Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Thank you so much for being a part of this movement, and we look forward to seeing where it takes us in 2020 and beyond! Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Jeremiah 29:14 (Music: "In Need of a Savior" by Nicholas Britell) and "Out of the Box" by John Vervaeke - "Out Of The Box" - "Good to See You" by Jon Vervoeck Music: "She's a Woman" by Jeff Perla (ft. John Verveke) - "A Goodie" is out of the box (feat. John Pajot & "In The Universe" by James Brown "Goodbye, My Name is Goodbye" by Ian McKee ) Join us in the Universe? , "A Better Place? , "Let Me See You (Goodbye" by Matt Walsh -- "A Little More Than This? ) and "A Big Goodie & Good To See You? " ? / "A Great Place (A Little Better Than That?) . "And This Is a Goodie?" -- "This Is My Story?" -- "A Song" by Matthew Walsh (A Big Love & A Goodie, Good To Hear Me & A Little More So Let Me Say So Much And A Little Less Than That And A Good To Say So And A Few More So Much & A Big Less So Much (A Good To Be More Than That So Much) -- And This Is That & This & This And This & A Few Other Than That & That And This And A Less Than This And So Much So Much More? & Other And A More So Than That?
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:22.500John and I have been involved in a conversation now that spans more than a decade.
00:01:28.880We've been both working assiduously in different ways on defining the meaning crisis and also exploring potential solutions to that crisis, and with some success, I would say.
00:01:41.960And one of the things that we do in today's conversation is to continue that dialogue and to delve more deeply into what the meaning crisis signifies and also what it means, say, in John's terms, that there's a new advent of the sacred.
00:01:56.920And what that means, what the sacred means, what a new advent might look like, what that means philosophically, what it means scientifically and theologically, for that matter.
00:02:06.920We spend a fair bit of time as well discussing Peterson Academy.
00:02:18.640And along with Pajot and my work on the Peterson Academy, that's another place where this meaning crisis, at least in principle, is in the process of being resolved.
00:02:29.740And that—God only knows what that means, but it seems to be a genuine phenomenon.
00:02:36.240And so, and phenomenon, that means to shine forth, by the way, and that does look genuine.
00:02:41.000And so, well, John and I had the opportunity to delve more deeply into all of those issues, and that's great fun.
00:02:46.840And that fun, that's an enthusiastic fun, you know, that's—and when that makes itself manifest in a conversation, you see that in itself is something like the advent of the sacred.
00:02:56.980Because a conversation that takes you outside yourself and beyond yourself and into the future and up into the realm of higher possibility is a manifestation of the sacred that's been characterized for centuries as part of the process of the Logos.
00:03:11.640And it's so useful and interesting to understand that you can experience that, and that you do experience that when you get caught up in, let's say, an exploratory conversation.
00:03:22.800You know, we talked about other ways you can get caught up in love and in what—enraptured by beauty.
00:03:28.120But the thrill, the enthusiastic thrill of a conversation that's transformative is a marker for the emergence of something that the world depends upon, right?
00:07:11.740And that became—and it was—that wasn't just a statement for me.
00:07:16.860And because of the people that were there and the way they received it, I felt—I don't want to get too overly egocentric, but that was a very healing moment for me.
00:07:27.340Well, it's a remarkable thing to realize.
00:07:30.160You know, I interviewed—had a discussion with Elon Musk recently, you know, and he had a very cataclysmic existential crisis around 13 or 14.
00:07:41.100And, you know, Musk has a world-class intellect, so it's not surprising that it happened to him early.
00:07:46.320And it had something to do with the conflict between the scientific view of the world, the hypothetical conflict between the scientific view of the world and the religious view.
00:07:55.960And it took him a number of years to resolve that.
00:07:59.160And I think essentially the way he resolved that was by realizing his identity with the Logos.
00:08:06.060Now, that's not exactly how he put it, but then he didn't have the benefit of the Gospel Seminar, for example.
00:08:12.020But what he discovered was that he could find intrinsic meaning in life by pursuing the path of the exploration of truth, right?
00:08:21.820And I don't think there is any real difference between the Logos and the pursuit of truth.
00:08:27.080Now, what that means theologically, well, you could unpack that for millennia because human beings have been unpacking it for millennia.
00:08:35.280But it is perfectly reasonable, and I think in keeping with your work, to point out that that investigation into truth itself, A, is a form of truth.
00:08:49.160Jean Piaget said that, is that if we're going to understand knowledge, what we really want to understand is not the structure of knowledge, but the process by which knowledge builds and is regenerated, right?
00:08:59.840And so Piaget figured that out, and to follow that deep commitment to the truth and that continual exploration is identification with the Logos.
00:09:10.340And that certainly characterizes your work, and it's good to put that back into context.
00:09:15.620I mean, I've been struck, too, by the fact that, you know, the Greeks, I released a series of documentaries on the Daily Wire as well.
00:09:24.080The last one of four is coming out this week, I believe.
00:09:29.200Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, two in Jerusalem.
00:09:33.240And one of the things that's remarkable about the conjunction of Greece and Jerusalem is the Greeks posited the existence of a Logos that was embedded, essentially, in the material and corporeal world.
00:09:47.000That there was an intrinsic logic to things, that the world itself was comprehensible, and that comprehending the world was good.
00:09:55.320And the Jews, essentially, and the Christians had an embodied Logos idea that the human being was a rational creature and an exploratory creature, and that there was a match between that and the world.
00:10:07.960And that combination of Greece and Jerusalem is one of the sources of Western civilization.
00:10:15.340But it's very good to be able to conceptualize the gospel account in that manner, because it, well, it starts to put rationality and the mythos that you described back together, which is, I think, you know, something of cardinal importance for our, and I think it's what's occurring in our current time.
00:10:43.880We're talking about the truth that's only, and Piaget would agree with this, the kind of truth that only is realized through personal transformation.
00:12:03.180Well, one of the things that I wrote about, I have a new book coming out in November, and I actually drew somewhat heavily on Richard Dawkins for parts of the book.
00:12:21.000And so Dawkins makes a strong case and repeats it again in his newest book, which is just out that an organism, any biological organism, has to be a microcosm of its environment, has to be a model.
00:12:35.460So it has to reflect the environment at every level, right, from the molecular all the way up.
00:12:45.540And, well, that's exactly what I guess Dawkins would say both.
00:12:49.220You have a model, or you are a model, and you have a model, and that would be particularly true for people.
00:12:53.880And, well, the fact that you're a model and that you have a model, so that's the interior logos that might be more associated with, say, Judeo-Christian thought, but it has to match the external logos of the world because otherwise it has no connection point.
00:13:10.360But that also begs a question, which is one of the questions I raise in this book, is that if Dawkins is correct in that supposition, that an organism has to be a microcosm of its environment, and human beings are embodied personalities at the highest level of their organization, then how can it be otherwise than that the human being as a personality is a reflection of the essence of the cosmos, let's say.
00:13:37.000Or, well, not pretentious, I mean, it could be taken as pretentious, or you could reframe it as, you know, there are potentialities in reality that are only actualized in our personhood.
00:14:02.820You can think about us as random, like as the consequence of random processes, which I think is a fairly absurd way of looking at the evolutionary process.
00:14:13.340But you can also look at us as manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate right from the beginning of time, right?
00:14:23.860And we know that these potentials exist because, well, hydrogen and oxygen join to make water, and what that, and so on up the chain of complexity.
00:14:32.860And what that seems to indicate to me is that there's an unrealized potential, even in the simplest of material forms, that contains within it, well, whatever possibility is.
00:14:44.240It's very difficult to define, but it isn't that that possibility makes itself manifest in an entirely random manner.
00:14:49.880It reflects something like an implicate order in those lower order material properties, or, yeah, properties.
00:14:57.700So you're turning in, and this is a great joy for me, you're turning into a Neoplatonist.
00:15:02.140Because, I mean, you have emergence up.
00:15:17.860And if you had emergence up without constraint down, the top level would just be an epiphenomena.
00:15:23.080But the top level, as a level, has to constrain what's going on.
00:15:26.660And this is in the book I'm working on with Greg Enriquez on consciousness, that you not only have bottom-up emergence, you have top-down emanation.
00:15:35.120And that's the Neoplatonic view, and that's the view that went into the heart.
00:15:38.560That seems to be the same view that Pajot holds, I would say.
00:15:41.080Well, of course he does, because he's an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and as we're going to say, Christian Neoplatonism is at the core of people like Jonathan Pajot and Bishop Maximus.
00:15:52.100Eastern Orthodoxy, like, all of Christian mysticism is profoundly influenced by Greek Neoplatonism, but especially Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
00:16:15.140I was pretty much out of it for the next three weeks in consequence, but it was well, well worth it.
00:16:20.580So, and I have a follow-up volume to the book I'm going to publish in November, which is specifically on the book of Job and on the Gospels.
00:16:28.500And this seminar certainly helped me flesh that out to a tremendous degree as well.
00:16:56.140Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone tech-savvy enough to intercept it.
00:17:05.520And trust me, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:17:08.440With some cheap hardware, even a precocious 12-year-old could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:17:15.200Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:18:15.080And challenging part of that entire narrative, and so—
00:18:20.320Yeah, I remember when we were in the Gospel Seminar, that was a—that was—that was—yeah, that was a—everybody was worried about that.
00:18:54.420Right, and that's—maybe that's something like the opposite of that Pharisaic religious pride that's often conceptualized as the ultimate sin, right?
00:19:03.420Is that, you know, when you're trying to hammer home your status because you're right about something,
00:19:09.080that's a completely different game than trying to build something together that expands you both in the course of the conversation.
00:19:17.680I think—I think the seminars were flawless examples of that.
00:19:21.440Everybody played extremely well together, despite very, very, very—
00:19:29.240Socrates made a distinction between Philosophia, the love of wisdom, and Philonokia, the love of victory.
00:19:34.860And he said that the greatest thing that thwarts the love of wisdom is the love of victory.
00:19:39.220I wonder if there's any difference between the love of victory and the worship of power.
00:19:43.180I mean, most of the opponents that Socrates is wrestling with are the sophists,
00:19:50.440and they are definitely advocates about, you know, that reality is power and that having power is what you're after.
00:19:58.880They were deeply political animals in that fashion, yes.
00:20:02.800Yeah, well, so one of the things I've wondered about, too, in recent years is—so imagine that there are different forms of conceptualization and action
00:20:13.600that can lead to something approximating a higher-order unity, and power would be one, because you can unify to some degree with power.
00:20:21.520I mean, it produces a counterposition, because if you use power on people, they tend to rebel.
00:20:26.500But at least for some periods of time, you can use command and force to bring together.
00:20:34.420But I have a sneaking suspicion that it's much better to bring people together in a unity under the aegis of something like the Logos,
00:20:43.060which is that game of genuine exploration and self-transcendence.
00:20:47.660But maybe there could be a corollary to that, which would be that if God dies, if the God is Logos and it dies,
00:20:54.800the deity that rises to replace it is power.
00:20:59.300Wow. You do what you frequently do. That's very pregnant with a lot of possibilities.
00:21:04.580I mean, first of all, that notion of die a Logos by means of a Logos.
00:21:08.480And I think that's something we should practice and do a lot of work about trying to help afford people being able to practice that as an explicit practice.
00:21:20.900So I think that's a very valuable thing to say.
00:21:23.120I think power is one of our senses of realness.
00:23:20.540And so you've got this interlocking between reason and love and beauty, which I think—
00:23:26.220Yeah, I wonder if that's something like—
00:23:30.540See, you object to someone's arbitrary imposition of compulsion over you because they're—this is one way of looking at it—
00:23:38.880That is, they're forcing you to perceive and communicate and to act in a manner that isn't in keeping with the structure of your values, right?
00:23:51.080So it strikes you as counterproductive with regards to your own aims, let's say.
00:23:58.160And that produces a sense of disharmony and rebellion.
00:24:01.680It could be that the reason that beauty and love can be compelling without being powerful in that compulsion way is that they speak to something like an emergent harmony of value that's part and parcel, you might say, of the soul.
00:24:18.540So beauty could compel you forward in part because if you—it might be that if you integrated your values properly, you would be naturally oriented in consequence of the makeup of your soul towards those things that beauty and love are pointing to.
00:25:07.200And, you know, I can't give you an argument to prove that that's the case because every argument presupposes that, in some sense, the grammar of reason and the grammar of reality must have some deep harmony.
00:25:19.980And the same thing with love and the same thing with beauty.
00:25:22.740And these are profound ways in which—
00:25:24.760Well, I think faith—well, I think faith is actually the willingness to posit the reality of that truth in the absence of final proof.
00:25:33.540Okay, let's talk about that because I think that's really important because that's a different—there's different notions of faith.
00:25:37.800And what I hear you saying—I might be wrong.
00:25:40.140What I hear you saying is faith is a recognition of the power in the good sense that we're talking about here as following—the power of these primordial presuppositions that are central for participating in the logos, participating in the true, the good, and the butyl.
00:25:55.540And that's a different notion of faith than the assertion of belief without evidence.
00:26:01.160Well, this is something that we concentrated quite a bit on in the gospel seminar because, well, this is actually a problem that I have with the Christian, the classic, what would you say, the standard Christian community.
00:26:13.780Well, now, because the Christians are all annoyed at me because I won't—I don't—I haven't proclaimed my faith in the propositional manner that many people who've adopted a creed would find would require.
00:26:30.720And so, they're upset about that and on my case.
00:26:35.300And it's—I find it's quite distasteful in some ways.
00:26:40.420There's an invitational element, but there's a compulsion element.
00:26:43.380And the compulsion element is, first of all, the insistence that the faith that's necessary to define something like Christianity is actually propositional.
00:26:52.360Now, it should be the case that your propositional content is in alignment with your existential commitments.
00:26:59.660But, for me, the fundamental move of faith is an existential move.
00:27:04.720And the danger in the propositional—this is the pharisaic danger, as far as I'm concerned—is that you substitute the propositional for the existential.
00:27:15.800Well, and this goes—you know, I talk about the four kinds of knowing, the propositional, the procedural, right, the perspectival, and the participatory.
00:27:23.320The participant—look, when you—look, think about the two levels of the—you've gone from being a model to perhaps having a representation of it and then trying to capture that model in a set of propositions.
00:27:35.640You're now two steps removed from the actual knowing that is you being the microcosmic model of the macrocosm.
00:28:01.380This is sort of pretty much almost consensus view in the philosophy of science because you're trying to distinguish between when science is generating knowledge versus when science is generating understanding.
00:28:12.240Because science will often say things that are false in order to generate understanding.
00:28:16.940Here's those—here's the—here's the atom.
00:28:34.340It's not that you don't care about the truth.
00:28:35.900It's that she calls them felicitous fictions because what they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to properly orient on the significance of what is known as opposed to give you evidence for coming to new beliefs and getting new knowledge.
00:30:07.900There's some proto-sharing that emerges, but they're not sophisticated, for example, at sharing toys.
00:30:12.960So the typical two-year-old, and some of them are much more like this than others, are pretty—they're oriented to the moment, and they're oriented to gratify the emotional or motivational state or whim that possesses them in the moment.
00:30:26.820Now, what happens as they mature, say, from two to four in particular, is they learn how to bring another party into their goal-directed space
00:30:38.100and to unify their desires, their whims, their motivational states with that of another.
00:30:47.840Okay, so now you can imagine these primordial motivational states and emotions, and we kind of know what the basic ones are.
00:30:54.940They're all pointers, fractionated pointers in an upward direction, but the upward direction actually emerges as a consequence of their interactions across time,
00:31:06.880but not only across time, across time in a social space, and they weave themselves together, and this would be something like Jacob's Ladder from the bottom up.
00:31:15.620They weave themselves together, so more and more things are taken into account simultaneously, and I think that parallels cortical maturation in a society, let's say, that properly socializes children.
00:31:28.800I don't think there's anything arbitrary about it.
00:31:30.720I mean, you and I have been able to have a relationship because of the pattern of interaction that we fall into when we converse.
00:31:39.040You know, you make an offering, and then I assess it and incorporate it, and then I make an offering, and you assess it and incorporate it.
00:31:46.560And we're able to do that in a way that jointly gratifies our desire to explore and integrate, right?
00:31:54.860And that is a cognitive act and an embodied act, but it's also something that indicates our fundamental concordance with each other at a level that's more than merely personal, right?
00:32:07.460This is the dialogus that you refer to, right?
00:32:09.860You're making an offering that I'm accepting and vice versa, but we can do that in a manner that makes both of us want to continue the process.
00:32:25.820It's like, well, and it's an optimistic viewpoint, too, because then you could say that the patterns of action that most optimally facilitate the desire to continue the patterns of action are the, in principle, are pointers towards the most moral way of behaving, right?
00:32:45.780And I think that's manifest in something like play.
00:32:48.920You know, we know there's a mammalian play circuit, so we're actually adapted to having these happen, but, and it's a fragile motivational state because it can be disrupted by any other motivation or emotion.
00:32:59.540But play seems to be an indicator that that harmony of emotion and motivation oriented towards the future and towards the maintenance of social interaction is in play at the moment.
00:33:14.060And so, and I don't think that this seems to me to be a very powerful argument against something like moral relativism.
00:33:21.080It's like, no, there are a very finite number of ways that you can pattern your dialogos, let's say, so that both parties involved want to stay involved in it over radically long spaces of time.
00:33:36.040And not just time, let's say, also different domains of inquiry, you know?
00:33:40.640And that's, that's, there's nothing about that that isn't highly constrained and orderly.
00:33:46.440Yeah, this is, I mean, this is very, first of all, I think very highly of what you're saying.
00:33:51.040It's convergent with a lot of things that I also think highly of.
00:33:54.120I mean, this is Habermas's proposal of universal pragmatics, that there is in the very act of communication, and he doesn't mean simply information exchange.
00:34:04.200He means in the very act of dialogos, which I agree with him, he is necessary for a properly functioning society, let alone a properly functioning democracy.
00:34:13.700That there are, there are pragmatic, in the linguistic sense of pragmatic, there are pragmatic constraints that are there, that are constitutively necessary in order for the dialogos that is person-making and culture-making and society-making to be present, and there are universal principles.
00:34:36.360Now, the products, like a conversation, there are universal principles, that doesn't mean the products are universal.
00:34:40.980Right, right, no, the process, it's, it's, it's, it's, well, and you, you added another layer to that, which is relevant with regards to emergence, because, you know, you could say, well, we have to conduct ourselves in a certain manner, like all the participants did, let's say, at the gospel seminar, in order for everyone to want to continue the process in the highest possible manner.
00:35:02.000But then you could also say, so that, so that works for you psychologically, because it's compelling and interesting, and it works for both of us practically, because we learn.
00:35:10.980But then, as you expand the social, as you expand the size of the group that that process is operating in, you start to see a concordance between the operation of that dialogos and the possibility of sophisticated, complex societies emerging that aren't predicated on power.
00:35:29.060And I think that's why we have, for example, in the United States, we have the First Amendment.
00:35:33.340It's because it's a recognition that something like, you have the right to engagement in the dialogos, not merely because it's a right, let's say, because you're made in the image of God, or it's a right because the state grants it.
00:35:46.140It's actually a right because it's a necessary precondition for the maintenance of the society as such.
00:35:53.560It's like, it works for you, it works for the people you're immediately communicating with, but it also works to stabilize society across long spans of time and to make it grow.
00:36:05.560And so you can't dispense with that without bringing the whole hierarchy.
00:36:31.640And notice the problems we can solve with the internet that we couldn't solve with individual computers.
00:36:36.040When you get attention, men who still believe in the American dream in a world gone mad, the precision five from Jeremy's razor stands as a beacon of sanity.
00:36:45.060Five blades of superior engineering offer a shave as unshakable as your faith that the nation's best days still lie ahead.
00:36:51.600Experience an exceptionally smooth, remarkably close shave and a testament to the fact that merit still matters.
00:36:56.840Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.
00:36:59.420Get Jeremy's razor's precision five instead.
00:37:01.680Available now at jeremysrazors.com, walmart.com and Amazon prime.
00:37:06.040At the right dialogical machinery going, you also afford distributed cognition.
00:37:13.620And distributed cognition gains access to reality and can solve problems.
00:37:20.700That's basically the argument of the Austrian school of economics, right, with regards to distributed systems.
00:37:26.420I've had some very good discussions with Robert Breedlove around that, exactly, about exactly that.
00:37:31.900And, you know, and I, you know, and Dan Giapia, we talked, we did a thing about how the NASA scientists do this.
00:37:38.900They create these dialogical narrative practices in order to move, in order to coordinate distributed cognition to move the rovers around on Mars.
00:37:47.960I remember, I remember you saying that.
00:37:50.380So you taught a course for Peterson Academy.
00:37:52.980I mean, let's talk a little bit about your experience, first of all.
00:37:55.980So as you remember, and you graciously said recently in the Toronto Star interview, you know, I offered you the possibility of coming to teach for us about absolutely anything you wanted to teach about.
00:38:09.360So walk us through the experience and the course, and then I'll update you a little bit about the state of the art with regard to this endeavor.
00:38:16.600First of all, I want to thank the reporter.
00:38:18.300The reporter reached out to me at the last moment and said, I'm going to do this.
00:39:55.440I want to make clear what I made clear in the interview.
00:39:58.300You, you know, when you reached out to me and, you know, and I wrote you an email and I said, you know, I don't consider myself a conservative or a Christian.
00:40:44.380And so that means that the constraints have to be lifted.
00:40:47.180It's like, no, I want to hear what you have to say.
00:40:49.140And so, and it's such a wonderful thing to be able to afford people this possibility because, you know, when you're teaching at a university, you have an approximation of that, but you're subject to a whole set of constraints, some of which are necessary and some of which just are entirely arbitrary.
00:41:04.700And it's not helpful because you can't wander where the spirit takes you.
00:41:13.480And I think we, I've taught three courses for Peterson Academy too, and I certainly felt the freedom that this new format allows.
00:41:23.180And so I should bring you up to date a little bit too.
00:41:25.680So, well, so we launched our pre-enrollment and it was really a way of testing the system and to see, first of all, if we could handle the user load to test, to see how people are responding.
00:41:39.660And to also assess whether we got the price right and to assess the reaction of the market, all of that.
00:41:59.320And I could delve into that a little bit because, you know, the odd person says, well, why isn't it free?
00:42:04.080And I mean, there's a bunch of answers to that is one, if it's free, you're the product and don't forget it.
00:42:09.660Second, on the social media side, because it has a sophisticated social media system, there's an open question about social media platforms now.
00:42:17.660You know, if they're free, they're instantly invaded by bad actors, right?
00:42:34.780And what we are seeing and what we hope for was that a relatively stringent price point, so it's about $40 a month, and a relatively stringent price point eradicates 95% of the bad actors.
00:42:48.240That's worth something, you know, because you have to ask yourself, if you're going to use a social media network, how much is it worth on an ongoing daily basis?
00:42:56.780Like, is it worth a dollar a day, because that's approximately, or $1.25, that's what we're talking about.
00:43:01.960Is it worth that not to be chronically annoyed by the pathology of the system?
00:43:08.880And I would say it's worth something for that to be the case.
00:43:12.280So, and people are pleased with the price.
00:43:14.460The indications we've had so far is that people would have paid more and still been happy.
00:43:18.360So I think we probably undershot the market limit, but I'm fine with that.
00:45:01.600And that's when you'll get your access and when you'll be able to start interacting with students on the social media platform and on your course site as well.
00:45:11.700So that should be, hopefully, I've spent a fair bit of time on the social media platform so far.
00:45:17.500And that's, it's a very positive place.
00:45:21.480And it has all the features of standard social media system.
00:45:26.000So I'm also kind of hoping that, you know, for academically oriented people, maybe it'll be a replacement for the other social media networks.
00:45:54.720I find it's useful for me to do things like identify podcast guests, you know, because I can kind of see who's of the moment and not only of the moment, you know.
00:46:04.100And so it's worth wading through a fair bit of narcissistic toxicity to find the odd gem, you know.
00:46:13.260And it's a pretty good way of keeping abreast with the dynamic shifts of the political environment.
00:46:19.040How much that's useful is a different matter.
00:46:21.740But because I run this podcast, that's something I have to be, I have to be on top of that, you know, in order to stay conversant with the current.
00:46:29.320But, well, part of what you do in a podcast is it speaks about the moment.
00:46:36.940And so you got to have a sense of what that moment is for better or for worse.
00:46:41.060And so, yeah, at least that's what I tell myself when I'm on Twitter.
00:46:45.360But this might be a good, well, and we're also hoping it'll work well for people to establish social networks, you know.
00:46:50.260Because at least you'll know that the people on the platform are interested in ideas, let's say.
00:46:58.280It'll be a great place for open people to meet, for example.
00:47:02.020The students who were in all three courses, they, I wanted, I try not to be too self-serving, but they all found it a very transformative experience.
00:47:25.100Yeah, well, soon people will have course-centered chat rooms.
00:47:31.120And we're hoping that if we start to grow to a large enough size that people will start to spontaneously organize.
00:47:37.780Well, you can imagine meetups where people get together to watch a lecture and to discuss it, you know.
00:47:43.680There's, there's no reason to outsource a fair bit of the classroom organization, let's say, to the students themselves.
00:47:50.620And we're also, with an eye to the future, starting to think out, think things through like, well, one, one possibility that we've been investigating are cruises, specialized cruises.
00:48:01.920Because, well, cruises, all things considered, especially compared to the cost of a, of, say, a private university education, cruises aren't that expensive.
00:48:15.340I, I saw a retired couple, for example, who booked 51 cruises back to back because it was far cheaper than staying in an old folks home.
00:48:22.620And the service is a lot better, let's say.
00:48:25.620So, you know, we, we're going to curate meetings for students.
00:48:31.480So, another thing we've been thinking about doing is having, you know, a series of conventions, maybe a couple of times a year in major, in major population centers where we could bring, say, 10 professors together and maybe 5,000 students and do a weekend of, you know, nothing but learning.
00:48:52.440And I just can't see why, you know, with some social events at night, it seems to me highly likely that this is possible.
00:48:58.760And I, I also have a sneaking suspicion that because of the rise of AI and the fact that increasingly much of what we see on the net won't be real, that the premium for in-person experiences is going to increase.
00:49:59.060In a world where traditional values are under siege, it's crucial to stay strong mentally and physically.
00:50:04.700Enter Responsible Man, a Daily Wire Ventures company that understands what it means to be a pillar of strength in these challenging times.
00:50:11.420They've created the Emerson Multivitamin, not for the faint of heart, but for men who shoulder their responsibilities with pride.
00:50:16.740The Emerson Multivitamin contains 33 key ingredients that work in harmony to fortify your immune system, sharpen your mental acuity, and maintain the strength of your heart and muscles.
00:51:17.660I enjoyed, there was electricity, some places more than others.
00:51:22.660And then, you know, you and I having, it was really powerful in the way we were talking about earlier, after you gave a talk and that electricity was there and to sit with you and talk afterwards.
00:51:36.140Or even before, you were gracious, you would have let me to sort of talk a little bit about who I was before I introduced you.
00:51:42.720And feeling even that a little bit there.
00:51:45.840And a lot of people, especially the last one, because in the last one, I was, I didn't go back.
00:51:51.440I actually booked in a hotel in the, right across from the convention center.
00:51:55.080And a lot of people were there from the event.
00:51:59.220And there was a lot of them that, of course, they were expressing appreciation for you.
00:52:04.820But a lot of them were expressing a lot of appreciation for me and my work.
00:52:08.540And I, that was very, very, very, very encouraging.
00:52:12.520So there was a lot about it I enjoyed.
00:52:14.940But, like I said, it was really good to have you there to, you know, get to, to what, to provide a informed overview of what I had presented.
00:52:29.860Because I'm presenting things that are spontaneous.
00:52:31.940And so it's very good to, and for the audience as well, to have that reflected and then criticized in the proper, in the proper critical sense.
00:52:42.000Because the proper critical sense is separation of the wheat from the chaff, not derogation of everything as chaff, right?
00:52:49.060And so it's very, very helpful for people to see that modeled, but also to have it happen.
00:54:00.420And it is, it is a real marker for that.
00:54:03.180You know, like I've traveled with lots of people and you learn very rapidly who kisses up and kicks down,
00:54:09.840which is not a testament to the integrity of their personality.
00:54:13.600But it's also a management style in a way, because we're very selective about who we hire, but also who we keep.
00:54:24.560And so there isn't anybody around at Peterson Academy or on my tour who isn't doing a stellar and necessary job.
00:54:33.300And so, and I also understand that, you know, like it's a very fast, well, you saw, it's a very fast paced enterprise to, to run a tour like that.
00:54:40.740And many things can go wrong, especially if you're trying to sustain it across multiple years.
00:58:10.880Well, the other thing you realize, too, I think, is that, you know, first of all, one thing I'm acutely aware of is that I could be out in public and people could be throwing rocks at me.
00:58:21.640Like, it could have easily gone that way.
00:58:24.060And so, you know, and I've had a taste of that more than now and then.
00:58:29.100And the fact that that isn't happening all the time, that's something to really remember.
00:58:34.060And, in fact, I have the opposite of that pretty much wherever I go.
00:58:38.780I'm so fortunate because people are very good to me.
00:58:42.520They're good to me in airports, wherever they meet me.
00:58:44.860And I'm more than pleased to return the favor.
00:58:48.340And, you know, you're asking for too much if you have a public face and the benefits of that.
00:58:56.340And you're not also, like, thrilled that people are responding to you in that positive manner.
01:00:12.840Well, it's going to be coming out, you know, you'll be able to get it, I think, instantly, electronically on the 29th and then print on demand thereafter on Amazon.
01:01:43.240And getting kind of a synoptic integration.
01:01:45.580And then also making it clear how it has that kind of existential import that you mentioned a few minutes ago.
01:01:52.280Right, so it's a gathering from multiple places and then also a practical specification.
01:01:58.560So you and I are similar in that regard, I think.
01:02:00.980And we were reacted to it in a similar way at the University of Toronto for that reason.
01:02:05.300Well, I mean, you have an acknowledgment in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis as the person who galvanized the public to the Meaning Crisis.
01:02:30.640Jonathan Paggio did this quite well in the course he teaches for Peterson Academy, too, by the way.
01:02:35.020Because he provides an encapsulated formulation of nihilism and what it means and what it signifies.
01:02:42.680And then dispenses with it as an existential necessity quite quickly and elegantly.
01:02:47.280Which is a big deal to be able to do that because it's a real problem for people.
01:02:50.180But you're highlighting of the Meaning Crisis as a phenomenon.
01:02:53.780Just that is helpful to people in the same way often that psychological diagnosis is helpful to people.
01:03:00.440Like, you know, people will come in to see a clinician and they think their particular brand of existential suffering is absolutely unique to them.
01:03:26.320But then you also want to ally that to a pathway forward.
01:03:29.760And, you know, for you to be able to conceptualize the Meaning Crisis as an existential situation and then also not say or imply that that that's hopeless.
01:03:41.100And that's the problem I have with approaches like the selfish gene or the more rationalistic atheist movement.
01:03:47.240It's like, well, no wonder you have a meaning crisis because things are meaningless.
01:03:51.780There's, that's, I think the fact that there is a meaning crisis is actually evidence that, evident that things aren't meaningless.
01:04:03.360And the more thoughtful atheists like Alex O'Connor that we've talked to are responding to that fact that you just stated because I think it is a fact.
01:04:11.680Yeah, I mean, the most consistent feedback I get from my students who watch it online, comments, or my friends and colleagues like Jonathan Pajot or Paul van der Klee is I gave people a conceptual vocabulary, a theoretical grammar.
01:04:28.720They were able to take stuff that they were able to take stuff that was in Kohate and like speak it and understand it and share it and communicate it and then connect it to psychological ideas and theory and philosophical ideas and ways of life and see why ancient figures like Socrates might actually be really relevant right now.
01:04:47.000Right, that's another huge advantage is that you're taking these ancient thinkers and you're pointing out how, what, how, how they conceptualized and what they knew is actually of great practical utility in the moment.
01:05:01.220This, this is something I also found extremely useful, for example, in the Exodus seminar, because the Israelite sojourn in the desert is the crisis of meaning.
01:05:11.980And so it's also very useful to know that this death of God phenomenon is not new.
01:05:18.100It's a recurrent theme in human history that a crisis of meaning is a condition.
01:05:24.180It's not a permanent state and it's not a statement about the nature of the world.
01:05:27.780It's one of the various ways you can be in the world.
01:05:30.940And it isn't, it isn't the final solution for those who are rationalistic, rational enough to see through, let's say, the protective superstitions of religion.
01:05:39.860That's not a good way of thinking about it.
01:05:41.980It's not an accurate way of thinking about it.
01:05:43.740Now, you, how did you, I presume, and I know to some degree that your concern with the meaning crisis is reflected in your personal experience.
01:05:56.700And so I'm kind of curious about how that made itself manifest in your life, but also how it was that you came to understand that there was a pathway forward and how you're communicating that.
01:06:08.100So, as I said, I was brought up in a, not only in a nuclear family, but an extended family with a very fundamentalist kind of Christianity.
01:06:18.060And only, I would now say, I wouldn't have said it then, but retrospectively looking back after therapy, by the way, I did extended Jungian therapy, that it was quite traumatic.
01:06:30.540Some of the most, I think some of the most horrific experiences of my life were around that.
01:06:35.100I belonged to a version of it that had a notion of the rapture, and I came home once when I was 10, and there was nobody home.
01:07:08.080And my mother, trying to help me, took me to the pastor of a church, and he gave me the most platitudinous useless.
01:07:14.840And even as a 12-year-old, I was able to recognize, you're useless.
01:07:20.000So I was a fan of science fiction because I was always intrigued by speculative thought from very early on.
01:07:27.940And I read a book by Roger Zelazny called Lord of Light that introduced me to Buddhism and Hinduism and the power of myth.
01:07:35.420And it opened me up, and I rejected Christianity.
01:07:38.560And I became, well, I became that person you were criticizing earlier, the very antagonistic atheist materialist.
01:07:47.840Yeah, well, that's a very standard pattern of reaction.
01:07:50.960And it's, I mean, I've seen that in the atheist community.
01:07:55.240I mean, there's two things that make someone a committed atheist, as far as I can tell, speaking generally.
01:08:00.620One is the rational problem that you described, you know, the inability to reconcile the claims of any given mythos with, say, the scientific viewpoint, or even with the nihilistic or hedonistic viewpoint.
01:08:15.780It's very frequently the case that people who turn in the atheist direction are traumatized by bad religious actors of one form or another, right?
01:08:35.460Yeah, well, it's a cardinal part of the story.
01:08:38.360It's so interesting to see this is the worst harm, obviously, in a sense, the worst harm is done by people who harness the best possible ideas to the worst possible end.
01:08:48.980I was very grateful that Dennis was there, because Dennis and Greg were both continually holding us back from an easy anti-Semitism that could come.
01:11:23.200But thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
01:11:27.380Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
01:11:31.880From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
01:11:38.800Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
01:11:46.320With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools,
01:11:51.780alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps, like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
01:11:58.280Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
01:12:06.620No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
01:12:13.060Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
01:12:18.580Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.
01:12:39.840Well, see, the thing about my upbringing is it had left a taste in my mouth for the transcendence.
01:12:46.260You know, missing a sage, if I can put it that way.
01:12:52.280And then I met this figure of Socrates who made the logos come alive and gave me a new way of understanding rationality
01:12:59.940and made me a way of understanding spirituality and transcendence in a way that was consonant with my burgeoning interest in science and reason.
01:13:51.420And when you're a first-year student and you're coming out of high school in the meeting crisis, right, that's very appealing because then you can, you know, it's—but then you realize the people he's defeating are the sophists, are the people who are after the Philo and Ikea, not Philosophia.
01:14:05.640And then you realize that he criticizes himself as much as he could, and you get drawn into this, and you get caught up in this process of self-correcting and self-transcending and doing it with other people dialogically, getting caught up in—like, you know, Jesus talked about—
01:14:21.980Yeah, so that's—is there something about the essence of higher order meaning that is either analogous to or identical with self-correction?
01:14:32.020I think—well, I think that's the Axial Revolution.
01:14:36.320The Axial Revolution, right, when people like Siddhartha or people like Socrates, is the recognition that our meaning-making machinery is actually also simultaneously the source of a lot of our suffering, and that simultaneously empowers us but challenges us.
01:14:56.800Because, I mean, I mean, think about the Dhammapada, you know, the mind is the beginning of everything, and if you don't—if you don't—like, your best—the greatest ally you can have is your mind, but the greatest enemy you can have is your mind, right?
01:15:28.200This is tremendously encouraging for—that was tremendously encouraging for me.
01:15:32.760And so I got caught up in this, and then I wanted to follow this, except academic philosophy at the time, after first year, stops talking about wisdom.
01:15:43.680And you get into all of these arguments about meta-ethics and meta-epistemology, and those are useful tools.
01:15:50.420They're useful for science, and so I kept going on for that reason, but this hunger was not being satisfied.
01:15:57.940So literally down the street from me, there was a Tai Chi meditation center, so I went there, because I decided to give Eastern philosophy, because I'd been reading some Hermenessa, a chance.
01:16:07.320And I started doing, practicing Tai Chi Chuan and practicing Vipassana Metta.
01:16:18.140And around that time, I started to read Pierre Hadot and how our ancient philosophy, the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists and the Skeptics, they also practiced philosophy as a way of life.
01:16:29.940And then I started to realize how much this overlapped with early Christianity and some forms of existing Christianity.
01:16:36.720And it started to help me, a rapprochement to Christianity and to religion, because I became very—
01:16:44.720Well, you've always struck me at your core as a religious thinker.
01:17:00.600It's one of the things that distinguished you from, say, the other professors that, while they were at the University of Toronto, but the professorate in general.
01:17:09.080And I also think it accounts to some degree for your impact on students.
01:17:14.500My—around this, when I—the episode I did for Awakening to the Meaning Crisis on Agape, I had Christians, Christian ministers, like Paul Vanderklei said.
01:17:33.000So, other than sort of desire, there's three kinds of love.
01:17:37.220Eros is the love that is accomplished by consummation.
01:17:41.200So, in—and I don't mean this in some creepy Freudian sense, but I can have eros for a cookie, because I become one with the cookie by eating it.
01:18:44.960And in that sense, it is the most fundamentally profound, creative, and we're not just creating meaning.
01:18:54.820We're creating the beings that participate in meaning, that, as you indicated earlier, could disclose some of the most fun—because they're at the apex of emergence, right, that they can disclose some of the most fundamental aspects of reality.
01:19:10.120So agape is the deep recognition of that in that sort of voluntary necessity and being compelled to draw into it.
01:19:18.340And Jesus is, right, Jesus, you know, in the epistle of John, God is agape.
01:19:30.920Jesus comes, and the agape way, the most excellent way, as Paul says, agape says to the Roman people in the Roman Empire, we can take all the non-persons of the Roman Empire,
01:19:41.860all the women, all the children, all the widows, all the slaves, all the impoverished, all the non-Romans, and we can make them into persons because we live the most excellent way of agape.
01:19:54.200And agape is the God power that turns non-persons into persons.