Right to Reply: A Dialogos about Sensemaking with Alexander Biener
We are joined by Alexander Beiner, current founder of Kainos and former co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, to grapple with that eternally slippery concept: sensemaking. Naturally, this leads us through interdisciplinary adventurism, reflections on the (il)legitimacy of academia, and the recurring “meaning crisis” that haunts our times. Sense will be made, unmade, and possibly reinvented along the way.LinksAlexander's Substack: KainosAlexander's recent documentary: LeviathanOur original episode that mentions KainosA related discussion we had a while back on the StoaOur previous episode with Jamie Wheal
Hello and welcome to the coding the gurus with me, the cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanaugh and him, the psychologist of some description slash statistician Matthew Bryan.
We are here today not doing a decoding or supplementary material.
We're doing one of the relatively rare interview slash discussions that we occasionally do.
And this one was at the suggestion of a listener to our podcast, Jay Waller, who also is a listener to or a reader, an interactor with the content of the guests that we have.
And it relates to the topic of sense making, which has come up quite a lot on the podcast, especially as of late.
And we are talking with Alexander Biner, who is currently the founder of Kynos and previously also involved with Rebel Wisdom.
We had interactions.
Well, I had interactions with David Fuller.
Previously, I don't think I spoke to Alexander, but he kindly agreed to come on and talk to us about, you know, maybe our perspective on sense making criticisms that we have of that approach and perhaps criticisms he might have of our approach or, yeah, differences of opinion.
So thank you for agreeing to come on, Alexander.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
And thanks for doing sort of a right to reply as a journalist.
It makes me happy.
I think it's good.
And hopefully it gets us to sort of interesting, fruitful new intellectual territory together.
Yeah, so we did briefly cover the kind of rebranding or launch of the Kynos.
My son's name is Kai, by the way, so this is an easy way for me to remember.
But on the supplementary material episode, yes.
And I think at the start, you mentioned that we got some things wrong.
And maybe you don't remember now, but I don't know.
No, no idea.
Earlier on, I sort of revisited a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, I think it's probably a good place to start.
I mean, so the first off, I mean, just to give people a bit of context.
So David Fuller and I founded Rebel Wisdom in like 2017.
And then we ended in November 2022.
So Kynos, my new project, started about two years after Rebel Wisdom had ended.
So that's just to kind of clarify that's not really a rebrand, but I understand why on first glance it might look like that.
Because I did call the piece announcing Kynos from Rebel Wisdom to Kynos, partly because of my own journey, you know, through kind of, yeah, quite a big process of ending one project.
And then there was two years where my book came out and I was writing essays on the sub stack.
And then it was more of a kind of, okay, right.
I want to do something a bit more considered and a bit more focused.
And so that was really what Kynos was about.
So just that's one clarification.
You guys did get a few things wrong in terms of, you know, the general thrust of it and who we had coming on, like smaller things like that.
But that's, maybe we can get into that.
I think the interesting thing, I think, is that, you know, when I was listening to that episode, I thought, like, on one point, kind of funny, like, fair enough.
It was quite a flowery piece I wrote.
That is, you know, that was kind of intentional.
And that's something it would be interesting to get into, like, the, you know, the response that Matt in particular had to phrases like, you know, dancing our way out of crisis, you know, and your guest, who's whose name I forget, I'll get into that in a bit, perhaps we could explain.
Twirling towards freedom.
Twirling towards freedom.
Absolutely.
That's, you know, and it's, I 100% stand by that.
It's, of course, metaphorical and an aesthetic choice.
And that's an interesting kind of place we could explore.
But I think a broader question I have is whether there is such a thing as a sort of sense-making space, which I don't say as a kind of cop-out, right?
But in the sense of sometimes, I think when I've listened to a few of your pieces around the sense-making, and from what I remember back when we were doing Rebel Wisdom, there is it is sort of on one hand, I think, accurate to say there is kind of a space of people who are referring to themselves as sense makers, trying to make sense of what's going on in the world.
I'm not entirely sure that that's still true.
And I think there is, you know, there's, for example, things like the Kinefin model of Dave Snowden, and he uses the term sense-making in a very particular way of navigating complexity.
I use it as a term to combine sort of the need to navigate complex environments in new ways with ways of understanding and knowing that are very multidisciplinary.
And I know, Matt, that's something that you spoke to in that, which I'd love to get into as well, because I think that's probably the main differing point.
And I have a few nuances on that.
And then finally, let me just check my notes.
Yeah, and I think there's somewhat, okay, to be generous and say there is such a category as the sense-making community.
You know, insofar as there's any kind of consensus about what that means, I think you guys have maybe oversimplified some of that.
And I think, yeah, so that's something I could get into.
But yeah, that was my main kind of stuff when I first listened to it.
Yeah, so that's good context.
I think in regards to like the sense-making term, to a certain extent, I don't really mind the label that is used.
I think there's a fair amount of content that chemically, if you like, uses the term sense-making.
And famously, for our audience, we listened to a 3R conversation that was sense-making about sense-making.
Yeah, sense-making cubed, if you like.
So, I think in general, it also dovetails in with things like Game B and in general, people talking about the meaning crisis or that whole area, right?
But there definitely is divisions and overlaps with things around other spaces like rationalists and this kind of a movement, right?
Alternative media and so on.
So, yes, there will be divisions and people that don't identify with the term and differences in between it.
But maybe there's a whole bunch of like places that we could go for.
But I think a good one to start with, since you raised it, and I know Matt has opinions on that as well.
So, on the subject of interdisciplinary issues, so maybe it's good for you, Alexander, to start with what your perspective is on that and what you think our perspective is on that.
And Matt, maybe you can respond and say what you agree or disagree with.
Yeah, yeah, that sounds good.
I think I would maybe go back a few steps because it's important context.
I think, Chris, basically what you outlined about, you know, a space of people interested in the meta-crisis, meaning crisis, etc.
Game B is sort of, yeah, sure, it's all kind of in the similar tent.
And I'd say the academic discipline I gravitate to most is sociology.
So I'm quite interested in looking at, okay, why did something like that spring up at the time it did from, let's say, I don't know, like 2017 to now?
Why is why there are so many, you know, why are there podcasts and thinkers trying to carve out a different space of understanding and navigating what's going on in the world?
Because journalism and academia used to play that role and to a lesser extent, perhaps, you know, aspects of popular culture.
And I think the reason that I find it important is that there is a kind of legitimation crisis going on in society of which academia is a large part.
Like academic legitimacy is eroding, I would say, for various reasons.
I was actually filming a film at a conference yesterday around academic freedom and free speech, but those kind of different things.
I actually met Richard Dawkins, who in my mind, Matt, you might have like a Richard Dawkins poster on your wall sort of just out of shot.
I don't know.
That's accurate.
So it's interesting.
That whole world also sort of intersects with stuff I'm interested in.
I have issues with it as well, but that's another story.
But so that there's certainly a crisis of legitimacy in academia and in journalism as well, and perhaps even more so in journalism.
And because of that, naturally, there's new ways of seeing the world and new attempts to get closer to some kind of shared truth or consensus kind of naturally spring up.
And I would say that what I've been doing for the last, I don't know, eight or nine years probably fits into that mold.
And so the interdisciplinary aspect of it is really crucial.
It's really an important aspect of it because I think one of the critiques that I certainly have is that the, okay, so aside from replication crises and the influence of the profit motive into academia and journalism,
there is a need for, well, let's say, I would say that the institutions as I stand aren't really complex enough or don't hold enough complexity to help us make sense of things like the rise of AI or the rise of the far right, because these can't be just rationally sort of quantified.
And we can do surveys and I read a lot of sociology like this.
We can do surveys of what's going on and we can really gain a good amount of understanding through the traditional academic method.
However, I think to really understand it, we need to bring in, in my opinion, the unconscious, so psychoanalysis, need to bring in philosophy.
We need to look at very seriously what are the metaphysical assumptions underlying what's going on, all of those.
So the more perspectives we can bring in, and I'm going to caveat this because I know that Matt, you made a critique of this.
So the more perspectives we can bring in coherently and accurately or as accurately as possible, the closer to a, let's say, a useful shared truth we get.
So my issue is that the siloing in academia means that it's that classic thought experiment of loads of people, blind people touching an elephant and one person thinks it's a snake and one person thinks it's a tree, et cetera.
that without that interdisciplinary communication um we don't actually get an accurate enough picture to do anything useful or to make new policies or to to transform institutions or to build new institutions um and i think that for you know for better or worse and obviously it's not perfect the the different attempts at trying to create a more complex way of seeing the world which you know,
often involves many academics.
Much of my work involves interviewing academics and then trying to blend, yes, certainly blend their ideas together in such a way that new ideas come out of it.
And Matt, I think you mentioned that that's a kind of a muddy water.
You can mix all the colors together and you get kind of a muddy brown.
That's where I would disagree.
And I'll end here so you can respond.
So where I would disagree is that I think you get a muddy brown if you do that in a very uncareful way and you're not checking back against reality or against other people's opinions while you do it.
If you're just like, wow, we're going to blend, we're going to blend interpretive dance with physics and we're going to have a new way of knowing and understanding the world.
You might, but it's got to have some kind of utility.
It's got to be useful.
It's got to be verifiable in some way, not just rationally, which we can get onto.
And so I would say it's what Ken Wilbur would call a pre-trans fallacy, where the pre-rational position is it's a muddy brown and way, whatever, it's great to blend physics and dancing together.
Now we're getting to some truth, which you get in the new age, you get in the maha kind of conspiracy theory worlds.
The rational position is like, no, you don't do that because we need the silos.
We need to, these things don't blend together because they're not of the same substance.
And then the trans-rational position would be a yes and of yes, actually you can blend these things together and you need to maintain some aspect of those silos so that you don't get into kind of nonsense space.
So that's that's my position on it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Before I reply, let me put you on the spot.
How good was your opposition to research?
Did you check about my background and what I research on and stuff like that?
No shame if you didn't.
Just checking.
No, no, my opposition research was not great because your guys wasn't great in the original one as well.
No, I would have actually, I'd quite like to, but I didn't have a huge amount of time before this.
But yes, but I mean, if you don't mind going into a little bit of it, that would be perhaps useful.
Maybe boring for listeners, but yeah, perhaps useful.
Yeah, I'll try to be quick because, yeah, it's certainly not the case that I think that interdisciplinary research and scholarship is a bad idea.
In fact, most of my research funding and most of my career has been based in the field of gambling studies, which involves addiction and all kinds of issues, social and economic associated with gambling.
I'm pretty well established in that field and pretty well known in that area.
Now, it's an interesting topic, I think, because it's a good example of the ultimate interdisciplinary academic investigation.
So you have the cognitive approaches, biases and impulsivity.
You've got a psychiatric approach where you can look at people that have got gambling problems.
And then you've got the economics and the behavioral economics associated with it.
So people don't like rational decision making, right?
Theoretically, people make purchases, hedonic purchases, and they're going to raise their utility.
But things like gambling or other addictive products are actually designed to actually promote that.
So it crosses over with economics and that all comes into it.
As well as that you have this sort of public policy aspect to it.
You have people who are kind of like socialists or stuff like that, or look at things through like a lens of who's getting exploited and the systems and stuff at play.
And you can look at it through that angle too.
And I've collaborated with those people.
And then there's the main thing that I'm known for, which is the crossover with public health, which is looking at it as a threat to public health.
So analogous to alcohol or tobacco.
And in fact, most of the stuff that I've done has been working on these things called health utility metrics, like health-related quality of life decrements.
And that's stuff that's mainly done through the World Health Organization and stuff, which they sort of measure the impact of stuff like malaria.
And we're extending that to bring gambling into that.
So I'll stop going on about it to come into point.
But like, this is for me, a good example of interdisciplinary research, which spans the topics, the whole disciplines that I mentioned, but also other ones that I won't go into.
And that's pretty normal.
Like this sort of stereotype at academia is these siloed academics who are just in their own little world and aren't collaborating with anyone else just isn't true.
So that form of interdisciplinary stuff, I'm all for.
What I'm against is not just the sense-making version of blending together philosophy and art and a smattering of empirical psychology and sociology or anthropology in there and blending it all up with spirituality and maybe a bit of dance and drum circles as well, who knows.
But, you know, like there are other examples of non-profitable interdisciplinary stuff, like blending stuff that just doesn't go together.
And I don't think sense makers are the only group that are guilty of this.
I could give you examples within academia where I just think they shouldn't be doing it.
There is like, for example, that kind of critical theory stuff.
They often use a lot of jargon.
It's actually really similar, right?
It's very dense.
It's kind of impenetrable.
There's a lot of big words and very little empiricism.
And it's almost treated as like an artistic philosophical exercise applied to psychology or social psychology.
And my personal opinion is I think that's a bit of a waste of time as well.
So yeah, I think it's just a matter about, yeah, doing stuff that is profitable, that actually yields tangible outcomes.
I've published about 300 papers during my career.
Much of my research has been cited in like submissions to parliament, all kinds of, you know, advocates and people use it.
It's used in government reports and stuff like that.
I mean, this is what we do.
We write stuff, we write academic papers, we write research reports, and then that stuff gets used for some purpose, maybe for more research or maybe for public policy or some kind of advocacy or people doing something, you know.
So yeah, I guess I'd just challenge you to say, well, look at what the sense makings have been doing and just maybe give me some concrete examples of how it's been profitable and how it's been used for something pragmatically useful.
Because, you know, I haven't looked into it super deeply, but I confess I haven't seen it.
Alexander, before you respond, can I just add a quick footnote so you can deal with the other point before we end up going on to another topic?
I just want to add in the market's point that like in my case, I work in primarily in the cognitive science of religion field.
And that in itself is hugely interdisciplinary.
The Jonathan Haidt Moral Foundations thing, which you cite on occasion, I've done cross-cultural research on that model.
And on top of that, my background is in anthropology, social anthropology and cultural anthropology.
And then I moved into cognitive anthropology and I teach social psychology.
So I teach quite a lot of courses about like the pros and cons of different methods, qualitative approaches and quantitative approaches, and don't have any issue with that.
But I lean towards Matt's point that you have to be careful in what you're doing.
I mean, people can do whatever they want in terms of everybody is free to pursue whatever kind of philosophy or personal interests or academic interest they want, but there are more and less productive avenues for it.
And when you mentioned like the replication crisis, for example, I'm quite an advocate, quite involved to a certain extent with the open science and methodological reform movement, and have written papers on it and promoted it.
And I see lots of people in the sense making space, for example, when they reference research in that area or the replication crisis, to me, it feels a bit like stolen valour because they're very, very rarely involved with any of the research around the replication crisis or the reform movement.
But they kind of cite it as undermining academic authority.
But in actual fact, that's science working.
And the people who are coming up with the Open Science and Open Science Foundation or pre-registration registered reports, all these things that are making science better are psychologists and scientists.
And they're not the people in the critique sense maker space.
So this is like just a footnote to Matt's point, but I guess it's a challenge that I've listened to lots of conversations with Jordan Hall, John Ferviki, who's in academia, Jordan Peterson, you know, any number of fingers.
And I don't see it having much impact outside of producing more podcast conversations or like workshops.
So what would you say to all of that?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, I think that last point is something I share, which is why Kynos exists and why I work with actually the Australian organization called Small Giants Academy, who I'm partnered with, who are very much focused on how do you turn systems change ideas into impact.
And so I can talk about that in a bit, because I care a lot about that.
I agree.
I think, well, I would say, just as a side note, before getting to the meat of it, you could make the same argument about what's the purpose of nonfiction books or novels or journalism, right?
We're talking about a different kind of impact, which is an impact on how people perceive, how they act, how they interact with each other, which is more qualitative.
And that's something I'll get on to.
So I think, Matt, I'm completely aware of the interdisciplinary nature of academia.
You know, I'm a director of a charity in the UK.
We put on Europe's largest academic conference on psychedelic medicine.
And so, you know, that involves sitting with colleagues, some of whom are academics themselves and trawling through four or five hundred submissions, mainly from, in fact, not exclusively from either academics or clinicians and going through the process of like, we've got four things on sil, we've got four submissions on psilocybin and OCD, which one is strongest.
And so I'm pretty familiar with, you know, some aspects of that process.
I'm familiar with people, you know, being part of multidisciplinary teams.
Everything you listed there in the gambling, cognitive, you know, cognitive science, behavioral economics, psychology, power, public health, all great.
My critique would be that they all share the same metaphysical underlying assumptions.
And they're all part of similar social structures at the whim of similar cultural forces and profit motives.
What my work focuses on and what I'm interested in, and I think a lot of the more out there people that I've spoken to is going up a level to go, okay, well, hang on.
I don't know how many pokies there are in Australia, Matt, or how gambling addiction has been affected, but I'm sure that this research is helpful.
But in the same vein, we've got a huge amount of climate change research and a huge amount of stuff going on.
We've got loads of gatherings, completely, largely ineffective, right?
Because for many, many reasons, there's so many overlapping kind of forces at play.
And getting people to behave differently or see the world differently is not a rational process.
It might involve rationality in the way we understand it, but it involves ways of perceiving and ways of engaging in the world, which are qualitative, not quantitative.
So trying to use quantitative methods to understand those is useful insofar as it tells us that, right, okay, we can see larger patterns, but I think is empirically flawed at a very deep level.
I can give an example.
I was a healthy volunteer in a psychedelic study where we were injected with DMT for 40 minutes, so continuous infusion DMT, which I talk about in my book a bit as well.
And it was very interesting to kind of go through a very profound experience, which is qualitative first and foremost.
And a lot of wisdom traditions do have, as Chris, you might be probably aware, do have pretty solid systems of knowledge to go, how can we make sure this isn't complete nonsense?
Can we verify that there's some kind of signal in the noise here?
But what happens in the study of psychedelic research is I got handed an iPad to do a metaphysical beliefs questionnaire to go from zero to 10, how much do you feel you became one with everything?
From zero to 10, how much did you feel?
And so, sure, that's somewhat useful.
And they can look at a correlate of my experience in the EEG helmet I was wearing.
That tells us very little about the experience or how that experience might shift people's minds.
I'll pause there, Matt, because you want to say something.
Yeah, sorry, I should interject there because I'm afraid there's a bit of a false premise, which is that our research is principally quantitative.
I've done a huge amount of qualitative research as well.
And I completely agree.
For instance, the lived experience of people, like we have, I'm actually well known for quantitative measures of gambling harm and mapping those to quantitative measures of health utility and stuff.
That has its place.
It's very useful.
But we put a lot of effort in grounding that into extensive interviews with people at differing levels on the spectrum.
I mean, that's just one example, but I won't take up too much time, but I just want to say that, you know, I'd say my research is maybe 60% quantitative and maybe 40% qualitative.
But yeah, and so thank you for the clarification.
The point I'm trying to get to is when that research goes to policymakers or it goes to local government or goes wherever it's going, which is seen as more true or valuable, quantitative data or qualitative experience?
I mean, they commission a lot of these reports.
And I can tell you that they do actually value both.
My colleague, Nera Lee Hin, I would focus on gambling studies.
It's just an example, right?
Of academic.
Of academic.
Yeah, it's a bit concrete.
You know, my colleague, Nera Lee Hing in our laboratory, she basically only does qualitative work.
And, you know, they commission it.
They pay for it.
They asked for it and she does it.
So, so yeah, you know, look, I obviously there's a sense in which quantitative stuff is preferable, but there is also ways in which qualitative stuff is necessary in the social sciences.
Um, Chris, being an anthropologist, is also obviously on board with this a lot because, yeah, they're right into that kind of thing.
Chris, did you want to pick up on that at all?
Or yeah, yeah, so I guess maybe I don't know if I'm sliding on to a different topic.
So, so feel free to slide off it if you prefer after.
But in regards to the point that you raised about the kind of metaphysical potential component, right, Dor, or that like a lot of the approaches that Matt is talking about are grinding things in a, you know, like a secular rational framework, if you want to put it like that, a materialist one, right?
And I think that's fair to say that Matt and I in general are advocates for a kind of secular materialist approach to things if you want to say that you're doing science.
That's the caveat.
If you are approaching things from the point of view of you are doing introspective practice or spiritual exercises or so on, I think, you know, knock yourself out.
The issue for me comes when one is presented as the other, or there's there's kind of like a lack of demarcation between them.
Because like when I take someone like Ken Wilbur, for example, who I know David was fond of, and I think you also have interest in integrated integrated theory, isn't that integral, integral, integral, thank you, yeah.
So the color system and that kind of thing.
To me, that seems more like there isn't a way to prove that it is any better or worse than the framework of Scientology or the framework of the Bak Chopra or the framework of the Catholic Church or whichever one, because the standards are internal to it and rely more on accepting the kind of metaphysical framework.
And there's a lot of things like piled in when Ken Wilbur is talking about evolution or talking about cognitive science and so on, insofar as I recognize the topics that he's talking about, it's to me misrepresenting what that research shows.
Like, I mean, his comments on evolution, for example, endorsed the kind of intelligent design, right?
Which indicates a lack of understanding of the basics of evolution.
But he talked a lot about evolution.
That's an interesting.
Yeah, okay.
I'll just pick up on that one.
I want to get to Matt's point as well.
That I think is probably a mischaracterization of integral.
I'm not a sort of massive integral head.
It was very influential on my thinking, but I agree there's a lot of flaws in that and there's probably a lot of there's overreach.
But I think the issue with that is that I don't think Wilbur or others in that space make a metaphysic, make metaphysical claims the center of it.
It's more having a map that is that takes different domains.
And in fact, Wilbur specifically argues what you were just arguing that I can't, you can't cross domains.
I can't go, oh, I had a, I just had a vision of a purple elephant, therefore purple elephants are real, that they've popped into reality and you didn't see it, but it's, it's real.
No, I had an internal experience.
There's different ways of interpreting and understanding that internal experience.
I might, for example, look at it symbolically.
I might look at it in any number of ways.
And likewise, the psychedelic researchers who are doing the research I was involved in can't say this is the psychedelic experience, right?
This data, this quantitative data.
So that's kind of the, I think that they would make that point.
But I think the, Yeah, I mean, I want to just jump back to, I think the reason there's kind of a, well, not a tangle, but I think that the point I've been trying to get to is that everything we've been talking about, and from what I understand, the kind of work you guys do and the critiques you have of, you know, the sense-making space are, you know, coming from a rationalist materialist metaphysics, primarily.
I would say that, Chris, like you, I don't think you can really make the claim that it's impossible to show some kind of teleology or directionality or intelligence in evolution definitively based on the empirical data.
If you do, then I would say that it's basically you've zoomed in so far that you're making a claim that can't be defended if you zoom out further.
We just don't know.
We don't know, right?
Like that's, I think that the stand, the solid position is we don't know because we're looking at a process unfold.
I'm not saying intelligent design in the way that Christians might see it, but if you're looking at a process unfold through its mechanisms and testing that, okay, well, this happens here.
I mean, look at the study of plant intelligence, for example, and the amount of vitriol there is in that field when people even use the word plant behavior, even though there's a lot of evidence that plants act in fairly intelligent ways to protect themselves, to find new territory.
And so that's what I'm talking about.
There is a the more rationalist you get, the more you miss out.
The more woo you get, the more you miss out as well, right?
So that's that's just the point I'd kind of make there.
I mean, I guess it depends on what we're talking about.
But like I would say, if you're talking about any of the biological fields that specialize in evolution, there's no like there's no debate about whether there's a teleological force in it amongst mainstream scientists.
There are some that are more fringe theories that take that position.
But like even if you take somebody like an arch reductionist like Richard Dawkins, right, for example, I mean, he wrote the selfish gene.
And there you're you're using, you know, egentic language to describe, you know, the gene.
But there isn't an implication in that, nor in most of the evolutionary theory, that you need a guiding teleological principle.
Now, you can talk about there being one, but in that context, you are usually introducing a metaphysics which isn't there in terms of like the biological evidence, because the processes of evolution don't require that teleological framework to function, right?
Well, you don't know.
I mean, sure, in the way that they're being looked at, you don't need to interject that.
You don't need to like break Occam's razor, although there are others who would argue that there's phenomena that arise that don't fit that paradigm.
So it's like kind of the Kuhnian paradigm thing.
Basically, what I'm arguing for is that the very same arguments that you guys have against, say, the sense-making community are, I think, violated regularly, especially on the cultural level by rationalist scientists, because they don't stay in their lane either, right?
There is a kind of general cultural expectation of, you know, scientism, that science plays the role for many people in the secular West of God, right?
Increasingly less so because it's not really its domain and it can't really do that very well, which is why I find humanism a really pernicious and ineffective cultural force for meaning making or belonging, but that's another point.
But I think the valid position a scientist can hold around, say, the teleology of evolution is from the way we're looking at it, it doesn't seem to be needed, but we can't make the claim that it's not there.
That I think would be a maybe a more solid empirical claim than what many would make, which is that we can't see it's needed, therefore it's not there.
I think, Matt, and I would also agree with you that like you shouldn't be looking to scientists or basically, you know, people who are specialists in one particular area or have a particular like expertise, they have a Nobel Prize or something like that.
It doesn't guarantee in any way that they're going to be good guides for how to live your life or to give you a meaningful philosophy or that kind of thing.
So, just to be clear, like I do agree on the point that there is a tendency.
Helen Lewis, we reviewed her book recently, was this book called The Genius Myth, where people overextrapolate from like competence in one area into that people are able to be competent in every area.
So, I agree that that is the case, that there are scientists who make like statements about things like neither grass tyson saying philosophy is useless or this kind of thing, right?
Like that, that's an issue.
But anyway, Matt, on evolution.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to quibble about specific claims and things, but I've probably better to try to look at the big picture, right?
I suppose in talking to you, Alexander, I kind of feel like in the position of someone talking to someone who is a, say, a devout Catholic or something like that.
You know, like, I'm not saying you are a devout Catholic.
I'm saying that we're coming from completely different premises.
So I accept that for you, you know, the premises I might be working from are limited and don't encompass enough things.
And for me, I just don't accept a lot of the premises you have.
So, and this applies to, I think, the accepting that there is a meaning crisis, for instance, accepting that there is some need to seriously consider something like teleology in evolution when there is just no, there is no reason to, like there is no, there is no evidence, no sort of theoretical reason why it should be necessary.
It's like accepting the existence of, I don't know, a spaghetti monster around Jupiter because we haven't looked to show that it's not there.
It could be there, as you say, but I see no reason to take it seriously unless I've got better reasons for it.
Similarly with Ken Wilbur and the integral theory, like it is something for me that just doesn't meet any of the basic criteria of science, isn't falsifiable, is basically a pseudo-scientific theory in the sense that it adopts a lot of the sort of language and technical figures and things like that and jargon of sort of scientific and rigorous inquiry while being basically a
big speculative framework, very similar to Scientology, as Chris sort of mentioned.
So, yeah, I guess that's the challenge.
Yeah, different premises.
Yeah, but I would say that there's a different level of it because I think there's an assumption of, from my view, there's an assumption of legitimacy that you guys are both bringing as academics in doing this show and like, you know, decoding the gurus, right?
So on the one hand, yes, I agree that if people are doing like, you know, like Ivermectin, you know, blah, blah, blah during COVID and like people trying to talk about, you know, stuff that is really out of their domain, fair enough.
But I think there's kind of a conceit in this where in a way there is an overstepping of your own domains, right?
Because I've, you know, very, the people you've mentioned don't really claim to be scientists.
You know, some of the people I, you know uh whose work i admire like john vervecki would claim to be a scientist you know and and and i think would have a fairly legitimate claim to that but i think there is a um there's a kind of discounting of anything outside of a rationalist materialist framework as inherently inferior not just method methodologically inferior but on a reality level like that the materialist framework that you're
using, which relies on a level of constant verification, as does science, science being the method of inquiry, which I'm not critiquing.
I'm critiquing the underlying myth, the ontology of it.
So that is a huge assumption, right?
And so, for example, and it's not really how we tend to live our lives because, for example, I'm guessing you guys have been in love before, right?
And now, could you decide between you which of your love was bigger, right?
Obviously, not.
This is a qualitative first-person experience.
My position is that there's two things I want to bring up.
Actually, the first one is that you talked about the efficacy, Matt, earlier, but like, what's the point of all this stuff, right?
My position on that is that the current models we have, and very, in particular, a sort of hyper-rationalist, materialist framework, are completely inadequate at meeting the challenges that we face right now.
Let me take immigration as one example.
The kind of technocratic humanist approach being taken by politicians in the EU and the UK towards immigration are failing across the board.
So Nigel Farage is probably going to come in in the UK, reform party, quite anti-immigrant.
It's happening in Holland.
It's happening in Germany.
It's happening in Ireland.
Like, it's happening across Europe.
And that old system of understanding people as a kind of behavioral units, and well, if we just give them more of this, and if we just send this message, we just do this, it's not working because what's at play is something much more powerful, a qualitative, an aspect of humans that can't be quantified and can't be put into a materialist framework, or could, but not in a way that it becomes particularly effective to make policy around it, which is, this is about status.
It's about belonging.
It's about connection.
It's about the need for ritual.
It's all of these things that get completely discounted from a hyper-rationalist worldview.
And the efficacy of that worldview, particularly with something like immigration, is absolutely failing.
And so if we want to avoid the rise of a far right, which use all of those techniques of ritual, and this is your land, and scapegoating, we're going to need to reclaim those ways of understanding humans, which go beyond the rational, and use them for a more pro-social purpose.
That's kind of my position on it.
So I would say that that's where the efficacy comes in.
Hard to do.
That's kind of what I'm attempting to do with others, but culture change.
Yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean, it's important to remember that in human society, there is a lot more going on than science and academia, right?
So you had journalism, you have politics, you have the arts, you have all kinds of things going on.
People activating for all kinds of causes, and having robust discussions about what we, you know, what kind of society do we want?
Do we want to live in a, like an ethno-state where we're all culturally the same, or are we in favor of multiculturalism?
People argue about these things, and a lot of them come down to values.
And I'll be the first one to admit, right?
This is, these are ultimately Christians, I mean, as well as being a scientist, I'm also a Democrat.
So I kind of believe that these are democratic processes, where basically what the majority of people want is, is to a large degree valid.
I mean, that's not to say though, and I think you sort of slipped into a bit of a straw man there, that, that academia sort of has this sort of technocratic sort of view of these topics that, that cannot inform any of that, except in a very limited way.
Because if you just take immigration as an example, yes, you've got the economic lens, and a country like Australia imports huge numbers of skilled young people, because demographically and economically, they're incredibly helpful.
But you have the sociologists who are coming to play and looking at how immigrants integrate in communities, stuff like that, they have political scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists, and demographers, and geographers, all with their different lenses.
Now, you know, I think one of the interesting things about academic and scientific inquiry is that it doesn't really tell you what you ought to do, right?
So again, I'm making space for other things, right?
Like, it doesn't tell you what you ought to do.
Like, I, you know, I need to go back to my gambling studies, because it's what I know and love.
But you know, I mean, I'm unknown for, you know, mapping links to gambling, dangerous gambling products, causes this amount of harm, quantifying, measuring the amount of harm, comparing it to other diseases, that kind of thing.
But all of that isn't telling politicians what they have to do, right?
Ultimately, that's a democratic decision.
Hopefully, it's not going to be influenced by lobbyists and various political interests.
It will be a democratic kind of decision.
But it's actually, I philosophically believe that it's not my decision.
It's ultimately the decision of a democratically elected government to do those things.
Then everyone has a right to voice their opinion about these topics.
And they certainly do.
So you know, that's, that's where I see our thing where it plays.
I mean, we're against crossing the streams.
I mean, again, we're the first ones to me.
We have our own personal tastes.
I do enjoy stuff like abstract art and abstract jazz.
I enjoy this kind of wild, imagined stuff as well.
I like to keep it separate from my view of the actual real world and what is actually there.
I don't think jazz or abstract art is going to help you understand it.
So I sort of agree with your point there about you were sort of hinting at non-overlapping magisteria.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I think there's some truth to that.
Yeah, you know, academia and science can inform.
It can give us an accurate view about something like climate change and say, look, this is definitely happening.
Carbon dioxide emissions, we've been monitoring temperatures, blah-de-blah.
All right.
All the models are predicted in this.
It doesn't actually say, oh, well, that means you have to do why, you know, X or Y. Ultimately, humanity can decide: look, we're okay with global warming.
You know, we want to have our economy booming and we're okay with the temperature going up for us five degrees.
That's ultimately a values-based decision.
So, so yeah, I mean, I think that's a conciliatory kind of statement, hopefully.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, I largely agree with much of that.
Um, Chris, I saw you wanted to say something, so I'll just pause.
Oh, yeah, I was going to let you respond first.
But so, on the UE is the like specter of you know, the kind of populist right and anti-immigrant sentiment growing and that kind of thing.
Um, and the fact that like the technocratic, moderate liberal consensus, 1990s consensus, right, is very strongly criticized at the minute and for lots of good reasons, right?
But there, I would say that, like Matt said, in terms of the best way to address things like immigration and integration and so on, I think there's lots of different positions that people can take.
And, you know, there are right-wing positions and left-wing positions and argue it out in the political arena and the public opinion arena.
But when it comes to dealing with that, so in my observations of the sense-making arena, and I would include in that, for example, that most of the, not most of the people, but a lot of the larger figures around there, for example, would be very fondly disposed to Jordan Peterson and would be also fondly disposed to Elon Musk.
I hear a lot of positive mentions towards figures like Elon Musk, and you have the tech-sing overlap there, right?
Including that many of the people that are active in Silicon Valley also like to present themselves as kind of technomunks, if you like, like Jack Dorsey or this kind of approach.
And to me, it seems like, as opposed to being a solution to that, if you look at Jordan Peterson's output in politics, it is absolutely endorsing, supporting, promoting the nationalism, the conspiratorial reasoning.
He made a video that was talking about how the Trump administration are all superheroes of old.
They're X-Men.
It was the most propagandized piece I've ever seen.
And then when I hear him interact with Jordan Hall or John Verviki and so on, they decry that there's like so much populist rhetoric around and that there's like conspiracism and there's lack of trust in institutions.
And to me, I hear people making that point while at the same time being the very people that are undermining faith in institutions, attacking it, saying scientists are liars, saying it's all discourse, it's all narratives.
And in that respect, they take a position that is very similar to like the kind of postmodern approach of saying it's all discourse.
It's all narratives, competing narratives.
And they're fundamentally, you just pick the narrative that you like.
But I think when it comes to stuff like conspiracy theories and what medicines actually work and the actual threat that immigrants pose, the levels of crime and those kind of things, there are actual facts out there in the world and there is rhetoric, right?
And so to me, I see an issue that if it's presented that the sense-making space gives a better solution, it seems odd to me that there is so much sympathical towards a particular arena.
And I will just mention like a couple of the tropes and you could say whether you think this is fair or not.
But I would say conspiratorial tropes are common.
Conspiratuality, if you like, the kind of overlap between.
right-wing populism and conspiratuality, the demonization of modernity, media and academia and science as untrustworthy.
Basically, any mainstream institution epistemics as being flawed, no longer trustworthy, that we need to now adopt alternative frameworks to deal with it.
And the alternative frameworks tend to push towards the figures that we cover who are modern day gurus.
And most of the time, what they're doing is claiming they're solving this pressing meaning crisis.
They're addressing real world problems.
But in reality, all that tends to happen is they get a bigger audience, they get more subscribers, they get rich, they go on podcasts or news shows, and they kind of speak very confidently and very sweepingly, often very polemically about various political topics.
So to me, that's an issue that is not contended with.
And it's part of the main thing that we critique when we listen to the conversations, because one of the things we do is we sit and we listen to three or four hours of people talking about very witty issues and never once addressing like I've never heard anybody challenge Jordan Peterson about his like level of conspiracism or polemicism whenever he's dealing with that and that to me would be like the elephant in the room that all the blind people grasping are deliberately choosing not to grasp because
it's less beneficial for their own growth as a creator a hundred percent agree with you yeah yeah guys i'm completely on the same page with that and i think one of the issues is that you've scooped me into a net that i haven't really been covering journalistically or since like 2019 and even on rebel wisdom we we raised a lot of these issues of peterson quite quite early and really moved moved on our focus so i mean david david was very critical i'll also give
you know credit he did yeah yeah and also very obsessed at the beginning as well you know so he had both he went through kind of a journey with that and and you know and i found i found peterson's um but i'm very youngian so i was like great there's someone bringing young into the mainstream you know so um and then that that quickly changed um and so i would say yeah i'm with you on that and i mean the thing is my my work which was a bit this is kind of what bothered me about uh the the what you guys put out about my sort of announcement email is it was i
was like my work when i'm doing what i write features largely right on my sub stack i write features about like say why is a far right right winning or i do a kind of analysis of you know i did a piece around barbenheimer what's the saying about the cultural relationship between men and women i you I do all sorts of things.
When I'm researching, I'm largely looking at academic papers when I'm researching.
I'm reading sociology books.
I'm looking at papers.
For the far right one, because I'm half German and half Northern Irish, I read a book written by two German sociologists about the Reichsberger, who it's a whole other story, but you guys should check them out.
They're all in jail now, I think.
But, you know, this kind of conspiracy to overthrow the German government.
So that's the kind of research that I'm interested in.
And if I'm putting something out journalistically, I'm like, it better be accurate and checked.
And sometimes I'll write to an academic, but is this true of what you've said?
So that is a choice of journalistic ethics.
You know, I could have, I mean, so I've, you know, I've got a decently sized following on Instagram and TikTok from pieces I put out when my book came out around psychedelics.
Now, it would have been very easy at that point to get up to like a million views, but just by putting out utter shite, right?
I've just had it, I've just basically, but I didn't because it's not where I'm coming from, right?
And so this kind of speaks to a bigger thing where perhaps there's a place to meet in this conversation.
My issue is not with the practice of academia or the skills.
I find those incredibly valuable.
In fact, I was quite seriously considering doing a sociology PhD a couple of years ago.
I thought I would actually quite like to get better research methods.
But I found, I mean, I just found the whole thing really obtuse of like, how do you get it?
You have to find someone who's going to be your supervisor.
Like, how do you find that?
Oh, you just have to sort of like, you have to read about, it's just a really weird process.
And I was like, I think I'll, I'll, uh, try and get the research methods from someone else.
Um, but you know, it's not off the table, you know, but and a lot of my academic friends warned me off.
They're like, no, run, don't do it.
I think it's an interesting one.
But my point is, what I'm interested in is, okay, if a lot of our institutions aren't working in the way they could, and I'm not saying they're not working at all.
I don't fall into that camp where I'm like, you know, like the kind of maha, like, yeah, it's all, it's all a conspiracy.
I think that's ludicrous.
I think it's literally, I think the real, a lot of my work is around complexity.
How do we hold the complexity of like, probably the best skills in the world are in those institutions at the moment.
And there is a peer review process.
And it's better than Joe Rogan sort of farting on about something.
For sure, it's better than that.
It's also limited in its own way.
The alternative media space is limited in many ways.
It relies on like any self-regulated area, someone caring enough about values and truth seeking to go, right, I'll ask for right of reply.
I'll do this.
I'll do that.
So that's kind of where I sit on it.
You know, I just had a long argument on somebody else's Instagram.
He's this Nordic guy who does these sort of like Nordic return to your roots thing.
And he put out, I don't know who he is, but he came up in my feed.
He put out a video which said, Europe had its own ayahuasca.
And it was like this kind of drawing on, you know, I know this space inside out.
I've written a book on psychedelic science.
I was like, that's nonsense.
No, we didn't.
And I got into a whole argument with like five different people on his thread.
They're being like, yeah, but we know maybe there's like, there's no evidence that Europeans ever use psychedelics ceremonially.
As much as it would be great if there was and it would give us a sense of belonging.
There's no evidence for it.
We can't really say that.
What we can say is there were a lot of psychedelic plants.
It's very possible.
But I really, you know, I'm sure we meet in a hatred of bullshit and unexamined premises.
I'm totally with you on that.
And at the same time, I think it's very fruitful to explore where the gaps are and to bring in some dancing mixed with physics, mixed with sociology.
I actually am fully up for that.
Not to be like, this is going to get, you know, see what happens.
See what happens.
Yeah, I mean, like any social institution, any human institution, academia is deeply flawed, right?
Chris and I, if we had two more hours, Chris and I could really fill that time talking about all the things that we think are wrong and could be better, etc.
But, you know, it's a little bit like the perfect being the enemy of the group, right?
And at the same time, you have these forces, you know, mainly these populist forces like Maha and so on that you mentioned, or the people that want to deny climate change, you know, who are actively like undermining these institutions, right?
Not just rhetorically, but actually, you know, actually in a very tangible way.
And, you know, so despite all its flaws, as we said, it is in a way the only game in town, like in terms of a certain materialist reductionist domain, right?
If you want to have drum circles and stuff, academia is not going to help you.
If you want to do really cool, abstract expressionist art, then, you know, you don't need academia for that.
You know what I mean?
You want to listen to some cool jazz or whatever.
That's not the job of academia.
But whenever I hear talk about, you know, academia is broken or whatever, like, you know, they discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
You know, gravitational waves.
The whole deep learning AI revolution came out of academia, right?
And it did what academia does.
It does the foundational research and passes it on to commercial enterprises who then pick up the ball.
AlphaFold, like genetic engineering, the mRNA technologies that went into those vaccines.
You know, like that's where it comes from.
It's not going to come from podcasts.
You know, we're podcasters as well, but it's purely for entertainment value, right?
We're not going to do any CRISPR here.
And, you know, it's not going to come from these other sources.
So yeah, you know, if, and, you know, as Chris said, like, you know, there are one of the problems that people like to mention is the replication crisis, which was a very genuine and deeply embarrassing thing for me as a psychologist.
But that was some time ago now, like over a decade.
And as Chris said, a lot of us took that on board, right?
And there's this self-correcting thing that has occurred.
And it'll probably take another 10 or 20 years, but that was a cultural thing that was found out to be broken by empirical replications, by academic researchers finding out that these things didn't replicate and instigated better processes.
So yeah, I mean, if there is anyone out there that genuinely wants to make research and academia better in terms of producing actual products that can make the world better for everyone, then yeah, I mean, we're all for it.
And we'll happily bash academia.
But, you know, when we hear a Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein or any of these other people, now Sabine Hossenfelder and others have got, you know, like it is a very popular thing, right?
Amongst the certain kind of you can see why it's appealing, right?
All of these eggheads out there, you know, they think they know everything, you know.
Yeah, it's the lower resolution end of a response to a legitimation crisis, I would say.
It's the dumb end in some way.
Sometimes they're smart, but there's a kind of, I mean, I mean, to be fair, Eric Weinstein has a theory of everything.
He just can't find where he wrote it down.
It's just, he's just, but when he gets published, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, like, that's a whole other thing.
You get someone who, you know, like, has intelligent things to say in other areas, but, you know, so anyway, that's a whole other topic.
But I would say that the work of like looking at the complexity of these different, Yeah, everything we've just talked about.
Look, bits of academia are broken, and yet at the same time, yeah, Higgs bows on.
That's where I'm going to go if I want a vaccine completely, completely.
And simultaneously, I don't want to be in a world where we have a Higgs boson, but we're ruled by some far-right group.
And I know you're also saying it's not academia's place necessarily.
Well, I mean, it's perhaps not science's place to science's place.
But, you know, you could argue that there is a role for academics to play a role in society where they are providing information and perspective that's what we don't.
Yeah, exactly.
Informing, not making policy like in sort of Soviet Russia, but like informing.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, I'm with you on that for sure.
The people you're talking about, I would say a lot of them are audience captured.
A lot of them are chasing a revenue stream, which requires basically going lowest common denominator.
And that's a real indicator of perhaps a lack of character, perhaps a kind of lostness in a kind in a version of like fantasy, like with Brett Weinstein.
You know, that's but and sometimes it's the best meaning people and they just aren't really prepared for the dynamics of the internet.
Well, yeah, well, I mean, there's the structural incentives, of course, too.
There are bad incentives in every area, but yeah.
Oh my God, the incentives amongst people whose livelihood relies on YouTube clicks.
They're pretty clear.
It's not just revenue, it's status as well.
It's a huge status driver.
You're going to lose status if you piss off your audience.
Yeah.
There's a bit for me, Alexander, that I guess like in the alternative media space and like critics of mainstream approaches in general, right?
That sometimes it's presented as nobody wants to hear, you know, these hard truths and we're going to give it.
But in actual fact, like bashing institutions is a great thing.
Like everyone loves it.
Like, you know, if you go on YouTube, now like I just saw, for example, Yannis Faroufakis and Tim Nguyen having a discussion that let the light in institute of ideas or whatever, you know, that conference in the UK that they have.
And whatever your position about their debate, right?
They're kind of debating about Google and big data.
And Varoufakis obviously has like, you know, the techno-feudalism, very critical approach.
And Tim Nguyen works for Google.
Now, in that conversation, if you look at the comments on YouTube, obviously nobody, even though they're using YouTube to express this, it's very much a cynical position, right?
Like, and I'm not saying, oh, therefore, you know, we should all trust Google and they're all doing great, but I'm just saying it's actually not an unpopular position to bash Google or to talk about algorithms or to like say the billionaires are screwing over society.
This is, it's, it's not only common, it is the unifying talking point across the political spectrum.
And it is the unifying like position of populists throughout the ages.
And that kind of also dove deals with a point I want to raise about the meaning crisis, because I hear a lot about the meaning crisis and the content we listen to.
It's a lot there.
And it's certainly the case that particularly if you focus on Western countries, that there are statistics that you can point to, right, that show people feeling a bit lost in younger generations and whatnot.
But I would challenge anyone to locate a generation in history where that narrative was not the case, where there was not a feeling that the previous generation had a sense of meaning, had a mission, and it's now being lost by this generation.
Because like in the 60s, you had the hippies, you had the new thought movement.
If you go way back in history, most of the religious movements are critiquing existing authorities, right?
Like the Vedic system or the Jewish system or like all throughout history, any history that you look, there are these movements where people are saying life in the past was like deep and meaningful and people were real rounded people.
They were tilling the soil and they had meaningful relationships.
And now us, you know, Max Weber was writing about it in the 1920s.
And I think that humans in general are in a perpetual meaning crisis that they want fulfilling meanings.
And, you know, if you look at the, I was talking to Matt about this before, but like death of a salesman, that's published in the 1940s or a streetcar named Desire.
Are they presenting it that like everybody in society is unified?
The American dream is great.
We all live in a unified society where we accept the same things.
No, they're talking about the breakdown of like society and the fact that you can't afford things and that there's class divisions.
And then you have, you know, the Cold War immediately after World War II in Northern Ireland, like you mentioned, there's no trust of authorities there.
Where I grew up, there's an entire community that doesn't trust the police, right?
Or in other countries, you have civil wars, you have post-colonial movements.
So I feel that there's like this kind of simple narrative where in the past, everybody had things and their life was simple and they had like a narrative.
And now us in the modern era, we've made it complicated or we've forgotten the meaningful things.
But if you go back to, you know, China, that's what the Taoists are trying to tell people how you should live in alliance with the Tao in order to be a good ruler, right?
And the point is, when you look back at the historical rulers, the Golden Emperor and whatnot, he was doing it right.
So what about that?
That like, is there an issue that there is constantly a marketable meaning crisis, which gives people, you know, an arena to offer solutions perpetually, but yet there will never ever be a solution as long as humans are social primates that feel dissatisfied with things in general.
Yeah, it's a good point.
I mean, like, I think we, I think you could argue that we are perpetually in a meaning crisis from the moment we're born through Jen.
I mean, Buddha was in a meaning crisis, right?
So it's, and then this is how we get.
But I think where I would differ, I think that if we're taking the term from John Revegi's work, there's a lot more to it than that.
Then just a sense of things were better.
In fact, I wouldn't say Verveki would even make the argument things were better in the past.
I do make a version of that argument where I say that there are aspects of our Paleolithic biology that the modern world completely strips away.
And that in that, we suffer, right?
And I'm not saying we need to go back to a Paleolithic reality, but I'm saying that there are pretty simple things that make human beings feel connected to the world and connected to one another and belong.
And of course, arguing on social media in a sort of disembodied realm of abstraction is not one of those things.
But sitting face to face to someone having a meal together and having a chat is one of those things.
And I think most people would be like, yeah, I would rather do the other one.
Right.
And so in that sense, I think there are human biological, bio-psychosocial things that we could largely agree across disciplines are better for humans and other things.
And I think part of the way I understand the meaning crisis is through that lens of how do we return to what we need without some imagined fantasy of like, let's go back to the last time things were good.
Because I agree with you.
There isn't really a last time things were good.
I think in many ways, I'm not like Steven Pinker, but in many aspects, this is a very, very good time to be alive.
In other aspects, that might be a temporary blip and it'll get a bit more like children of men in a few years, you know, sort of like that's how I see it.
That's my review.
Sort of like a crapper version of now.
It's more authoritarian.
Hopefully people will still have babies.
But yeah.
Yeah, I think that's an excellent note to wrap up on.
Because on one hand, I'm with you on the evolved psychology of human beings, right?
We are biological creatures and we have to take that into account.
And the second way in which I agree with you is that sitting around and having a meal with your family, that's super important.
More important, some would say, than arguing with people on the internet.
And I definitely need to do that in the next 10 minutes or so.
But yeah, look, this is really interesting, Alexander.
Thanks for coming on and having a chat.
And I'll also just note, Alexander, that I've taken up bouldering in the past year and a half or so.
I go with my son and I go by myself.
He's getting in touch with his monkey.
Yeah, that's it.
You're social primate, climbing up a wall.
It's very enjoyable.
I agree.
I promote that people should try it.
Seeing, you know, the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu had its moment of themselves for the same reason.
But yeah, they're definitely the fact that we are ultimately social primates.
It is something that I think people should bear in mind and should factor in.
And for the same reason, not find it so surprising that we're influenced by emotion and powerful rhetoric and maybe a little bit sometimes too swayed by interpersonal connections and whatnot.
But yeah, maybe Matt and I have a notion that like the level of attention that the social media current ecosystem provides, that is something perhaps which is somewhat the reinging of social primates.
It's that seeking art status and attention.
So yeah, we can agree on that.
And everything else, we appreciate the exchange and the willingness to come on.
And yeah, so if people want to check out more of Alexander's work, there's also a documentary, right?
