he is a sense-maker.
And in this particular episode, he's talking to John Vavakiu, I think.
He's a nice guy.
We like John.
He's also a sense maker though.
Yes.
Jordan Peterson also had a magnificent episode with someone who's been on our show.
What's his name again?
Jamie Weill.
Jamie Weill.
That was really something.
Oh yeah, that was some sense making.
That was some sense making.
Maybe we can have another holiday next time.
No, we can't stay in sense-making land for too long or you become a sense-maker.
That's the truth of it.
So it is like the ring then.
Don't look too long.
You can't wear the ring.
Don't look at the orb.
Yeah, so yeah, Jimmy Wheel went on and it wasn't actually that much of a fascinating episode.
It is sense-maker-y, but there's actually Jimmy Wheel on occasion pushes back at Jordan Peterson on some points, which was...
Somewhat surprising to me.
Not a lot, but more than this typical in the sense-making realm where the Omega Rule applies.
You need to remind people what the Omega Rule is.
There might be some new listeners who aren't sure.
I think it was the Omega Rule.
It might have been the Alpha One.
Who knows?
In any case, it was basically always look for the sliver of truth and the point of agreement in Everything that the other person is saying.
It's like extending ultimate charity at all times.
Never, never look critically, too critically, because that will break the sense-making jazz.
That's the principle.
They wouldn't exactly put it like that, but that's how it applies.
Yeah, you take the...
Big, long, convoluted thing they said, and you sift through it, and you find those nuggets of truthiness in there, and then you riff on those and come up with your own thing, and you bat it back to them, and back and forth we go.
It's terrific fun, and I think we're going to see some of it in this conversation.
Yes, yes.
So, John Fervaki, for those that don't know, is a cognitive scientist professor at the University of Toronto, known for various things, but he...
Like Jordan Peterson, he has a public online profile.
He has a YouTube channel, which is relatively popular.
And on there, he has a series, Awaking from the Meaning Crisis.
He's got other series about After Socrates and so on.
So he's got a lot of...
Material online, right?
And he's often engaged in discussions around the meaning crisis and sense-making and big ideas.
And you will often see him in conversations with Jonathan Pejot, Jordan Peterson, you know, the general cast of the sense-making world.
And actually, should you want, you can find him having conversations with me and Matt on the STOA.
On the topic was wisdom signaling and the wisdom of criticism.
So if you want to see us talk directly about things, you can see that there.
Now, as Matt said, John is a friendly sort, not prone to the kind of conspiratorial rhetoric that you will see in like Jordan's content and whatnot, or even Peugeot's content for that matter.
He often takes a more...
Moderate position and sticks more to like the philosophy and that kind of realm.
Some could say to a fault because he almost entirely doesn't engage with the fact that his fellow sense makers are often promoting that kind of thing.
But so this jaunt is not intended to like argue that this should be clear to people now, but we're not covering people on here.
To say that they are the worst, most evil, toxic guru.
Some people got that impression, but that's not what the show is about.
So us covering John and Jordan's conversation doesn't mean that we are saying he's a toxic, secular guru trying to promote Trump to the White House and sell Ivermectin.
I just want to make that clear.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
We cover the full spectrum.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's fine.
Understood.
That is fine.
Yes.
And so this episode was released just two weeks ago.
It's called The Meaning Crisis, Colon Resolution.
Episode 482 of Jordan Peterson's, Jordan B. Peterson's podcast.
So finally, Matt.
A resolution.
We've desperately needed.
Freaking meaning crisis.
There's been a quick YouTube or Google search.
We'll confirm.
That this is a topic that has vexed Jordan Peterson and Pales for many a year.
The meaning crisis, what gives life meaning, maps of meaning, how to find meaning.
Awakening from the meaning crisis, getting over the meaning crisis.
Making sense of meaning.
It comes up a lot.
It comes up a lot.
But yeah, okay, maybe this time it gets resolved.
That would be a relief.
It was so good.
The meaning crisis in the gospel with Jonathan Pajot.
There we go.
So let's have a look at the kind of things that they were talking about.
And maybe a good place to start is with the introduction of the topic.
So this is Jordan kind of framing the episode.
Hello, everybody.
I have the privilege today.
To speak yet again to Professor John Verveke.
He's a repeat guest on my show, maybe more than anyone else.
That's possible.
John and I have been involved in a conversation now that spans more than a decade.
We've been both working assiduously in different ways on defining the meaning crisis and also...
Exploring potential solutions to that crisis and with some success, I would say.
And one of the things that we do in today's conversation is to continue that dialogue and to delve more deeply into what the meaning crisis signifies and also what it means, say, in John's terms, that there's a new advent of the sacred.
And what that means, what the sacred means, what...
A new advent might look like, what that means philosophically, what it means scientifically and theologically, for that matter.
We spend a fair bit of time as well discussing Peterson Academy.
John's one of the lecturers there.
He's done three courses for us, which have been very—the first one is released already.
It's been very well received.
And along with Paggio and my work on the Peterson Academy, that's another place where this meaning crisis, at least in principle, is in the process of being resolved.
There you go.
So Peterson Academy is the ground zero for resolving the meaning crisis because you've got Peugeot, you've got Vervaki's courses there, and you have Peterson, right?
They are working hard, Matt, to get this meaning crisis resolved, and you've heard some of the high-level ideas that are going to be covered.
Obviously, Jordan is very into this.
He considers this his Ballywick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll be hearing a lot about the Logos and finding wisdom and so on.
It's a kind of, I guess the topic is an abstracted philosophical approach to religion and spirituality, which is definitely something that Jordan Peterson is super into.
And yeah, it seems like students who enroll in Peterson Academy will get a thorough grounding in that as well.
Yeah, and just to mention as well that Vravaki is promoting a book.
About the meaning crisis, which this is related to.
So just his little summary of this.
Well, the book is my best attempt to...
There's two halves.
The first is sort of the historical half.
The second half is the sort of cognitive scientific half.
It's my attempt to...
The first half is like, how did we get into the meaning crisis?
What is it?
Why is it?
And then the second half is, well, what do we mean by this meaning in life?
What's the best cognitive science?
What do I...
I think I'm very good at integrating material across different disciplines.
And looking for patterns.
And looking for patterns and getting kind of a synoptic integration and then also making it clear how it has that kind of existential import that you mentioned.
Give that to me again in words of one syllable.
Synoptic integration.
It's essentially interdisciplinary.
Approach, right?
Like that you're going to be talking about the meaning crisis and providing answers that have been given from disparate disciplines and kind of synthesizing them together in a way that people can practically help to deal with their existential dread or whatever they might be facing.
So again, fair to say that this is a topic that Vravaki is quite...
Focused on as well.
And by his own account there, might be approaching the realms of the galaxy brain category, right, or feature.
Now you can, of course, take interdisciplinary approaches and synthesize things, but this would be something that you would want to do with careful consideration when you're claiming to...
Synthesize answers from disparate disciplines to provide a solution to existential issues.
That's a tall order.
So not to be undertaken by the faint-hearted or whatnot.
But yeah, nothing inherently wrong with doing it.
Just noting that it is a feature that we often see amongst secular guru types.
Yeah, yeah.
But you've listened to this stuff more comprehensively than me, Chris.
And I wonder, do you know, or maybe you've got a clip that illustrates this, presumably they believe that there is a crisis in meaning, existential meaning, or some kind of deep purpose to life or something that is particularly acute today.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, that is fair to say.
Hello.
Well, let me just play one clip.
This is very briefly the counterpoint where they usually don't focus on this, but they do note that there have been other crises of meaning.
But this is one of the few times that I've ever heard anybody reference that in this space.
So just listen to this.
I'm giving the wrong impression if I say that there's nothing special about the current era.
This is something I also found extremely useful, for example, in the Exodus seminar, because the Israelite sojourn in the desert is The crisis of meaning.
They're the same thing.
And so it's also very useful to know that this death of God phenomenon is not new.
It's a recurrent theme in human history that a crisis of meaning is a condition.
It's not a permanent state, and it's not a statement about the nature of the world.
It's one of the various ways you can be in the world, and it isn't...
It isn't the final solution for those who are rationalistic, rational enough to see through, let's say, the protective superstitions of religion.
That's not a good way of thinking about it.
I see.
Yeah, yeah.
So being, like, wandering the desert, I guess.
I mean, in his way, he says it very strongly.
That literally is the meaning crisis, but I think he means kind of a little bit metaphorically.
Maybe, you know, it's because it is a good metaphor, right?
The long night of the soul.
Yeah, looking for salvation and so on.
Okay, so it's a personal struggle that humanity and humans have always had to do.
Is that right?
Yes, although, as I say, focusing on that little segment gives the wrong impression because usually, in the sense-making ecosystem, there's an acute contemporary crisis, typically brought on by the loosening of...
Religious authority on society, right?
And in particular, the new atheists are often singled out, materialists and this kind of thing.
So Dawkins does come up.
So listen to this.
And for you to be able to conceptualize the meaning crisis as an existential situation and then also not say or imply that that's hopeless, that's the problem I have with approaches like the selfish gene or the...
More rationalistic atheist movement.
It's like, well, no wonder you have a meaning crisis because things are meaningless.
I think the fact that there is a meaning crisis is actually evident that things aren't meaningless.
I agree.
Because it's not a neutral state.
It's a very negative state.
Yes, so the fact that there is a meaning crisis helps illustrate that there is such a thing as meaning, otherwise we wouldn't be having a crisis about it.
And he doesn't like the selfish gene because...
I mean, you and I are rereading The Self Machine right now.
And I can tell you it has nothing to do with meaning or philosophy or purpose of life.
And I guess you think so?
Yeah, I mean, purpose of life from a biological point of view, like even Dawkins on the first couple of pages says, Darwin's theory of evolution means that essentially all are answers to the meaning of life.
Well, I get that point.
I guess I'm kind of agreeing with Jordan, which is I'm just trying to understand what his issue is.
To me, it's a very clear account of evolution.
And in as much as it is a replacement story.
Because I think for sensemakers, all of these things are narratives and stories and mythos with which we construct a personal meaning for life.
It's incredibly unsatisfying.
And in effect, Dawkins does emphasize this, offers no guidance as to how we ought to live our lives.
In this way, he shares an interpretation with a lot of More liberal critics of the selfish gene as well.
Yeah, there's an interesting portion there.
Parallel, right?
Yeah, because they also imply that Dawkins is endorsing evolution as a guideline for human behavior.
And that human behavior is inherently selfish, right?
The title of the book is The Selfish Gene, not The Selfish Human, right?
But nonetheless...
Yeah, so Jordan objects to it.
And, you know, he objects in general to materialistic, like, secular interpretations of existence.
Yeah, reductionist ones.
Yeah, that's right.
And like you said, there is a nice parallel where a lot of sort of humanity's academic left-wing types also sort of quietly disapprove of reductionism.
Yeah, for the implication.
Because of the implication, Chris.
Yeah, feeling the human spirit.
Yeah, and it reminds me very much of why flat-earthers very much disprove of cosmology and astronomy.
And it is for the same reason, that the kind of universe that science describes is a lot like evolution in the sense that it's a very cold and heartless one that isn't a very cozy place for squishy,
meaning-seeking humans to inhabit.
it and they much prefer a little snow globe universe where you have a nice flat earth and you have a dome around it it's all quite small and it's kind of human it's human scaled right and it's obviously created by a personal god that cares about us in particular um
yeah much more meaningful i would say yeah well and just for people who might not be familiar with the selfish gene
I'll try to do this in a very brief nutshell, but that book and that approach is talking about...
Evolution from the perspective of genes and the legacy that has left in biological life on Earth, including in humans.
But one crucial aspect of that is that it is also arguing that that is our biological legacy in terms of genes are out to produce more copies of themselves in the next generation, and this is how you have to understand evolution.
But the humans, crucially, are not subject.
To genes being solely in control.
We have culture.
We have self-consciousness.
So we now, through the products of evolution, are able to rebel against the selfish impulses of genes.
So there's no implication in the selfish gene that the good thing to do is follow the selfish whims of replicating genes.
But that is often how it's interpreted.
And I think with Jordan as well, You know, I think he is doing the double thing of saying, like, if you're acknowledging that humans are like biological machines programmed by genes, that you're removing the grandeur from human existence where we have poetry and art and all these complex cultural things and,
you know, higher orders of morality and whatnot.
So that's the objection.
We're probably veering off topic here, but I remember in one of Dawkins' books, he described it quite nicely, which is that bodies, including human bodies, the phenotypes, are vehicles that were constructed.
By genes for their own ends, right?
And he made an analogy to human consciousness and free will to the extent that we have it and so on as being like a virus, like a computer virus that kind of took over the control mechanisms of these vehicles and are now using those vehicles for our own ends,
right?
Like human ends, not...
Not genetic ones.
And I remember Dawkins being quite explicit about that.
And I quite like that metaphor.
But I suspect for Jordan, the mythos of humanity being like a cognitive virus is probably not a particularly fulfilling one.
Yeah, that's the bit that I feel that a lot of the reaction will be around.
Though I do also note that Dawkins has described religion as a virus and meaning it in a moralizing, pathological point of view.
But in that case, he's talking about it.
As a mind virus on humans.
Yeah, as a meme.
In this case, he was using virus in a different...
Yeah, so our consciousness is like a virus for genes, from the perspective of genes, right?
Yeah, yeah.
We've invaded their construct, which is basically the biological brains and getting them to do stuff that we want, as opposed to what our genes might want.
Yeah, yeah.
So the other thing about it is that...
So Peterson does talk about...
I'm being inspired by Dawkins for his new book.
So listen to this, Matt, and see if you think this makes sense.
Well, one of the things that I wrote about, I have a new book coming out in November, and I actually drew somewhat heavily on Richard Dawkins for parts of the book.
We Who Wrestle With God.
I've read it, of course.
Right, of course.
And we're on the tour with me.
And so...
Dawkins makes a strong case and repeats it again in his newest book, which is just out that an organism, any biological organism, has to be a microcosm of its environment, has to be a model.
So it has to reflect the environment at every level, right?
From the molecular all the way up.
Pristen says the same thing.
Right, right.
Pristen says you don't have a model, you are a model.
Right, right.
And well, that's exactly what...
I guess Dawkins would say both.
You have a model, or you are a model and you have a model, and that would be particularly true for people.
And, well, the fact that you're a model and that you have a model, so that's the interior logos that might be more associated with, say, Judeo-Christian thought, but it has to match the external logos of the world because otherwise it has no connection point.
But that also begs a question, which is one of the questions I...
Raising this book is that if Dawkins is correct in that supposition, that an organism has to be a microcosm of its environment, and human beings are embodied personalities at the highest level of their organization, then how can it be otherwise than that the human being as a personality is a reflection of the essence of the cosmos,
let's say.
I haven't read Dawkins' new book.
I don't know.
If it's available to read.
What is the book that they're referring to, Chris?
It's not the genetic book of the dead, is it?
I don't know.
Peterson seems to regard that Dawkins has a thing about organisms being microcosms of the environment that they are active in.
You don't know what that is in reference to?
I mean, I can guess.
I can think of some ways, but I'd be guessing.
I mean, I can imagine Dawkins talking, say, like, just take a microbe, for instance, and its life is living in water.
Where there might be some sunlight and some chemical sources of energy and predators and so on.
And in many ways, you could say that the organism is like a mirror image of its environment because it's entirely adapted to it.
And you could tell a lot about the environment that it's in based on how the organism is structured.
So, you know, the organism phenotype and, you know, gets trained.
We reflect.
Yeah, we reflect the environment.
I would imagine that's the way in which Dawkins would mean it.
Yeah.
But Peterson has to draw on that and basically extend it so that human beings are embodied personalities at the highest level of their organization and they are therefore a reflection of the cosmos,
right?
So this is him wanting to say like humans instantiate the logos through what they're doing.
Now this parallels Dawkins talking about Organisms' internal workings reflecting their environment.
Right, right.
Yeah, okay.
So just if you switch out environment for Logos and you switch out the organism for, you know, the human spirit, then you have his cosmic version of whatever it is.
Yeah.
Okay.
And the other aspect of it, of course, is that you want to inject a kind of...
Teleological principle, a directed nature to the universe in Peterson's version.
This is crucial.
He views Dawkins or, you know, materialists as having a very, like, a version which is just all, oh, it's all random and it's all, you know, nihilistic and there's no purpose to anything and, like, he doesn't feel that's how the world operates.
So, like, listen to this.
This gives you some sense-making jazz and you get to hear...
Jordan Peterson's teleology dropped in.
Pretentious, but...
Well, not pretentious.
I mean, it could be taken as pretentious, or you could reframe it as, you know, there are potentialities in reality that are only actualized in our personhood, and they reflect.
And without us, access to those principles in reality would not be available.
Well, that seems to be akin to something like emergence.
Well, yeah, very much.
You can think about us as random, like as the consequence of random processes, which I think is a fairly absurd way of looking at the evolutionary process.
But you can also look at us as manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate.
Right from the beginning of time, right?
And we know that these potentials exist because while hydrogen and oxygen join to make water and so on up the chain of complexity, and what that seems to indicate to me is that there's an unrealized potential, even in the simplest of material forms,
that contains within it, well...
Whatever possibility is, it's very difficult to define, but it isn't that that possibility makes itself manifest in an entirely random manner.
It reflects something like an implicate order in those lower order material properties.
So you're turning in, and this is a great joy for me, you're turning into a Neoplatonist.
Because, I mean, you have emergence up, but emergence up has to be constrained.
Did you process all that, Chris?
There's a lot to take in.
I did.
You didn't?
Matt, are you lost constantly with sound makers?
Because to me, it's quite clear what they're saying.
No, well, yeah, no.
Give it to me in words of one syllable.
I genuinely do just lose the thread halfway through Jordan's thing.
Well, so he's talking about that there are in the most basic elements of the universe.
There is a move towards order from hydrogen and oxygen atoms coming into a stable pattern in order to form elements.
And because that is there and we are made up of those things that the universe, in a sense, tended towards...
An order that was inherent and that we are the outcome of all these processes.
So there's an innate structure and direction of the universe, which you can see even in the fact that basic elements and atoms are going into particular arrangements.
So for that reason, it doesn't make sense to talk about evolution being a random or unguided process because it's following all these fundamental.
Yeah, but of course, evolution isn't a random process.
Randomness is one part of it, and the other part of it is replication and fitness, propensity to persist.
And yeah, I mean, look, that's fair in some ways, right, Chris?
You know, chemicals do have a propensity to connect together and form more complex chemical formations, and those in turn...
As we've seen on Earth, have a bit of a propensity, at least sometimes, to organize themselves into self-replicating organisms, and then the mathematics of evolution tends to create more sophisticated...
Organisms as they compete with each other to make copies of themselves.
So, you know, I think I agree with that.
Now you've explained it to me in purely materialist terms.
I think that's fine.
I don't think you necessarily need to inject some sort of cosmic significance into it.
I mean, it is a topic for, like, metaphysicists.
Like, why does the universe we live in happen to be...
Like have that propensity for order, right?
And complexity.
Because you can imagine there are a bunch of, you know, fine-tuning type parameters out there, the laws of physics, which could be different.
And if they were a little bit different, then you'd have very little scope for the kinds of complexity we see in humans.
But of course, one explanation for this is in universes like that, you wouldn't have people like us in it to even ask the question.
So there's that hindsight bias, right?
Where you have to be living in the kind of universe with physical laws that creates a propensity for complexity.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have anything complex enough in it to ask the question, right?
Yeah, it is notable that the universe has been around for, by current estimates, like 13.7 billion years, right?
But for most of that...
There's no evidence.
And not only in time, but in space as well, right?
In the vast majority of places that you look, from Venus to the Moon to the surface of the Sun, there is a limited type of complexity, but not that much.
Yeah, so there's a reasoning backwards.
It's a bit like you've got a full house in poker and say, well, that was obviously meant to be...
The outcome, because how else would I have got it?
One thing I wanted to say from before is that I feel like he does, like the materialist like Dawkins, a little bit dirty here.
Like, as you said, the way that Jordan frames it is that, you know, materialism, having a materialistic worldview is one that is inherently nihilistic and is absolutely meaningless, right?
And the only alternative to that is a kind of cosmic...
Pseudo-Christian spirituality like what he's keen on.
But I think that's a bit unfair because there is a very broad stream of thought, not only in academia, but also in popular culture, of a thing you might call materialist humanism.
And from this point of view, which I think most people who, like us, people who don't really care about this stuff very much, low-key subscribe to, which is that, yes, the universe itself, You know, evolution, the cosmos,
the laws of physics don't naturally have any kind of meaning woven into it.
But, you know, as humans, we have the capacity to create and find meaning through our actions and our relationships and the various intellectual pursuits, like podcasts, that we get into.
So that isn't necessarily the case that you have to be a despairing nihilist, right?
There's another option.
Absolutely not, but Jordan basically doesn't ever address that.
From his point of view, insofar as that functions, it's parasitical on the religious traditions, and in particular, the Christian traditions.
Yes, and that reminds me of that book, Dominion, because he's not the only one, right, who would say that, oh, you might think of yourself as an atheistic, secular-type person, but...
Really, everything good that you've got, everything that stops you from just killing yourself at the end of the day, is kind of fundamentally derived from Christianity or some other cosmic religion.
Yeah, so like, you know, Jordan's description uses the cloak of materialistic science.
He talked about the manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate, right?
This is sounding like technical.
But what he wants to talk about is essentially like a supernatural force that permeates matter and the universe and orientates it towards humans as an expression of order and meaning.
The highest expression of order and meaning.
Yeah, well, Jesus is the highest, but we simply...
We're the second highest.
Yeah, so there's that.
Now, this is high-level sense-making.
Right now, we got a bit ahead of our skis because we haven't exactly illustrated what sensemaking is all about.
I think, like Jordan feels about the universe and the cosmos, I feel about sensemaking.
There are building blocks that need to be understood that permeate all aspects of sensemaking.
And I feel this is a good illustration.
So this is from early in the conversation.
God only knows what that means, but it seems to be a genuine phenomenon.
And so, and phenomenon, that means to shine forth, by the way, and that does look genuine.
And so, well, John and I had the opportunity to delve more deeply into all of those issues, and that's great fun.
That fun, that's an enthusiastic fun, you know, that's, and when that...
Makes itself manifest in a conversation.
You see, that in itself is something like the advent of the sacred because a conversation that takes you outside yourself and beyond yourself and into the future and up into the realm of higher possibility is a manifestation of the sacred that's been characterized for centuries as part of the process of the Logos.
And it's so useful and interesting to understand that you can experience that and that you do experience that when you get caught up in...
Let's say an exploratory conversation.
You know, we talked about other ways you can get caught up in love and in raptured by beauty.
But the thrill, the enthusiastic thrill of a conversation that's transformative is a marker for the emergence of something that the world depends upon, right?
And that's something sacred.
And there it is.
Tangible as hell.
So that's a very useful thing to know.
So join us.
Yes, that was the introduction to the conversation.
So, in words of one syllable, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's saying that when two people are having a conversation with each other, as you and I are now, and when you're having fun doing it, that is a manifestation of the Logos and a creative thing that manifests.
It's secret.
The sacred.
Everything.
It's an amazing thing.
That's a very excessive way, I think, one could describe a conversation.
Yeah, I mean, I like talking to you, Chris, but I wouldn't go that far.
Do you remember, Matt, when Jordan Hall talked about having a conversation producing this third entity, you know, a union between two people's minds that is neither one mind or the other, but an intrinsic holy joining?
Part of that is me.
Part of that is him.
Part of that is things beyond both of us.
It's the whole complex, the whole warm data milieu.
I may be able to come into something like an integrous relationship with aspects of Brandon.
Aspects of me can come into an integrous relationship with aspects of him.
And for the moment, it forms a new being, which is those aspects coming into relationship and exchanging perspectives and possibilities.
Tensions.
And then perhaps coming back into relationship with the complex relationality that is me.
So it's the same thing, like, the sand speakers to me, in a way, are idolatrous.
Because they are worshippers of conversation.
That's what they...
Their holy sacrament is indulgent chats.
I think, genuinely, I've got to be confused through the clips, right?
And I think this is true because the way they talk about conversations, it's unbelievably reverent and invested with so much deep meaning.
And they take the fact that they enjoy them and get lost in them and find them, you know, thrilling.
To be...
Like as they talk about there, you know, like something secret, something divine.
It's a feeling the spark of creation in the very act of talking to someone.
And so you see the same thing in people like Russell Brand, their love of language, their absolute like obsession with going on these vast soliloquies.
Yeah, I'm gonna say that sound speakers are word worshipers.
Idolatrous.
I like that.
I like that.
Well, you make a convincing case there, Kavanaugh.
I have to admit, there is that self-referential quality, right?
So you could be talking about something else, like Christianity, God and Jesus and stuff, or the Romans.
Or you could be talking about the actual conversation that we're having right now and reflecting back on yourself, like a mirror or the moon or something like that in the still pond.
And that provides so much...
Scope for some pretty exciting stuff, but it is like navel-gazing, lotus-eating.
It is a pursuit.
There is something of a parallel to, as I always have noted out, with postmodernists in the attention given to specific words and subjective interpretations of words and words having multiple meanings and this being deeply significant if you can find Parallels between certain kinds of words and words that might have similar structures or forms or so on.
And another secret sacrament for sense speakers is what we talked about, the Omega rule, right?
The principle that you must almost always, like, yes and the person.
It's like the sense-speaking game is that you must add another concept to pick up the conversational ball, right?
And you might disagree.
But being too disagreeable would be to break the sense-making chain, right?
And dance is not allowed.
That's bad for him.
The worst things you could say is, one, I don't understand.
Two, no.
And three, it's like something completely different.
No, what you need to do, it's very much like jazz, like we described it before.
What you do is you take the riff that you heard and you expand on it.
So what you want to do is have the conversation grow like a fractal and increase in complexity.
And that's where I think the joy comes into it.
And I believe that it's real.
They have a real aesthetic love of what it is they're doing.
And I can understand why.
It's the same reason why people...
I'm not saying they're conspiracy theorists, although sometimes Jordan is.
But, you know, there is a cognitive delight that conspiracy theorists have in constructing incredibly elaborate things.
And I think you are right.
This is a theme we have hit upon before, but there is a strong correspondence between the kind of ultra-indulgent, postmodern, academic, philosophical wank and what Jordan Peterson and friends do,
I have to say.
They seem very similar.
Well, I'm going to jump just because of some of the themes that we highlighted there to a bit later in the conversation where they're talking about the development of conversations, the ability to have conversations.
And this is part of like Jordan's thoughts about maturation and development, right?
So we're kind of jumping in on that conversation, but you'll hear a little bit more.
About the deep meaning of being able to exchange thoughts between two people using the vibration of signs that travel across the air.
So listen to this.
So more and more things are taken into account simultaneously.
And I think that parallels cortical maturation in a society, let's say, that properly socializes children.
I don't think there's anything arbitrary about it.
I mean, you and I have been able to have a relationship.
Because of the pattern of interaction that we fall into when we converse.
You know, you make an offering, and then I assess it and incorporate it, and then I make an offering and you assess it and incorporate it.
And we're able to do that in a way that jointly gratifies our desire to explore and integrate, right?
And that is a cognitive act and an embodied act, but it's also something that indicates our fundamental concordance with each other.
At a level that's more than merely personal, right?
You're doing something.
This is the dialogus that you refer to, right?
You're making an offering that I'm accepting and vice versa.
But we can do that in a manner that makes both of us want to continue the process.
That's definitional.
That's not an arbitrary definition of a moral interaction, right?
It's very practical.
And it's an optimistic viewpoint, too, because then you could say that...
The patterns of action that most optimally facilitate the desire to continue the patterns of action are the, in principle, are pointers towards the most moral way of behaving, right?
And I think that's manifest in something like play.
Yeah, you might have to do some more explaining to me.
I'm working?
Yes, please.
Oh, wow.
They destroy your mind, Matt.
Well, so there he's...
Essentially saying that as we develop, we learn how to engage in tone taking and conversations and interactions are based on these dyadic understandings of,
you know, give and take and response and reaction and so on.
Not pure selfish motivation, which is like characteristic of earlier stages of life.
And so he here analogizes that to The kinds of conversation that he is having for Favaki, where they give and they take and they enjoy it and they make offerings, cognitive offerings,
which they then inspect and imbibe and, you know, show their respect to by maybe riffing on the idea that the other one takes their turn.
But the other aspect, which is quite impressive, is that he suggests that, like, getting The way where you would have the most enjoyment, the most frictionless conversation is morally good because you're allowing conversations to flourish.
So it is a moral good, not just a functional development.
I might describe as engaged and furious intellectual masturbation.
That's one way to put it.
I see what you're saying there.
Right.
So it does have that moral dimension.
It's like this process of increasing complexity and the maturing mind is able to engage with its environment and with others in a more complex way, which this back and forth is this process.
With that talk about offerings and the...
He is making your case there that they are word worshippers.
Word worshippers.
And it's a moral behavior as well because the better you talk and the more your ideas can interact and bounce backwards and forwards, then the more cooperative and the more sociable person you are.
So there's another clip, Matt, which is...
Talking about, you know, the underlying logos and whatnot.
And it embodies, if you want, Matt, the spirit of sensemaking.
Because listen to how Vavaki responds to Jordan outlining his idea, right?
And this is the proper way to receive an offering in a conversation.
So this is talking about, like, Greek and Christian culture and how they're fundamentally, the logos underpins them all.
And one of the things that's remarkable about the conjunction of Greece and Jerusalem is the Greeks posited the existence of a logos that was embedded essentially in the material and corporeal world, that there was an intrinsic logic to things,
that the world itself was comprehensible, and that comprehending the world was good.
And the Jews, essentially, and the Christians...
Had an embodied logos idea that the human being was a rational creature and an exploratory creature, and that there was a match between that and the world, and that combination of Greece and Jerusalem is one of the sources of Western civilization.
But it's very good to be able to conceptualize the gospel account in that manner, because it, well, it starts to put rationality and the mythos that you described back together, which is...
I think, you know, something of cardinal importance for our—and I think it's what's occurring in our current time.
Thank you for saying that.
I think that was very well articulated.
For me, it afforded—because the kind of truth we're talking about is existential truth.
We're not talking about just propositional truth.
Right.
We're talking about the truth that's only—and PIJ would agree with this—the kind of truth that only is realized through personal transformation.
An embodiment.
Yes, of course.
So Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates could properly dwell together within me.
So did you hear, you know, thank you for saying that.
I think that was very well articulated.
And, you know, it afforded me the chance to talk about this.
He's a good sense-making citizen.
This is the way you do it.
Yeah, you're essentially acknowledging the offering that has been made by your conversation partner.
And then...
You're going to respond, right?
You're going to go on to the next thing in the jazz session.
So another example of this, Matt.
So they're talking in this clip about a kind of seminar that they were part of, like a seminar on the Bible, you know, discussing the Bible with a bunch of sense makers and theologians.
And so on.
And they got to the topic of the resurrection, and they were worried this could cause conflict, right?
Because some of them are more metaphorically inclined, and some of them are not Christians and whatnot.
So this could break up the sense-making jazz.
Well, we were worried about the seminar, period.
But I thought it went extremely well, and we were very happy to have you there.
I mean, everybody...
One of the wonderful things about the Exodus Seminar and the Gospel Seminar is that that Logos spirit, everybody abided by that Logos spirit 100% of the time, because everybody was trying to extend their knowledge instead of trying to prove that they were right.
Exactly.
And maybe that's something like the opposite of that Pharisaic religious pride that's often conceptualized as the ultimate sin, right?
You know, when you're trying to hammer home your status because you're right about something, that's a completely different game than trying to build something together that expands you both in the course of the conversation.
I think the seminars were flawless examples of that.
Everybody played.
Like the way you play music.
Socrates made a distinction between Philo Sophia, the love of wisdom, and Philo Nokia, the love of victory.
And he said the greatest thing that thwarts the love of wisdom is the love of victory.
I wonder if there's any difference between the love of victory and the worship of power.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's all good sentiments though, isn't it?
I mean, loving knowledge, wanting to cooperate in a...
Community of minds to expand knowledge together, not being concerned about winning arguments, but rather looking at how you can learn more together?
Well, I think it depends in the way that you take it, because in the case of jazz, Matt, you're trying to make nice music together, right?
In the case of a seminar, critically evaluating something or whatever, maybe the truth isn't.
Exactly in the middle of everybody's opinions.
And somebody might be wrong about something that feels bad to correct them on.
But they are making a virtue out of engaging in something where everybody comes away feeling that they were respected, feeling that their ideas are heard and whatnot.
But surely the truth wouldn't necessarily make everybody...
Happy?
Yeah.
No, I hear what you're saying, whereas it's approaching that kind of thing as a form of art, right?
Like play, as they say.
Yeah, and one that is meant to be a beautiful thing and a beautiful thing to participate in.
And actually, again, this parallels one of the feelings I've had about why I don't like some aspects of the humanities in terms of how they approach things, because I think they do muddle the practice of art.
And actual scientific investigation and understanding the world, right?
So art is one thing.
At least to me, right?
I love art.
And I happen to like really abstract, crazy, modern expressionist type art, right?
So it's the ultimate kind of free-for-all jazz, whatever, right?
But mixing that together with...
The task of actually, I don't know, understanding why the Roman Empire fell, for instance.
Or critically examining the Gospels.
Yes, those are two topics.
Exactly.
If you turn it into a form of artistic expression, then that's not the right approach to actually get the correct answers to any of those things, I think.
No.
So there's the positive view where you're just like...
You know, you don't go into some collective endeavor by being an abrasive dickhead and like insulting everyone that's there.
Right.
And so on.
Like there's the interpersonal social aspect of those things where, yes, if people get along and are willing to hear others ideas and whatnot, that this is generally better for the quality of conversation.
But there's the issue about indulgence and removing anybody.
Who might be disruptive of the indulgent conversations.
And like you and I, for example, Matt, would not go down well at most sense-making parties because we wouldn't agree.
To, like, just yes and everything and ignore the things that people might claim.
Yeah, well, we wouldn't be harmonious voices in the chorus.
And you're right.
I mean, this is the thing that, you know, and I think it's fair to say that Vavaki and Jordan are exemplifying in this conversation, which is that they deliberately avoid discordant issues, right?
Vavaki is, like, a nice, polite guy who generally stays clear of, you know, those sort of fraught, No,
double mastectomies on confused girls.
Hey, British Columbia, don't vote for the idiot socialists again.
You know, Jordan Peterson has many aspects to him, which is not polite, philosophical stuff.
no, no.
Truth and beauty, but they won't come up here too much, right?
That's right.
Like his conversation with Helen Lewis, for example, that was obviously, for Jordan, a deeply unenjoyable conversation because he constantly references it and how mean and how unfair and how cruel and essentially evil Helen Lewis was because she did normal journalistic practice of asking him critical.
I wasn't the push of her.
But Jordan, that's remained like a totemic experience.
And that is anti-sense making.
That is, you know, you are bringing up stuff that I don't want to talk about.
I like this.
Helen Lewis, the anti-sense maker.
She'd be proud of that.
Yeah.
And so, like, you heard there at the end of that riff as well that Jordan said, right, and, you know, love of victory.
Isn't that like worship of power, right?
So we've added a new word, like power, right?
Victory and power.
They're related.
But that allows more jazz to happen.
And power would be one, because you can unify to some degree with power.
I mean, it produces a counterposition, because if you use power on people, they tend to rebel.
But at least for some periods of time, you can use command and force to bring together.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's much better to bring people together in a unity under the aegis of something like the Logos, which is that game of genuine exploration and self-transcendence.
But maybe there could be a corollary to that, which would be that if God dies, if the God is Logos and it dies, the deity that rises to replace it is power.
Wow.
You do what you frequently do.
That's very pregnant with a lot of possibilities.
First of all, that notion of dialogos by means of a logos.
And I think that's something we should practice and do a lot of work about trying to help afford people being able to practice that as an explicit practice.
So I think that's a very valuable thing to say.
I think power is one of our senses of realness.
I think...
And we need it.
You talk about this.
You talk about the fact that we don't want to be overwhelmed by anomaly.
We need to have some power.
We need to be able to—our skills have to get a purchase on the world, right?
Yeah, I'm thinking not so much power.
That's more of a Nietzschean notion of power, I would say.
I'm thinking more of compulsion, right?
Like, that I can force you.
To abide by the dictates of mind.
Okay, this is better than that.
Power as force, not power so much as ability.
That mark of reality.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so let's move to there, because what's really interesting is this, and talked about this in the course on the Peterson Academy, the primacy of beauty.
Yeah, you know, you see the ideas like...
But like you said, they're pregnant with possibilities.
Yeah.
And you do that so frequently, Jordan.
You do it wonderfully.
He does.
So victory, power over others, as opposed to an Ichigen power, which is competency, which is a good thing, control over your environment, perhaps.
But they have the God, which is also the Logos.
The Logos.
God and the Logos.
And if that dies...
Yeah.
Then what rises is kind of the devil, which is...
The power thing.
Totalitarianism.
Or wokeness, I think.
Yeah, well, I think you get the double entendre of the totalitarian urge to power, which they anyway, or Jordan at least, conflates with wokeness and totalitarianism.
But also that the postmodern Marxist approach is so concerned with power.
Foucauldian analysis is obsessed with power relations.
So that's the devil.
That's rising to replace.
And the alternative, Chris, is dialogical practice.
Yeah.
There was a lot of practice.
You know, I feel a little bit mean in this case.
There was a sentence saying, like, that's something we practice.
We should practice, do a lot of work by trying to help afford people being able to practice that as an explicit practice.
Yeah.
Well, at least I don't say practice.
Well, true.
But, you know, that's just the nature of people riffing on things immediately.
Because you can hear at times where they're like, what do I want to say about power?
Okay, what about this, right?
And it is like verbal jazz.
It's just like, well, what about power in the sense that...
You know, power determines realness, right?
Like, because isn't, like, objective force to do with powers?
You're like, wow, that's all into another, you know.
Yeah, like, Chris isn't a child, you know, a child interacting with his environment, learning to see how they can interact with the environment.
They see they can just, even to knock over a cup, that they've exerted some power over the world, and therefore it becomes real for them.
They can become a real entity, an embodied entity inhabiting the world.
Fascinating stuff.
So that's right.
So remember, we started off here with the gospel seminar and sense-making, conversation, dialogos, right?
Then we got to love of victory, which morphed over to power.
Now we've went to power and some riffs about that.
And thank you for making those interesting points.
And you heard Vravaki at the end there say, what about beauty?
Right?
So what about beauty?
And that produces a sense of disharmony and rebellion.
It could be that the reason that beauty and love can be compelling without being powerful in that compulsion way is that they speak to something like an emergent harmony of value that's part and parcel,
you might say, of the soul.
So beauty could compel you forward in part because if you It might be that if you integrated your values properly, you would be naturally oriented in consequence of the makeup of your soul towards those things that beauty and love are pointing to.
Right.
And let's not remember, beauty and love are also overlapping with reason.
And you need reason because you have to care about the right things to reason well.
Yes, you have to care about the right things, which implies that there are right things to care about.
And so notice what you're doing.
And that goes back.
To the microcosm, macrocosm.
Yeah, right.
It's that moment where the principle, the grammar of my cognition and the grammar of reality are calling to each other.
They could interpenetrate.
That's right.
And, you know, I can't give you an argument to prove that that's the case because every argument presupposes that, in some sense, the grammar of reason and the grammar of reality...
Must have some deep harmony.
And the same thing with love and the same thing with beauty.
And these are profound ways in which...
Well, I think faith is actually the willingness to posit the reality of that truth in the absence of final proof.
Okay, let's talk about that because I think that's really important because there's different notions of faith.
Wow, yeah.
It is certainly pregnant with possibilities.
It's prolific.
Yeah, so so many...
So many concepts and words getting woven in there.
And they're all related.
It's all the big hits, isn't it?
It's all the big ideas.
Power.
Realness.
God.
Logos.
Beauty.
Love.
Reason.
The soul.
The microcosm and microcosm got a shout out.
Yeah, that's right.
Can't forget the microcosm and the macrocosm.
But how can we reconcile with that?
Because isn't beauty and love a form of power?
But it isn't a bad form of power because it integrates rather than imposes its will.
Look, it really isn't possible to comment on this except to almost just bask in...
The jazz of it.
It is wordsmithing, isn't it?
Well, I mean, I'm going to stop here for following this train of thought, but just to note that at the end there, they moved on to fief.
So it wasn't finished.
You actually heard Vavaki say, well, this is really interesting because this brings up notions of fief.
There's different definitions of fief.
So he's going to go into a discussion of the different ways that you can have fief.
It's traveled all over these different concepts with profound insights being applied.
But a lot of it is a vibe, right?
It is a vibe.
So I'm not saying that they aren't constructing a dialogous conversation and like, you know, a kind of semantic network of things.
But it's very thin.
A lot of it rests on ripping on...
Words and concepts.
Like one person mentions a concept.
Yeah, like traversing the semantic web.
Yeah, and it's almost demonstrating to the other person how capable you are to take a concept, integrate it with references to philosophers and psychologists and theories,
and then hand it on to another topic.
And as long as you can both keep Riffing and connecting it back to the topic.
You can see why Jordan regards this conversation as a kind of instantiation of the divine.
Yeah, but like you said at the beginning, the truly ironic thing is that this is so much like constructivist postmodern philosophy.
It's all about words and semantic concepts being disconnected from a material reality.
You know, creating this arbitrary structure.
And they enjoy it so much.
Like, I can tell.
And the audience enjoys it.
I was reading the YouTube comments.
Oh, yeah, I would imagine.
They love this stuff.
And I can understand why without being mean or looking down at people, whatever.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You know, who doesn't want to hear about beauty and love being connected with meaning?
And you're learning about Plato, and you're learning about Socrates, and you're learning about Piaget's developmental research.
You're hearing all these big thinkers, all these philosophical ideas condensed down into a very enjoyable conversation with people being polite, praising each other for their insights.
There is an aspect of this which is social primates love this shit.
We do worship.
Social interactions, like, in a way.
And there is a vast contrast between this and the kinds of conversations I have as a workaday researcher.
Yeah.
These goddamn people, you know, criticizing my work, finding from it, asking me to revise things, having to justify things, having to redo it.
It's not particularly pleasant and it's not particularly aesthetic.
But this is like, this is the recreational version.
Obviously, Matt, we're quite critical about this style of conversation, although we recognize that other people enjoy it, right?
But I will say that the criticism is not entirely without substance, right?
It isn't just a stylistic thing, because one, we are suggesting that a lot of the things are less profound than they are communicated, and that a lot of profundity is being injected by the reaction of the co-participant, right?
If you had somebody that was More willing to say, well, hold on, so aren't you just saying da-da-da, right?
That would break things.
Yeah, critical commentary of any kind, like even a mild sort.
I don't quite follow.
I don't see how that necessarily implies this.
Couldn't be the case that this is the case?
That would be allowed as long as that was only done once.
And you didn't keep saying, well, I don't think that actually follows, right?
Or that kind of thing.
Another aspect that I want to highlight about why I'm more than just aesthetically displeased by this kind of approach to things is Jordan does this a lot, where in invoking concepts and ideas, you've seen it like in conversations we've seen with Brett Weinstein,
that they both talk as if they're building up these very complex, robust...
Semantic and theoretical constructs to understand how the world functions and whatnot.
But a lot of it is just based on their intuitions, like their self-generated concepts from the autodidactic insights, right?
And here's an example where Jordan Peterson starts talking about his intuitions about psychopathology.
Well, that seems to me to be associated too with this idea of...
Higher-order ethical virtue.
Of course.
Let me walk through this with you for a second.
Tell me what you think.
Well, I've been thinking more and more about general psychopathology as a failure of maturation.
You mean like being a psychopath?
Is that what you mean?
Well, being a psychopath is a good example of that because two-year-olds, for example, are radically egocentric.
They can't play with others.
They can't occupy a shared mental space.
They can't take turns.
There's some proto-sharing that emerges, but they're not sophisticated, for example, at sharing toys.
So the typical two-year-old, and some of them are much more like this than others, they're oriented to the moment, and they're oriented to gratify the emotional or motivational state or whim that possesses them in the moment.
Now, what happens as they mature, say from two to four in particular, is they learn how to bring...
That's how they make a friend.
Is that what you mean by going up this hierarchy?
Yeah, exactly.
So now you can imagine these primordial motivational states and emotions, and we kind of know what the basic ones are.
They're all...
They're all pointers, fractionated pointers, in an upward direction.
But the upward direction actually emerges as a consequence of their interactions across time, but not only across time, across time in a social space.
And they weave themselves together.
And this would be something like Jacob's Ladder from the bottom up.
They weave themselves together.
So he's been thinking about child maturation from the ages of two to four, which is a topic that's been studied.
Quite a bit by developmental psychologists.
And it's occurred to him that aren't they a bit like psychopaths?
Because they're very selfish and egocentric.
And they don't play nice.
And then what came next?
What was his big idea?
No, that's it.
He was just elaborating on the...
I mean, he's going to go on in the material to flesh this out.
But he's essentially thought that since two-year-olds are egocentric and psychopaths are...
Selfish and egocentric that maybe, you know, they're kind of...
Oh, yeah.
We can think of psychopaths as a failure of maturation.
Right.
So, you know, it's an idea.
It's, you know...
It's not a particularly good idea, though.
It's not a very good idea.
No, I mean, there's lots of problems with it because it's not founded on anything apart from exactly what you said.
It's an intuition.
He's noticed that these two things have this thing in common.
So maybe it's the case that...
One of these things, the adult state, is a case of that, right?
I mean, you know, there's not much there.
So as an illustration, Matt, like with that particular clip, if we were to look at it in a non-Omega rule kind of way, right?
So Jordan is drawing a parallel between the egocentricism of two-year-olds, like their developmental...
Capacity, right?
They lack theory of mind.
This is one of the issues.
They're not good at modeling others having different thoughts and feelings, right?
So they're very egocentric individuals, in part because they're unaware of others' minds, right?
Now, he likens that to psychopaths and thinks like maybe psychopaths are stuck at that developmental stage.
But there's obvious issues there.
Yes, there's a parallel you can make that, well, both of those things, psychopaths and two-year-olds, are egocentric, but there's quite a lot of crucial differences as well.
Like, for example, psychopaths don't lack theory of mind, typically, right?
They're perfectly able to model others having minds and different wants and whatnot.
What they tend to lack is empathy for what other people want, but it's not because they don't have any Theory of mind.
And also, yes, some psychopaths have shown in various studies to be more sensation-seeking and impulsive than normal people.
But this does not mean that they cannot engage in long-term planning.
As anybody with the kind of stereotypical view of a psychopath would know, many of them have, famously.
Engaged in Roller detailed long-term plans to satisfy their...
Of which, Dexter, I know how it goes.
You know how it goes.
Well, you've probably done as much work as Jordan has.
So there is strategic and goal-orientated behavior observed in psychopaths.
So the parallel is really Roller shallow that he wants to draw.
And it's unlikely that it's going to be that psychopaths...
Are egocentric narcissists because they stopped developing a two, right?
Because if they stopped mentally developing a two, there would be a whole host of other issues about their cognitive maturation that would be problematic.
So he's just basically saying, yeah, that there's an egocentric thing, there's an egocentric thing.
And it's not an incorrect parallel to draw, but it's because he's just working from this vibe-based association that these kind of connections seem like very profound.
And I think they can sound profound at a superficial level, but they would break down if you have subjected it to critical scrutiny.
Yeah, exactly.
If you look at the etiology of psychological disorders of various kinds of psychopathologies, yeah, you can notice superficial similarities with immature humans.
But, you know, that doesn't necessarily give you any insight into...
Like how that disorder came about and what are the structural forces.
So yes, you could list off those similarities, like you said, egocentric behavior and so on.
But there's an awful lot of dissimilarities as well and in a completely different set of causes, right?
Yes.
I mean, you're talking about your problem.
With this talk, right?
And I may as well set out a few of mine now, right?
One is I obviously just don't subscribe to this humanity style, I don't know what to call it, sense-making.
Maybe it's European philosophy.
I don't know how to classify it, but it's certainly postmodern.
And, you know, working through analogies and metaphors and relating things to, you know, using concepts like...
From the Bible and stuff like that to understand psychology.
None of it is evidence-driven.
It's all driven by intuitions and vibes, like you said, from your reading of the Bible and so on.
And it takes so long to say anything because really, they really enjoy the process of talking more than actually just spelling something out nice and briefly.
It's very elaborate and Baroque.
And there's absolutely no appetite for critical analysis.
There is only an appetite for yes-ending and going, well, that's very interesting.
Yes, how can I take that and then do something else with it?
So the conversation drifts around from one thing to another, incorporating everything from love to God to psychopaths to whatever.
And then after two and a half hours, the conversation ends.
And then in a couple of weeks, they're going to have another one.
And they've been doing it for years.
So I don't really approve.
They said this is time to resolve.
I bet you it's not resolved.
It's not resolved.
I bet you in a couple of years we're still talking about the meaning crisis returned.
Resurrection.
Resurrection.
Yeah.
So, you know, you said about that, like, this is Jordan's time of speaking.
It takes ages to say.
The most straightforward thing because he has to give examples and extended metaphors and whatnot.
But I think bits like this also interrupt.
You know, we were talking about the kind of fairly indulgent way that you have to respond to somebody offering something.
So here's another case of that.
There's nothing about that that isn't highly constrained and orderly.
Yeah, this is, I mean, this is very, first of all, I think very highly of what you're saying.
It's convergent with a lot of things that I also think highly of.
I mean, this is Habermas' proposal of universal pragmatics, that there is in the very act of communication, and he doesn't mean simply information exchange.
He means in the very act of dialogos, which I agree with him, is necessary for a properly functioning society, let alone a properly functioning democracy.
You got to say, you know, look, that was a very valuable incident.
But actually, it parallels the insights of Habermas, who I really respect because I agree with him on these.
And the concept of this is very important.
But especially, Matt, I think very highly of what you're saying.
And I've had, you know, thoughts which are aligned in a way with that.
So let me elaborate.
But like almost every conversation, you have to add in how much you got from the thing that the person has.
You and I, for instance, rarely do that with each other.
I mean, I don't think normal people do.
You don't really need to.
It happens a bit.
It happens a bit.
If you analyze conversations, people tend to say something positive and then switch the topic to talk about something that they want to talk about or whatever.
But it's so labored.
In a sense, we need environment that it feels a little bit like a return to Victorian era where you're like, well, my good gentleman friend there made an insightful commentary that I did find intellectually stimulating.
And might I add to that, that the venerable parity said at the party last week that, you know, it just, it feels, dare I say, performative, whereas their presentation of it is that it embodies the true Nature of the universe and the cosmos,
like this kind of Prius is, you know, the correct way to have a conversation.
And I don't know.
It's one way to have a conversation.
I don't know if it embodies the pure nature of the, you know, the underlying essence animating the universe to do it.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, conversations are...
Conversations, right?
We're having a conversation right now, Chris.
And, you know, most podcasts are based on that.
We're analyzing a conversation.
We're having a conversation about conversation.
Oh, you can't sense me.
I guess what I'm saying is that, you know, it's fine.
Anyone can have a conversation about anything.
There's no premium on competitions, all right?
It's just, I don't think we should...
I don't think one should overstate the significance of them.
No!
As a way of figuring out how the world works.
It's like you could take some academics and go into a common room after they've had a couple of sherrys or something in Oxford or whatever and you could find an indulgent conversation like this and maybe something comes out of it.
But ultimately, I think anything important that comes out of This kind of thing.
I don't know.
It has to get written down.
You have to do some more work in order to actually get something useful out of it.
I mean, if it's not just going to be a source of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure.
Well, Matt, one thing that might undercut the profundity of this conversation is like this is hosted on the Daily Wire platform, right?
Ben Shapiro's network.
So periodically there are advertisements that come in.
And I just want to play one that bust into this high-minded discussion of the offering of conversation and the secret values and beauty and love and passion.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about something that matters.
Your well-being.
In a world where traditional values are under siege, it's crucial to stay strong mentally and physically.
Enter Responsible Man, a Daily Wire Ventures company that understands what it means to be a pillar of strength in these challenging times.
They've created the Emerson multivitamin not for the faint of heart, but for men who shoulder their responsibilities with pride.
The Emerson multivitamin contains 33 key ingredients that work in harmony to fortify your immune system, sharpen your mental acuity, and maintain the strength of your heart and muscles.
It's not just a vitamin.
It's fuel for the culture battles that we face every single day.
And here's something to make you stand just a little taller.
Every Emerson multivitamin is proudly made in the U.S. of A. No compromises, no shortcuts, just pure American craftsmanship.
And now listeners of this show have an exclusive opportunity to invest in their health and values simultaneously.
Take advantage of Responsible Man's fall sale.
Visit ResponsibleMan.com and use code Jordan to get 30% off your order, plus an additional $9 off your first order.
But hurry, because this deal won't last long.
Remember, a resilient society needs resilient men.
Start your journey to better health and a stronger America with Responsible Man Vitamins.
That's ResponsibleMan.com, code Jordan, for 30% off, plus an additional $9 off your first order.
Responsible Man.
Because true strength comes from within.
They've got a red-pilled Jordan Peterson-oriented vitamin pill.
Multivitamin.
Real strength comes from, apparently, from a multivitamin.
Yeah, for strong men to make them stronger.
To help you fight the culture battle.
They literally say, it will give you fuel for the culture battle.
When he said it's got nothing in it but pure American crap, he said...
Craftsmanship in a weird way.
It sounded like it was going to say something else.
Pure American craft.
Yeah.
Just, like, that is the most culture war pre-indead.
Like, that's an Alex Jones level ad.
I just want the highlight.
It might sound like this is a bit unfair.
Well, you know, Jordan, this is just the Daily Wire putting in, you know, the advertisements.
He's like...
Have the control over it.
He chose to partner with Ben Shapiro.
This is going out on that network.
If you want to hear the additional conversation with John Vervaki, you have to subscribe to the, you know, the bonus.
So, like, that's the reality of this.
This high-minded conversation about the beauty of nature and conversations, it is grounded in the partisan online platform.
Of the Daily Wire.
And actually, we'll get into it more because there's more stuff that comes up.
But that was just particularly jarring because it's like a parody of a fucking red pill advertisement, right?
Like, responsible man.
Are you a resilient, responsible man?
Do you work hard?
Like, you know.
Oh, God.
So, yeah.
Good, good, good, good, good.
Contrasting.
The responsible man.
Just to finish off on this point about the dialogos and the kind of worship of the word which I observe in the sense-speaking sphere.
Here's Jordan talking about how fundamental this aspect of the word is to society and the US in particular.
Right, right.
No, the process.
The process.
Well, and you added another layer to that, which is relevant with regards to emergence, because, you know, you could say, well, we have to conduct ourselves in a certain manner, like all the participants did, let's say, at the gospel seminar, in order for everyone to want to continue the process in the highest possible manner.
But then you could also say that...
Works for you psychologically because it's compelling and interesting, and it works for both of us practically because we learn.
But then as you expand the social...
As you expand the size of the group that that process is operating in, you start to see a concordance between the operation of that dialogos and the possibility of sophisticated, complex societies emerging that aren't predicated on power.
And I think that's why we have, for example, in the United States, we have the First Amendment.
It's because it's a recognition that something like you have the right to engagement in the dialogos, not merely because...
It's a right, let's say, because you're made in the image of God, or it's a right because the state grants it.
It's actually a right because it's a necessary precondition for the maintenance of the society as such.
And that's not arbitrary.
It's like, it works for you, it works for the people you're immediately communicating with, but it also works to stabilize society across long spans of time and to make it grow.
And so you can't dispense with that without bringing the whole...
Hierarchy.
I want to add to it.
There's always more layers that can be brought in.
So, in simple terms, Chris, he's saying, well, first of all, reasoned discussion between equals, dialogos, is a good thing.
It's nice.
It increases the total sum of wisdom and understanding in the world.
And on a bigger scale, the scale of a country...
Where the politics are based in principle on, you know, like a democracy, parliaments, the senates, things like that, where people supposedly discuss policies, discuss issues, and then come to reasoned decisions about them,
is better than like a power-based one, I suppose, like a king and his dukes just making stuff up and forcing people to do things.
Yeah, although I think he's arguing that it's more, he is making that point.
But he's also making the point that it's more fundamental.
It's like the primordial building block of society is this dialogus.
So it's not just about politics.
That is an instantiation of it.
But he specifically says that the First Amendment is not because of people being made in the image of God or it's not a right granted by a state.
It is a component.
That allows society to function.
But that is also not real.
Again, you can see what he's saying, right?
It's important to democratic functioning and social interaction that you have exchanges.
But actually, the First Amendment is something that is guaranteed by a specific political nation state, right?
the U.S., Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress
of grievance
That does sound like a state granting a specific legal protection to a variety of rights.
So he's saying it's not that, but that is what it is.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I guess in simple terms, it is a...
It is a construct, right, specific to the United States.
Countries like Australia, we famously don't have explicit constitutional protections for free speech.
On the other hand, we still have a lot of free speech in Australia, so it's not like a necessary...
It is, I think, something that societies tend to invent.
There were laws in England, right?
In merry old England.
When the printing press stuff first came about, then they were shutting them down all over the place when they didn't like the kinds of stuff they were printing.
And that gradually changed.
I mean, I'm not quite sure what he's saying.
Is it a necessary thing that any society has to have or any good society has to have?
I don't know.
Yeah, I think, you know, it's just his worship of the logos, right?
This is the example of it.
But one of the issues there is, like, it's presented that essentially what they did at the gospel seminar, which I imagine.
I haven't listened to it, but I have seen their Exodus discussion.
And that is...
Largely an indulgent discussion amongst people that, yes, they have different positions, right?
You know, they have different theological specific beliefs and whatnot, but they're all sense maker inclined Jordan Peterson guys, right?
You don't have people there that are going to cause too much friction.
And Jordan says that's the fundable nature of, you know, like we expand out the gospel seminar.
And with the spirit of what was happening there, and you create society and you create nations.
But actually, nations tend to come from robust debates and disagreements and people arguing the case where this is a better way to organize than that.
It's not from these super indulgent, polite yes-handing.
Even if you go back to antiquity, there is quite a lot of...
To be it valuing more robust exchanges than you see in the sense maker.
So he's basically saying what me and my friends do is the fundamental holy unit of social progress.
And you're like, is it?
It's clearly not, right?
Like from ancient Greece to modern America, there's very few public...
Debates where people were yes-ending each other and saying, oh, let me add another layer to what my colleague on the other side of the chamber has said and then expands on it and grows and everyone leaves feeling...
So what about harmony?
What about harmony?
Have we considered harmony?
There's a really good sketch between Fry and Laurie, you know, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, and it's a very good parody of this kind of approach.
Exactly this kind of thing.
And this was before the Sand Speakers, right?
It's from the 90s, I think, that clip.
Yeah, because this kind of thing has always existed in certain areas of academia, right?
Here's a question.
LAUGHTER
What is it?
Well, my question is this.
Is our language, English, capable?
Is English capable of sustaining demagoguery?
Demagoguery?
Demagoguery.
And by demagoguery, you mean?
By demagoguery, I mean demagoguery.
I thought so.
I mean, um, highly charged, oratory, persuasive, whipping-up rhetoric.
Listen to me, listen to me.
If this term had been British, would we, under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged out, fired up by his inflammatory speeches, or would we simply have laughed?
Is English too ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles?
Would his language simply run false in our ears?
We're talking about things ringing false in our ears.
Um, may I compartmentalise?
I hate to, but may I?
May I?
Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on?
Or do those qualities come extrinsically, extrinsically from the language itself?
It's a chicken and egg problem.
We're talking about chickens.
We're talking about eggs.
Let me start a leveret here.
There's language and there's speech.
There's chess and there's a game of chess.
Mark the difference for me.
Mark it, please.
We've moved on to chess.
Imagine a piano keyboard.
88 keys.
Only 88. And yet, and yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone.
Yeah, we'll link to it in the show notes.
I actually watched that recently, Chris.
It was very funny.
Yeah, it's just a very good parody.
And the fact that it maps so well to the kind of thing that you see in the sentiment game sphere, I think, speaks to...
The primordial nature of this pattern that resonates across different communities in time.
So, you know, we heard responsible man intruding the Daily Wire platform coming in.
But this conversation is not all lofty discussion of philosophical concepts and words.
There is some more grounded material in that.
And it has a particular flavor.
So I'll play you a clip which I think is illustrative of the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
Yeah, what did you think of the tour?
What was that like?
How many days did you spend with me?
Was it three or four?
I can't remember.
I think it was four.
Yeah, I think it was four.
Yeah.
I had a really good time and I enjoyed...
I enjoyed our dinners.
You and I got to reconnect on a more personal level, which I deeply appreciated.
I thought that, I mean, it was like touring with a rock star.
I've told people I enjoy touring with a rock star.
I don't want to be the rock star.
You can have that.
But I enjoyed it a lot.
Your staff was fantastic.
I enjoyed, there was electricity, some places more than others.
And then, you know, you and I having, it was really powerful in the way we were talking about earlier, after you gave a talk and that electricity was there and to sit with you and talk afterwards.
Or even before, you were gracious, you would have let me to sort of talk a little bit about who I was before I introduced you and feeling even that a little bit there.
And a lot of people, especially the last one.
Because in the last one, I didn't go back.
I actually booked in a hotel right across from the convention center, and a lot of people were there from the event.
And I got to talk to a lot of them.
And there was a lot of them that, of course, they were expressing appreciation for you, but a lot of them were expressing a lot of appreciation for me and my work.
And that was very, very encouraging.
So there was a lot about it I enjoyed.
Like I said...
So, he really had a good time.
Really, really liked that tour.
Now, Chris, is this the We Who Wrestle With God tour?
Yeah, probably.
Actually, I imagine that must be it.
It's one of Jordan's speaking tours.
You know, he's done them with various different people, and I guess this is one of his recent ones, so it probably is the We Who Wrestle With God tour.
Cool.
Well, okay, so they had a nice time.
It was a great tour.
Okay, we've established that.
So, I mean, Fine.
This is friends talking about the nice time they had together.
But, like, there is something...
I don't know.
You can call me cynical or analyzing things too much, right?
But, like, isn't it a bit weird?
Like, in this relationship, Jordan Peterson is the bigger star.
And he is the one that is inviting John Vervaki on the tour with him.
And we'll see all the things that he's inviting him on.
And then on this podcast, he's like...
Tell me about the experience.
How was it?
And like, what does he think he's going to get back there?
Oh, it was okay, but I didn't really enjoy it.
Like, so, no, he got back, you know, it was great.
It was so fantastic.
You're a rock star.
And George's like, uh-huh, uh-huh.
And I'm like, what's this exactly for?
Because this might be something that you ask someone in private, right?
But this is a recorded conversation that goes out to millions of...
Or, you know, Jordan's subscribers.
So, isn't it a bit weird?
Like, how much do you like doing the podcast with me?
Well, hang on.
I'm the big dog in this relationship.
I should be asking you how much.
And I don't, generally, ask you how it is.
No, I know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I guess, you know, a bit of promotion of the tour.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Maybe that's what it's about, right?
But I do think...
I do think it extends to more than that.
So, first of all, just to mention as well, I think it's useful to remember the kind of people that are in this ecosystem and active touring around with Jordans.
It was really good to have you there to provide an informed overview of...
What I had presented because I'm presenting things that are spontaneous.
And so it's very good to, and for the audience as well, to have that reflected and then criticized in the proper critical sense.
Because the proper critical sense is separation of the wheat from the chaff, not derogation of everything as chaff, right?
And so it's very helpful for people to see that modeled, but also to have it happen.
I thought we did a good job at that.
Yeah, I think so.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it was fun.
We'll do it again.
Yeah, it worked out real well.
It was good, too, because I had you and Constantine Kissin and Jonathan Paggio along, and I've also traveled with Douglas Murray and Rex Murphy.
And so all of that, that's all been extremely good to have that second party in there to, third party in there to interrogate, right?
Yeah, and I'm sure Constantine Kissin and Jonathan Paggio, they're really pushing back.
Jordan, quite hard.
You heard the Omega rule restated there in another form.
Separate the wheat from the chaff, but crucially, make sure that that's what the focus is on.
What were the best bits?
Be critical, but not critical in an overly critical sense, because that's not real cynicism.
No, just helping people see the gold that is buried in there.
Yeah, no, definitely a group of like-minded people there that's accompanied Jordan on his tours.
I'm interested in this We Who Wrestle With God tour.
Sounds great.
It's cosmic, man.
Well, I guess it's the same old themes, isn't it?
Basically inspired by the Bible, drawing these metaphysical themes from it, making stories, weaving out these narratives and stories from it.
Have this mental struggle to find a united sense of meaning in the world and how society should prioritize things.
But, you know, given people like Constantine Kissin and Douglas Murray, given the people that are with him and Jordan Peterson himself, it's pretty clear what the social priorities are.
No, those are good people to push back, Mark.
Very critical as well.
So, like you say, I guess this is promotion of the tour, but...
Allow me another illustration of the kind of thing I'm talking about.
And if you'll allow me, you, behind the curtain off camera, you treat your people very well.
And that impressed me throughout.
You've risen to quite a bit of influence and notoriety, and people have been twisted by that in certain ways.
And I was very impressed by...
How gracious you were with your staff, with your people, how kind you were.
You know, part of that, there's kind of a...
What would you say?
I think that's an important thing to note.
It's an important thing to watch for when you're evaluating people.
That's what I was doing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I understand that.
So, Viveki evaluated...
If you'll allow me.
Yep, I just want to give you some unabashed praise for a moment here, publicly.
Yeah, so Viveki was observing him.
Closely, and just saw how well he treated people, even when the camera wasn't running, Chris.
Which he may well do, right?
Yeah, I suspect that could be a true report, but it's, again, it's first as, well, if you let me say this, I realize this could be, and Jordan is like, well, that is an important thing to evaluate someone on,
right?
But it's talking as if it's not him.
Being praised.
So, like, what Brevaki's saying is, you know, you're such a wonderful person behind the scenes, and people don't know that about you.
And Jordan is like, well, that is important, isn't it?
It's important to know how good people are, but the people in this example are him.
And then Brevaki says, yeah, yeah, that's what my point is.
And he's like, yeah, I get that.
You know, that's great.
And it's just like, again...
This isn't a private conversation breaking down the tour.
It's a public podcast praising Jordan Peterson for being, you know, like a good guy.
And like, Vervaki specifically talked to people being twisted by their notoriety.
And anybody who objectively looks at Jordan's content online and his behavior would have to acknowledge...
He is someone that has been twisted by his prominence and notoriety.
His Twitter feed is just an endless parade of outrage and clickbait reacting to titles.
He had a thing, decrying psychoanalytical approaches alongside hospitals and medicine, right?
So he's added to that.
And he is a demagogue, but he's being...
Like, kind of praised here for his balance and, you know, ability to stay above it all.
And you're like, but he doesn't actually, you know, like, there's a huge contradiction that's going on.
And I know Vavaki is commenting on his, like, behavior on the tour, but that's part of his behavior as well.
Yeah, Jordan is on extremely good behavior when he's talking to John Vavaki.
But, you know, it is remarkable that, you know, John, who was so...
Closely intertwined with Jordan Peterson's activities has such a studied blindness.
It's as if he is completely unaware of what Jordan does with the rest of his time, which is not like a minor thing.
His cultural antics, his railing against hospitals or vaccines and all of these things, it seems like it's a studied ignorance, I have to say.
It's understandable, but...
You're not going to want to be confrontational all the time, but if you're going to spend so much time paying attention to all the things that make Jordan Peterson such an awesome guy, then maybe you have to pay attention a little bit to do other stuff.
On that subject, have you considered how good a manager he is?
I saw you delegating without question.
And that's a marker, too.
I look for that in people.
I look for, can they delegate authority?
Can they trust people to run with things?
And you were basically, to my mind, you were managing things from sort of 30,000 feet above.
You were giving sort of general orientation.
And you'd have specific things here and there.
But other than that, people would say, we need to do this, or we need to come here.
And you'd go, okay.
And you were just like...
Well, the other advantage, I mean, there's a bunch of advantages to that as a managerial style.
I mean, the first advantage is, for me, it frees me up to concentrate on only what's necessary.
So when I thought through, well, what's necessary for the tour to work and to continue?
Well, it's necessary that Tammy comes along with me and that she has a role and that that works.
Okay, so that has to be set up, and it is.
Then it's necessary for me to get there.
Like, no matter what, right?
I have to be there like an hour ahead, period.
And then I have to do a good job.
And that's really the three things.
And so everything else has been farmed out to other people.
You know, the hotel logistics, the flights, the meals, all of the scheduling of my days.
Other people take care of that.
And then if they do that fully, then I'm...
Very happy about that.
And they have something that's really crucial to do and can take pride in their work and are committed to it.
I mean, people often ask me, like, how do you do it, Matt?
How do you do this podcast?
And I say, it's very simple.
I think about what has to happen and for the podcast to occur.
One, you have to be here.
That's essential, Chris.
You have to be here.
Two, I have to be here too.
I have to turn up at the time that we have arranged beforehand.
And if I focus on those things and I delegate other extraneous things to other people, then that's how it happens.
It's really quite simple.
It's no great mystery.
People think it's very, very hard.
Actually, as long as you delegate and you focus on what's important, you can make it happen.
Well, and there's a lot of people behind the scenes that don't get credit.
You know, your family are making food.
You're making food, right?
But also your children.
They give you support.
Your colleagues give you ideas.
Yeah, like Jordan here is really, it is making a mountain out of a molehill with, how did I do a tour?
But it also started with Vavaki being like, you know, another thing that's good about you, Jordan, you're a great delegator.
And he's like, yes, I am.
I have a great delegator.
This is how I do it.
Yeah.
And what I delegate are things like flights.
We know our delegation works.
Again, yes, it's a nice thing to say, but it goes on.
We've got more examples of this.
I don't know.
Is somebody being able to undertake a tour and delegate other people arranging their flights and hotels?
Is that really a huge marker of the quality of a person?
It's a marker of exceptionalness, Chris.
No, but seriously, I mean, this mode of backpatting, like really, really strong praise of each other.
This is a constant theme amongst the Guru set, right?
You listen to any stuff from Eric Weinstein, people talking to Joe Rogan.
There's a lot of...
Sam Harris.
Sam Harris.
There's a lot of kissing of butts, I have to say.
In this set, the regard to which they hold each other, unless someone's having a spat, which does happen from time to time, is difficult to measure.
It's extraordinary.
It's like a French court.
It's how I imagine.
Maybe the French court had more.
This is how they talk to the king.
Yeah, this is how a courtier talks to the king, right?
Louis the Sun King.
Oh, my lord.
You could be the lord of the privy, the privy seal or something like that.
You congratulate the King on his wonderful bowel movements.
Very magnificent.
Well, so that was about the tour, right, that they went on together.
But there were other topics to cover, Matt.
So, for example.
So you taught a course for Peterson Academy.
Let's talk a little bit about your experience, first of all.
So, as you remember, and you graciously said recently in the Toronto Star interview, you know, I offered you the possibility of Coming to teach for us about absolutely anything you wanted to teach about.
So walk us through the experience and the course, and then I'll update you a little bit about the state of the art with regard to this endeavor.
First of all, I want to thank the reporter.
The reporter reached out to me at the last moment and said, I'm going to do this.
Do you want to talk?
And I said, I bet.
I really do want to talk.
Because I wanted to be clear, and I didn't...
I'm not attributing anything to this person, but I...
Get this, I've been misquoted before.
And there's a couple of things I was very insistent on.
So I'm happy that it came out the way it came out.
So I just want to express, as far as I can tell, the reporter was true to their word.
And I think that's honorable.
And when reporters are honorable, we should honor them.
Absolutely.
Have we got the feedback yet, Matt?
We're going to get to that.
But just to note, the reporter, I imagine, Didn't do what they would consider a hit piece and quoted, you know, favorable feedback.
So this is an honorable reporter.
Now a reporter who had written a critical piece of Peterson Academy, I wonder if they would have been regarded as honorable, right?
Like, I don't think it's possible to be honorable in Jordan's framework and be highly critical of him.
I can't think of any examples, put it that way.
Yeah.
But so, you know, Jordan said, let's get your feedback on my academy, which I invited you for, and you taught a course on.
I would imagine there is some compensation for that.
But nonetheless, nice to be asked.
So here's Ravaki discussing his experience.
So first of all, let's go going through the experience.
Pleased throughout, all three times.
I don't know if I should mention any names, but like Vincent, the person, excellent, just fantastic.
Your crews are fantastic, super professional, gracious, careful, competent, inviting, welcoming, constantly checking with me about my needs.
How can we improve this?
How can we do this?
Good, glad to hear that.
That's what I've said consistently to everybody who asked me about it.
Very, very professional.
I want to make clear what I made clear on the interview.
When you reached out to me, and I wrote you an email, and I said, you know, I don't consider myself a conservative or a Christian.
Do you want me on this?
And you said, of course I do.
I want you to.
And you were true to your word.
You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy.
I have had it through every course.
You said, And I've said this on video, so I'm happy to say it again.
I want you to teach the course you've always wanted to teach.
True, true to your word, all the way through, for all of these courses so far.
I'm proud, genuinely proud of all of the courses I've done.
Great, great.
Well, we're dead serious about that.
I mean, my intention in identifying people is that I am bringing people to the platform whose views I want to hear.
And I actually want to hear them.
And so that means that the constraints have to be lifted.
It's like, no, I want to hear what you have to say.
And it's such a wonderful thing to be able to afford people this possibility because, you know, when you're teaching at a university, you have an approximation of that, but you're subject to a whole set of...
entirely arbitrary.
And it's not helpful because you can't wonder where the spirit takes you.
Can't follow the logos.
Exactly, exactly.
And you need to be able to do that.
And I think we, I've taught three courses for Peterson Academy too.
Lavish, lavish praise.
Was it inviting?
Inviting?
Would you say inviting?
Yes, inviting!
I like how he was struggling to find more praising words.
Jordan helped him out a little bit there.
Yeah, now this is obviously one of Jordan's many ventures which they're collaborating on and just praising the hell out of it, out of each other.
It was absolutely great.
The tour, the academy, I'm sure anything else that they work on together will be deserving of lots and lots of public.
Mutual congratulations.
It is notable, however, though, that he considered this huge virtue that he gives people editorial control of the content, right?
Which I would consider like the bare minimum if you were going to ask someone to contribute a course.
But nonetheless, here it's a, you know, this is absolutely unheard of levels of freedom, right?
But also...
He talks about it as if he wants it worse than all, just people tell it the way they're going to tell it.
He's not going to put his finger on the scales and whatnot.
But when you look at the people contributing at Peterson Academy...
They are very carefully curated.
Yeah, they're people, like he said, whose views he wants to hear, which is Brett Weinstein and Heller Haying, Eric Kaufman, the conservative political scientist guy.
Brian Keating, noted conservative, kind of religious-seeking physicist, online, want-to-be influencer.
And Rob Henderson, complaining, you know, luxury beliefs person and so on.
So the only person I've heard him mention that he would actually have fundamental disagreements was that he invited Richard Dawkins to contribute, of course.
Obviously, that's because Richard Dawkins is extremely famous, and it would be a very big deal if he provided a course.
So, yeah.
I know, I know, I know.
I mean, it is ironic, isn't it?
Because the thing that purportedly inspired these independent, alternative, red-pilled universities to get started was this lack of ideological diversity in universities.
But, my God, the...
Standard university looks like a rainforest in terms of diversity compared to the monoculture of ideas that are there in Jordison Academy.
Yeah, Jordison Academy.
I like that.
Just on that Dawkins point, Matt, so here's where this was mentioned, by the way.
Well, I would recommend if you're interested in this sort of thing...
Check out Peterson Academy.
Check out John Vervecki's courses.
Check out Jonathan Paggio's courses.
My courses.
They definitely make a tight unit.
And there are other thinkers on the site whose thought is, what would you say?
Well, sometimes opposed to that.
I invited Richard Dawkins, by the way, to lecture for us.
So, you know, and we don't necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything, to say the least.
But there is a developing consensus around the kinds of issues that John is bringing up.
And I think you can...
Perhaps you can be most rapidly exposed to what that is on the Peterson Academy site.
So his best example of somebody, you know, with ideological diversity is someone that didn't contribute to the Academy.
And, you know, he correctly identifies Pajot, Gravecki, and him as like a tight interconnected unit.
And that, you know, Peterson Academy is the front lines for resolving the meaning crisis.
Yeah.
There's, like, kind of nods to ideological diversity, but no actual clear indicators.
Just, like, some people don't agree with everything I say.
Yeah.
No, no.
The theme is clearly, like, it's a Christian-inspired, metaphysical...
Yeah, I don't know how to describe the particular field of philosophy in which...
In which Peugeot might be placed or Vavaki, but it is a very specific kind of approach.
Yeah.
So just to finish off this part, Matt, there's one more example.
I don't know if you listen to much of Infowars, but one of the things that he's fond of doing is revealing His audience with stories of where people have come up and talked about how correct he is and how amazing, how everybody agrees with him.
This is something Alex Jones does all the time.
And Jordan, during his conversation, felt it important to point out that people are nice to him a lot of the time.
And in fact, I have the opposite of that.
Pretty much wherever I go, I'm so fortunate because people are very good to me.
They're good to me in airports, wherever they meet me, and I'm...
More than pleased to return the favour.
And, you know, you're asking for too much if you have a public face and the benefits of that, and you're not also, like, thrilled that people are responding to you in that positive manner.
You said that to me multiple times.
Oh, yeah.
You did.
You're a fool if you don't, if you're not continually appreciative of that.
So, and, you know, all the people...
Around me, all my staff, they're all like that.
They're all wonderful people.
Good, good, good.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
So people are nice to Jordan everywhere that he goes.
They tell him, you know, how wonderful he is.
He is nice to all of his staff.
He's a great manager and his staff are great to everyone around him.
And you got to appreciate how great he and everyone that he surrounds himself with is at all times.
And this, you know, like...
It includes Dave Rubin, who might go on the tour with him, or Konstantin Kessen, or Douglas Murray.
You know, they're all great people.
Yeah, great people engaged and cooperating on great works, like promoting the We Here Wrestle With God tour, or contributing.
To Jordanson, Jordanson Academy.
Well, yeah, you also have responsible man vitamins, the Daily Wire with the Jordan code there.
But as we said, that could be a bit of a cheap shot because it's the Daily Wire inserting ads with a Peterson promotion.
But Peterson himself has some ideas.
We've got the Academy.
We've got the tours that he's on.
We've got his book coming.
We've got his podcast.
There's some areas, though, that haven't been fully explored.
And we're also, with an eye to the future, starting to think things through like, well, one possibility that we've been investigating are cruises, specialised cruises, because, well, cruises, all things considered, especially compared to the cost of,
say, a private university education, cruises aren't that expensive.
You know, they're actually quite remarkably inexpensive.
I saw a retired couple, for example, who booked 51 cruises back-to-back because it was far cheaper than staying in an old folks' home.
And the service is a lot better, let's say.
Cruises, Matt.
Sense-making cruises.
You might think cruises are somewhat expensive, a luxury thing, but if you compare them to the cost of a private education...
They're relatively inexpensive.
Yes.
Yes.
I get that.
So this is the new thing to go on a cruise, a Jordan Peterson cruise?
It isn't up and running.
Yeah.
But what would be better than sealing the high seas with Jordan, sense-making, hanging out by the pool?
Like, who needs to go to university where you could go on a cruise and have, you know, maybe a Constantine Kissin there, a Jonathan Peugeot?
You know, whoever, Matt, the sky's the limit.
Peterson Cruise is coming soon.
Like, this feels like we've got quite far from the discussions of agape and love and beauty and harmony and power.
We're now pretty much down in the influencer, self-promotional, mucky reality of branded cruises, online courses, and talking about how great...
You are delegating your travel arrangements to your staff.
Yeah, indeed.
We've moved on from the phenomenological Christian philosophy and now just settling into some straight-up promotion of stuff that they sell, basically.
Yeah.
Okay, so there was just a few other things, Matt, to mention before finishing.
One that I just wanted to note to give you credit to highlight that you never miss.
Have I ever told you that, Matt?
You never miss.
You're so good at not missing.
People come up to me and say, Marvin, does Matt miss?
And it doesn't seem like he ever misses.
And I say, no, Matt Matt, she doesn't.
Yeah, that all sounds right to me.
That all sounds right.
Yeah, and that's the quality I look for in people.
It's not missing.
So I want you to know I appreciate that.
And here's your not missing about Jordan and annoying Christians.
Well, this is actually a problem that I have with the Christian, the classic.
What would you say?
The standard Christian community.
Well, now, because the Christians are all annoyed at me because I won't, I don't, I haven't proclaimed my faith in the propositional manner that many people who've adopted a creed would find,
would require.
And so they're upset about that and on my case.
And it, it's, I find it's quite...
Distasteful in some ways.
There's an invitational element, but there's a compulsion element.
And the compulsion element is, first of all, the insistence that the faith that's necessary to define something like Christianity is actually propositional.
Now, it should be the case that your propositional content is in alignment with your existential commitments.
But for me, the fundamental move of faith is an existential move.
And the danger in the propositional...
This is the Pharisaic danger, as far as I'm concerned, is that you substitute the propositional for the existential.
Totally.
Totally.
I followed every word of that.
I mean, actually, it makes perfect sense that Vavaki said totally that.
Chris, I want to just quickly just read you a short quote from a paper of Vavaki.
It's from a couple of years ago, at least.
This is it, real quick.
This paper will argue that the psychotechnology of dialectic is a practice of discernment that discloses the effective difference between valences of nothingness while integrating their aspects.
Dialectic cultivates perspective.
Stereoscopy A form of contradictory self-identity That functions as an opponent process That resolves into an implicit singleness And depth of being that the Buddhists call Shin Yuta or nothingness
Sinyata.
Lovely.
Anyway, the point is that it's a very similar vibe.
But, you know, regarding...
Yes, I was right, of course.
I didn't miss...
I read stuff on the internet about Christians being upset with Jordan Peterson.
I tell Christopher Kavanaugh, and Christopher Kavanaugh doesn't believe me.
I didn't say it!
Hey, big news!
This is the anti-Omega principle, in effect, here.
My feeling to give me charity.
All I said was...
You said...
He gets in more trouble with the Christians than he does with, like, the left.
And I was like, no.
You're misrepresenting my words.
Worse than a BBC reporter.
Worse than a BBC reporter does to Jordan Peterson.
This is not a divine conversation.
This does not spark joy.
No, this is the opposite of dialectic.
Stop telling me about my qualities.
My time management.
But notice, Chris, that...
Like the way Jordan Peterson frames that, like first of all, like it's very natural, right?
The traditional Catholics, traditional evangelicals or whatever, who really do believe in God, right?
And they believe to various aspects of the New Testament and or the Old Testament.
And Jordan Peterson is an extremely famous proponent of a certain...
I think it's very natural that they would have criticisms of how they are representing their religion.
But just notice that for Jordan Peterson, it's quite distasteful.
It's hurtful and just not legitimate for them to have a problem with what he's doing.
And I think it just speaks to how...
How they approach all criticism, regardless of where it's coming from.
It could be coming from people like you and me.
It could be coming from proper Christians.
But if you disagree, if you're not doing the dialectic and if you're not doing the Omega principle, then you're just not okay.
You're not really getting it.
You're not getting it.
And on that subject, Matt, just to note, you said, you know, Verveke and Jordan agree on...
Christianity and religion and whatnot.
But, you know, they would see it that there's very important distinctions in their perspectives, right?
They enjoy discussing and working through, right?
And you will hear this kind of sentiment, I think, for example, will for certain people sound like very different from Jordan.
So listen to this.
I'll do the personally first.
Yeah.
Although it bears on the intellectual.
So I'm very cautious of the fact That I shouldn't ever come to the conclusion that my intellectual or philosophical assessment is somehow swinging free of my idiosyncratic bias that has come from my own personal background.
Right, right, right.
Okay, so that's why I have, and sincerely, by the way, and with affection, especially for a lot of people like Jonathan and Paul.
I think I showed it in the Gospel Seminar.
I showed it to Bishop Barham, for example.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
Even more than respectful, I'm open, I'm listening, I want to hear.
But on the personal, like I said, what it did for me is it's almost like, you know, Kierkegaard's thing.
I realized I'm not going to ever return to Christendom, but maybe I've...
And I don't mean to be offensive to any Christians here.
I'm trying to answer your question honestly.
So his experience at the Gospel Seminar cemented into him that he's not going to return to Christianity.
But I don't find that at all surprising.
But I think for certain people that would regard that, well, Raviki's kind of focus is on Buddhism and incorporating Plato.
And this kind of thing where Jordan is more focused on the Bible.
So this is a very important distinction.
What do you think?
Well, I think you've spoken about, what is it, syncretic?
Syncretic?
Yeah, syncretic.
Yeah, beliefs.
And I think they have obviously a huge amount of common ground.
They're both sort of into that kind of thing.
Vavaki more so into other religious traditions, perhaps.
Including Buddhism, then Jordan.
But, you know, that doesn't really matter, I don't think.
Like, it's quite interesting.
Vavaki's lectured on behalf of this thing called the Circling Institute.
He spoke about circling and dialogos very much on this topic.
The After Socrates Wisdom Intensive.
And what is circling, Chris?
What is circling?
It is a proprietary, multi-stage relational practice and unique transformational modality.
It is a dynamic group process that is part art form, part skillful facilitation, and part relational yoga.
Quite relational yoga.
Wow.
That does sound quite familiar to a conference that I was at recently that was interdisciplinary and there was a lot of kind of sentiment.
So you're saying that when you adopt that kind of freedom, that there is a lot of...
It is an association of the Omega rule, right?
Basically, you are going to yes and even if you have metaphysical commitments that might not be attuned.
Well, I'd put it like this.
I think the stance that they take, which is like this kind of Jungian, symbolic, interpretive approach.
That's the most important thing.
That is the most important thing.
And you can apply that to archetypes and stuff, or you could apply it to the wisdom coming out of the Bible.
You could apply it to Buddhism, but it all blends together into this stuff that they both like.
And I think it's just understandable that your bog-standard boring Catholic who goes to church and stuff isn't necessarily into that.
No, correct.
You're correctly assigned that.
And I will say...
This is going to be a little bit of a personal critical commentary, like none of the other stuff has been.
But I don't mean this, actually, specifically to focus on Vrveki, because I think he, here, in the clips I'm going to play, outlines a very common narrative that you hear in the sense-making and also the religious or symbolic religious space.
Part of it goes like this.
So he mentioned in the clips, you know, about his background, influencing his attitude towards things.
And this is him talking about his background.
So, as I said, I was brought up in not only in a nuclear family, but an extended family with a very fundamentalist kind of Christianity.
And only, I would now say, I wouldn't have said it then, but retrospectively looking back after therapy, by the way, I did extended Jungian therapy.
That it was quite traumatic.
I think some of the most horrific experiences of my life were around that.
I belonged to a version of it that had a notion of the rapture.
And I came home once when I was 10, and there was nobody home.
And that was a very rare event.
First time it occurred to me, I'd come home from school.
And I was convinced that everybody had been raptured.
I had been left behind because I was clearly a sinner, condemned to the Antichrist and to hell.
And for a 10-year-old, you can imagine.
How horrible that is.
Or I remember when I was reading the Bible, I came across the passages that talk about the unforgivable sin.
And I was just riven with anxiety.
And my mother, trying to help me, took me to the pastor of the church, and he gave me the most platitudinous, useless.
And even as a 12-year-old, I was able to recognize, you're useless.
So I was...
I was a fan of science fiction because I was always intrigued by speculative thought from very early on.
And I read a book by Roger Zelazny called Lord of Light that introduced me to Buddhism and Hinduism and the power of myth.
And it opened me up and I rejected Christianity.
And I became that person you were criticizing earlier, the very antagonistic atheist materialist.
Yeah, that's kind of a moving...
You can imagine, like growing up in that very fundamentalist environment where, you know, at 10 years old, you're absolutely given to believe that things like the rapture are absolutely definitely going to happen, probably quite soon.
And you can be kind of traumatized by what would seem like a really minor thing to someone who hadn't been indoctrinated with that stuff.
Yeah, it sounds like very powerful experiences.
And I will also say that, like, I think he's speaking about them, you know, very honestly and genuinely here, right?
And I'm reflecting on that experience.
But also, that is a very specific kind of experience.
Like, I was raised a Catholic, right?
I never had these big concerns about the particular descriptions of hell or the rapture, right?
Because that is a particular style.
Of fundamentalist Christianity, like he highlights.
And this is not to say I didn't have existential dread and concerns about dying, right?
And look around religions in a similar way that like Verveke and Sam Harris have done.
So I get the impulses, but that bit with like, you know, a genuine dread of the rapture and this being psychologically traumatizing to you as a child, that sounds like a very specific kind.
I think it does speak to the degree to which you're being indoctrinated with very strong emotional religious concepts.
And that's different than a cultural Christian or somebody from a Catholic background where there is less of an emphasis on that.
Emotional experience.
Well, what he's describing as well as that personal background as being from that fundamentalist milieu which he rebelled against is the kind of seeker.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, which sort of leads one to one may kind of abandon and reject the original.
But then, as you know, it's a very common pattern where one falls into new.
Sources that can deal with the same issues.
And those could be Jungian therapy.
Those could be science-oriented, even Scientological type of stuff.
I mean, I've read Roger Zelazny, or Buddhism, as in a couple of my friends.
Sure.
Or me?
And you, to some degree, yeah?
And I've read Zelazny's Lord of Light.
It's a great book.
But, I mean...
Someone like me would read that and go, wow, here are some wild ideas.
That was really fun.
Whereas someone that is maybe more traumatized and is looking to resolve some serious issues actually takes that as guidance for where you go.
Yeah, so let's hear a little bit more about that.
I left and I went through a profound personal meaning crisis, deep nihilism.
How long?
For how long?
For about three or four years.
And how old were you when that happened?
Sort of 15 to like 18. Right, right.
Well, it's interesting too, and I would say significant, that you turned to science fiction.
That definitely happened to Elon Musk too.
And it happens to a lot of smart, rational people who lose their religious connection.
And I think it's because the science fiction contains...
The emergence of a new mythos.
Especially the new wave that I was reading.
People like Roger Zelazny.
I mean, Lord of Light is about a planet where people have sort of mutated themselves and done sort of hyper-technology and they've assumed the roles of the Hindu pantheon.
And so Hinduism...
And so this is one of Zelazny's themes about the relationship between myth and science and philosophy and religion.
And so I was deeply, you know, interested in all of this.
And then I got to university.
So that is the Sikur.
And, like, I know that you will have elements of that that resonate in terms of, like, you know, finding these big ideas in science fiction appealing.
And, like, Jordan talks about science fiction giving, you know, like, an alternative mythos, which is his particular spin.
But it is true that lots of people find that and that lots of people go through existential or nihilistic periods, right?
Often when they're teenagers.
But I will say, for example, That according to my parents, and I experienced this with my own son, that existential dread period can happen at a modular age.
According to my parents, I went into the bedroom when I was like six and started saying, you know, we're all going to die.
What the hell?
Yeah, I definitely had the same experience when I was the same age range, six to ten.
You know, I remember like in bed in the dark going, oh my God.
Everyone's going to die.
Yeah, my son did it.
I mean, I don't want to go into too much detail, but, you know, crying and stuff about realizing people are going to die, right?
So, like, this is a common thing.
So, yeah, I don't want to downplay that having a significance in people's development, but I do think there is something about the response to this being extrapolated.
I think that...
I think an appropriate point of view may be is you have to have sympathy with the motives, the forces and the anxieties that are driving people towards a resolution of those existential concerns.
And this is clearly a big driver, a thing that attracts people towards religion.
And it can also be a thing that attracts people to other forms of...
Finding meaning.
Some of them more celibrious, and some of them less celibrious, like Scientology or UFOlogy and the rest.
And for Varvaki at university, he explains this.
So, okay, so you got turned on to philosophical and theological ideas?
I took an intro to philosophy course, and we read the Republic, and I met Socrates.
Aha, and what did that do?
Well, see, the thing about my upbringing is it had left a taste in my mouth for the transcendence, missing a sage, if I can put it that way.
And then I met this figure of Socrates who made the logos come alive and gave me a new way of understanding rationality and made me a way of understanding spirituality and transcendence in a way that was consonant with...
My burgeoning interest in science and reason and that...
Right, so that was a defragmentation process.
Profound.
That's why I will not follow any religion, any pseudo-religious ideology, any political vision that says you must abandon your loyalty to Socrates.
That's not going to happen for me.
That's not going to happen for me.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, this is just a remarkably honest...
And Frank segment, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, he mentioned that his upbringing has left in him a taste for transcendence.
And then he discusses finding the work of Socrates and this being like finding a guru, right?
Like, I mean, in the traditional sense of a guru and one with a deep emotional attachment and one which sounds to me, Matt, I have to say, It sounds religious in nature because I have lots of thinkers that I respect that have influenced me that I find very important to my intellectual development.
But I would never speak of them in the way that he does there about my deep abiding loyalty to them.
I like Richard Dawkins' stuff, for example, but I have no problem talking about him being an idiot in the culture war or whatnot.
Yeah, you don't need no heroes, huh?
No, I understand what you're saying.
Look, a big theme of this entire movement is that there's a religion-shaped hole in society, they would claim.
I've never felt it, personally.
Someone that has never had religion, and I don't see it around me in Australia very much.
But I believe it's true for them.
And I think that they're projecting...
Vavaki has done us a big favour here in that he's described the secular guru thing perfectly in his own modality, which is that reconciling of those transcendent, spiritual, emotive,
ineffable impulses, desires with this logic and science and reason.
Like, these endless conversations are kind of them reconciling these two aspects, right?
Yeah, and, you know, it's not us reading into this.
They acknowledge this.
And so you get this tremendous...
Yeah, because questioning improves, but it also destroys.
Right, exactly.
And so you need a figure that is...
Like Socrates, you know, he's open to following the logos.
Wisdom begins in wonder, but there's tremendous courage.
He demonstrates it unto death.
He demonstrates it unto death.
This is tremendously encouraging.
That was tremendously encouraging for me.
And so I got caught up in this, and then I wanted to follow this, accept academic philosophy at the time, after first year, stops talking about wisdom and the love of wisdom.
And you get into all of these arguments about meta-ethics and meta...
You know, epistemology.
And those are useful tools.
They're useful for science.
And so I kept going on for that reason.
But this hunger was not being satisfied.
So literally down the street from me, there was a Tai Chi meditation center.
So I went there because I decided to give Eastern philosophy because I'd been reading some Hermann Essa a chance.
And I started doing, practicing Tai Chi Chuan and practicing Vipassana Metta.
I was introduced to Lao Tse.
I was introduced to Siddhartha.
And so these things...
Opened me up.
And around that time, I started to read Pierre Hadot and how our ancient philosophy, the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists and the skeptics, they also practiced philosophy as a way of life.
And then I started to realize how much this overlapped with early Christianity and some forms of existing Christianity.
It started to help me, a rapprochement to Christianity and to religion, because I became very...
Well, you've always struck me at your core as a religious thinker.
Correct, Jordan.
Correct.
Correct.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, Vivacchi, as you said, we're not doing any interpretation here.
They're being quite explicit about the motivations.
The thing about philosophy that really, really filled that meaning crisis hole for Vivacchi was Socrates as this Christ-like But bringing in these nice philosophical ideas of rationality and seeking the truth and so on.
Along with Eastern spirituality and traditions, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And the syncretic religions approach.
Exactly.
And when the curriculum of the philosophy degree moved beyond that more sort of elementary or historical stuff into more technical...
Well, I have sympathy for him, though, getting in on with Matt Evans.
I don't want to study it either.
So we're on the same page.
Yeah, no, it really gives some good insight into...
And it's not a criticism.
We're not criticizing anyone here.
In fact, it gives you a lot more empathy for where Bervaki's coming from, even though I don't have the same needs.
So this is the bit...
Where my criticism comes where I opened up that framing with that.
Because everything that's described here, like we say, not for you or me necessarily, but, you know, an intellectual journey.
And I think correctly talking about, you know, the motivations and whatnot, even if they don't emphasize them in all settings.
But the bit that I feel is a bit inaccurate, and Jordan Peterson does this too, and so does others, that like...
There was an appeal to, I was a hard-nosed, atheist, rationalist, new, atheist skeptic, and I went through that, and then I came out on the other edge.
And I don't doubt that there is a period of that, like, you know, the kind of, like, rebellion against a religious upbringing, and you hate Christianity and all that.
But, like, given the timeline that he's laid out, there's a very short period for that, too.
Because in his first year of university, he's already found Socrates.
He's going to the Tai Chi center and counting Eastern spirituality.
And so assuming that he went to university at a relatively young age and he was raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment, right?
There's not many years there for the deep commitment to secular.
Atheist.
And he also already talked about how he was attracted to Hinduism and science fiction that was talking about, you know, these kind of concepts from Eastern traditions and whatnot.
So, like, I think there's a bit of a misrepresentation where people overemphasize how much they were, these kind of rational atheists.
And then they came to see the hollowness of that worldview because it sounds like actually you were...
Almost always a seeker and you moved from one, you know, tradition and now you've selected a tradition which is a better fit for you, more aligned with your values and like a philosophically deep consideration and you've built your own worldview.
Perfectly fine.
But it's often done on the back of, well, I explored.
The other, you know, reductionist materialist.
And it was just empty.
There was nothing there.
It was meaningless.
It didn't provide any account.
So I fully explored that.
And then I went.
And it just feels a little bit like, or did you?
And I'm not saying they need to become atheist or secular rationalist reductions, because I don't think that fits everybody's, you know, intuitions and like personality type and whatnot.
But it's that they...
Kind of present that as the enlightened position that you might go for a stage of, you know, reductionist materialism, but you will quickly realize how unfulfilling and silly.
That point of view is.
So someone like Richard Dawkins or even you and me are kind of trapped in an adolescent, immature stage of spiritual development.
No, I know.
I mean, I think there is a rhetorical power to leaning into that idea that you've been redeemed or something.
You are fully on board with the opposite of what you're committed to now.
Like, it kind of explains why a lot of our gurus who are, you know, basically...
They often misrepresent themselves, like Brett and Heather do, as disillusioned, true progressives.
But it's really hard to detect any genuine progressive sentiments in them.
But you can see the rhetorical power that it has, that you've fully considered, you've fully bought into this wrong point of view, and you are better informed about how wrong it is than anyone else.
Yeah, and there was a bit, I feel a little bit cruel in highlighting this, but I think it speaks to that exact sentiment, right?
So we were talking about the presentation that, you know, you have looked at some other philosophy or whatever, and it's not for you, but you might understand it, like, in a way better than the people that got, like, stuck in that field.
It's a common thing.
I would even say, like, applying it.
From my point of view, I became interested in Buddhism and Eastern traditions.
And from the point of view of like a Viveki or Sam Harris, you know, seen as an alternative to the Western religion that I've been brought up in, I find that all very attractive.
And then I studied the history of Buddhism at university and I was kind of, what's the word?
Disillusioned slightly?
Yeah.
Well, it's more like my unrealistic image.
Kind of crashed against the reality.
But I find the reality more interesting.
And so I feel a little bit like an Evan Thompson.
I feel a kinship with him in a way that he also has an interest in all these things.
He's a professor in the philosophy of Buddhism or whatever his particular thing is.
But he also released a book, Why I'm Not a Buddhist.
Because he thinks there's metaphysics in it, which isn't justified.
So he finds it all interesting, but he's not done with the metaphysics.
In that sense, you can see a parallel where I'm saying, well, look, I've explored these various things and I didn't end up getting caught in the practitioner thing.
But from the point of view of a practitioner, I probably fell in some early stage where you're supposed to persevere beyond that.
So everyone is always casting themselves as they are looking from the lofty position.
I think it's a natural inclination.
And I don't mean it like that you're looking down on people, but more...
You've experienced it.
This is why you've reached that point.
But there's a clip that speaks to this.
And it's not about Buddhism.
It's about Christianity.
So listen to this.
And precisely.
And my partner, Sara, who's not a Christian, and I don't profess to be one, but she took me aside at one point and she said, And I want this understood, that I'm saying this at an arm's length, okay?
And you're a good friend, so I'll trust you for that.
But she said, you're actually the only real Christian I've ever met.
What did she mean by that?
Of course I asked her.
Yeah, right.
And she said, because you, you know, she said, I get it, you don't identify with a set of doctrines, but you try to live a God...
Agape.
And you try to follow the logos.
And you've structured your whole life and the cultivation of your character around that.
Well, that's what belief...
Believe it.
To give your heart to.
That's the original meaning.
My wife has never said anything that nice about me, I don't think.
Yeah.
Like, there's, again, you know, I'm speaking about the structural component here, but there's a bit of, like, look.
I'm going to say this, and you will understand that I'm not putting anyone down.
This is me relating to you, Jordan Peterson, my friend, something that my wife said to me.
And I'm not saying it right about myself.
I'm telling you what someone else said about me.
But the thing is, this isn't a private conversation.
This is a conversation going out again to like hundreds of thousands of millions of people.
And isn't it perfectly sane?
Somebody said I'm a better Christian than like...
Normal Christians, because I embody the values more.
And, like, it's just odd to me that you would tell that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I actually don't necessarily doubt that it's perfectly true, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I suspect it's true.
I'm sure his wife is very cute.
I remember one time my mum told me I was the best boy in the school.
Yeah.
She is my mum, so, you know.
I know.
It does sound a bit...
Like I said, I feel being pointed out this exchange.
But the point is, it's released publicly.
It isn't a private conversation with your friend who will just interpret this in this way.
It's to this big audience and to us.
It's a little bit similar to their talk before about just lavishing the praise on how amazing the tool was and how amazing Jordan is, how amazing the Academy is.
That's one thing.
Like, if you and I went on a thing and we spoke about it, I just had such a great time with you, Chris.
Yeah.
Just heart to heart.
I really enjoyed spending my time with you.
That's one thing.
Doing it on the podcast, like, there is an audience, right?
And you are speaking for other people.
So it is a bit cringe, I guess.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean...
But it speaks to, I think, like, Jordan.
And for Vicky and other people in the sense making an ecosystem, I would put Jordan Hall or whatever and Russell Brand even in a sense in this way where like it's not the Christianity of your bog standard Catholics.
Like, you know, the people who just go and do the thing and it isn't like this big theological or existential thing for them.
It's a tradition that they're a part of and whatnot.
This is a little bit setting yourself up.
As that you are in this more refined...
Yeah, you're a more highly evolved form of Christian.
Yeah, it's the syncretic thing, isn't it?
Where you sort of draw upon all of the religions and you draw upon Jungian things.
Or, you know, to express a criticism of someone else that I think is similar, it's like what Sam Harris says about he understands the teachings of Jesus, right?
In a way that people...
Who haven't done meditation and had the introspective insights that he's had, they don't really properly get it.
And that's a feeling that lots of people have, and they are not necessarily people who would identify, you know, like Sam Harris doesn't identify as Christian, but he thinks that he understands the insights of Jesus better than lots of adherence of Christianity.
So, hmm.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that's just an accurate description of where they...
You know, it's this nexus of philosophy and spirituality and religion, and it's a highly abstracted, rarefied form of thought,
which is, like, my fundamental issue, Chris, I've been wondering when is the best place to say this, but, I mean, like, where I'm just so different from these guys, and I think where I tend to criticize them is not...
It's not for a specific thing that they're saying necessarily or that they're religious or they're not religious or they like this kind of philosophy or that.
It's just that they seem so comfortable with the use of language that to me is completely meaningless.
So when Vavaki or Jordan say to one another that the fullest expression of the dialectic is a manifestation of the logos.
Or something like that.
All of the writing, we could cite innumerable cases of them saying stuff like that.
I literally don't know what it means.
There are two intangible, unmeasurable, unverifiable concepts that they're still struggling to define.
Most of the conversations are working on defining what is the logos, what is the dialectic, what is the meaning crisis.
And then they connect them together through these heuristic...
Intuitive associations.
And I understand that to them, that is a very meaningful activity.
And for me, it means absolutely nothing.
Nothing at all.
See, that's interesting because I'm probably in the middle in the sense that I don't find it that hard in general to follow what they're flowing to from one to the next.
And I understand why They invest it with profundity, right?
And I even can kind of, like, sympathize if I turn off the critical side of my brain.
But I need to do that, right?
Like, I need to turn off the thing about, so, like, what is the exact concept?
I'd rather go with the vibe, right?
That, like, ah, yeah, so that's connecting this concept to that one.
And I think that is a little bit around just, you know, individual...
Yeah.
No, no, I hear you.
Yeah, I hear you.
I think it is like that.
I mean, you've had more experience, like, reading this kind of thing, you know, in your explorations of Buddhism and stuff, and I've had very little throughout my entire life.
Absolutely no religious background, nothing in the family, no real study of this kind of philosophy or theology.
Never had an interest in it.
So to me, yeah, for me, it is just like a...
Nothing.
But I think it also speaks to just the personality type.
And it actually gives me more sympathy for both of them, just in this particular stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not sympathy for Jordan's other activities, but I have more sympathy for them because it sort of speaks to the point that they could do no other.
Like, this is how their minds work.
This is what resonates with them.
For them, this kind of talk is extremely meaningful and they're not lying.
This is just how their minds work.
And it's just very different from how mine does.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, that's okay.
People can have different interests and stuff like this.
And I actually think this side of things is probably the component of Jordan's output that is at least objectionable, right?
Like, I still think it is very indulgent and has the issues that we talked about with the sloppy thinking and the kind of, you know, that it essentially just...
Wordplay in lots of occasions.
But, you know, each to their own.
You want to do like indulgent wordplay, jazz with people, you know, whatever.
That's fine.
The issue is, with Jordan primarily, is the other stuff.
The attachment of this onto his conspiratorial and hardline conservative polemical politics, right?
Which he does.
And he does it every day.
On his Twitter feed, but he does it in interviews constantly all the time.
And so, like you said, there's kind of a studied ignorance that Jordan is putting this to justify a political worldview and like an ideological project, which he claims is non-ideological, but you can see it in the figures that surround him and that kind of thing.
And I feel like Verveke doesn't strike me.
As someone that obviously has that same political agenda, even if he has, you know, some sympathy for whatever, like, you know, certain conservative values or that kind of thing.
But I think as a result, he just ignores the conspiratorial output of Pajot and Jordan or their like endless polemical stuff.
And I think if you do that, you're not actually taking a full view of a person.
You're constraining the thing to like the part that won't cause you a big amount of dissonance or any conflict.
And to me, that's something that the sense-making sphere does a lot of.
Like when we talked to Jimmy Wheel, when we talked to David Fuller in the past about it, this is a part where they're quite comfortable to just constantly avoid that.
And like, for example, when David Fuller wanted to arrange a conversation between me and Jonathan Pajot, I said, fine, I'll talk to him.
And we could talk about rituals and whatnot.
But I will bring up the stuff about conspiracism and the things he said about Alex Jones and the things about theocratic governments and whatnot.
And then he didn't want to do it.
It would be unpleasant.
It would be fractious.
But if we did a yes-ending conversation about ritual cognition, then...
Fine.
It wouldn't be hard to just take a very symbolic and academically dense Omega rule conversation and have that thing.
So that's the bit where I feel like I have criticism of the approach that John and all those apply.
But I think it's their values.
They don't see that as a priority.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, early on in the podcast, Chris, we said one way to think about what gurus do, these secular gurus, is that they provide an elaborate and complex mental cognitive framework that kind of provides a rationale or a justification for what is a pretty base.
You know, red meat, emotive kind of impulses.
And, you know, sometimes those impulses are like political ones, like you just don't like foreigners and you want a return to, you know, traditional values where men were men, whatever, right?
Or they could be like existential impulses, right?
But the point is that they're sort of gut kind of...
Needs or gut kind of things that you need satisfying.
None of us like to think of ourselves as sort of animalistic people following our urges around.
We like to think that we're very rational and considered and so on.
So, you know, part of what secular gurus do is that they provide all of that.
And Jordan is obviously an ultimate example who plays both sides of it.
Here we see the rarefied...
Very intellectual, thoughtful, and it sounds very nice, a lot of the things that he's talking about, right?
The dialogos and universal love and things like that.
But it does stand in stark contrast to the other things.
What Jordan does.
What Jordan does, yeah.
And for the people who are fully on board with this...
You tend to see that they get it both ways, right?
They're fully on board with some pretty unpleasant political messaging and really kind of demonizing out groups.
You know what I mean?
These people are the worst people and so on.
At the same time, you can think of yourself as just like the best possible person, like exploring the limits of the dialectic and trying to find deeper truth and meaning.
And if I do have a criticism of Vavaki, it's just that he's participating in one side of that.
And though he might not be directly doing the other thing, he's definitely a big participant in helping Jordan Peterson flesh out one side of that coin.
Yeah, yeah.
And I guess if we were looking at John from the secular guru Templar, I think that he would score low in a bunch of significant characteristics like excessive profiteering, conspiracy mongering,
anti-establishmentarianism.
Like, I don't think he does a bunch of those.
But the bits where he does is the...
I feel a bit mean saying pseudo-profundity, but I'm not saying like none of his message has any depth to it.
I just mean that there is a lot of the accoutrements that would lead someone to perceive profundity.
I think I can help you out there a little bit.
It's a kind of like pseudo-phenomenology.
The very abstracted, mystical version of philosophy where it is infused with heaps of pseudo-profound bullshit in the sense that using really complex words when you could use a simple word, linking together all of these jargons.
I mean, we could read out quotes from papers where he is guilty of that kind of obscurantism.
Now, actually, he's not alone in doing that.
No, there's entire areas and fields.
Yeah, dedicated to this.
So this isn't...
Really a particularly nasty ding.
He just is part of a discipline which you and I would diagnose as not very good.
So, yeah.
Well, look, to put it a little away, I would say that he would object to that characterization of what he's doing.
But I think that there could be a bunch of value in his work and you could also detect those kind of...
You know, if you put it into...
A chat GPT and said, like, highlight the things that academics are criticized for doing in this paper.
And it would correctly identify a lot of this seems like incredibly complex linguistics to express fairly straightforward.
Well, I mean, just basic things, like using Greek variations of ordinary words like communitas, right?
All our sense makers like doing that.
Instead of saying community.
Or like inventing phrases like dialectic into dialogos and things like that.
Like in very basic terms, it is true that profound bullshit.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, but that comes from the love of Socrates and Plato and, you know.
I've read Socrates.
It's pretty clear.
It's pretty straightforward.
Okay.
Okay, well.
You know, so this was an interesting episode in a way because I think it is an alert jaunt into the sense-making sphere, but it's from one of the much less objectionable members of that sphere,
I would say.
So, you know, but it's interesting to see the kind of features of those competitions, right?
And maybe you really dig them and you're not like me and Matt or...
Me and Matt stunted.
Empty husks of humans.
Yeah, philosophers tell us all the time that we are.
There will be people that agree, but maybe this also helps flesh out some of the points that we're making about why we're critical of those kinds of conversations and why we detect a potential religious impulse that people universalize to everyone,
where I don't think that is actually the case.
Some of us just don't have it.
Oh, and I will also add in, just as like a final slam, while extending charity in the Omega way that I have been, the fact that there's all the cruise chat and how great the Peterson Academy is and whatnot,
and what was it?
Responsible Man Vitamins?
You have to factor that in too, right?
Like, yes, we're up in the lofty philosophers thing, but responsible man multivitamins pulled us right down.
And the planned cruises.
So, you know, I think there is things that you can criticize, even if you disagree with all the stuff about the philosophical chat.
Yeah.
If you want to be a public philosopher, a public meaning maker, you don't have to have those ads for...
Overpriced multivitamins in there.
I mean, we don't have them.
You do if you want to fight the culture war, Matt.
If you want to stock up your energy and be like a responsible man.
Responsible man vitamins.
Two on the nose.
I don't usually take vitamins, but I thought, oh, it might help.
So I'm taking my wife's vitamins, so they're for women.
And I'm thinking, well, you know, women and men, how different can we be?
So that's what I'm taking.
I'm taking women's vitamins.
Well, unfortunately, they don't generally do much in any sex or gender.
No, that's not true.
That's not true, Chris.
My urine has definitely changed color.
Oh, wow.
Vitamin vitamins do that.
Yes, and before people say iron supplements and if you're vitamin C deficient, yes, yes, yes, we know.
We know what used multivitamins are.
And yeah.
So, Matt, we're done.
We're finished.
But this is a decoding episode.
This has an outro bit.
I have reviews for us.
Just two.
Just two for this week.
Just to finish us off.
We've got a review of...
Reviews segment.
We're engaging in asynchronous dialogos with our listeners.
And as I like to, I select a fine-grade criticism.
Criticism that is not cruel and demeaning, but carries value with it.
It has a message in it, Matt.
It's spoken in the true spirit of Christ.
And here is a review by Money Birdie from Australia.
Smarmy but enjoyable in small doses.
Y 'all are so smug when it comes to taking down Sam Harris.
You can't hide your enjoyment at any sign of less than perfect reasoning.
The man is human.
The man has biases.
He wants to believe the best of his friends and associates.
Why not approach your criticism in a way that allows for him to be an actual human with good intentions, waiting for your takedown of Ezra Klein, Roxane Gay, Ibram X. Kendi, Nicole Hannah-Jones, or Ta Nevis Coates, but he means Ta Nahasi Coates.
So, yeah, Matt, you can't hide your smarmy enjoyment of tearing down poor Sam.
He's a good man.
He just likes his friends, okay?
He just...
That's fair.
How many stars did you say?
Four.
Four out of five.
So it's good quality.
High quality criticism.
I'll take it.
And if, Money Birdie, you were a bit more, you know, observant, you might have noticed, we have done Ibram X Candy.
Okay?
So, yeah, we'll get to the other ones.
All right?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, whatever.
Just give us time.
All right?
What's this guy called again?
Early Birdie?
What's his name?
Birdie.
Bode-brian.
Money-body.
I think his comment, what he fails to understand is that our criticism of Sam was a form of dialectic, cultivating the perspectival stereoscopy.
In our criticisms, we were actually identifying with him.
We were feeling a form of contradictory self-identity, functioning as an opponent process that resolves into an implicit signal as a depth of being that I think he missed.
It all went over his head.
Well, what we did as well, Matt, which is important, like if you think about the concept of feedback, right?
Feed and back, like on someone's back and you feed them.
You make an offering to them and they consume it, right?
So we offered feedback to Sam from the back, but going to his front.
And in that way, he...
That's exactly what I was saying.
That's what I was saying.
It's a dialectic process, right?
He made an offering to us with his feed back, and we've, in turn, christened it, sanctified it, and offered it back to him in return, and together we built something beautiful.
Totally, totally.
And you often say that, and you often say that, and I often agree.
That's right.
Very astute of you when you do.
But so another review map from somebody that might get things a bit better, you know, might have a bit more of a, they're approaching criticism at a higher level and they said 20%,
Oh, nice!
I would describe this as self-flagellation.
Well, yeah, no.
I think what you do, Chris, with the research for this is self-flagellation and the rest of us are kind of getting off on...
Along for the ride.
Along for the ride, sort of enjoying your pain.
What did you call that?
It's a prurient kind of observational sexual thing.
So you guys are the sickles.
Yeah.
You're like the little guy pressed up in the meme at the window saying, yeah, yeah.
Or the emperor.
I feel your hatred.
It makes you strong.
So, yeah.
Well, that is what it is.
Now, Matt, people pay us for this.
They pay us to go into the sense-making realm.
To be critical, we are the fly in the soup of the sense maker's free course meal.
We are the grit in their oyster salad.
We understand that they're romantic interlude at the beach.
Yes, that's right.
We're their Jar Jar Binks in their sequel trilogy.
And yet, people reward us for that and we shout them out.
And I do that now, Matt.
I do that now with no hesitation, no delay, no stalling to get names up or anything like that.
I don't do that kind of thing.
So let's go.
Conspiracy Hypothesizers.
I'll start there.
Ben Goddick, Clark, Killian McCotter, Mike Craig A. Green, Ben Crook.
Hope you're not a crook.
Jordan McCoy.
Colin Fardy.
He's the real McCoy.
No, this is good.
Let's even think of a riff for every single name.
Next one.
Jeremiah Syropoulos.
It's like the first name and the last name don't go well together.
You know?
Is the last one Greek?
And the first one sounds like it's from Oklahoma.
Jeremiah?
That's an Oklahoma type.
He's here all week, folks.
He's here all week.
Lisa?
Is that it?
Lisa?
That's not much to go on.
Come on.
Give us more than that.
Get a better name.
Give us a name we can riff on.
Simpsons?
All right.
Oh, that's another Scandinavian.
We know what they're like up there.
They listen to us because there's nothing else to do for like nine months of the year.
And it's dark.
Yeah, except drink.
It's drink and or listen to Decoding the Gurus.
Yeah.
Or Dag Soros, the comedian who likes us, so they should listen to him.
Yeah.
Charles Ioma Murray.
Ioma.
Lord of the Rings.
A heroic name.
Love that name.
Probably named after that.
Saul Kushti.
Let it call Saul.
Let it call Saul.
Call him if you've got a problem.
Kirsten Budig.
Kirsten Budig.
I got nothing.
You got something?
No, I didn't expect you to throw it back to me.
What kind of sense making is this?
Sorry, Kirsten.
You've got a nice name.
We're moving on.
Well, we're going to move on now, Matt, because given that that slows things down, we're going to play the conspiracy hypothesizer clip, which sounds like this.
I feel like there was a conference.
That none of us were invited to.
That came to some very strong conclusions.
And they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
He's moved well on from hypotheses now.
Yeah, that's right.
It's all traps now.
It's freaking traps.
Traps within traps.
So, revolutionary geniuses, Matt.
We have some of them.
These are the people, by the way, that get access to Decoding Academia.
Fantastic series.
You can only get this.
Revolutionary genius in the above tier.
Just letting people know.
Just so you know.
Don't make that mistake.
Don't be like the thousands of others.
No, that's right.
They're missing out.
That's right.
It's a spin-off series that in some ways has surpassed the original one.
It's like the Better Call Saul to Breaking Bad.
Both excellent shows, just like ours are both good.
Yeah, but I like Breaking Bad better.
You like Breaking Bad better?
Come on.
Yeah, of course.
Okay, it's more epic.
It is a bit better.
But I like Better Call Saul too.
It was good too.
It was good too.
Okay, so people in that tier are Thomas Steckbeck, Keith Miller, JR5000, Kieran Scanlon.
Josh.
Could be Josh Epps.
Stuart Cunningham.
Christine Ulloa.
Mandy.
Andrew McRae.
Fred Dyer.
Paul van der Hayden.
Gerperders.
And Robert Hannan.
Gepperders.
I like that one.
Gepperders.
Oh, also Old Timey Bomb, Space Iguana, and Eric Coins.
Space Iguana is another good one.
I can never think of a good handle.
I know.
I'm going to steal Space Iguana.
Yeah, Space Iguana is good.
I think this is the same part of the brain that understands what the vacuum and sense makers are talking about.
This is the part of the brain that can think of good handles because I'm incapable of both.
Well...
Fortunately, revolutionary geniuses probably don't like that part of the brand, so here's their thank you.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Remarkable thing is that Sam talking about hospitals killing.
Hospitals.
Yeah, which Joan Peterson has brought up again.
Recently.
He's even more certain of it now, without ever having looked into it.
But it's stewed in his brain long enough, so now he's certain of it.
No, it's like more things are added in that are deadly.
It's all of medicine, and it's drugs and everything.
Therapy.
Yeah.
For Galaxy Brain Girls, Matt, I'm only going to thank one person.
Almost as if there's only one on the sheet.
Anna T. Thank you, Anna T. You get a special shout-out.
I'm sorry.
All by yourself.
Thank you, Ana T. She deserves our full attention.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
I do like that juxtaposition, I have to say.
And it isn't that we only have one new galaxy green.
Patreon.
It's just that this particular way that they're laid out on the sheet makes it very hard to find them.
So, gotta be a better system.
I've been thinking about a better system for years, but we've got to get on top of this.
So, yeah, we're going to revise the shoutouts.
We'll let you know what we come up with.
Are we?
How are we going to revise them?
I don't know, because we're never going to get through this.
It's only going to get worse.
It's only going to get worse as time goes on.
I'll come up with a system.
I'm going to put my intellect towards it and we'll save it.
But yeah, there we go.
An enjoyable one.
Dare I say one that contributes to the universal logos that has been bubbling since the first atoms banged together in the dark emptiness of space.
And here we are talking about sense makers on a podcast.
Two men.
And doesn't that say something?
Makes you think.
Yeah.
Vavaki and Peterson gave us an offering.
Also two men.
Also two men.
They made us a discursive offering and we chewed it up.
Gobbled it up.
Gobbled it up.
Sped it up.
Sped it up.
Sped it up on the grind.
Yeah.
Well, we look forward to their return gobbling of us.
And maybe two other men.
Someday.
Only men.
Only men can do it.
Only men in the South African ecosystem.
No women allowed.
It's not for you.
I'm sorry.
There is a lot of testicular people.
No.
There's just a lot of people with testicles in the podcast world.
Almost as if men are prone to indulge in chit-chat with each other.
It doesn't seem like that, doesn't it?
Maybe women are just incapable of sense-making at this refined level.
Maybe that's it.
That's it.
That's what the problem is.
It's not that men have a higher tendency to...
Think what they're saying is profound.
Be grandiose bullshiters.
Nah, it wouldn't be that.
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
Anyway, that's all gender essentialism and whatnot.
Forget about it.
Forget about it.
You didn't hear anything.
We were just joking.
We were just joking.
It's irony.
It's ironic.
It's irony.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, bye-bye, Matt.
I'll see you soon.
For more, like...
We're going to get into some people, right?
We're going to get into the Teal.
We're going to get into the Kurdish Arvin.
We're going to go into a little left-wing season, maybe some left-wing figures.
