A Sense-Making Odyssey, Part 2: Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke & Jordan Hall
Matt and Chris once again take up their oars and plunge deeper into the recursive whirlpools of contemporary sensemaking. Picking up where Part 1 left off, having grappled with conscience, touchstones, hierarchies, and normativity, we return to the sensemaking labyrinth to see just how many more words and concepts the combined powers of Peterson, Vervaeke, and Hall can stretch to breaking point.This second leg of the voyage allows us to chart more of the universal sensemaking grammar, with its biblical scaffolding, liberal use of metaphors, and frequent exhortations to ascend Jacob’s ladder. But alongside Peterson's predictable biblical musings, you can also thrill at unexpected treats like John Vervaeke unveiling how finite transcendence connects to inexhaustible intelligibility and Jordan Hall explaining that even silence can be a form of sensemaking.Expect symbolic snakes, dangling ropes, and ecological psychology refashioned for mystical ascent, Augustine rediscovered through Plato, and culture reframed as an alcoholic parent. Or if you prefer, enjoy detours into atheists and their Luciferian egos, the sacred role of play, and the profound revelations that can be drawn from childhood disappointments at McDonald’s and grandfathers complaining about Nixonian duplicitySo join us for the final leg of the Sensemaking Odyssey. Sharpen your mind, get ready to traverse through 3D space, and prepare for an encounter with the Logos... in the context of listening to a podcast.SourcesA Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall | EP 532
This is the greatest minds of the world has to offer.
Try to understand what they're talking about.
You're my co-host.
That's you.
Yes.
Matt Brown, Mitt, that's that's who I am.
I'm here.
It feels like it's hardly any time at all since I last spoke to you.
I know.
It's a bit weird doing an introduction when we're kind of a continuation episode.
Uh this is this is big brain stuff, Chris.
Um, we're not lying when we're saying we're listening to the greatest minds.
Um we've got three of them.
And we're and we're still figuring, we're still handling it, we're still processing.
We're still on topic one.
Yeah.
We're still why are they having this conversation?
We're still working on the definitions.
Um, so but we'll we'll get there, we'll get there.
So Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris, help me out here.
Help everyone out.
Where do we leave off?
Yeah.
Well, what did where are we?
What did we establish?
Where have we gotten to from the first part of the conversation?
Yes.
So where we left off was that there'd be discussions of conscience, and when you're talking about conscience, you're talking about like adhering to verticality if you're Jordan Peterson.
You're talking about normativity in in search of what is true and beautiful if you're John Verveke.
And if you're Jordan Hall, it's hearing a SAR note or a child trying to pick up a P. But all of that was, you know, we were going down the Russian nesting dolls for the various definitions and where we got to was that John Vervake was talking about unifying meta-narratives.
I think that's what it was.
But and it they were talking about the difference between ideas, but he'd mentioned the word touchstone.
Ah, yes.
One thing you should never do when you're talking to Jordan Peterson is introduce a new word because he's gonna get stuck on it.
Yeah, so and Jordan had gave his uh explanation for why he thought that he had used the word touchstone.
So the touchstone is something that has uh transformation of the axiomatic assumptions on which the viewpoint are based.
That was what Jordan Peterson said, and that's where we left it.
Now Vervicki was kind of agreeing, but he's got some points to note, you know, some caveats to add to that.
So yes, it's axiomatic assumptions, but it's the axiomatic assumptions, but I think it's woven with I I don't know if you'll allow me to extend it.
Axiomatic skills, axiomatic states of mind.
Yeah, paradigmatic.
The actions wouldn't have to be propositional.
That's right.
There's paradigmatic.
And then what even perceptual, even perceptions can change, right?
That's right.
Right.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah, the touchstone is I want to be in contact.
I want to do this comparative reflective thing that makes me aware of the inexhaustible intelligibility.
That which is most real.
So the compare a real object to a dream object.
The dream object like you could do some Jungian analysis, but you could.
You could let's not.
Um, so I think he's probably gonna say that real objects are more real than dream objects, which I think we can all get on board with.
That's probably oh, is he?
That's what you think he's going.
Well, I mean, you you did get there, Matt, some important clarifications that it's not just about the axiomatic assumptions, it's about axiomatic skills, axiomatic states of mind, and paradigmatic paradigms, actions, not necessarily propositional, but that's key.
I thought that I thought that point was key that the that the axiomatic paradigms wouldn't necessarily need to be propositional.
I was thinking, I was thinking that just before he said it actually.
So was I, and you know, a good point To note about the inexhaustible intelligibility, right?
Also good.
Good to get these terms in.
Good that nobody stopped on one of those because any one of those, it's like you know, it's like mind sweeper.
There could have been uh like, well, what do you mean by two say inexhaustible?
But yeah, each one of those is a potential rabbit hole for wormhole for them to delve into.
So it's good that they gingerly stepped over them.
Chris, I mean, jokes aside, I didn't actually understand any of that.
Did you did you?
Oh, I mean well, to be honest, I I didn't follow a huge amount there because it it felt like it was just pointless babble, but like techno babble, because yes, I I understand that they're wanting to say it's actually broader than this specific category, but each of those words that they invoked today will have a specific semantic web that they attach to it, and who knows what that is.
So yeah, you know, they they're just talking about why he used the word touchstone, right?
Like, let's keep let's keep a grip on what's going on here.
The touchstone thing wasn't even a key component, it's not connected to the what they were talking about just before.
But anyway, if you're interested, that's why he mentioned use the word touchstone.
Oh, they're not done, Matt.
There's more when he used the word touchstone, it made Jordan think about something else, but and uh it is a bit Jungian, it is a bit Freudian.
So uh I'm sorry, you said you know, let's not, but well, let's and I think that that well, I think you have an you have you have a fount of inexhaustible intelligibility, and I think that is ultimately the the touchstone, it's the sense of contact, and it gives us the comparative reflective judgment of what is most real.
So, you know, that reminds me of uh the representations of Moses' staff.
I was thinking about Moses' staff when you were talking about that first stage.
I think you described it not as orientation, origin, origin, yeah.
So Moses' staff is a symbol of center point, right?
That's right, right, right, and it's got a it's got a stable element, which is the tree, let's say it's the tree of life, it's the staff of life, but it also transforms into a serpent, right?
So it's it's order, it's order with the lifeblood of chaos still within it, and wisdom, because the serpent's also wise, right?
Yeah, well, serpent's wise partly because it sheds its skin and can transform entirely exactly.
So Moses, Moses' staff, this is relevant to your concern about pathological super egos.
That's right, you know, because you could say part, and maybe this is partly why the left, like the left suffers from that, I think, to a large degree, because when the left examines hierarchies, they see corrupt power.
Yeah, so you know, you you were asking Matt about you know what so the touchstone point.
I just I think it's worth noting that now we're on to Moses staff and serpents, right?
And and serpents are smart, Matt, because they can shed their skin.
No, that's that's true.
That's very true.
I've forgotten what were they talking about before they got distracted by the word touchstone?
Normativity, normativity, right?
So, like you need a touchstone of something, right?
In order to compare other things, and then they got on the shadows and sticks, and then the when Verveki was talking about touchstones, it made Jordan think about Moses' staff, because of course it did.
I guess uh and I like that he, you know, of course, as I have pointed out in the previous segment, and and we'll point out more so as we go on.
Jordan Peterson mentions religious uh story or Bible figure, talks a little bit about psychology, mentions something about verticality, he said hierarchies, and then he links it to like politics.
This is what the left gets gets wrong, right?
So the universal grammar of sense making or Jordan Peterson's particular brand of it continues to manifest itself in this conversation, so yeah, yeah, but but the way that the conversation proceeds is like a kind of a dream sequence of you know segueing things just you know one to the other.
It's um it it I don't need to be too mean here, but honestly, it does remind me of uh schizophrenic word salad.
Like this is what like I've read transcripts of schizophrenics babbling, and it's not that different from this.
Okay, well, look, what about this comparison?
Couldn't this be a French cafe late at night with a bunch of nilists?
I mean, no, not nihilists, but I'm just saying, like, you know, I I feel like could don't you have people that engage in in this kind of symbolic yes and different spheres than schizophrenics, like schizophrenics are are proficient at it, but I feel like artists and dorm room students who also are also guilty.
Yeah, proficient at this.
I think um I think we can compromise.
I think it's on the boundary.
I think it's on the boundary of an incredibly yeah, pretentious, incredibly academic-y wank and um schizophrenia.
That's probably where I'd play.
Intellectual masturbation.
That is that is the way I would put it as well.
That's that's what it is.
But you know, so we're making progress, we're getting somewhere.
So we were we were on touchstones, but we've raised the issue of hierarchies, or I mean Jordan has hierarchies.
No, in that now, we know, of course, from Jordan's other work.
I used that word loosely that hierarchies are good.
Um, you know, hierarchies are good, yes.
Hierarchy is absolutely good.
Um, but power is is bad.
Um it's not about power, right?
That's right.
You got it.
So let's let's hear Jordan Ideline that point again.
But then the question arises if some hierarchies aren't degenerated into power, then what's the principle of the hierarchy?
Right?
And you can see echoes of that in the culture war that we're having right now about the definition of merit.
Right.
What's well, what's the principle that rules if it's not power?
Right now, this is why I've been playing with this too.
So some of it's voluntary self-sacrifice, but that's also where I think ideas of play start to become important.
Yeah, I think it's fun.
I think we're I think what we've I think it's not power.
I think it's this uh the like love, beauty, reason, play are all what uh what Frankfurt calls voluntary necessities.
They're compelling, but they're not compulsive.
Yeah, uh, we we we say I I would do no other, but I feel totally free in doing it.
Okay.
Well, that's that sounds good.
A voluntary uh necessity.
So that's good.
So play, play is good.
Uh hierarchies, beauty.
Reason.
Yeah, they're all good.
And uh and merit, merit is also merit is also good.
That's right.
That's that's the kind of thing that puts you puts you up there uh on the hierarchy, and that's why it's not corrupt, because you know, you but you belong you belong in your place on the hierarchy.
Exactly.
Like when you look at America today and you see the people at the top of the Trump administration, you're seeing people operating purely on merit.
As far as the I can see so much merit.
Not they're not there because of like sycophancy and party politics and all that kind of thing.
It's Merrick.
They've ascended competency hierarchies, RFK Jr., Dan Bon Gino, Pam Bondi, all at the top of the game.
That's that's it.
So yes, Jordan's nailed that one.
So okay, they've invoked there, Matt, the concept of play.
Okay.
Yeah.
Somebody somebody said the word play.
So, well, inevitably this happens.
You think it would be reasonable to make play central to that notion?
Because my suspicions are this is in form partly from studying Panks psychology of play, right?
And yeah, play is a fragile motivational state.
It can be disrupted by the dominion of virtually any other motivational state, but you added beauty and love and like higher order values to that.
But I guess my question would be is What you're doing with those higher order values in that state of voluntary, what did you crowd the voluntary voluntary necessity?
Voluntary necessity.
Is that state of voluntary necessity?
Is that the definition of play?
I I think it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to.
Um I think uh and I think they're all ways of tracking the I I'm proposing the alternative to power.
Oh, I like it.
The reaction there was good.
Okay, okay, yeah, that's pretty good.
Because is this a definition of play that is being invoked?
The voluntary necessity.
Ah, is that well, it's the definition of the genius that play belongs to.
Right.
And I like I like like Jordan Hall hasn't got a chance to say that much.
But he liked that.
He liked nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's a that's a good way to say that something is like kind of definitionally connected, but is it a definition?
Well, yeah, well, yeah, uh you don't want to say no, because that would um uh violate all kinds of discourse.
Bruno Mega.
But that that doesn't that doesn't apply there.
But you so again, I mean, yeah, you know, this is illustrating to the nth degree this point, but like they're just leaping from word to what I mean, touchstone, forget about that.
That's that's that's in the past, man.
Yes, you defined that.
We're way beyond that now.
Um we're on play.
Now we're on play.
What play has got to do with the half dozen other things that they've covered is uh is unclear.
But um, let's proceed.
Well, let's proceed.
Yes, and this next slide, Matt will highlight, you know, like we talked about the different kind of references and the hobby horses that they have.
Now, John Verbake, he's guy that likes nature and martial arts and this kind of thing.
Jordan Peterson, he's a man that likes the Bible.
So uh listen to this exchange.
I find this telling.
Look, think about the moments when you feel called.
You come around the corner as you're tracking through the wilderness, and unexpectedly, uncontrollably, there's the sunset that's beautiful, and you enter into a moment of resonance, and you feel that you're in contact with something more real.
See, reality has to have an element that exceeds us, that is beyond us, and we have to have a responsivity to it, a faithful openness to it.
That's also that's something that's intensely desirable.
I mean, I think like one of the insistences in both the old and new testament is that in the fundamental, in the in the final analysis, what's at the pinnacle is ineffable, right?
So if you there's no end to to the traveling up Jacob's ladder, and that means that the ineffable transcendent is by definition outside our reach.
And there's there's uh there's a cost for that.
Rare for Jordan to bring up the Bible and verticality, but he managed to manage to get it there.
I mean, you you might think that looking at a oh, you know, you're going for a walk, you're you you're you're in nature, it's all very lovely.
You see a sunset.
Oh, it's beautiful.
It brings you out of yourself.
It's very, it's very poetic.
And Jordan Peterson is that's like the Bible.
Like going up Jacob's letter, ascending the dominance hierarchy, etc.
etc.
There's a there's a pinnacle.
That's a pinnacle experience, right?
It's at the top.
At the top makes me really come.
It is like that.
And you know, so that's what you know.
Jordan Peterson, he drops in references to the Bible and the verticality.
Like once you realize that that's what he does, he just doesn't use endlessly.
It's quite remarkable.
Uh but the other thing he does, and that all the sense speakers do is they drop in references to famous world literature or intellectuals, you know, that are known for our history.
Here's an example of this.
Right.
And and you could also imagine that there isn't a limit to that.
That the mysteries that might grab your attention, even if you're operating at a relatively high level of apprehension, there's no limit upward to that.
That's kind of what Tolstoy experienced when he had a dream that resolved his suicidality.
And he had a vision of uh first of all, being hung over a uh he was he was at a great height, right?
He was hung over like an abyss, an infinite abyss, which is like an existential catastrophe.
And when he finally looked up, he could see a rope that was holding him above the abyss, but it disappeared into the unknowable, right?
Notice upwards, Matt.
I rope.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we got some dream analysis.
Uh Tolstoy.
Of Tolstoy's dream, um, which is which is helpful.
Um, so the so his point there is that even when you're operating at a high level, you're attuned with the universe, and um, you know, you're you're you're maximizing your competence.
Like Tolstoy.
Like Tolstoy would be.
There's like uh there's an infinite amount of good things you could.
I don't know.
You can always go up the ladder or climb the rope or it's infinite, yeah.
That's right.
It always will take you up and up because yeah, because you know God's up there, so he's infinite.
So makes sense.
You're following along, Matt.
You're following along.
Now this is good.
Now, next step for thing for you.
We've only been we've only touched the sense making waters.
They haven't even got started yet.
The cord, but this next clip I thought was classic sense making.
So let's see how many sense making tropes you could get.
I believe this is just Jordan Peterson referring himself, but let's see how many of the tropes he manages to hit on.
I think we talked a little bit.
I was at a party with you recently.
We talked a little bit about an extension of ecological, what's the ecological approach to visual perception?
Who's Gibson?
Right.
So Gibson talked about tools and obstacles, right?
So you you set a goal, you see a pathway.
The objects that you perceive are tools and obstacles, everything else is irrelevant.
That's associated with your idea of relevance realization.
But there's you can add layers to that.
So you have tools and obstacles, you have friends and foes, that'd be the equivalent on the social level, and then there's another level too, which is like agents of magical transformation, and agents of magical transformation are beings or phenomena that emerge into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being.
And the the more distant up the Jacob's ladder that emissary, the more the quality of magic would obtain.
And it the magic would be that the interloper is bringing with it a new set of axioms, a new set of rules.
So that's the magic.
It's right, like something magic plays by different rules.
And so then there'd be a hierarchy of rules up Jacob's ladder, essentially, something like that.
That is something.
That is something.
Um I'm vaguely familiar with Gibson's ecological perception theory stuff.
For Gibson.
Paul Gibson.
That's right.
I mean, probably Gibson wouldn't know that it also involved perceiving angels of magical transformation.
Um, that are that are lifting you up to a higher agents, map.
Well, but the angels are an example of the an agent.
So yes, yeah, that's uh, yeah.
Are they the are they the are they real?
Well, you know, it was a big surprise for me again to hear Jacob's ladder coming in at the end.
And I just I wasn't expecting that.
That was out of that field, but you know, my again, reference to real thinker, big thinker, you know, researcher, talk about definitions and specific words, tools, obstacles, friends, yeah, toes, right?
When Gibson was writing about affordances and things like that, and specific stuff, the environment in terms of ways you can interact with it.
What he was really getting at was the ladder, Jacob's ladder, yeah, but the angels and sans makers like this esoteric mysticism, religious stuff, right?
Like so that always comes in.
So, yes, you've got agents, objects, tools, obstacles, but really also magical beings and and supernatural things and and stuff, and those are the really transformative stuff, and then link it to the Bible verticality, just to finish off.
So, like Anakin said, now this is sense making.
It sure is, but you know, like Jordan is really directed, like as You've been emphasizing.
He's very directed at his sense making.
Like his one mission in life is to kind of connect everything, but in particular the sort of philosophical psychology stuff that he likes to the Bible and his version of Christianity.
Like fusing those two things together is really his mission.
Yeah, no, I so that's a good illustration of Jordan's sense making the response to this, John Vervaiki types up.
Yeah, I think uh uh I I agree.
I think the uh if reality is if uh if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot make it determinatively intelligible.
We can't fully grasp it.
I think that's really the ineffable.
Yeah, and I think what that does is, and and this is what my proposal, what I think existential conscience is as opposed to pathological psychological conscience.
Existential conscience is to realize our correct attitude, our correct comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly, but it also withdraws in mystery.
And I think that, and this is Plato's central argument, which I just sort of powerful realization that this is I finally understood what Augustine meant when he said that Christianity was the continuity, uh, the continuum or even the completion of Greek philosophy.
The correct comportment, Plato talked about was finite transcendence.
You have to hold like this tonos, this creative like the tension of the bow.
You have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent.
We are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence.
But if you just identify with that, you fall prey to despair and you become servile and manipulatable.
You have to remember your transcendence.
I imagine um Jordan Peterson would like that a lot, both the mysticism and the connections of how Greek philosophy, you know, basically was kind of fully realized in Christian philosophy.
Um the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, and the inexhaustible points to the fact that we cannot make it determinative.
Determinatively intelligible.
Yes, because we cannot grasp the ineffable.
So um and that's I mean, he makes a heroic effort there to connect whatever it is they're talking about back to conscience, his his thing about the Oh, yeah, he did do that, he did do that.
Yeah, and um I thought you were gonna say Plato, because you know, Jordan connects things to the Bible, but for Vervake, it should connect to Plato.
I haven't heard much about Hermes.
No, it was Hermes.
Yeah, it's another thing, Matt.
You know, we're it's fair to say poking fun a little bit at this conversation, but according to Verve that is fair, thank you.
According to Vervackey, this conversation has just allowed him to have a breakfast.
A revelation is a powerful revelation that he finally understood, you know, what uh Saint Augustine meant when he said so.
We are poking fun, but if you have the ears to listen, this is actually really a quite powerful conversation.
Um yeah, because we've we've had the realization that um it's all about finite transcendence, us limited beings that we are, Chris, crawling around in the mud, we have within us this divine spark, this ability to perceive the infinite, and that's the thing that can raise us out of sin and decadence and despair.
I I do agree with Hermes that Vervaiki is uh perhaps taking something off a road, uh, you know, a winding road towards Christianity.
Uh, because I do detect certain motifs and um like it it continues here.
And I think existential conscience is the call to constantly re-inhabit and re-identify with holding both remembering that reciprocal remembering of your finite and your transcendence.
And I think the incarnation and the crucifixion are the enactment of like of finite transcendence.
That's just what I was thinking, because I thought if Pagel was here, that'd be the first thing he pointed out.
Yeah, so that's yeah, he'd love to point that out to me.
Well, because well, yeah, because you have this insistence in Christian theology that Christ as God puts on mortality comprehensively, right?
It's not just death, it's kenosis.
It's the deep self-emptying, right?
And this all the way down.
All the way down.
Not past death into hell.
Uh I um I sometimes feel bad making fun of this because I mean they they're very passionate about it.
Like they are really they're into it.
This is they're getting a lot out of it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't I don't really take issue over people getting excited about you know the their interpretation of the symbology of the crucifixion or that kind of thing.
But I I do think it's worth keeping in mind about what is being said here, because essentially a lot of this boils down to big words connected to some thinker loosely from philosophy or psychology,
or some discussion of words, and then ultimately, ultimately, Matt and uh the Vervake does this lesson, Peterson, but as we're just seeing, he doesn't mind to do it.
Connect it to the Bible, connect it to Christianity, connect it to Jesus.
But there's a lot of that going on.
And like if this was a theological conference, I'd understand, but it's it's not sold as uh as uh yeah, you know it's it's it's not sold as theology, but yeah, I know what you mean.
Like it is like this the whole discussion just circles around theological concepts.
Um, like you know, it's speculative sense maker-y version of it.
But but like even me, atheist that I am, I can recognize that stuff.
Like, I know that that's the whole deal with Christ and the crucifixion and the whole thing that he was you know, totally like uh limited human being with and also God, and that's that's the great mystery and the connection between you know, like even I know that.
So I guess they just they are reprising, relatively standard, you know, bits of Christianity theological discussion, yeah, yeah.
And that's that's fine if that's what it is.
But that I feel like it's billed as something slightly different.
And Matt, this particularly triggered me.
Let's see if you can work out what upset me here.
This is a discussion about terror management theory.
Then like the terror management theorists who aren't very pessimistic in my estimation, think that much of human motivation it springs, or even all springs from the denial of death, right?
That's a Freud, that's a Freudian trope.
But that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways.
One of them empirically undermined too.
Well, we'll have to talk about that because I don't know about the I know of alternative models that fit the data better, but I don't know of any direct challenges to it.
But in any case.
What do you think?
What do you think triggered me there, Matt?
I think what triggered you is that Jordan Peterson doesn't know it doesn't care uh whether or not there is any empirical support for the you know sexy terror management theory stuff.
Quite right, quite right.
All he cares is he wants to talk about like what he thinks is a better interpretation, right?
But he his interest in like the validity of the data or the the strength of the evidence, that kind of stuff.
Who would give a shit about that?
To Vakey's credit, he at least is aware.
He's aware, that's right.
Yeah, actually, Chris, just as total upside.
I um when I first started working at my current university, I was helped out a colleague who had a like a terror management theory interpretation of some some topic.
He actually had a kind of a fun little experiment where he would actually get people to hold a crocodile, like a small, like a small alligator or crocodile, I can't remember, like not a dangerous one, but but still the so the this was the main question.
Yeah, I think so.
But yeah, I mean, so the whole thing that's meant to the idea was is this would cause a bit of terror.
Uh yeah, and and then see if uh people reacted to that by um you know gambling more and stuff.
And it works.
No, no, not at all.
I do like that's a lovely experiment though.
Hold this crack about he he actually won the Ignoble Prize, you know the Nobel Prize.
Oh, he won that.
He won't.
Yeah.
That is also that just does speak to me what you psychologists, pure psychologists like to do.
You know, that's the kind of what if we get someone to hold a crocodile and then play some.
Yeah, I've got this really wild theory.
And uh as to the mechanism now is gonna cause something completely unrelated.
To be fair though, to be fair to him, I like that a lot better than I do like the word search games where like a lot of terror management theory or mortality salient stuff.
Some of it is quite direct, like write about your death, like write a paragraph about your death.
That's good.
I think that's a relatively good manipulation.
But there were ones like we've done a word scrabble task, and if you unscrabble some of the words, they relate to coffin instead of coffee, and so on.
And like I've been involved with research that did that, and that just struck me as wildly implausible at the time, and the data bears rare.
So but yes, so I was triggered by Jordan Peterson being like, Well, I don't know anything about that, and I don't, and I'm like, of course you don't.
Of course, you know nothing.
That's all right.
I think, but it does give you insight to how Jordan Peterson operates, right?
But in his head canon is is a bunch of random psychology style factoids like that, and something like um, yeah, mortality salence and terror management stuff.
Is he's obviously gonna like that, right?
It's it's sexy.
I mean, you he likes a map, but he's got a better explanation for it.
He thinks they're you know this is that's the raw material, right?
That feeds into his thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I wonder if his interpretation will connect the verticality at the Bible.
I wonder.
Let's find out but um well, actually, this next little bit, I think it's beautiful because what we've mostly been hearing is John Vervake and Jordan Peterson go back and forth, right?
You've heard a couple of absolutely well, yes, from Jordan Hall.
We've heard him make a couple of analogical definitions, but he hasn't contributed that much.
And John Vervake notes this.
He makes this little aside here, and he's referencing Jordan Hall.
I agree, I agree.
I think and and and first of all, I'll I'll say something, and I want to be quiet because I want you to talk more.
Uh um because I value what you have to say.
I could just say that every time I cut you off.
I'll say this, uh that'll be crap because because you know, I do care this.
Do you value what I have to say, Chris?
Do you I do most of the time, I do, yeah.
That's true.
It's fair.
But I I and there's nothing wrong with that, right?
That is no, it's not he's a nice guy, right?
He yeah, yeah.
Interpersonally, very much so, and um, you know, he means well, but it's just it is that kind of squishy, soft kind of padding each other kind of thing.
You and I don't do that.
We're not cut, we're not cut from the same cloth.
No, we're not as nice as Vravake, but um so you know, they go on to talk about stuff, but and then Jordan pivots to Jordan Hall.
It's like, well, you know, tell us, Jordan, like when did you get interested in this, right?
So he prompts him to explain things, and uh and Jordan Hall responds that it's this is just beautiful.
How is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from the entrepreneurial, let's say?
Hmm.
I'm gonna answer that in a moment, but first I want to just say something here.
Um I think it's it's useful to notice again, and I guess I'm playing the role of self-referentiality.
That while it may appear that I'm not talking, we don't actually really under understand reality very well.
And I feel like I'm quite present to what's happening.
So it may very well be the case that I'm participating meaningfully, even though you can't hear the sounds come out of my mouth.
And you're gifted at that.
I just uh I'm also aware of the fact that listening.
I'm also aware of the fact though there's there's an opportunity here for you.
Sometimes I say things.
Okay.
Chris, do you remember that scene from Best in Show where the lady is there with a very old husband, and she's saying, We have so much in common.
You know, she's like buried up, she's like a gold digger.
She's married this week.
We have so much in Colin.
We we like to talk about, you know, we we we both like Sprouts and we both like visual, and we could we could talk or we've we're always finding things to talk about and not talk about.
We could we could sit and not find things to Not talk about for hours.
I've never seen best in show, which is why I didn't interrupt you there, Matt.
To let you for the listeners and for my benefit, you you are glad.
But but yes, that's that's we'll play the clip.
We'll play the clip.
I didn't we'll play that clip.
Yeah, we both have so much in common.
We both love soup.
And uh we love the outdoors.
Uh we love snow peas and uh talking and not talking.
Uh we could not talk or talk forever and still find things to not talk about.
Looks because the thing about Jordan Hall is that he's an alpha, right?
He usually dominates.
He wouldn't want people to have the impression uh that he's sexually his point.
He is actively actively listening.
Not taking part, not taking part, yes.
Yeah, I I mean, like it's fine, right?
Like it's fine.
He's responding to this to say, okay, look, I haven't contributed much, but you know, the like don't feel bad for me because I've got to be a good idea.
Yeah, I'm just happy to listen.
But you could just say that you could just say I I don't mind.
I'm I'm just happy to be here and happy to listen.
But it's the way that he says, first of all, he says, look, it might appear that I'm not talking, but we don't actually understand reality very well.
You know, am I not participating?
And then he's like, actually, is it not the gest that I'm participating meaningfully, even though you can't hear songs covered out of my and I I did think like in what sense do you participate in a conversation by you know not making signs?
I guess like the fact that you're there, it inspires people to talk about different things, and you can do head nods, you can say, mm-hmm, and Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris.
You're so concrete, you're such a materialist.
Yeah, he at a cosmic level, there is stuff going on that you don't even know about me.
Well, that's actually true.
It'll take months for me to realize well the worthwhile contribution was from all of this.
But yes, he did give the analogy about the baby grasping the pea.
Let's not forget that.
Yes, he did.
He did do that, and he did say that conscience is recognizing the discordant note.
So he did do that.
Look, I'm not here to litigate who's made the most contributions to this conversation.
It's not for you to say.
Not for us.
Yeah, that's that's not our job here.
But I I will also say that I don't think the speaking the most necessarily means that you've contributed the most sense, right?
Your conversation.
And I will just say too, that there is no shade at all if if you find yourself in a room as Jordan Peterson and you fight it's the case that you cannot get a word in edgeways.
You should not be embarrassed about that.
That is that is natural and normal.
Look, Matt, can I can I just reference an example that's a little close to home?
A little bit, you know, let's let's stop poking the poor Jordan Hall and uh, you know, uh what poking their sensitive spots, okay?
Let's let's turn the looking glass round on ourselves.
Now at one point we had a conversation with a fellow called Sam Harris.
During that conversation, you were present, Matt.
You were there, okay.
But verbally, you were not that present throughout the conversation.
Um, and then at the end, you know, you emerged, you attempted conciliance, which failed.
Um failed, yeah.
Yeah, and you said, you know, I've been here, I've been enjoying listening, and blah blah blah.
But one thing that was quite funny is you you did not say like, and I just to be clear, I have been contributing.
But um, like there is an issue when that kind of thing happens, right?
It's you need the you feel there's an obligation to say, look, I haven't sorry, I haven't contributed much, but I've been enjoying the discussion.
That's what normally happens.
It's it's just that the way that he delivers that.
And in that case, uh I I think we made this clear in the following episodes, but your lack of contribution was your choice.
Was Your choice.
And actually, in that occasion, unlike Jordan Hall, you were contributing via messages that we were typing to each other about ways to free his thing and whatnot.
So it's fair to say it's fair to say my reaction to Sam Harris's monologues is kind of non-plussed, I think.
So that's true.
I should I should have asked you to summarize.
Well, what did Sam just say there?
I would have been checking my phone.
I could stay on my phone for hours.
Fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So anyway, look, all fine to uh for Jordan's.
It's fine.
I mean, but look, it's the fundamental thing.
It is sense making first and foremost is just incredibly pretentious.
And I think self-indulgent.
And self-indulgent.
That is the um that's the key thing there.
So he's saying a thing that a normal person would say, just in the most pretentious way possible.
Possible.
Yeah, yeah.
And like in this conversation, as you mentioned, like, you know, Jordan Hall is is kind of the third fiddle or second fiddle to the pairing of Jordan Peterson and John Fervicki, right?
They're bouncing off each other.
In the previous sense making cubes, sense making about sense making conversation that we covered, Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger were the more engaged interlocutors, where Jimmy Wheel was playing the kind of third wheel, if you will.
And that was called out there, and they discussed it.
So this is something that they do because they're you know, they're sense makers.
So they they talk about why are we having this conversation?
They talk about the dynamics in the conversation, they discuss who's talking, you know, most and what that signals and so on.
So this is just the nature.
I think this will happen if you have a sense making conversation for long enough, you will eventually reference about that specific conversation and the contours of that conversation.
Exactly.
Yeah, so it happened at that uh original sense making cube thing as well.
And uh yeah, it's all about self-referentiality, you know.
It's it's like turning the looking glass inwards and digging in, you know, that that idea that they talk about they they love the concept of play and creative play and and and and you know, the dialogue us and connecting together.
So they are very much like the process of what they're doing just fascinates them.
Like, and that is kind of the main the main object of their curiosity.
Yeah, and that that is why I think you and I often draw analogies with like postmodernism, because within that movement, or you you could say like critical theory or the referential tone and uh anthropology or whatever, there's a lot of that that like the work should be self-referential, you should be turning the looking gears round and introspect on like you as the organization.
Self-reference.
Yes, that's the word I was looking for.
So you know, that's part and parcel.
So that's why there is those parallels in some respect, because that is something that is recommended from people who come from the genre, which in other ways is like very different from what they're doing.
Yeah, and well, and and that's what I experienced as an undergraduate with those communication-oriented units I was forced to take, which was I don't I don't think you'd call it exactly post-modern, but it was definitely kind of critical theoretic, you know.
And it was it was just like this.
It was this self-referential disappear up your own asshole stuff.
I hated it then.
Neville King.
I hate it my entire life.
Yeah, I don't want anything to do with it.
And that's not that interesting, but yes, consider your personality.
There's nothing there's nothing to be found up there, you know, it's just leave it alone.
But um, well, anyway, so so let's continue on.
That was that was just a side show.
The other thing about Jordan Hall, Matt, you probably remember this because we did cover it in a supplementary material, but Jordan Hall has been sense making for quite a long time.
Um, somewhere around the um probably late elementary school, I began to notice that the world that we live in, or at least the world that I have been thrown into was suffering some significantly from making any sense whatsoever.
Sort of haphazardly thrown together in a fashion that tended to produce more negative than positive.
Think about just what happens when you go to school.
How old were you when when that started to become a focus of attention?
Do You think?
Well, fourth grade.
Oh, yeah, okay.
Um, and then uh similarly the same noticing, for example, like, oh wait, I'm sitting in front of a television in the context of my home, which is lying to me continuously with a highly effective capacity to manipulate.
And yet that seems to be something that the people who are around me seem to be perfectly okay with.
Hmm.
That's interesting.
So a sense of there's something way off, it's way off, and curiosity about okay, well, what would right look like and how might we accomplish that?
So you can see how those two things linked together.
Yeah, we get some insight there into um Jordan Hall's nascent genesis as a sense maker.
It happened, it happened early, it happened young, it happened in the context of his home.
Uh while he was perceiving the television.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's uh so Jordan Hall, he's been sense making from a young age.
We've established that, and the kind of things which he's nice and smoking about are like this.
I would call it pseudo metanoia right there.
Like if you imagine you're going the wrong direction and metanoia is to turn you into the right direction, pseudo-metanoia at least turns you perpendicular to going in the wrong direction.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kind of like dead reckoning.
Yeah, and the trouble, of course, is if you get stuck in pseudo metanoia, you don't get pointed in the right direction.
You're now in a therapeutic loop where you're constantly drifting back here, unless you happen to be in a very healthy context, which will begin to drift you in this direction.
A healthy context.
So out of the context of the house and then do a healthy context.
But Matt, that's that's what you know, sans speaking from the your early teenage years does to you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It does.
Yeah, I don't think we've got time to listen to all of Jordan Hall's reminiscences here, but you know, he paints a picture.
You know, he was attuned to things from a very young age.
You could see that he he lived in a world where things didn't make any sense, people were lying, people were happy to be lied to, and um he was uh asking the big questions, uh the philosophical questions.
Well, they I mean, just to make it clear, Matt, they do nail it down the precisely like those were the first inklings of sense making, but there's more precision that can be added.
He would actually have to find a way to embed himself in a world that was in continuous contact with that sort of perspective.
Yes, yes, to expand that territory to include the whole of his life and the whole of all that he loves.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, that's probably what the Protestants are like, and that was my that was my my pivot in sixth grade.
Okay, okay.
So sixth grade is when I had that thought of it's you can't solve the problem by don't by controlling a particular sphere in which you can find something like solace or joy, because you have to create an entire world that has that continuity for everything that you love.
And so that was the dual vector for me.
Wow, that's a pretty big insight the to have at such a tender age.
Um to remember individual faults, yeah.
Has your I don't I don't remember much.
What was I thinking in sixth grade?
But then again, this is what I'm not a sense maker, okay.
So I'm I don't have the right stuff.
Um what was can just as an exercise, Chris.
Do you think can you can you put what Jordan Hall was saying in your own words there?
Just not criticizing it, just Omega principle.
Just reflect it back.
What what was Jordan saying then?
What was Jordan saying then?
Um, so trying to recreate.
I believe they were talking there about like depression and you know, overcoming nihilism.
And then that's why Jordan Hall got onto the pseudo-metanoia point, right?
Right.
That the you you're you don't want to be perpendicularly going in the wrong direction.
You don't want to be perpendicular to where you want to be going.
No, yeah.
So he managed to recognize that to get out of these like dead ends, you have to, you know, you have to sense me.
You gotta go beyond these looking for solutions in the wrong place.
That's what was happening.
But he saw there was a you know another way out of it.
So that was the dual what was the dual vector for him, the dual vector.
Uh the dual vector.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You remember he was talking about you can't create a particular sphere Where you could find joy, but because that would mean you would have to create the entire world that has continuity for everything that you love.
And that was the dual vector.
And uh what's the dual vector?
I don't know the specific thing that dual vector refers to.
It's like related to agency and his business and stuff like this, but you're getting hung up on the details.
But it's not like that specific word matters.
What are you?
A sets maker?
Why didn't you choose that word?
Like he's just no, I'm just trying to know what he's referring to.
What on earth any of it means?
Um anyway.
Um I think the vibe, I think the vibe is clear, right?
You know, he's it's it's finding joy, happiness, not being perpendicular to the direction you need to be going.
Um so he wanted the because basically part of this conversation is that Jordan Peterson presented, you know, you were a um successful businessman.
So you were like kind of pragmatically oriented, and at some point you became philosophically engaged.
And like when was that pivot?
But Jordan Hall wants to say, no, no, no, no.
I've been always like this.
I was I was always sans making since I was a child.
And he he makes this point that he had a meeting because he he was involved with Div X, right?
This like video codec kind of uh thing, right?
You know DivX, but so listen to his story.
He wants to highlight the Jordan that no, you're getting him wrong if you think he was a businessman who became a philosopher.
He was always philosopher.
Um and then in the meantime, like here's a scene where in 2005, my third company has gotten to the point where it's quite successful and worth a lot of money.
I'm in the office at the Google headquarters where I'm gonna be meeting with Sergey Brynn.
They're talking to me about buying the company.
Which company was this?
It's called DivX, DIVs.
And in the lobby, I'm reading uh Gidelo's um A Thousand Plateaus.
And so in the in the moment where I'm about to actually have a serious business meeting about my company being acquired by what at the time was by deaf by Steps, the ascendant giant of the space, my curiosity is still pointing to okay, what's going on here in the world of like uh post-structuralism?
So these things they're very tightly wound for me continuously.
Yeah, so just to be clear, my you know, he will he was still reading, you know, Dan's philosophy books whenever he was in a successful man in the world of tech startups.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was he was there, you know, ready to go into the interview because to do a big business deal with Sergey Brynn, Google, just saying, and reading Gidday, is that uh uh Deluze?
I don't know how to pronounce it.
I don't know how to pronounce it either.
No, Gilles Deleuze.
Yeah.
But anyway, reading French philosophy just before going, that's that's a good story.
That's a good story.
He's he seems like quite the man to be you know, philosopher king, yes.
And then well, after that, Jordan's right, well, okay, that's yes, that's a very good, very important.
Okay, so back to this point with John, right?
So you get uh you get an interlude there, but but then later, when uh Jordan has been silent again for quite a while.
Jordan, you know, suggests, okay, we've been talking about some things, maybe this relates, Jordan, to that, you know, the stories that you shared earlier about you know your proclivity for sense making.
And um, so Jordan Hall gives some more examples.
And I think Jordan Peterson's reaction to it is is quite interesting.
So this is later in the conversation, right?
And he's he's giving more examples from his personal life, Jordan Hall that says making very concrete as an example.
There were two uh that I remember quite clearly.
One was a McDonald's happy meal, which was in fact not at all happy when you actually got it.
Um, and then the other one was uh the president, Richard Nixon, um explicitly saying something on the television, and then having my grandfather over here letting everybody in the family know that that was a lie.
So there's the two events that I remember going, huh?
So I live in a culture where this kind of thing happens.
I didn't think it in that way, but I remember the feeling landing very heavily on me.
Um, that means I can't actually This is like the the child who has an alcoholic parent who begins to have to take responsibility for parenting because they notice.
So our culture is an alcoholic parent.
It's actually a really good metaphor.
That's brilliant, John.
Yeah, it's a really good metaphor.
Um and so that feeling of, oh, I need to start taking responsibility for navigating this world.
Why didn't you make that just okay?
But that's not the only like in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain fails and he gets alienated from God, and in consequence of that.
So he experiences a landscape of trouble, let's say.
But his response isn't to take responsibility.
His response is to curse fate and I wasn't alienated from God.
I was alienated from our culture.
Those aren't the same.
Import point of the way.
Yeah, but but they they can easily become the same.
Like people don't challenge Jordan Peterson like that.
Don't challenge his don't tell when he's going on a Bible thing.
Just let him go.
What's he doing?
So Jordan Hall was talking about a happy meal that wasn't happy.
And that would have been traumatic.
And Richard Nixon.
It's grandfather said Richard Nixon's a liar.
Yeah.
In the context of his house.
I know the society where politicians are liars.
And happy middles uh not always happy.
Um that yeah, so big insights there.
Then they his metaphor is that he's like, so that made me think our culture is like an alcoholic parent, right?
The culture is supposed to be taking care of you.
Yeah.
But it's actually it's like it's actually corrupted and abusive.
And um, so you've got a man up and put on your big boy pants and uh make the world uh better place, right?
Yes.
So then Jordan Peterson butts in and's like, this reminds me of Keenan and Journal this kind of is like, no, well, it's not exactly right.
It's actually uh yeah, because it's not to nothing to do with God.
It's actually Nixon and happy males, neither of which I think one could mistake for God.
So that's fair, I think.
Fair fair for him to push back.
But then Jordan, Jordan's um response there, you there's no reply to that, which is that could become the same thing.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
And and actually you get Jordan attempting to work out.
How can happy meals and Richard Nixon be connected to God?
How can this be?
Or these things, you know, he might he was a therapist, right?
So there's things that Jordan Hall has selected there, which might be telling.
So, you know, the investigation continues.
Okay, but that didn't happen to you when you were a kid.
And you said you were you decided to take responsibility.
Okay, and you you also made reference to your grandfather.
Yeah.
Okay, so so did did he play a role in this?
Only in this particular episode.
Only in that episode.
Okay, so why didn't you despair and why did you decide to take responsibility?
And then what did that mean?
Well, I think the answer to why I didn't despair was that the so much of my life was still very much connected with just base reality as a kid, living in uh a physical environment, maneuvering around.
And so something like 95% of my life was it's possible to navigate reality in a fashion which works.
And were you doing that successfully?
Yeah, yeah.
My friends, along what dimensions?
You had friends.
I had friends, yes.
Okay, I would I was not hungry often.
The chat the child to you know puzzle out the the cutters, and so it continues.
Like how how did Jordan Hall go on after having the unsatisfying happy meal and hearing his grandfather criticize Richard Nixon?
How did he go on?
And the answer is he was moving around the world.
It was it's it's blowing in creeks, he was talking to people.
It's like, yeah, it's it's amazing how much they can drag our, you know, like these kind of like they shouldn't need to do this, right?
They should just let him get to the end of his point.
But so it continues, Ma.
What about your relationships with your parents at that point?
Pretty healthy, I'd say.
I think so.
Okay, so you were fairly firmly grounded.
So you had a platform that enabled you to determine what constituted the truth.
You could do it from the center out, Right.
Center out was pretty solid.
Right.
My own sort of physical body, my ability to maneuver in space, my ability to connect things, my relationships with my parents and my close family, my relationship with friends, my relationships with nature were all pretty solid.
So when I come against this error at the level of culture, that's the anomaly.
I don't have to worry about the center.
The center is pretty solid.
Yeah.
Why phrase it in terms of center and anomaly?
Well, anomaly in the sense that for the most part, again, everything is actually functioning reasonably well.
Chris, I guess I had this image in my mind of Jordan Hall maneuvering in space in the context of his home.
Can't get out of it.
I just can't cut that image out of my head.
Um, yeah, like what is this?
This this does illustrate, doesn't it?
Just like their ability to take anything and and pick it apart and psychoanalyze it and fasten upon the particular words that are used.
Like there is there is nothing that cannot furnish the tea leaves for a particular analysis.
And clearly Jordan Peterson's motivation here is to say, okay, we're gonna take this story, Jordan Hall's sense maker-y self self-congratulation.
Self-revelation, yeah.
Yeah, self-congratulatory anecdote about how pretty amazing he was as a kid seeing the world for as it really is.
But Jordan Peterson's mission, of course, is to is to turn this into a kind of a parable, which amounts to his favorite things, which is about taking responsibility, you know, connecting with God, I don't know, maybe being a can we mention something vertical in this other character.
Where does the verticality come in?
I feel it must somewhere.
Yeah, so I but I do like that he's he's like kind of it sounds a bit like he's digging for trauma or you know, like a kind of Dr. K thing.
So how was relationships with your parents?
Was your grandfather?
You mentioned alcoholic, right?
You know, these kind of things.
But Jordan Hall's kind of like, no, no.
Like I was sad, friends, I was playing, it's it's all good.
And then he mentioned the freeest center anomaly.
So obviously, Jordan then's like, well, why did you select that one?
Just like you, Matt and dual vector.
Why did he say dual rector?
Uh that's uh and so they they talk for a little bit about anomalies and uh centers because of course they do, and this is basically where this segment ends.
This is what it leads to.
I have set now a new purpose.
My new purpose is to cajole my parents into taking me to McDonald's to get a happy meal.
I have noticed that in the act of doing that, I'm creating dissonance with my own relationship with my parents who are not happy about this thing.
I get the happy meal, the experience sucked, and I made my family mad.
Anomaly, purpose of value alignment, not anything.
Oh, yeah.
So uh so that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had a multiple dimensions of success, and I mean qualitatively distinct dimensions.
Yep.
So that's important, such that when you were introduced to the abstracted digital world, so to speak, and you saw that it was faulty, that didn't shake your face.
So now we're in a situation.
And you go they managed that, didn't they?
Isn't that connected and coherently?
Uh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um I don't know what that got to though.
Well, what you missed Matt, stop thinking about Jordan Hall rumaging around in his context of his house.
Like, to me, that's pretty clear, right?
So he had you know these experiences, like he had an unhappy, happy meal, and he had Richard Nixon's alliar.
And that led him to realize that he is not just a consumer of society, he must contribute to society.
Things aren't always what they seem.
They need to repair things, and so at the time he was in the world of tech.
This was chance play for him, right?
Literal child's play, because he was operating on so many different paradigms from such an early age that it was no problem for him to read French philosophy and you know, prepare to sell divx to Google.
Right.
Okay, good.
Yeah, no, that's helpful.
Thanks.
Yeah, you got it, okay.
So um that's where we that's where we got to.
No, I that was Jordan Hall's contribution.
That's basically it for the entire conversation.
But before they got to that map, there was a little bit more sense making before it got to there.
So, you know, in case you thought it was finished.
What about this?
So it was the that reminds me of a variety of things.
That the developmental psychologist Piaget spent his whole life studying children's play.
There were other things he studied too because he was a polymath.
But the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science.
None of the psychologists that I ever encountered ever told their students that, which is really quite sad because it was like, that's actually an important detail.
You do.
Yes, that doesn't surprise me, John.
Let's go back to the superego issue.
Right.
Yeah, well, I I have to admit I didn't didn't know that either.
Didn't know the Piaget's main goal is to reconcile science and religion.
Wouldn't surprise me because it wouldn't surprise me.
It wouldn't surprise me.
This is something that many older academics start to start to talk about later in life.
So yeah, and especially if you're a famous theorist.
But yes, that's that's sense making, right, Matt.
Reference famous fear is talk about a word and connect it to religion.
There we go.
Yeah, yeah.
Sense making, not complete, but but started.
And I think he did there introduce, you know, let's talk about the ego.
We've been talking as we know about conscience and about verticality and about all sorts of words we've defined.
But but what about ego?
I do really think like one of the things I've seen about the atheist crowd, for example, is that to be an atheist, from what I've been able to understand, requires two things.
One is a kind of alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism, and there's a kind of a Luciferian pretension that goes along with that.
But that's it, that's insufficient.
It also really helps if you were viciously hurt by someone religious.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And so if we let's let's delve into the nature of power a bit, and and not as not as ability, but as uh when the postmodernists make the proclamation that everything's a power game, let's say, that they're basically saying that power is the uniting meta-narrative or or procedure or world.
Now we're trying to distinguish between, or partly what we're trying to do is distinguish between the world that's governed by power and the world that's governed by these this other orientation that we're trying to flesh out.
So let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power.
Now you said that you're subject on a fairly regular basis to like uh a tyrannical Freudian superego.
Oh, those are some words.
Um it wouldn't be a Jordan Peterson uh interview if the postbombers didn't get the boot uh stuck here.
Yeah, and I thought the atheists were gonna get away with yeah, yeah.
That's it's that turn now.
Sorry.
An alliance with the reductive materialist rationalism, and there's a kind of Luciferian Luciferian pretensions.
I've no I've noticed this in you actually, Chris.
I've not as that's true.
Well, Jordan Peterson observed the same thing when he interacted with me and we were you ever viciously hurt by someone religious.
You probably were probably you grew up in Northern Islands.
They were also nice to me as well.
So you know, it's it's uh, but yeah, so it's part of the course, but Jordan Peterson's understanding of the atheism is that you have to be um uh broken, a broken person.
Yeah, you know, you're reeling against God for the crime of existence, or you're dealing with your trauma in all the wrong ways.
So it's Luciferian shit, that if he is materialist and and postmodern, you know, whatever.
They're all bad.
But he does tie this into as he opened us, Matt, that the postmodernists say it's all about power.
We've been fleshing out there's something else, you know, another unifying.
Let's say, for example, the Christian narrative as an alternative, maybe that's better.
But Verki, you might have thrown the spanner in the works by pointing out that sometimes conscience can be pathological, people can be self-critical and all that kind of thing.
So maybe we need to deal with that issue first.
How do we distinguish between you know the true impulse and and the false bad one?
How do you distinguish between an impulse of your conscience that's a manifestation of the tyrannical superego and one that's orienting you towards a higher good?
How can you tell the difference?
So good.
So the uh uh my response to the the situation that you were describing with the architect, what I do, what I've learned to do uh is um I ask the source of the normativity of the judgment that's being rendered against me.
The voice is saying, Whoa, that's not real.
Okay, tell me what real is then.
Tell me what your standard of realness is.
I get it to commit to a normativity, and then once it commits to a normativity, then I can bind it to what I was talking about earlier.
Okay, so so let me ask you a clarifying question.
Does that mean that conscience without call is unreliable?
Like is like if I'm stopping you and calling you out on your misbehavior, let's say, but I'm not providing an alternative pathway forward.
Is that one of the markers of pathological like tyrannical conscience?
I I I think so.
I but I don't know if that's the point I was making.
So let's not lose that point.
That's a good point.
So let's put a pin in that point.
The point I was trying to make is I can the pathological conscience isn't consistent about normativity.
What it does is constantly invokes normativity that it doesn't refute that it refuses to submit itself to.
Right.
Okay.
So the puzzling out here, the the problem of distinguishing between good conscience and bad conscience.
And a bad, yep, bad conscience, this tyrannical superego.
Of course, they love Freud, right?
I hate postmodernists, I hate atheists, but Freud, everything Freudian.
Freud and Jung, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, uh, but yeah, so okay, so the bad one, the neurotic one is the one that just kind of criticized you're just feeling bad about yourself, but there isn't like a clear path forward.
So the the good kind is he says it's a call.
The good kind is where it's like a you shouldn't do the you shouldn't be doing that.
That's bad.
What you should be doing is is this ah Matt, but that's Jordan.
That's not what Vervenki is says, hold on, you know, put the brief on.
That's not exactly my point.
And you know, in good omega root principle, he says, but that is a that's a fantastic point you're making, and let's get back to that, right?
Yeah, but uh but my point was uh subtly different.
I this did invoke in me, Matt, the feeling of listening to Vervecki talk about his relationship with Hermes.
Because he says what he does when he hears that voice is he he stops it and says, wait a second.
Where are you or values of normativity coming from?
Where do you get them voice in my head?
And then the voice needs to commit to where its normativity comes from, and then that helps to distinguish what kind of source of wisdom.
So, like if it was Hermes, he would have a very good thesis for the various things that he's meeting, and he has your best interest in that.
If it's Lucifer, the voice in my head is Luciferian, then it's gonna, you know, be invoking bad incoherent values.
So John John Vavaki's thing there is a bit more abstract than Jordan's because his thing is that you can tell the difference between good conscience and bad conscience, because the bad conscience is like an is an entity that he can demand that it explain itself, and when it does try to explain itself, it's gonna get all confused, it's not going to be able to provide a coherent rationale.
Entity is so reductive, Matt.
What a verdict of materialist.
Is it an entity?
Is it a cosmic aggregate or is it a self aspect that is manifesting in a cognitive way of we don't reduce things down to entities and whether they are internal or external?
That's just materialist Western science nonsense.
Um so what we do care about Dumas is are they demons?
So what is it you're saying?
What is something that actually has a point voice?
And then it will net if it's genuine conscience, if it's calling me to finite transcendence, It'll say blah.
And I'll it'll call me to a virtue.
If it's this pathological thing, it will start to thrash.
It'll start to flounder because it will realize that it doesn't have an up.
It doesn't have something that it can actually bind me to.
It can inflict pain.
That's definitely the voice of a demon.
It's got no upward orientation.
It's just trapped in hell.
It's got no upward orientation.
So that's that's my personal answer to your question.
But that that therapeutic intervention, if I can call it that, is coupled to the philosophical reflection that finite transcendence is what I am most called to identify with.
That is what I am.
That is what my humanity is.
It's to hold together, reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my transcendence.
Right.
Finite transcendence.
So okay.
So how do you know if you're talking to a demon or an angel?
That's kind of one way to put this.
And what a productive way.
That's that's Jordan Peterson's perspective.
Well, that's that yeah, the one point they were all clear on, they all agreed was, yeah, that's a demon, like David Stevens.
Stevens don't have uh demons don't know which direction is up.
Uh notice the up.
Yeah, okay.
So and the most important thing is reconciling your nature as a finite being that longs for transcendence.
Yes, but very Vivaki.
So Vervecki friends like this.
Jordan Peterson is the one with the demons and the thrashing.
Although no, he hecki is on board.
Vervecki said that actually.
Yeah, he used thrashing.
So that's the thing.
Like Vervecki does play around with the Christian terminology as he sees fit.
But I mean, they're all in agreement, right, Matt, that the goal of life is to become the numinous one with the like the transcendent values, be it in the instantiation of Christ or some other religious numinance thing.
That's what it's about.
And and that is what a lot of sense speakers believe, and a lot of theologians and spiritually inclined people also believe.
So yeah, yeah.
So there's that that's basically what is being invoked there.
Yeah, yeah.
It's all it's all pretty familiar.
Like I don't think this discussion would be out of place in a 14th-century monastery.
Like I can imagine Gnostic monks, you know, getting very enthusiastic about these questions.
There might be some people getting uh strung up as heretics for the fact that how far they went, but it but it's the same kind of concerns, right?
How do you distinguish demons from uh prophets and you know all this kind of thing?
So Jordan Peterson contributes in response to that.
How could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our affinitude without remembering our ineffable relations?
You'd think so, right?
Well, right?
You can fall into despair, but and people might say, well, that's a rational response.
It depends on what you think the point of the rational is.
It's it doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's well, we could go into that.
If it's self-defeating, yes, right.
So then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means?
Like one of the symbolic representations of that, that's the blind leading the blind, right?
They're gonna fall into a pit.
Okay.
Well, why not?
What's the difference?
What the hell difference does it make, anyways, if you fall into a pit, right?
And that's a discussion about the nature of reality.
Well, there's endless suffering in the deepest of pits, and that I don't know, that seems so Jordan there just kind of starts, he sort of has, you know, those sort of that style where he starts he starts saying something and then he he cuts off and then he he interjects with the other voice.
Well, you might say, yeah, someone might say and then cuts off again, and he's like pretty quickly six layers deep, and he's kind of ranting to himself about being in a pit with it and suffering.
Um it's a very self-indulgent thing though, Matt, because like he's there talking about, you know, right?
So he's kind of yes and being the finite and the ineffable and the the suffering that you know that we'll die, this this generates and all this kind of thing.
But but then you hear people like trying, you know, Verveki trying to interject in the background.
But then Jordan's like, well, wait a minute.
What about the symbolic representation of the blind leading the blind?
Why don't we why don't I think about that for a minute and what that represents?
And you're like, didn't you hear the person trying to speak?
Like before you go into your your next metaphor that you want to discuss in detail.
Like he's a very self-indulgent man, Mr. Peterson.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I think so.
It must be so tarring to be in a conversation with him.
But yeah, I mean, yeah, Vivaki and even Jordan Hall are very, very tolerant.
I think very sure.
Well, and I, you know, one thing though, Matt, though, we have to give him credit.
He didn't invoke the Bible, and he didn't invoke verticality, right?
You you didn't hear any of that, did you?
No, but he talked about infinite suffering in a pit.
Okay, yeah, but that's not vertical.
So uh just that's good.
The religious overtones.
Maybe this is also why that union that we discussed of death and hell with the infinite.
You probably can't find, yeah, that's probably right.
You can't find an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you traverse the lower realms.
That's what happens to Jonah, right?
In the whales, he's all the way down in the bottom of the abyss.
Then he orients himself upward, and and the voice of God makes itself manifest, but only under those conditions.
So don't worry about it, he got it in.
Yeah, the he left uh you know the metaphor of the blind leading the blind, and is like this makes me think of my Jonah in the wheel.
The wheel is at the bottom of the ocean.
And he didn't know how to get out of the whale.
And if you want to find your way out of a whale, the first thing you gotta do, Chris, is orient yourself and know which way is up.
Because that's yeah, that's that's the way out.
Um that all makes sense.
So, you know, if you're the if you're the blind and you're leading the blind and you lead them down inside a whale, and you're trying to figure out which way is up, don't worry too much because you have to go down there and traverse the depths because that's the only way in which you can actually transcend the finite and figure out what the highest good is.
You have to get down there, uh, thrash around for a bit.
Yeah, that's right.
So you know, Jordan Peterson, verticality, Christian reference, self-indulgent monologue.
That's that's Jordan.
We know what he does.
Verbake, then I mean a deep uh uh ownership and responsibility to one's capacity for self-deception.
Okay, that okay.
Now you've gone sideways with that.
Now, I've been interested, as you know, in self-deception for a bit this was the thing that you really focus on, and that that's the thing he really focuses on.
If we can find the place where there's me, we've got uh done something really interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, okay, so so tell why bring in the theme of self-deception?
Because I think is uh I think uh this is I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception.
So if at the heart of evil is self-destruction, why would any system destroy itself?
I mean, this is a platonic argument.
I think at the heart of it is is self-deception.
I mean, this is in the like to use a Christian source, this is the epistle of John.
Like we are prone to self-deception, and that's what keeps us from the love of God uh in a profound way.
Wow.
Wow, wow.
So you you know, Matt, this is this is how the conversation shift when somebody else references a word, self-deception, and then you know, they're like, Well, what's the relevance there?
And he's like, Well, I I think this connects, right?
And then Vervacki surprise, surprise, brings in Plato, but also adds in some references to the Bible, which eases the transition.
So they're not gonna talk about self-deception.
Yeah, I think and I think there is some sort of isn't there some philosophical theme, maybe it is Plato who you know, it's a very very philosophical point of view, which is like the root of all bad things comes around through not to misunderstanding things and not not thinking about them clearly.
And so bad behavior comes from people misunderstanding, um, comes from errors, essentially, philosophical errors.
So uh, you know, they're referencing this grab bag of of themes that are out there.
Actually, suspect that in most cases the people that they're referencing are relevant to the topics that they're oh yeah, oh yeah, talking about.
So yes, that makes no surprise me.
It's not like the topic of self-deception is a rare topic in religious or philosophical traditions, right?
Like you can let literally pick any tradition, and it will be a significant topic that philosophers and theologians have talked about, right?
Like for an example, Matt.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like a lot.
Yeah, it's cross multiple times.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so um it seemed to me that it's it's akin to Freud's notion of repression, but there's an important difference because as far as I can tell, repression is like a sin of commission.
It's something you do.
Whereas most self-deception looks to me like omission.
Yeah, it's omission.
That's what that's what I was just saying.
Yeah, exactly.
I omit.
So I think I failed to explore.
I okay, so lay out your your theory of of omission in relationship to self- So it's an omission of insight.
Yeah, you can relate it to Freud, Freud as well.
Yeah.
Uh if you're if you're repressing things.
Yeah, it's not exactly the same.
And the difference is very important.
One's about omission, the other's about commission.
Mm-hmm.
So this is kind of part of the shape of it too, isn't it?
Like they'll they'll take a concept, a word, then they'll think, okay, well, what's related to this?
Where where does this come up?
And there could be some passages from the Bible which relate to the concept.
There could be some classical thinker whose stuff is around this.
There could be some Freudianism, which which comes into bear.
And uh, yeah, you can you can take all those different ideas and see if you can mesh them together somehow.
So you can link it.
Yeah, like this, for example.
Maybe that's an example of a pattern of me mistaking fear for anger that's permeated all my relationships.
Okay, now I've got an entropy pit in front of me, right?
So I'm gonna have to that's a journey down Dante's Inferno.
I think I'm gonna have to go into that pit of uncertainty and do the hard work necessary to reconstitute the world that that insight demolished.
And the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that, right?
I can just not do that.
And this you just made Iris Murdoch's argument in the sovereignty of the good.
She talks about the example of the mother-in-law who has like this attitude towards her daughter-in-law, she's coarse, yeah, and then she realizes oh, she's not coarse, she's authentic, she's not rude, she's spontaneous, and then she does the thing you just did, and then she thinks, oh, but maybe this isn't an isolated, maybe there's a systematicity.
Think Piaget, yeah, maybe there's a systematicity to my error, and then she faces the choice.
Well, there you go.
Like you mentioned, Matt, you've got reference to entropy, right?
Scientific concept.
You've got Dante's inferno, you have Aris Murdoch's argument about the sovereignty of the good.
You got Paget thrown in there at the end.
So it's and and you can hear people, you know, you can hear Varveki and and Jordan getting energized by the the conversation.
Noticing the connections.
Yeah, and yeah.
Like I'll have to take it on faith because I'm I'm sure there is some connection there, some conceptual connection that is.
You know, it might be tenuous in some cases.
We've got Dante's Inferno, we've got entropy, we've got Aris Murdoch, and what else?
I don't know.
Piaget.
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, I I'm sure there is some golden threads at some level that connect these things, but yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know.
Um I'm not gonna, we're not judging it at this point.
I'm just I'm just saying I don't know whether it sounds like you say you're not judging Mather, how much self-deception are you engaged in?
It sounds like you're judging it from your internal voice.
Well, there's a legit problem here, right?
Because it's a bit like there's an emperor's new clothes that you could say, well, look, they are onto something deep and meaningful here.
It's just that you don't know, and I mean me, I don't know Iris Murdoch's arguments well enough in all of the subtleties.
I haven't thought about Dante's Inferno deeply enough.
In the context of Paige Piagian development and ego and you know, like someone that wanted to amount a defense could do a bunch of research and find something there.
But I yeah.
Well, the way the way I would point it out is they are building internally consistent semantic networks connecting these.
Like and in most for most of the conversation, I can follow the various words that they're weaving.
And I understand how their literary references and academic references are like sprinkled in as illustrations that other people have talked about these concepts.
And you know, you can connect it to this bigger like literature and and realm of thought out there.
But the part which gets this for me is that this style of reasoning is very well suited to indulge in a theological or I'd like I don't know the way to put it.
I've I've seen this a lot, but often what's been done, it does feel like what you've described as decorative scholarship, where you're just dropping in names of influential thinkers, uh people who've written important books, they've said something about it, and you don't really go into huge amount of depth about it.
So it's like it is a judgment call, but there's a difference, right, between when somebody is making a reference because they think it's important to connect this to a particular concept and that it helps explain things, right?
Or they want to illustrate where they got the idea from.
And when someone is doing it to illustrate that they are a very serious thinker who knows a broad range of literature, and it's it's a subjective call in some cases when someone is doing which one, right?
I would say there's plenty of times in the San Switch game world where you can tell that it's it's decorative scholarship, but here in this kind of part, there is an argument that it is in that more like loose associative, like free thinking kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, it's more self-indulgent than anything.
Like I don't think it's being done on purpose, if you like.
But here's here's another way to describe why I think it's there's a bit of a problem with it.
I'm an audience here, I'm doing my best to understand what's going on.
I have not only studied Piaget at school at university, I'm familiar with with that stuff.
I've even read Dante's Inferno.
Maybe I didn't finish it.
I read a fair bit of it.
I'm very familiar with it.
Admittedly, I don't know a great deal about R.S. Murdoch's arguments there, but about a lot of the rest.
I think I'm probably more well informed than most.
Being a professor of psychology, I think I should be relatively well positioned to understand what Jordan Peterson and John Fabacci are talking about.
But it's not clear at all that to me.
Uh and and I think you know, whether or not it means something to them, I'm sure at some level it does, because you can do these semantic associations, and oh, this reminds me of that.
And here's a story about this, and you can see how there's a connection where that can be symbolizes that you can see how that's kind of the same thing.
I mean, it's incredibly loose, it's incredibly self-indulging.
But in terms of how it functions to the audience, it amounts to the same thing as what you were saying, that decorative scholarship.
I don't think it's actually done on purpose.
I might disagree a little bit here or not, because most of the time with when I listen to these, I don't get lost in what they're arguing.
Like my brain checks out because I get bored of the self-indulgent nature of it.
But whenever I I sit, I can follow all of the things that they're trying to connect to.
Well, wait, you say that you say that, but let's take this as an example.
What happened is that Jordan Peterson gave a story about Dante's Inferno going down to a pit of uncertainty and having to reconstitute the entire world that your insight has demolished, whatever that means.
And then and how that's a thing, the in important struggle.
And John Vacky goes, right.
See, now this is the same as Aris Murdoch's argument, where she had this misperception of her uh daughter-in-law thinking that she was coarse, but actually she was authentic and not rude and spontaneous.
So she's noticed it was a systematic thing to that error, right?
So you explain to me then, Chris.
If you if you if you understand that, tell me how those two things are connected.
Yeah, it seems very obvious to me.
This is that hard.
Oh my god, you're a sense maker.
Maybe I'm just very literal, but like, am I just very literal-minded?
Yeah, so let me explain.
Jordan Peterson is talking about him and other people like falling into unhealthy relationship dynamics because of a lack of self-awareness.
So they're mistaking what's causing arguments and whatnot in their relationship, and this is this is what he's likening to somebody you know going into Dante's Inferno into the realms of hell of their own making because they're trapped in these self-defeating lack of awareness, uh, interpersonal dramas and whatnot that are of their own creation, but they don't realize it, right?
Lots of people in Dante's Inferno in various circles of hell who are like kind of being tormented for their own sins in life and lack of awareness about their pride or whatever the case might be, right?
So there's the connection there, and then the next bit that Aristoc's argument about the Muller in law is uh pointing to that same thing that people can misread others because there's this semantic gap between people and what they're doing and their ability to interpret what others are doing.
So we're all stuck in this never-ending pursuit to try and accurately represent the world and the other people in it, but we're never gonna do it perfectly, right?
So there's there's like, and you can get better at it.
And you know, this is like why you would focus on things like self-deception.
Self-deception is a thing that is keeping you from better relationships, but also from recognizing your actual relationship with the ultimate values that are there.
Okay, I kind of see that.
I kind of see that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so hey, just listen, okay, for all the people in the audience who are gonna recast this as me saying I could never understand what we're making, what that are saying.
That's Matt, okay.
And the reason I'm saying this, but as you know, is because when this happens, people will then attribute that argument to me, right?
They'll be like, Chris just doesn't appreciate when when people are making metaphorical arguments or whatever, but yes, so there we go.
All right, so that's all right.
I I see that, and also thinking about the conversation.
Yeah, I mean, to be fair to me, that required a fair bit of context to be uh I had you had you reminded me of some of the previous context that was surrounding that immediate discussion, which if you bend your mind, you can you can see the connections there.
So they are ruminating about it's a it's a problem, right?
We misunderstand each other, you know, we have this egocentric point of view, we have uncharitable perceptions of other people, and maybe this is all contributing to us thrashing around in our own private hell.
This like I get it.
Okay.
Alpha Yearboon, no matter your boon here, because in the end it often does evolve into religious gibber chopper, right?
Well, okay.
Well, so so then so Dante, I think that that journey down into Dante's Inferno is a descent into that entropy pit.
I agree.
You know, and then at the bottom, and I saw this in my therapeutic practice a lot too.
Dante put the betrayers right by Satan, right?
And so imagine that you engage in one of those sins of omission in the situation that you just described.
Well, that now that means that you've betrayed yourself, right?
Because you've betrayed your capacity for transformation.
I think that's that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost is that you've now divorced, if you divorce yourself.
Yeah, well, because it's the sin that can't be forgiven, right?
And so you think, what the hell is that?
It's like, well, if you violate the spirit of transformation itself, then how in the world could you possibly recover from that?
Because you foreclosed off any, and then like in your scenario there, there was a painful realization of inadequacy on part of the cell.
And it goes on that it doesn't ego, it doesn't stop there.
But it does not stop there.
I I I feel validated.
I feel somewhat validated.
Well, but it's it's still all coherent, right?
I mean, I mean to the mysterious significance the Holy Ghost that you can ever be.
But it's uh okay, well Matt, here.
That's because Jordan Peterson is a religious gibber jabber.
We've we've established this.
Now if you prefer it more in terms that you would like, you know, like your cognitive, your your psychological terms.
Vervake has got you covered.
Uh so it's been demonstrated the work of Stefan and Dixon.
It's it's very complicated, but what you can do is you can use um sort of state space math to translate uh like where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into uh like uh a measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation.
It's it's the the math is well established.
Um so excess neural activation is that associated with that increase in entropy?
It it depends because that's hard to measure, right?
Because because it could be uh, you know, it could be excitation or inhibition, and so you can't just track right uh and so uh but what you get is you get uh a significant increase in entropy, and then you get with the insight that the decrease.
I'm gonna bet it looks it'll look a lot like what we saw on Twitter around the H1B thing for the past three days.
If you were able to measure that's interesting, because I I've been toying with that idea, Jordan, of the uh of being able to see the insight uh mechanics in distributed cognition, not just in individual cognition.
Absolutely.
Well, that'd be that state of confusion.
Like again, Chris.
No, come on, you're the psychologist, all right?
You're the cognitive psychologist.
There was lots of terms there from cognitive psychology.
I and look, I just need to point out, right?
That I I did my PhD in psychophysiology, right?
And signal processing.
I know what entropy is, right?
In the sense that it especially in relation to neural signals.
Excess neural activation.
Do you know what that is?
I don't know what excess neural activation is.
I know what neural active is excessive neurolect.
Is it talking about a seizure?
I don't know.
Whatever.
But yeah, I mean, uh again, I'm sure he's alluding to a real thing, something he's read, right?
And I'm sure if I'm not you don't know Stefan and Dixon.
Look, Matt, let me let me try and break this down for you.
Okay, I'll do it, even though it's your subject.
So he said the space math that translate where somebody's looking or pointing a finger, and the measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing that orientation.
So doesn't that make sense?
I'm I'm tortured here, but like I'm sure you can make a mathematical equation for the cognitive processes about how people are orientating towards stimulus in the environment, right?
Is that what he's referring to though?
Like at state space, like I I don't know what he's talking about.
I don't know what he's talking about.
I'm sorry.
Like you could describe neural signals in any number of ways, measuring entropy or complexity of the signal in various ways is one way to do it.
Or you could talk about I I don't know what he's talking about.
Like if I'm sure he's referring to something he's read, but well, Stefan and Dixon.
That's what he's referred.
Yeah, but how can the audience have any idea what any of that means?
Like it's not oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, and that's a separate point.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that we're talking about, right?
Because immediately after that, you switch to Jordan Hall, making a reference to like a culture war thing around H1B visas, and then the topic switches from there to Vervake being like, ah, well, actually, I've been thinking about distributed cognition, right?
He's written some papers about people operating in the Mars rover on Mars, but Jordan Hall's interjection kicks that very firmly out of that area, and then it's kind of into uh a lot more speculative.
Um even it assuming that the first part isn't speculative.
Like I have no reason to doubt that you can make mathematical equations related to cognitive processes.
Like, why would that be in any way controversial?
Well, yeah, of course you can, right?
Like I mean, you can express anything in mathematical equations if you are.
So you could describe the activation function of a neuron firing, right?
And that's gonna, you know, you can't.
Exactly.
But you know, I've actually just googled it because I've I'm not, I wasn't aware of Stefan and Dixon.
And now I look at the papers, I'm like, uh huh, okay, I get it.
I know now why Johnky likes it, and I know now why I had no awareness of it.
But what is that?
Look, here's the paper.
Oh, here's one of the papers.
The self-organization of insight, entropy and power laws of problem solving.
Explaining emergent structure remains a challenge in all layers of cognitive science, bloody bloody blah.
We propose that the explanation of insight is beyond the scope of conventional approaches to cognitive science in terms of symbolic representation, cognition may be better at represented in terms of an open, non-linear dynamical system.
By this reasoning, insight would be the self-organization of novel structure.
So it's it's this like dynamic systems, or I'm you know, open systems kind of speculative stuff.
I mean, you know, there's uh like the Sandify Institute and stuff like that is right into this.
Like, you know, what are the deep connections in systems theory and uh like ecological type psychology and you know, people and societies and everything.
Like it's it's fine, you know what I mean?
But it's not it's just abstract speculative stuff that actually is got only to do with cognitive science or um nothing to do with cognitive science.
Well, not nothing, but it's nothing to do with conventional, like it's nothing to do with anything empirical, you know, not really anyway.
It's just speculative stuff.
I get it, I know what it is.
It's just I see I see those guys on a couple of empirical papers, though, but you know, I think it's like all right.
All right, but in in this context, Chris, this talking about state space math and significant increases in entropy and stuff.
Like I once was on the panel reviewing a PhD proposal where they were proposing using chaos theory and dynamic systems theory to to model uh self-organizing social dynamics in like corporate boardroom settings, right?
Now that stuff exists, right?
There is you can do it, you can do it, right?
And people do all kinds of things, but yeah, anyway.
That's all right.
That's all right.
So we're like expressing it.
Just because it's got math in it, just because it's got math at it, doesn't make it science.
That's all.
I agree on that.
I agree on that.
But and I do think that in this conversation, it's very unlikely that any of the people listening are going to follow up on you know, reading the relevant material or doing like the foundational stuff that you would need to investigate claims being made about cognitive processes and I actually went through a short phase during or shortly after my PhD where I was kind of into that stuff, you know, it's like self-organizing systems, dynamic systems theory, chaos theory, fractals, all like you know, there's lots of cool stuff.
You watch Jurassic Park and you thought that that was cool.
Yeah, I thought it was cool.
Yeah, James Conway's game of life, all sorts of stuff.
And it's fine, like it's it's okay.
Like a it's not you keep saying it's fine.
But it's but it's but it's but it's also like a self-indulgent rabbit hole you could go down, which isn't sound like the people that were covering here at all.
That doesn't sound like something that would interest them at all.
No, um anyway.
I'll stop, I'll stop blustering about that.
Move on.
That's okay, that's okay.
All right, a little bit more.
Don't worry, we're almost at the end of the sans speaking excursion.
You're getting cranky.
You've you've been on the sense making reverber for two logs, but just a little bit more, you know, omission, tyranny, humility, all our ideas.
No, this is governed initially primarily by the cinema mission.
Like nobody actually listening to anybody else, like nobody actually stepping back, taking the stance of humility, which allows them to say, wait, maybe I'm making a mistake, maybe I'm reading you wrong.
So this is this is part of what builds up the entropy is the hardening of the dialogic space around something which isn't able to actually step into an appropriate level of humility to allow the insight to land.
Well that's like a definition of tyranny.
I want to pick up, I want to pick up on the humility thing.
Yeah.
So there you heard about the pivot.
Okay.
Forget about what what the hell were we talking about?
I forget now.
It's uh self-deception, right?
Because somebody said humility.
So we're off now it it's important to talk about humility.
And you know one example of this, we're gonna hear Verveki talk a little bit about humility but then Jordan is aware of humility because he's been having experiences.
Experiences with which I'm familiar with it.
I just want to make one point.
Okay.
I think humility is the virtue of identifying with finite transcendence.
Humility is not despair and it's not hubris.
Humility is a confidence in a recog uh a recognition of a reality that transcends you but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it.
Yeah you can be in contact with okay so I was at church this morning with Tammy and I'm kind of getting accustomed to going to Catholic services and one of the ways this service opens and many of them and maybe this is a constant across services is that the entire congregation professes a disjunction between itself and the transcendent.
Jordan's being demo yeah that's that's good.
That's good.
he's been going to mass okay did you like for vicky's definition of humility yeah it's very abstract yeah well it's not despair it's not hubris it's confidence and a recognition of morality that transcends you but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it wow yeah yeah yeah i'm kind of impressed that they have those definitions like right on the tip of their tongue that's right because i he wasn't he wasn't prepared for this like he didn't know they were gonna get it that we're gonna
get on to i mean he's talked about let's be clear he's talked about humility before it's not my chance that they got on the best topic but no yeah so jordan can transform like going to mass into a transcendental psycho drama like it's it's pretty impressive you know so so how's that related how is jordan's little anecdote and little christian riff there how's related to humility i my brain phased out
there oh
because like in order to like shut up and listen to someone else maybe he was exercising i could see actually no you know catholic mass matt you wouldn't know about this being a heathen but there's various things that you have to steer there are responses and there are chants by the we believe in one god the father of the almighty the maker of heaven of all of the senior non-seen we believe in one blah blah blah blah right the
profession of faith and all these kind of things so i presume it's something in the
those various like things from the catechism where you're you're stating what you believe and your stated belief in a higher power and yourself as a believer but somebody that's not worthy and it could be a number no it could be a number of things I get it I could imagine a bunch of Catholic things that involve humility um okay so that's fine that makes sense humility is going to be related to Christian teachings.
Yes.
Yeah and you know Matt there's all the things like you you know you might have an argument with someone that's about humility.
And then but so you can step back and you can think okay well what the hell are we trying to accomplish here then you have to remember that while you're married and the person's gonna be there tomorrow and that you love them then you have to remember what that means and then you have to remember what it's like when you're not arguing which is often very difficult when you are arguing and then you have to call to that spirit I think and that's what delivers the insight it's like okay what are we trying to do here?
Yes we're trying to make productive peace.
Okay the argument was power let's say a power manifestation at least in part but the proper goal is productive peace and then you'll get you'll get an answer from the spirit of productive peace.
So you do this you do this uh you know uh by asking you can you even do this with like individually um uh it's a Solomon paradox Uh Igor Grossman's work.
Somebody get get them to describe a problem they can't solve.
They will inevitably describe it from the first person perspective.
Yeah, Matt, you know, sometimes when I listen to these steps, I'm like, what are we trying to accomplish here?
What you have to try and remember at times, right?
And uh he's talking about marriage and it's a long-term commitment marriage.
So, you know, you might get caught up in the moment and arguments, you might have dark periods of the soul and whatnot, but it's it's about productive pizza, and that requires humility, you know, and this relates to Igor Grossman's work.
Yeah, yeah.
It's it's all connected, isn't it?
Humility, Christianity, engaging in dialogue with other people.
You have to sometimes shut up and listen to someone else, uh, that that requires humility.
Same as same as when you're married.
Uh yeah, it's all connected.
It's all connected.
I see that.
Well, I can I can also point Matt to um, you know, the conversation goes on.
And so it's so it continues, but there's a couple of sans speaking themes that they hit, which are very recurrent, right?
That I just want to flag up before we get to the end of this road that we're on today.
Um one is the kids today.
The kids today, Matt, they got problems, okay.
So this is Jordan talking about kids being shunted off to like watch movies in the basement where the adults enjoy themselves upstairs and he doesn't like that, or he doesn't like it if they're watching a movie.
So listen to this.
And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement and let them amuse themselves, right?
They have to do that.
They have to learn to play, they have to learn to get along with strangers, and and that's an excellent and you just short circuit that.
But now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital.
Yeah, and they come to that realization, you know, that that they're being deceived in multiple ways.
The question then is like, what the hell's their center?
They haven't won.
You think that's true?
Yeah.
So there's data coming out.
I'm interested in your response to this, John.
So I read recently that six many times, by the way, and I think Jonathan Haidt um details this.
Um, sixty percent of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness.
Now that's self-reported, you know, and so there's problems with that, but but I'm wondering to what degree.
And I'm I'm not necessarily pointing the finger at finger at the liberal ethos here.
I'm wondering about this immense rise in neurotic mental illness that seems to be characteristic of our culture.
Let's just bring in to to the the image of uh the golden calf.
Right, because the the I think the key insight is to recognize that any time a group of people move themselves into this way of being in relationship with each other and with the world, that is what I used was aggregate.
I think we've used different words to describe it, meaning they're not in communion as a well-integrated whole, but are in fact parts endeavoring to pull themselves together by means of something like consensus.
Jordan Jordan Hall has a way of being pretentious that is different, it's special.
I know, it's so good.
But it's a Christian reference, right?
He's the game.
Oh, he's playing the game.
You know, he knows what Jordan Pitterson likes.
He's gonna like this the golden cup.
So right, okay.
Retrace our steps again.
So they started off with what's wrong with the kids today.
It's annoying when you know you have little kids around or whatever.
Jordan wants them to like be challenged to play in unstructured ways.
So he's like, throw them down the basement, yes, but just with the just with some other kids like in play.
Yeah, don't give them any games.
Don't give them any games.
Yeah, don't have them, you know, watch a movie.
Okay, that's fine.
Don't play computer games, absolutely not.
I'm sure the computer games are oh that's yeah, that would be a good idea.
And there's that uh he saw something 60% of liberal.
No, he doesn't want to doesn't want to make this a liberal conservative thing, but 60% of female liberals are mentally ill.
Yep.
Yep, yeah.
Just the liberal females, the conservative females are they're fine.
No, they're all fine.
We're seeing they're well adjusted in general.
So and you know, Matt, there are our statistics that show that uh at least in the US, but this could also be related, for example, yes, it could be related to like social contagion and fabs and all this, it could also be related to a greater willingness to be diagnosed with mental illnesses and liberal communities and whatnot.
So, like it's all it's all messy, but yeah, in any case, the 60% statistic seems roller high.
Yeah.
Um anyway, sorry, so that's what's so that's what's going on.
You know, there's something something bad going on here related to these facts.
Um Jordan Hall is helping out by saying that's all like the golden calf.
Yes, those kids couldn't do what he did.
Like, you know, he integrated because of all those childhood experiences and whatnot, but this digital kids, yeah, they they don't have the requisite sense making skills to do that.
So Jordan Hall was out there interacting with objects in the context of his home, and that was that was the context of fields, yes, various context.
So that so that to that that sent it him, whatever.
But kids today, they're not in communion with uh they're not integrated whole um because whatever.
I don't know, too much time on device, perhaps.
Yeah, yeah.
And so they don't the golden calf is what is the golden calf?
Like other the golden calf was like what's they're worshipping they're worshipping an eye a false god, the iPad is is like a false is like an idol.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's it.
And he's used the word aggregate, but maybe that's not the exact right anyway.
That's it.
Thank God nobody fooled them.
What do you mean by aggregate?
Because then we would have had a long conversation about aggregates.
So that's one thing, okay.
Like the kids today, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The postmodern people are bad, the atheists are bad.
These are things that you typically hear.
Another thing that we've heard in other science speaking conversations is them taking us through the stages of humanity and detailing the different kinds of social systems that we've had.
So Jordan Hall does this here.
It's sort of by definition.
If if the if it's an aggregate that isn't unified by the appropriate higher order principle, it's going to disintegrate.
Yes, that's correct.
That's that's that's why that principle isn't ideal.
Right disintegrates.
And so uh can we go here?
I'm I'm gonna I mean take it up like one level that maybe more than we can handle right now in this like where we are.
But the basic idea is that the ability to actually form well-integrated wholes that include a diversity of people outside of a small group of people who are genetically related has not actually been a solved problem.
So we've actually had three cuts of this.
One is the indigenous mode, which is small groups of people who are genetically related, live within a culture that has been the same culture for everybody for a very large number of generations.
And by the way, if you investigate the indigenous modes, they have incredibly powerful psychotechnologies for inhibiting things like self- self-deception or tyrannical norms, right?
So that's it's a whole integrated complex that forms a relatively stable over long periods of time.
Long periods of time.
There we go.
So are we ready?
Are we ready?
Are we in a place?
Can we handle this?
Are we ready to do that?
Can we pick it up a level?
Can we take it up a little?
That's right.
I mean, maybe we're not ready for that.
Maybe uh this is too much for you guys to handle.
So good Jordan Hall.
When he gets a chance to talk, he's he's I know.
I wish he talked more.
Yeah, but okay, well, let's go there.
And so this incredible idea, Ma, incredible that incredible idea.
No, you're you're an anthropologist, right?
So you can enlighten us.
What what are these incredibly powerful psycho technologies that indigenous uh peoples had to prevent tyrannical norms?
Like, because I know I know I know that they didn't have like you know, enforcement of of tyrannical norms or or self-deception.
No, they that's things that he uh inhibited.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I see yeah, well, so I was wondering there whether we were referencing, I mean, often when these guys are talking about psycho technologies, they're talking about psychoactive substances.
Right.
Of course.
Yeah, and because we know from the other conversations, they've talked about drum circles and ayahuasca and various tools for introspection, right?
But being charitable, Matt, I actually think here, because he's taking a more cultural evolution perspective around things, that what he wants to invoke is things like third party punishment and social observation and various structures that exist that allow people to enforce group norms and and values that do not rely on institutions.
I understand that but he's saying the opposite he's saying these psychotechnologies we use to inhibit things like tyrannical norms.
And yeah but but so they often present those as social technologies that inhibit tyrants from developing or whatever like in you know enforced equitarian oh I see yeah like a yeah I can't reputation management stuff if some yeah if someone gets too big for their boots then then I think that's what he's evoking.
It could be ELA anyway anyway no you're right I've I've already spent too long on this okay so that's great.
So that's so very stable systems they had it all figured out humanity knows how to live in a in a small genetically related group.
Yes so and then there are other layers right so one is the city state getting together agricultural society um and one is the tyrant model dictatorships and empires and this kind of thing so if you want to hear a little bit of it it's it's a bit like this this comes towards the end.
So they have a sequential satisfaction of lower self-demands, which keeps them relatively stable for some amount of time, but not for a very long time, because it is structurally, fundamentally unstable, as you said, so it will undergo collapse, which is where we are.
Yeah.
Okay, so partly what we're trying to do here, and I would say in the broadest possible sense, I think this is what you're trying to do, John, and correct me if I'm wrong, is we've been investigating the propositionalization of an ethos that would unite.
unite iteratively and relatively permanently and and we're investigating the possibility that that must by necessity be predicated on something other than that hedonic immediate hedonic gratification and it's also not predicated on power.
Okay, so one of the things you see in the Old Testament...
Hold on one second.
Yep.
I think that was very powerful and very important.
So in case other people besides us are participating in this conversation, put a bookmark on that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of exploration summarized very quickly in that statement.
Yep.
There's an immense emphasis in the Old Testament on the value of hospitality.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So they go through, you know, the other stages and then as is often the sense we recall we are in the the collapse of the empire stage you know we've we've gone to like the kind of neoliberal technocratic attempt and now that's falling apart in front of our eyes so we need some new kind of approach in order to stabilize society.
We can't go back to the primitive Matt we can't go back to tribal society because society's changed we don't want empires and tyrants again and the third wave of neo liberal technocratic internet society that's not working either what we need of course what we need is game B but game B doesn't doesn't get invoked here.
But that's it and so Jordan there as Jordan Hall noticed, you know, we're participating in this conversation as well Matt, albeit asynchronously and we he told us to put a bookmark in because I think it's very important here that they've outlined that all the stuff we've been listening to it's actually not tedious waffle about definitions and references to the Bible.
It's very important because they are working here on establishing what would be an alternative universal value structure that we could orientate society towards and would allow society to continue.
That's what they've been doing.
That's what this conversation is in a service of and that's important Matt because we you know all these other alternative things like saying it's all about power or a Denying that there is any unifying structure.
That's all leads to Lucifer and hell.
So there you go.
Yeah, no, I get it.
Okay, well, this is classic.
This is the goal of the sense makers, right?
This is the political project to create a new a new world based on sense.
Waffle until into a new civilization.
A civilization purely built on Waffle.
So Matt, that would be an that would have been a good point to end, but they didn't end there because Jordan mentioned the word hospitality.
Yes.
So they got on to hospitality.
This is the last of the topics that I'll allow them to expound upon.
They did talk about other words as well.
But um hospitality, Matt.
Let's have a little thought about that.
And so I'm wondering.
Then I was thinking about hospitality, like it's a local thing, right?
Because that's what you do at it at a banquet or at a party.
Make people welcome.
That's what you do if you run a small business.
If you have even the least amount of sense, you make people welcome.
Then you could think if that scaled, uh, well, then the whole world would be a hospitable place and the problem would be solved, right?
So it's obviously a scalable virtue.
And maybe it's also the foundation of that societal trust that constitutes, I think, the only real natural resource.
Could you speculate, do you think, on the relationship between hospitality and play?
Like we talked about throwing insight too.
Okay.
Okay.
Oh, I will.
I'll throw an insight too.
Okay.
All right.
So yeah, you're right.
That actually this the latter part of the conversation is so it makes it clear they're thinking about how to craft the foundations, the philosophical moral foundations of these are the finding colors.
Yes.
Of a brave of a brave new world.
And you know, they talked about some things, they've got a lot of ideas there, but actually, maybe hospitality just popped up.
Maybe that just came in at the end.
It's just the other side.
It just cropped up.
And maybe that's the foundation for this new society because hospitality is good, right?
And it scales, it clearly scales.
You just, you know, if everyone's being hospitable to everyone, then you've got the bedrock of new civilization.
Yeah, yeah.
And the banquets, Matt, you know, or small businesses, both things, you gotta be hospitable.
Yeah.
And like, why wouldn't that be a foundational bedrock?
So it's very important.
The thing is, this is the kind of insights that's been out of these.
You know, it seemed like we weren't going anywhere.
We're spinning in circles.
We were just defining whatever word that somebody happened to mention.
We talked about shadows and sticks.
We we talked about uh touchstones.
Yeah, you know, we we talked a lot about conscience and the and the ladder, the ladder and the directionality, the up the upper verticality.
Yeah, that's that's important.
But actually, it all boils down to hospitality.
Well, you can connect hospitality to verticality because there's relationships between customers and and the owners, right?
And it's uh kind of yeah, they're hierarchical elements there, Matt.
So think about that.
But um the the last thing I'll end on, the last step.
I have to do this, Matt.
I'm sorry, because people will complain if I don't.
They'll be like, what you covered all of this and you didn't mention this.
So in this conversation about hospitality and civilization and how things have function, there is an aspect where Verveki discusses ritual, at my particular specialty.
And he actually has a course on the cognitive science of ritual, which I've heard various parts of.
So let me just play him talking about ritual and I'll offer some thoughts.
Or maybe you can offer some thoughts first.
But uh pay attention to this, Matt, okay?
Why don't you see if you have any issues here if this is all okay?
All right, I'm focusing.
And the proposal is that we get the invention of important sets of rituals that you get the invention of like something perhaps like even like the handshake, which is a ritual which is designed to try and speed up the process by which you and I, who are strangers, might be able to recognize each other as at least potentially trustworthy.
And then and then you you but you have you so you have outward Facing rituals like that.
And then you have inward-facing rituals of initiation.
Like, okay, we have to tighten our identity.
So we like, in order to be willing to interact with them, we have to know clearly better who we are.
And so you get the initiation rituals, you have like uh interaction rituals, and then uh in in connection with that, you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible.
Now, here's the connection.
Ritual is play, it is a profound kind of play.
Because what I'm doing in ritual is I'm engaging the imaginal.
So the Corban's distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal.
So the imaginary is when I picture things in my mind and I'm taking myself away from reality.
The uh imaginal is when I like when a child is playing at being Superman.
They're not picturing Superman.
They're what's it like to look at the world like Superman?
What is it like to try out this identity?
That's what a ritual is.
A ritual is a way of what's it like, play to serious play.
What's it like to look at it?
What's it like to look at this person as as although they're a stranger, they're trustworthy.
What's it like to be a person that can be can enter into recognition with you?
And so I think they're okay.
I kind of followed it, I think.
Yep.
I'm proud of myself.
Uh yeah, I'm glad.
Congratulations.
But do you have any issue there?
Do you think that was any problems, or is that okay?
It wasn't mostly coherent.
Uh yeah.
How's it related to hospitality though?
So we start off with hospitality.
That was Jordan Peterson's thing.
This could be the foundation.
And John of the Vicky.
I can't remember if this bit comes before or after, but like the connection to play.
Oh, the play.
That's right.
So it's actually Jordan who asked for that connection between hospitality and play.
And Jovenel Vacky's very happy to oblige.
In a nutshell, I don't see the connection with hospitality.
I see how he talked about ritual, but I guess if if you say that hospitality is a kind of ritual, and ritual is a kind of play, then he's done the job, right?
He's connected play to hospitality.
Yes.
But okay, well, uh Matt, it might be a disservice to Verveki, because there's there's obviously other context around that particular clip that he has there.
So let me play another clip that that might make the connection clearer.
So if we think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, how critical the hospitality protocol was.
Oh, yeah, a lot, a lot is when you go willing to go to great lengths not to violate the protocol of hospitality.
That tells us, ultimate length.
That's right, ultimate length.
And so the vertical dimension, right?
The fact that we are now able to enter into a state of communion by means of properly exercising this ritual, this protocol of engagement, to form a new identity that has completely new capacities and competencies that are an expansion in the vertical dimension as well as in the horizontal dimension.
And that's like that's the key unlock that enables it.
Yeah, yeah, well, that's so it's so cool that that hospitality has that imaginal element.
It's right.
I'm going to I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome.
Well, on there's on what basis.
So there's some connections.
And you got even vertical mention.
Yeah, and not just verticality, but also horizontality.
Uh yes, well, that's important.
Now it's unfair to ask you about the ritual stuff.
I know you're not an expert in that area.
And actually, I think the majority of the stuff that he points out is is stuff that's that's pretty standard.
You know, people don't think about it, but the way that you greet people is often heavily ritualized, things like that.
No, I you I totally buy that, right?
I'll tell you by that.
If you want to get off on the right foot with someone or put yourself in a good position, then you go through the social niceties and they exist for a very good reason.
Yes, and institutions, even scientific ones have their various ritual initiations, pieces of paper that you have to display in order to demonstrate that you have certain competencies that you're trustworthy, so on so forth.
Ritual is a part of society map.
Well, you want the I'm a board with that.
I'm on board with that.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, so I get it.
So ritual, hospitality, but also play.
You you've left out the play.
Yeah, this is the bit where I think I take it a little bit of issue because he then links it to like, well, ritual is really like play, it's a marginal play, right?
Because you're stepping into a world where you're doing things and it's very symbolic and you're you're playing characters or you're transforming into gods or right.
Ritual is a very diverse figure map.
When you do a handshake, I don't know that it's exactly imaginal play in that respect.
Yeah.
I mean, they are to be fair to them, they're relying very much on there being a very particular common denominator, which is like when you smile and shake hands with someone, you are acting as though you are pleased to see them.
And when you're acting, right, you're imagining yourself, yes.
Yeah, uh, you see the connection there.
Yeah, but you can equally emphasize, and this is one of the key components to ritual, that while there is this constructive, and then some stages like creative aspect to rituals, there is also rigid enforcement of particular repetitive motions and and styles.
So like even taking the thing about shaking hands, yeah, right.
If you grow up in a society where people shake hands and you deeply bow to them, you'll confuse them.
But both are greeting symbols, right?
So actually, ritual has yes, it does have creativity within it, but one of the features of rituals is that they are often quite dogmatic in the way that they should be performed.
I know.
I'm just messing with you.
I don't really think ritual is really just a form of play, or vice versa.
No, I know, but so this is the thing, he's not wrong that there are elements, you know, people would point to like carnival style rituals or whatever, but like the Christian mass, except for when Jordan Peterson is a is you know, in his psychodrama, and it is not one where you're adapting all these imaginal, right?
You're essentially just following the routine to get out of the mass after an art, right?
And there are all these things like, but aren't you imagining that you're consuming the body and blood of Christ when you and isn't that playing?
Isn't that the same as when a child is imagining themselves to be superman?
Isn't it fundamentally the same thing?
But you can see that people could argue that, right?
But I could equally argue that that is a good example where people are just eating bread because that's what they're supposed to do, and they don't actually spend much cognitive effort in imagining that it is actually the body and blood, even while they're saying the words, this is the body, bro.
Oh Christ, right?
So, like that's that's the thing.
Another aspect of ritual research is that there is a tedium effect, which like repetitive rituals become you know, things that people just do without any processing, they're just like going through the motions and it doesn't require,
and then there are other rituals where you're so involved in the specific procedure because it's so rare or it's so demanding that you actually don't have much space to do this reflective uh stuff, and this is one of the arguments about why rituals are anxiety relieving because they allow you to focus on lower down processes, right?
So, you know, people that have obsessive compulsive disorder often engage in repetitive rituals, and and that's anxiety alleviating for them.
So, anyway, it I'm just saying that like there's a good example where the things that he's saying aren't like it's not all just nonsense gobbledygook about ritual, right?
There's there's valid stuff, and I think Verbake does know things about that literature, but it's kind of how it's then used in the conversation is much more like the extrapolation is very far and very specific.
There's there's a lot of it's very loose.
There's a and there is a lot of reaching going on, yes, and and a lot of reliance on a very tenuous connection.
It's like, yes, if you bend over backwards, you can see some common elements between play and ritual, because they both arguably sometimes have some amount of imagination or pretense involved in them.
Yes, but you know, that doesn't mean they're the same thing, and you know, you shouldn't be leading on that tenuous um connection.
And I for me that's the issue.
I agree with you, and I was trying to make that sort of point throughout, which is like they're not referencing imaginary things, they're referencing real ideas from real stuff that they've they've read and they're connecting together.
It's just that it's a very loose semantic and sometimes just based on word similarity connections between wildly disparate things.
And this is why I think we originally sort of pinged all of these guys on the Garometer, because it's a particular style of expansive, all is one type reasoning, sort of mushing together ideas that you know it's very satisfying,
I suppose, to sort of see a connection between a passage in the Bible and some you know neuro effective thing, a 1970s psychologist, 1970s psychologist, a Greek philosopher, you know, connecting it all together.
But yeah, in order to do that, it is it is very loose and it is very tenuous.
Yeah, and you know, so rounding it up, Matt.
If we went back and we traced where the conversation went, we could make it we could make a graph, we could make a diagram that showed how this conversation went.
And if we did, Chris, how what would that diagram look like?
I don't want to go through it all because it's so long, but it's but it's essentially the same pattern always, right?
Which is like a topic or word is introduced, there's discussion about definitions, there is occasionally people offering alternative definitions, and there's a bit of a negotiation, but inevitably during that, another word will be brought up,
and they will move to that concept, and all the while they'll be reaching into their grab bag of references, which for Jordan is the Bible, for Viveki is Plato, and and in this conversation, Christian stuff, and for Jordan Hall, it's metaphors and and tech stuff, and um maybe more since he's become a Christian, a bit more Christian stuff as well.
But that's it, right?
So you you talk about conscience, you talk about worthwhile, you talk about quest, you talk about dimension, you talk about normative, you talk about ideas, you talk about play, hospitality, blah blah blah.
These are all big concepts.
And the point I do want to stress though, is like while it is a very like associative conversation that often turns on just one person's choice of a word, the themes that they return to and their thesis are relatively stable, right?
And it's and they're not complex, right?
Like Jordan's thing is there is a vertical dimension to relationships and society and the universe, and at the top is God, and you should orientate yourself towards that, or you should always be looking for that, because otherwise you'll fall into these pathological traps,
which are you know, postmodernists or atheist materialists or whatever, which are also demonic, and there's a constant blowing of the lines between like religious terms about whether it's metaphorical or whether they're actually talking about like a force that exists and you know is influencing society, and is it independent from people, or is it just like a metaphorical language for an emotional state?
And and they don't like to ever like address that kind of thing, right?
Because they regard it as as reductive and materialist or whatever to talk about that, and so I think that one thing is once you know the themes of any given sense maker, you're just gonna hear them repeated ad infinitum, right?
And when they get together with all the sense makers, that's what they do, they just like bat their particular concept back and forth and and reference different words.
But that's it.
And it's I mean, we took a holiday in Sandspeaker Land, but I don't want to go back for quite a while now.
I've got enough of it.
And it's it's clear though to the audience that that kind of conversation for a lot of people comes across as profound and moving and insightful, yeah.
And uh, yeah, I don't I don't think it is.
I I don't think it is, but you know, that's a subjective assessment.
But like for them, you know, they're they're very clear that they're making progress, they're all working towards things.
This is all like an ongoing endeavor to build insight and and resolve problems in society.
And you know, they titled this a dialogue so dangerous, it might just bring you wisdom.
So yeah.
Yeah, I yeah, no, you summed it up pretty well.
I I sign off on your interpretation there.
I saw I won't rehash the things you said because you said it well.
One thing I'm curious about is like what in their own minds, like what is their endeavor?
Like towards the end there, it sort of sounded a little bit like they're trying to build a kind of a the philosophical principles for a new society.
But yeah, that is it.
Is it is that it?
Yeah, that's I mean, I think you got it because like we know science speakers prepared a document uh they were working on like a new constitution, right?
That that they did release publicly, but various people said to us, and and that was uh, you know, when society collapses, here is the way that society will be organized.
That it was people should if that document ever becomes public.
But that was like the kind of game B people.
But the GMB people are in the same pool, right?
They're it's all the same thinkers.
Jordan Hall is uh is a GMB person, Brett Weinstein is and and they are about modern society is unfit for purpose.
We need new values, and like typically the new values are religious, or if they invoke other non-religious stuff, it's kind of spiritual, psychedelic insights or luminous kind of things, and uh yeah, and like the other aspect of it is that they're very often tied up with reactionary conservative politics, kind of strangely, but yeah, but that is where these people congregate.
So yeah, no, it is an example of this weird kind of new age conservatism, you know.
On one hand, it's very kind of playful and extravagant and intellectually diverse, you know, meshing together, synchronistic or whatever it's called, but actually it's all aligned to you, quite quite conservative social views.
That's kind of the subjects.
Yeah, global global warming denialism, and you know, like these are all common talking points, so like anti-immigration stuff, right?
All liberals and liberals are mentally ill.
Yeah, the the one thing I'll say, Chris, is that I think this is a good illustration of uh galaxy brain list, right?
This when we when when we talk about it in in the Grometer, you know, we we give the sort of pat definition of it's like you know, having having deep insights or whatever across a wide range of things.
So it's it's kind of it could be confused a little bit with being a polymath, like claiming that you have a great deal of expertise in a whole bunch of different areas, and that's that's part of it, sure.
But this conversation made me remember what made us create that thing in the first place, which is conversations like this, right?
What distinguishes them from I think a normal kind of more academic or technical discussion, even amongst some philosoph philosophers who are more rigorous and a bit more disciplined, or even theologians perhaps, is that it is so expansive, right?
So even if a theologian or a speculative philosopher who's a bit more buttoned down, is a bit more specialized, would constrain the the kinds of connections and the the links that they're looking to make.
What what you see with these kinds of comment conversations is that they're they're so cosmic, it'll link together developmental psychology with mathematical concepts like entropy with scripture from the Bible, from you know, ancient philosophers.
I won't list them all.
You just heard all of the stuff that they're they're referencing, all of those ingredients which they're connecting together into their kind of new science of everything, and that's kind of what sense making is it's a science of or a philosophy of everything.
And you know, Hitchhiker's God to the Galaxy made made fun of these kinds of questions, right?
What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
But you know, that's kind of what they're about, trying to try to answer these these questions like this.
Um I think it's a fool's errand.
I like you, I don't like uh I don't think you'll ever get anywhere with this kind of process with this approach, this epistemic approach to things.
Um but you know, um each I mean you'll you'll get you clearly will get somewhere in terms of social media developing the following and people thinking that you're I meant in terms of actually Understanding things, but yes.
No, no, yeah, in terms of actual contributions to science, so there were no no, but that goes without saying almost.
But the one thing I will add, Matt, just last note for me on this, is that both you and I recognize, just in case it's clear, that like this takes place in the podcast world, right?
These guys are podcasty, sense speakers, content creators.
Vervecki is an academic as well.
And there are actually, these are the kind of conversations that you can find in various academic disciplines and conferences.
Like this is not restricted to the sense speaking realm.
There are there are plenty of disciplines where this kind of conversation would be relatively normal.
And Matt and I would be similarly critical of the reasoning there.
Other people really like it.
So like there is that aspect where it is a value judgment in it.
But I just want to point out that like it's not like you don't see this in corporate culture or academia.
No, like this is a style of conversation and reasoning which is very popular, and you can find it throughout history.
This is just a particular manifestation of it, the sand speaking realm.
So I think you could find it.
You could find it in certain Gnostic type monasteries.
You can find it in certain corners of academia.
Ironically, often in very progressive corners of academia.
Which Jordan Peterson.
He would hate them.
He would hate to be compared to them, but it is very, very similar.
And like you said, there are there are some areas of late-stage capitalism for want of a better phrase.
Like, you know, like the kind of management consulting, corporate um branding stuff where they're operating on some abstract bullshitty level that is so far up their own asses.
And it's no coincidence that a lot of the sense makers, that is John Hall's friends, are actually management consultants.
Like that's their job.
They they go or they give retreats to high-powered individuals or help them to unlock the potential and yeah, that kind of thing.
So, yes, you're right.
There is an overlap there.
So, yeah, but I just want to make clear that like it's if you think that this doesn't happen in academia, it it does.
It does.
Yeah, there's entire conferences where this is the main activity.
And I will never I will never go to them.
Never, never have been there.
Um well, Matt, now that's that's enough sense making.
Where we've had our holiday.
We can all agree.
Whatever you think about takes, we can all agree that's enough sense making.
We've done enough sense making for a while.
And I think you are right that perhaps the splitting into two parts might have been at Mrs. SV in this case.
Um, so yes, there we go.
It was a dangerous conversation, but we we navigated it, dare I say, and and managed to survive, right?
Well, crashing on the any rocks, but you let us know.
It was a danger close situation.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Now, Matt, just a quick thing, a little thing at the end.
We gotta shout out our Patreon people.
We gotta do it.
They deserve it.
Okay, I've got them here in front of me, and I will not be stopped from doing it.
Okay.
Oh, I won't, I won't stop you.
I I love our patrons more than you do, probably.
I don't know if that's possible.
They're like children to me, Chris.
They're like my own children.
Yeah, lost except they financially benefit me rather than costing me money.
Listen to what you say, and they listen to me.
That's right, unlike my children.
That's right, they're better than my children in so many ways.
Agreed, agreed.
Um, so new members of the flock include Cole Talley, Lord Nickel, Johnny Cripps, Michael A, Matt O'Connor, Fleurne, Joshua, and Femick Love I, Gavin Wilding, Benjamin Van Wyck,
Crispin Lockwood, RB543210, Vyron Sharma, Josh, James Hankin, Til Sulman, Nurple Dirple, K, this again, oh no, not KB, Daniel Hockhof, Hockmoff, Stephen Wen, Ari Garb, Deal Dumfries, Selman Weiler, Dora Anna, Patrick Darharty, Chiara, Mercenary Lawyer, Andrew Preppins, Josh Stewart, and A. Steve Rewright.
They are our conspiracy hypothesizers for this one.
That's who they are.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Thanks for being a conspiracy hypothesizer.
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 Sorrow stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Numat are revolutionary thinkers.
Here we have Samuel Charles Innes, Kim, Hill Harvard, Phil Donat, Claire, Super Octomau, Matsy, Claude, Work, Jenny Connard, Dumbitch, Moana Coffee, G,
George Morrison, Tina Baker, Martin Tubert Leftel, Florian Schmidt, Pete Thompson, John Ray, Chris Callahan, Conrad Benjamin, Billy Morris, Adam Tidbitz, Ryan Thieler, Dr. Jennifer Burgess,
Vigard Harks, Rob Ibs, Samuel Phillips, Jesh Herf Singh, Nicole, Dennis Stigman, Eric Ireland, Alexander Tasker, Richard Walter, Odin, Liam, Alexander Skjoldhammer, and Ash Korig.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
Thanks, everyone.
And um, I knew a couple of those names.
I think I've I think I know them on social media.
I knew more than you.
Oh, you don't know that.
I didn't say how many I knew.
Could have been uh, but I still know I know more than that.
Could have been one more than you know.
Could have been, but it wasn't.
But uh thank you, one and all revolutionary thinkers, geniuses, some would say.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
Yeah, and the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
Um 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 and and it could easily be wrong, but it it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Good old Jordan Hall.
We we had some more good good clips from Jordan Hall this episode.
Yeah, not as many as I would have liked, but a little bit too much of Jordan Peterson for my toast.
I would have liked a bit more of a balanced.
Yeah, uh oh, also just to mention at this late stage, uh, John Fervenki did apologize to Jordan Hall in the comment section on YouTube.
He said to my dear friend Jordan Hall, I apologize for talking too much and not making space for you.
That was not considerate of me.
It was not intentional, but it was negligent.
Ideas should not trump relationships.
Ideas should not trump relationships.
Yeah, I was kind of like we what?
It's kind of a long way to put it, but I know.
Anyway, he felt compelled to apologize, so there you go.
But he obviously didn't remember that Jordan said just because he wasn't, you know, you don't hear the word coming out of his mouth.
It doesn't mean he's not contributing.
That's right.
That was a it it played out exactly the way Jordan Hall planned it to.
So he's exactly he shouldn't really be implying otherwise.
No, that's not that's not uh necessary, but whatever.
Uh now the Galaxy Brain Gurus map.
We got a couple of them.
We have Chris Sullivan, Kizmet 13, Ivar's Gerdans, Richard Wilt, Curtis Freeman, John Schumacher, Seth Armstrong, John Marshall, Resident Marxist, Iffy Donatello, Hart, Blackheart, Adam Session, good old Adam, and Matt Happ.
And if he's a resident socialist.
He is, we gotta convert him.
Um working on that, chipping away, but he's I think he's stuck in this way.
So I think you know, but he's not a tanky.
Let it not be said that he's a tanky.
That's right.
That's uh make it clear.
Okay.
That's there's nobody nobody said that, Matt, but I'm just making it clear.
If I know you're not a tanky, all right.
There we go.
It's never quite clear what a what a socialist is.
I think I've got a lot of socialist opinions.
Maybe I'm a socialist.
You probably uh I'd like to ban private schools and also private health uh insurance.
Because if if all the rich bastards were forced to go to the same schools and get the same quality of health care as the least fortunate among us, Chris, then they'd have to pay for it to be good for everyone.
And I think those are two things that are just any decently prosperous civilization should give to everyone as a human right.
There you go.
How about that?
All right, Shay.
Viva la revolution!
...
Yeah.
Well, that's it.
So contributing at this level helps you gain access to insights like that from that.
That's right.
That's right.
And if we get if we get like 10 new top-tier sign-ups, then I will spout more revolutionary.
More revolutionary.
Which would be we're trying to penetrate the socialist market now, Chris.
This is the same thing.
Yeah.
I heard we're trying to carve out the Sam Harris.
It's unclear whether we hate Sam Harris or we love him.
Their opinions differ.
It is funny.
Yeah, and and what our motivations there are.
Some people say stop talking about Sam Harris so much.
Leave leave him alone.
Other people say they clearly in the Sam Harris laundering game.
I I heard that you were just butthurt because he owned you so bad in those debates.
What?
Who said people are saying those to beating that?
Yeah.
Anyway, uh, the clip, the clip for the people.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
You may not be aware that your entire reality is being manipulated.
Become part of our community of free speakers.
We are still allowed to say stuff like this.
Science is failing.
It's failing right in front of our eyes, and no one's doing anything about it.
I'm a shell for no one.
More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber.
In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone.
There we go.
That's that's an appropriate thanks to all the galaxy green level.
And if you made it this far, God bless you.
That's all I can say.
I hope you're thinking about the vertical and how to transcend Jacob's ladder or all that kind of thing.
And that you never listen to Jordan Peterson ever again without thinking about the sense making grammar that we've on the LTO TV.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thank you, Jordan Peterson.
It's reminded me why I'm not a Christian.
But uh Well, you use the word reminded there.
That made me think, Matt, when we re-mind, we mind it, you know, there's a lot of things that that connect now think about it.
No, it's like it's like it's the same as re-imagining.
If you think of what it is to yeah, to imagine something, but then to reconceptualize that.
