The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 482. The Meaning Crisis： Resolution ｜ Dr. John Vervaeke

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We 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.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.780 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody.

00:01:09.820 I have the privilege today to speak yet again to Professor John Verveke.

00:01:16.640 He's a repeat guest on my show, maybe more than anyone else.

00:01:21.780 That's possible.

00:01:22.500 John and I have been involved in a conversation now that spans more than a decade.

00:01:28.880 We've been both working assiduously in different ways on defining the meaning crisis and also exploring potential solutions to that crisis, and with some success, I would say.

00:01:41.960 And one of the things that we do in today's conversation is to continue that dialogue and to delve more deeply into what the meaning crisis signifies and also what it means, say, in John's terms, that there's a new advent of the sacred.

00:01:56.920 And what that means, what the sacred means, what a new advent might look like, what that means philosophically, what it means scientifically and theologically, for that matter.

00:02:06.920 We spend a fair bit of time as well discussing Peterson Academy.

00:02:11.620 John's one of the lecturers there.

00:02:13.100 He's done three courses for us, which have been very—the first one is released already.

00:02:17.440 It's been very well received.

00:02:18.640 And 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.

00:02:29.740 And that—God only knows what that means, but it seems to be a genuine phenomenon.

00:02:36.240 And so, and phenomenon, that means to shine forth, by the way, and that does look genuine.

00:02:41.000 And so, well, John and I had the opportunity to delve more deeply into all of those issues, and that's great fun.

00:02:46.840 And 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.

00:02:56.980 Because a conversation that takes you outside yourself and beyond yourself and into the future and up into the realm of higher possibility is a manifestation of the sacred that's been characterized for centuries as part of the process of the Logos.

00:03:11.640 And it's so useful and interesting to understand that you can experience that, and that you do experience that when you get caught up in, let's say, an exploratory conversation.

00:03:22.800 You know, we talked about other ways you can get caught up in love and in what—enraptured by beauty.

00:03:28.120 But the thrill, the enthusiastic thrill of a conversation that's transformative is a marker for the emergence of something that the world depends upon, right?

00:03:39.280 And that's something sacred.

00:03:40.520 And there it is, tangible as hell.

00:03:42.520 So that's a very useful thing to know.

00:03:44.860 So join us.

00:03:46.880 So, good to see you again.

00:03:49.460 Good to see you too, my friend.

00:03:50.680 We spent a lot of time together this year on the tour in particular, eh?

00:03:53.740 Yeah, yeah, on the tour.

00:03:55.060 So you got any thoughts about the tour?

00:03:57.840 Well, I mean, and the Gospel Seminar, too.

00:04:00.480 Right, right, right, right.

00:04:04.120 The Gospel Seminars was a very profound experience for me.

00:04:07.800 As you know, I was a little bit hesitant because I don't consider myself a Christian.

00:04:11.000 But you were extremely welcoming.

00:04:13.000 You were good to your word, as you always have been with me.

00:04:16.080 And, of course, there was a lot of people there that I'm very fond of.

00:04:18.880 Douglas Headley, Jonathan Pajot, Stephen Blackwood.

00:04:21.900 And I became fond of some people like Greg Horowitz.

00:04:27.400 And so I had a really amazing time.

00:04:32.480 Yeah, well, I'll give people the background on that.

00:04:34.520 So, John came down to, we typed it in Nashville.

00:04:39.480 It was Nashville, yeah.

00:04:40.260 Yeah.

00:04:40.700 So we did, as many of you watching and listening know, I did a seminar with a group of people on Exodus

00:04:47.440 that we released a year ago on The Daily Wire.

00:04:50.000 And it's become the most popular thing they've done, apart from What is a Woman by Matt Walsh.

00:04:56.740 And it was quite a trip to go through the Exodus story with a group of eight scholars.

00:05:01.500 I learned a ridiculous amount.

00:05:03.740 And so we decided to duplicate that procedurally with the Gospels.

00:05:09.200 And so we had many of the same crew.

00:05:11.500 Yeah.

00:05:11.980 But John came along for the Gospel Seminar, and that worked out very well.

00:05:16.000 Well, that's going to be released between now and December, by the way, on the Daily Wire platform.

00:05:20.880 And so they're very happy with the way it's turned out.

00:05:23.680 And there'll be more images in it, more interviews.

00:05:26.700 And so it'll be a little pepped up on the editing side from the Exodus seminar.

00:05:31.400 So why did you like the Gospel Seminar?

00:05:35.000 I'm not making a comparison to the Exodus because it wasn't there.

00:05:37.920 But, well, as you know, I was brought up in a very sort of fundamentalist Christianity.

00:05:47.060 So I've had a very slow, at times, therapeutic, you know, rapprochement.

00:05:54.580 I hope that came through in my—I showed up at the Gospel Seminar.

00:05:58.460 Oh, definitely.

00:05:59.060 And I came to, like, sort of a profound—this sounds like a Hallmark card, so I know you won't take it, though.

00:06:11.240 But I came to a sort of profound sort of reorientation, reappreciation, reapprehension of Jesus of Nazareth.

00:06:21.340 And this may sound—I'm asking for a ship of charity in the next thing I'm going to say.

00:06:28.700 Sure, sure.

00:06:30.360 Well, I'd always missed being a Christian in some sense.

00:06:36.540 And I missed going to church.

00:06:39.840 I missed the community.

00:06:40.940 I missed that sense of having a mythos that you belong to.

00:06:46.680 And a community.

00:06:47.840 And a community, yeah.

00:06:50.880 And—but I'm trying to make this positive.

00:06:53.220 I lost that longing at the Gospel Seminar, not because I became a Christian, but because I felt I came close.

00:07:04.480 Well, there was a moment, if you remember the Gospel Seminar, where I said, like, I consider myself a deep follower of the Logos.

00:07:11.240 Yeah, right.

00:07:11.740 And that became—and it was—that wasn't just a statement for me.

00:07:16.860 And 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.

00:07:27.340 Well, it's a remarkable thing to realize.

00:07:30.160 You know, I interviewed—had a discussion with Elon Musk recently, you know, and he had a very cataclysmic existential crisis around 13 or 14.

00:07:41.100 And, you know, Musk has a world-class intellect, so it's not surprising that it happened to him early.

00:07:46.320 And 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.

00:07:55.960 And it took him a number of years to resolve that.

00:07:59.160 And I think essentially the way he resolved that was by realizing his identity with the Logos.

00:08:06.060 Now, that's not exactly how he put it, but then he didn't have the benefit of the Gospel Seminar, for example.

00:08:12.020 But what he discovered was that he could find intrinsic meaning in life by pursuing the path of the exploration of truth, right?

00:08:21.820 And I don't think there is any real difference between the Logos and the pursuit of truth.

00:08:27.080 Now, what that means theologically, well, you could unpack that for millennia because human beings have been unpacking it for millennia.

00:08:35.280 But 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.

00:08:49.160 Jean 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?

00:08:59.840 And so Piaget figured that out, and to follow that deep commitment to the truth and that continual exploration is identification with the Logos.

00:09:10.340 And that certainly characterizes your work, and it's good to put that back into context.

00:09:15.620 I 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.

00:09:24.080 The last one of four is coming out this week, I believe.

00:09:29.200 Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, two in Jerusalem.

00:09:33.240 And one of the things that's remarkable about the conjunction of Greece and Jerusalem is the Greeks posited the existence of a Logos that was embedded, essentially, in the material and corporeal world.

00:09:47.000 That there was an intrinsic logic to things, that the world itself was comprehensible, and that comprehending the world was good.

00:09:55.320 And the Jews, essentially, and the Christians had an embodied Logos idea that the human being was a rational creature and an exploratory creature, and that there was a match between that and the world. 0.76

00:10:07.960 And that combination of Greece and Jerusalem is one of the sources of Western civilization.

00:10:15.340 But it's very good to be able to conceptualize the gospel account in that manner, because it, well, it starts to put rationality and the mythos that you described back together, which is, I think, you know, something of cardinal importance for our, and I think it's what's occurring in our current time.

00:10:33.740 Thank you for saying that.

00:10:34.660 I think that was very well articulated.

00:10:36.000 It, for me, it afforded, because the kind of truth we're talking about is existential truth.

00:10:42.020 We're not talking about just propositional truth.

00:10:43.420 Right.

00:10:43.880 We'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.

00:10:51.340 An embodiment.

00:10:52.400 Yes, of course.

00:10:53.820 And it was, so Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates could properly dwell together within me.

00:11:01.340 Right.

00:11:01.560 Well, and that's kind of a classic, that's a classic Western view as well.

00:11:07.580 I mean, even Dante put the Greek philosophers in the uppermost echelons of hell, right?

00:11:13.860 I mean, which was a compliment in a fundamental way.

00:11:16.500 Justin Martyr said that Socrates was a Christian before Christ.

00:11:19.420 Right, right, right.

00:11:20.540 And, right, and there's, well, and that was part of that juxtaposition of Greece and Jerusalem, right?

00:11:27.480 Because it was evident that the same spirit was trying to make itself manifest in two different ways.

00:11:33.420 You have two different notions of the Logos that are complementary, right?

00:11:36.080 The Greek notion is this notion of gathering things together so they belong together, so they're intelligible.

00:11:42.100 Yeah.

00:11:42.280 And then you have the Hebrew notion of the Logos as the way in which language and thought create and make and speak into existence.

00:11:56.040 Of course, we do it in a very limited fashion, and then the idea is there's some sort of ultimate aspect of it.

00:12:01.440 And then they're brought together.

00:12:03.180 Well, one of the things that I wrote about, I have a new book coming out in November, and I actually drew somewhat heavily on Richard Dawkins for parts of the book.

00:12:15.120 We Who Wrestle with God.

00:12:16.160 We Who Wrestle with God.

00:12:17.100 I've read it, of course.

00:12:17.900 Right, of course, of course, and we're on the tour with me.

00:12:20.760 Yeah.

00:12:21.000 And so Dawkins makes a strong case and repeats it again in his newest book, which is just out that an organism, any biological organism, has to be a microcosm of its environment, has to be a model.

00:12:35.460 So it has to reflect the environment at every level, right, from the molecular all the way up.

00:12:41.000 Kristen says the same thing.

00:12:41.900 Right, right.

00:12:42.380 Kristen says you don't have a model. 0.97

00:12:44.220 You are a model.

00:12:45.160 Right, right.

00:12:45.540 And, well, that's exactly what I guess Dawkins would say both.

00:12:49.220 You have a model, or you are a model, and you have a model, and that would be particularly true for people.

00:12:53.880 And, well, the fact that you're a model and that you have a model, so that's the interior logos that might be more associated with, say, Judeo-Christian thought, but it has to match the external logos of the world because otherwise it has no connection point.

00:13:10.360 But 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.

00:13:37.000 Or, 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.

00:13:51.360 Right, right.

00:13:51.620 And they reflect, and without us, access to those principles in reality would not be available.

00:13:58.260 Well, that seems to be akin to something like emergence.

00:14:01.480 Well, yeah, very much.

00:14:02.820 You can think about us as random, like as the consequence of random processes, which I think is a fairly absurd way of looking at the evolutionary process.

00:14:13.340 But you can also look at us as manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate right from the beginning of time, right?

00:14:23.860 And 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.

00:14:32.860 And what that seems to indicate to me is that there's an unrealized potential, even in the simplest of material forms, that contains within it, well, whatever possibility is.

00:14:44.240 It's very difficult to define, but it isn't that that possibility makes itself manifest in an entirely random manner.

00:14:49.880 It reflects something like an implicate order in those lower order material properties, or, yeah, properties.

00:14:57.700 So you're turning in, and this is a great joy for me, you're turning into a Neoplatonist.

00:15:02.140 Because, I mean, you have emergence up.

00:15:05.880 Right.

00:15:06.160 Right, but emergence up has to be constrained.

00:15:09.500 There has to be an ordering to those possibilities because of the possibility.

00:15:12.620 This is a point even made by Whitehead much later.

00:15:14.880 Yeah, it'd be just chaotic otherwise.

00:15:15.960 Right, right, right.

00:15:16.660 So you have emergence up.

00:15:17.860 And if you had emergence up without constraint down, the top level would just be an epiphenomena.

00:15:23.080 But the top level, as a level, has to constrain what's going on.

00:15:26.660 And 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.

00:15:34.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:35.120 And that's the Neoplatonic view, and that's the view that went into the heart.

00:15:38.560 That seems to be the same view that Pajot holds, I would say.

00:15:41.080 Well, 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.

00:15:51.660 Yeah.

00:15:52.100 Eastern Orthodoxy, like, all of Christian mysticism is profoundly influenced by Greek Neoplatonism, but especially Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

00:16:01.900 Yes, very much.

00:16:02.620 Yeah, so I really enjoyed the Gospel Seminar.

00:16:06.500 I learned a lot.

00:16:07.240 It was quite a cognitive effort to get through that in a week.

00:16:12.880 You did a good job.

00:16:13.480 To keep all that on track.

00:16:14.300 Well, thank God for that.

00:16:15.140 I was pretty much out of it for the next three weeks in consequence, but it was well, well worth it.

00:16:20.580 So, 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.

00:16:28.500 And this seminar certainly helped me flesh that out to a tremendous degree as well.

00:16:32.820 I'm just in the writing now.

00:16:34.200 I'm just getting to the story of the crucifixion and resurrection, which is, of course, the most complex.

00:16:40.760 Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your keys in the car when you run into the gas station.

00:16:45.760 Most of the time, you're probably fine.

00:16:47.560 But what if you come back to see someone driving off with your car?

00:16:51.360 In today's digital age, your online privacy isn't just a luxury.

00:16:54.780 It's a necessity.

00:16:56.140 Every 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.

00:17:05.520 And trust me, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:17:08.440 With some cheap hardware, even a precocious 12-year-old could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.

00:17:15.200 Now, you might think, what's the big deal?

00:17:17.600 Who'd want my data anyway?

00:17:19.360 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

00:17:23.480 That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

00:17:27.940 This is where ExpressVPN comes in.

00:17:30.260 It's like a fortress for your digital life, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:17:35.500 Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:17:40.840 But don't let its power fool you.

00:17:42.940 ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly.

00:17:45.200 With just one click, you're protected across all your devices, phones, laptops, tablets, you name it.

00:17:51.060 That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.

00:17:55.640 It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.

00:18:01.880 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:18:06.100 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan, and you can get an extra three months free.

00:18:12.960 ExpressVPN dot com slash jordan.

00:18:15.080 And challenging part of that entire narrative, and so—

00:18:20.320 Yeah, 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.

00:18:26.220 Oh, yeah.

00:18:26.740 Well, we were all—we were worried about the seminar, period.

00:18:29.360 Yeah.

00:18:29.580 And—but it—but it—but I thought it—I thought it went extremely well, and we were very happy to have you there.

00:18:34.640 And I—I mean, everybody—one of the wonderful things about the Exodus Seminar and the Gospel Seminar is that that Logos Spirit—

00:18:44.420 everybody abided by that Logos Spirit 100% of the time, eh?

00:18:47.680 Because everybody was trying to extend their knowledge instead of trying to prove that they were right.

00:18:54.020 Exactly.

00:18:54.420 Right, and that's—maybe that's something like the opposite of that Pharisaic religious pride that's often conceptualized as the ultimate sin, right?

00:19:03.420 Is that, you know, when you're trying to hammer home your status because you're right about something,

00:19:09.080 that's a completely different game than trying to build something together that expands you both in the course of the conversation.

00:19:17.680 I think—I think the seminars were flawless examples of that.

00:19:21.440 Everybody played extremely well together, despite very, very, very—

00:19:26.440 Like the way you play music.

00:19:27.640 Like the way you play music.

00:19:28.640 Yeah, right.

00:19:29.240 Socrates made a distinction between Philosophia, the love of wisdom, and Philonokia, the love of victory.

00:19:34.860 And he said that the greatest thing that thwarts the love of wisdom is the love of victory.

00:19:39.220 I wonder if there's any difference between the love of victory and the worship of power.

00:19:43.180 I mean, most of the opponents that Socrates is wrestling with are the sophists,

00:19:50.440 and they are definitely advocates about, you know, that reality is power and that having power is what you're after.

00:19:58.880 They were deeply political animals in that fashion, yes.

00:20:02.800 Yeah, 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

00:20:13.600 that can lead to something approximating a higher-order unity, and power would be one, because you can unify to some degree with power.

00:20:21.520 I mean, it produces a counterposition, because if you use power on people, they tend to rebel.

00:20:26.500 But at least for some periods of time, you can use command and force to bring together.

00:20:34.420 But 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,

00:20:43.060 which is that game of genuine exploration and self-transcendence.

00:20:47.660 But maybe there could be a corollary to that, which would be that if God dies, if the God is Logos and it dies,

00:20:54.800 the deity that rises to replace it is power.

00:20:59.300 Wow. You do what you frequently do. That's very pregnant with a lot of possibilities.

00:21:04.580 I mean, first of all, that notion of die a Logos by means of a Logos.

00:21:08.480 And I think that's something we should practice and do a lot of work about trying to help afford people being able to practice that as an explicit practice.

00:21:20.900 So I think that's a very valuable thing to say.

00:21:23.120 I think power is one of our senses of realness.

00:21:31.860 I think, and we need it.

00:21:35.120 You talk about this.

00:21:36.560 You talk about the fact that we don't want to be overwhelmed by anomaly.

00:21:39.400 We need to have some power.

00:21:40.680 We need to be able to, our skills have to get a purchase on the world.

00:21:44.140 Yeah, I'm thinking not so much power.

00:21:46.920 That's more of a Nietzschean notion of power, I would say.

00:21:49.900 I'm thinking more of compulsion, right?

00:21:52.740 Like that I can force you to abide by the dictates of my power as force, not power so much as ability.

00:22:02.160 That mark of reality.

00:22:02.880 Yeah, exactly.

00:22:03.640 Okay, so let's move to there because what's really interesting is this,

00:22:07.000 and I talked about this in the course on the Peterson Academy, the primacy of beauty.

00:22:13.240 You got this really interesting thing because, right, you want it, like, you want reason to be compelling but voluntarily.

00:22:23.040 Yeah, right.

00:22:23.500 Right, right, right.

00:22:24.220 The voluntarism is a crucial element.

00:22:25.780 Right, right, right.

00:22:25.960 But you don't want it to just be arbitrary.

00:22:28.280 You're like, no, reason compels me.

00:22:31.060 We say things like that, and we don't think the person's insane.

00:22:33.820 We go, oh, I get what you mean.

00:22:34.760 That's a really good argument.

00:22:36.020 And this goes towards Frankfurt's notion of, well, reason is voluntary necessity.

00:22:44.160 But then there's another thing that seems to be voluntary necessity, which is what his book is about, Reasons for Love.

00:22:49.500 Love is a voluntary necessity.

00:22:51.220 It seems like you're compelled, but yet it seems to be totally what you want to be doing.

00:22:57.200 And then if you think about what love picks up on.

00:22:59.480 That might be something like the concordance between calling and psyche.

00:23:03.200 Well, let me pick up on that because think about what love is often, this is a platonic argument, love is often a response to beauty.

00:23:10.360 And beauty has that same thing.

00:23:12.500 It's kind of like it calls you.

00:23:14.140 It's this voluntary necessity.

00:23:15.560 You're struck by beauty.

00:23:16.760 You're compelled, but you don't feel forced.

00:23:19.440 It's like, right?

00:23:20.540 And so you've got this interlocking between reason and love and beauty, which I think—

00:23:26.220 Yeah, I wonder if that's something like—

00:23:30.540 See, you object to someone's arbitrary imposition of compulsion over you because they're—this is one way of looking at it—

00:23:38.880 That 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?

00:23:51.080 So it strikes you as counterproductive with regards to your own aims, let's say.

00:23:58.160 And that produces a sense of disharmony and rebellion.

00:24:01.680 It could be that the reason that beauty and love can be compelling without being powerful in that compulsion way is that they speak to something like an emergent harmony of value that's part and parcel, you might say, of the soul.

00:24:18.540 So beauty could compel you forward in part because if you—it might be that if you integrated your values properly, you would be naturally oriented in consequence of the makeup of your soul towards those things that beauty and love are pointing to.

00:24:38.000 Right.

00:24:38.620 And let's not remember, beauty and love are also overlapping with reason.

00:24:42.560 And you need reason because you have to care about the right things to reason well.

00:24:46.260 Yes, you have to care about the right things, which implies that there are right things to care about.

00:24:50.720 And so notice what you're doing.

00:24:51.920 And that goes back to the microcosm, macrocosm.

00:24:56.440 Yeah, right.

00:24:57.160 It's that moment where the principle—the grammar of my cognition and the grammar of reality are calling to each other.

00:25:04.900 They could—

00:25:05.780 They could interpenetrate.

00:25:06.780 That's right.

00:25:07.200 And, you know, I can't give you an argument to prove that that's the case because every argument presupposes that, in some sense, the grammar of reason and the grammar of reality must have some deep harmony.

00:25:19.980 And the same thing with love and the same thing with beauty.

00:25:22.740 And these are profound ways in which—

00:25:24.760 Well, I think faith—well, I think faith is actually the willingness to posit the reality of that truth in the absence of final proof.

00:25:33.540 Okay, let's talk about that because I think that's really important because that's a different—there's different notions of faith.

00:25:37.800 And what I hear you saying—I might be wrong.

00:25:39.960 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:40.140 What 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.

00:25:55.540 And that's a different notion of faith than the assertion of belief without evidence.

00:25:59.820 Yes, very, very much so.

00:26:01.160 Well, 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.

00:26:13.780 Well, now, because the Christians are all annoyed at me because I won't—I don't—I haven't proclaimed my faith in the propositional manner that many people who've adopted a creed would find would require. 0.92

00:26:30.720 And so, they're upset about that and on my case.

00:26:35.300 And it's—I find it's quite distasteful in some ways.

00:26:40.420 There's an invitational element, but there's a compulsion element.

00:26:43.380 And the compulsion element is, first of all, the insistence that the faith that's necessary to define something like Christianity is actually propositional.

00:26:52.360 Now, it should be the case that your propositional content is in alignment with your existential commitments.

00:26:59.660 But, for me, the fundamental move of faith is an existential move.

00:27:04.720 And the danger in the propositional—this is the pharisaic danger, as far as I'm concerned—is that you substitute the propositional for the existential.

00:27:14.800 Totally.

00:27:15.800 Well, and this goes—you know, I talk about the four kinds of knowing, the propositional, the procedural, right, the perspectival, and the participatory.

00:27:23.320 The 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.

00:27:35.640 You're now two steps removed from the actual knowing that is you being the microcosmic model of the macrocosm.

00:27:43.080 That's participatory knowing.

00:27:44.660 That's the knowing that makes all the other knowings possible.

00:27:48.080 And you can't—

00:27:48.560 Would that be understanding?

00:27:50.840 No.

00:27:51.340 I think all the kinds of knowing have their own—I think understanding is a way of grasping the significance of what you know.

00:27:58.920 And this is—this isn't my idea.

00:28:01.380 This 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.

00:28:12.240 Because science will often say things that are false in order to generate understanding.

00:28:16.940 Here's those—here's the—here's the atom.

00:28:19.460 It looks like a solar system.

00:28:20.840 Well, no, it doesn't.

00:28:22.120 Right, right.

00:28:22.620 Not at all, right?

00:28:23.520 Right.

00:28:23.860 Here's how gas works.

00:28:24.980 Here's the ideal gas law.

00:28:26.040 Well, there's no such ideal situations in reality.

00:28:29.260 Right?

00:28:29.440 Catherine Elgin writes about this in True Enough.

00:28:31.660 So under—

00:28:32.160 True Enough, yeah.

00:28:32.820 Right, right.

00:28:33.280 Why do you do this?

00:28:34.340 It's not that you don't care about the truth.

00:28:35.900 It'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.

00:28:51.000 There's a difference there.

00:28:51.980 And so I think understanding—and I get the illusion, you know, faith-seeking understanding.

00:28:58.460 I understand.

00:28:59.540 But I think they're a little bit different.

00:29:01.380 I think you have these primordial propositions that are your primordial participation that make your cognitive agency possible, right?

00:29:10.160 And then you—I don't know what to—you properly orient and identify with them.

00:29:19.100 And when you understand that, it's to step back and let them see how those primordial propositions are playing out.

00:29:28.980 What's the significance landscape they're creating for you?

00:29:32.040 That's what I think it means when you—

00:29:34.100 Well, that seems to me to be associated, too, with this idea of higher-order ethical virtue.

00:29:41.100 So let me walk through this with you for a second.

00:29:44.000 Tell me what you think.

00:29:44.800 Well, I've been thinking more and more about general psychopathology as a failure of maturation, right?

00:29:53.140 You mean like being a psychopath?

00:29:54.880 Is that what you mean? 0.95

00:29:55.500 Being a psychopath is a good example of that because two-year-olds, for example, are radically egocentric, right?

00:30:01.800 They can't play with others.

00:30:02.920 They can't occupy a shared mental space.

00:30:06.040 They can't take turns.

00:30:07.900 There's some proto-sharing that emerges, but they're not sophisticated, for example, at sharing toys.

00:30:12.960 So 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.

00:30:26.820 Now, 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

00:30:38.100 and to unify their desires, their whims, their motivational states with that of another.

00:30:43.820 That's how they make a friend.

00:30:44.760 Is that what you mean by going up this hierarchy?

00:30:46.380 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:30:47.840 Okay, so now you can imagine these primordial motivational states and emotions, and we kind of know what the basic ones are.

00:30:54.940 They're all pointers, fractionated pointers in an upward direction, but the upward direction actually emerges as a consequence of their interactions across time,

00:31:06.880 but not only across time, across time in a social space, and they weave themselves together, and this would be something like Jacob's Ladder from the bottom up.

00:31:15.620 They 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.

00:31:28.800 I don't think there's anything arbitrary about it.

00:31:30.720 I mean, you and I have been able to have a relationship because of the pattern of interaction that we fall into when we converse.

00:31:39.040 You know, you make an offering, and then I assess it and incorporate it, and then I make an offering, and you assess it and incorporate it.

00:31:46.560 And we're able to do that in a way that jointly gratifies our desire to explore and integrate, right?

00:31:54.860 And that is a cognitive act and an embodied act, but it's also something that indicates our fundamental concordance with each other at a level that's more than merely personal, right?

00:32:06.620 You're doing something.

00:32:07.460 This is the dialogus that you refer to, right?

00:32:09.860 You're making an offering that I'm accepting and vice versa, but we can do that in a manner that makes both of us want to continue the process.

00:32:17.640 That's definitional.

00:32:19.060 That's not an arbitrary definition of a moral interaction, right?

00:32:24.800 It's very practical.

00:32:25.820 It'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?

00:32:45.780 And I think that's manifest in something like play.

00:32:48.920 You 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.

00:32:59.540 But 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.

00:33:14.060 And so, and I don't think that this seems to me to be a very powerful argument against something like moral relativism.

00:33:21.080 It'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.

00:33:36.040 And not just time, let's say, also different domains of inquiry, you know?

00:33:40.640 And that's, that's, there's nothing about that that isn't highly constrained and orderly.

00:33:46.440 Yeah, this is, I mean, this is very, first of all, I think very highly of what you're saying.

00:33:51.040 It's convergent with a lot of things that I also think highly of.

00:33:54.120 I 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.

00:34:04.200 He 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.

00:34:13.700 That 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.

00:34:36.360 Now, the products, like a conversation, there are universal principles, that doesn't mean the products are universal.

00:34:40.980 Right, 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.

00:35:02.000 But 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.

00:35:10.980 But then, as you expand the social, as you expand the size of the group that that process is operating in, you start to see a concordance between the operation of that dialogos and the possibility of sophisticated, complex societies emerging that aren't predicated on power.

00:35:29.060 And I think that's why we have, for example, in the United States, we have the First Amendment.

00:35:33.340 It's because it's a recognition that something like, you have the right to engagement in the dialogos, not merely because it's a right, let's say, because you're made in the image of God, or it's a right because the state grants it.

00:35:46.140 It's actually a right because it's a necessary precondition for the maintenance of the society as such.

00:35:52.460 And that's not arbitrary.

00:35:53.560 It's like, it works for you, it works for the people you're immediately communicating with, but it also works to stabilize society across long spans of time and to make it grow.

00:36:05.560 And so you can't dispense with that without bringing the whole hierarchy.

00:36:10.160 I want to add to it.

00:36:10.980 Yep.

00:36:11.180 So, and this goes to work I've done with Dan Chappie and a whole bunch of other people.

00:36:16.460 When you get dialogical systems, what you get, you get the possibility of, you get the possibility of distributed cognition.

00:36:24.980 The way the internet is distributed computation and releases powers that know, where is the internet?

00:36:30.740 Like, right.

00:36:31.640 And notice the problems we can solve with the internet that we couldn't solve with individual computers.

00:36:36.040 When 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.

00:36:45.060 Five blades of superior engineering offer a shave as unshakable as your faith that the nation's best days still lie ahead.

00:36:51.600 Experience an exceptionally smooth, remarkably close shave and a testament to the fact that merit still matters.

00:36:56.840 Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.

00:36:59.420 Get Jeremy's razor's precision five instead.

00:37:01.680 Available now at jeremysrazors.com, walmart.com and Amazon prime.

00:37:06.040 At the right dialogical machinery going, you also afford distributed cognition.

00:37:13.620 And distributed cognition gains access to reality and can solve problems.

00:37:20.700 That's basically the argument of the Austrian school of economics, right, with regards to distributed systems.

00:37:26.420 I've had some very good discussions with Robert Breedlove around that, exactly, about exactly that.

00:37:31.900 And, you know, and I, you know, and Dan Giapia, we talked, we did a thing about how the NASA scientists do this.

00:37:38.900 They create these dialogical narrative practices in order to move, in order to coordinate distributed cognition to move the rovers around on Mars.

00:37:47.060 Right, right, right.

00:37:47.960 I remember, I remember you saying that.

00:37:50.380 So you taught a course for Peterson Academy.

00:37:52.980 I mean, let's talk a little bit about your experience, first of all.

00:37:55.980 So as you remember, and you graciously said recently in the Toronto Star interview, you know, I offered you the possibility of coming to teach for us about absolutely anything you wanted to teach about.

00:38:09.360 So walk us through the experience and the course, and then I'll update you a little bit about the state of the art with regard to this endeavor.

00:38:16.600 First of all, I want to thank the reporter.

00:38:18.300 The reporter reached out to me at the last moment and said, I'm going to do this.

00:38:23.120 And I said, do you want to talk?

00:38:24.200 And I said, I bet.

00:38:24.940 I really do want to talk.

00:38:26.360 Because I wanted to be clear.

00:38:28.400 And I didn't, I'm not attributing anything to this person.

00:38:31.520 But I, get this, I've been misquoted before.

00:38:34.300 Yeah, right.

00:38:34.780 Right, right.

00:38:35.640 And so, and there's a couple things I want, and I was very insistent on.

00:38:38.980 So I'm happy that it came out the way it came out.

00:38:43.380 So I just want to express the, as far as I can tell, the reporter was true to their word.

00:38:49.240 And I think that's honorable.

00:38:50.460 Yeah.

00:38:50.680 And when reporters are honorable, we should honor them.

00:38:53.380 Absolutely.

00:38:54.620 So that being said, first of all, let's talk about the first course that's out right now.

00:38:59.720 But I did, I've done three for you.

00:39:01.180 Right, right, right.

00:39:02.420 So the first one is intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and spirituality.

00:39:07.660 Right, and it's already up on the site.

00:39:09.460 Yep, yep.

00:39:09.720 And I've got feedback from some of your people that it's getting very well received, which I'm very happy.

00:39:14.740 That's for sure.

00:39:15.580 I'm very happy to hear that.

00:39:17.840 So first of all, let's go, going through the experience.

00:39:20.860 Pleased throughout, all three times.

00:39:22.780 I don't know if I should mention any names, but like Vincent, the person, excellent, just fantastic.

00:39:29.580 Your crews are fantastic.

00:39:32.160 Super professional.

00:39:34.300 Gracious, careful, competent.

00:39:37.900 Inviting.

00:39:38.660 Inviting.

00:39:39.300 Good.

00:39:39.620 Welcoming, constant checking with me about my needs.

00:39:42.480 How can we improve this?

00:39:43.800 How can we do this?

00:39:45.060 Right, you know, and just.

00:39:47.460 Good, good.

00:39:48.240 Glad to hear that.

00:39:48.980 That's what I've said consistently to everybody who asks me about it.

00:39:52.620 It's very, very professional.

00:39:55.440 I want to make clear what I made clear in the interview.

00:39:58.300 You, 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.

00:40:05.820 Do you want me on this?

00:40:06.820 And you said, of course I do.

00:40:08.200 I want you to.

00:40:08.980 And you were true to your word.

00:40:10.320 You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy.

00:40:12.580 I have had it through every course.

00:40:14.020 You said, and I've said this on video, so I'm happy to say it again, I want you to teach the course you've always wanted to teach.

00:40:20.460 Yep.

00:40:20.800 And true, true to your word all the way through for all of these courses so far.

00:40:24.980 I'm proud, genuinely proud of all of the courses I've done.

00:40:30.020 Great, great.

00:40:30.780 Well, we're dead serious about that.

00:40:32.500 I mean, my intention in identifying people is that I am bringing people to the platform whose views I want to hear.

00:40:42.080 And I actually want to hear them.

00:40:44.380 And so that means that the constraints have to be lifted.

00:40:47.180 It's like, no, I want to hear what you have to say.

00:40:49.140 And 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.

00:41:04.700 And it's not helpful because you can't wander where the spirit takes you.

00:41:09.920 Can't follow the logos.

00:41:11.040 Exactly, exactly.

00:41:12.160 And you need to be able to do that.

00:41:13.480 And I think we, I've taught three courses for Peterson Academy too, and I certainly felt the freedom that this new format allows.

00:41:23.180 And so I should bring you up to date a little bit too.

00:41:25.680 So, 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.

00:41:39.660 And to also assess whether we got the price right and to assess the reaction of the market, all of that.

00:41:48.140 And so we onboarded 30,000 people.

00:41:50.500 Oh, no kidding.

00:41:52.040 No kidding.

00:41:52.720 So that was, that exceeded our expectations quite nicely.

00:41:56.720 And the price point seems good.

00:41:59.320 And I could delve into that a little bit because, you know, the odd person says, well, why isn't it free?

00:42:04.080 And 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.

00:42:09.660 Second, on the social media side, because it has a sophisticated social media system, there's an open question about social media platforms now.

00:42:17.660 You know, if they're free, they're instantly invaded by bad actors, right?

00:42:23.560 Because your attention isn't free.

00:42:25.580 And so it's very valuable.

00:42:26.780 And so you get hordes of trolls, you get hordes of bots, you get like bad corporate actors.

00:42:33.080 The whole thing can deteriorate.

00:42:34.780 And 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.

00:42:46.480 I would have expected that, yeah.

00:42:47.100 Right.

00:42:47.380 So that's cool.

00:42:48.240 That'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?

00:42:56.780 Like, is it worth a dollar a day, because that's approximately, or $1.25, that's what we're talking about.

00:43:01.960 Is it worth that not to be chronically annoyed by the pathology of the system?

00:43:08.880 And I would say it's worth something for that to be the case.

00:43:12.280 So, and people are pleased with the price.

00:43:14.460 The indications we've had so far is that people would have paid more and still been happy.

00:43:18.360 So I think we probably undershot the market limit, but I'm fine with that.

00:43:23.020 That's perfectly fine.

00:43:25.260 And now we've raised enough capital, because we have enough students, to start doing the AI language translations.

00:43:34.160 And so we should be able to translate all of the courses into God only knows how many languages eventually.

00:43:39.620 And that technology is really coming along quite nicely.

00:43:42.100 And we're going to branch out so that we'll have representatives in, well, to begin with, all the major countries in the world.

00:43:48.480 And hopefully we can bring the advantages of elite higher education to anyone who wants it.

00:43:54.400 And I think we actually have a crack at doing that.

00:43:56.560 So it's quite, and our system worked.

00:43:59.960 It didn't, there were some bugs and people were quite patient while we worked through them.

00:44:03.500 And the team worked very hard to rectify them as soon as possible.

00:44:07.000 But yeah, I was your first course recorded.

00:44:09.220 So yeah.

00:44:10.240 Right, right, right, right.

00:44:12.100 Right, well, congratulations on that, too.

00:44:14.080 So that's a good thing.

00:44:16.660 So yeah, I'm very excited about it.

00:44:18.500 And we're working, we have jurisdictions that are interested in working with us towards accreditation.

00:44:24.260 So we're happy about that.

00:44:25.400 But we've also found that probably 75% of the people on the platform aren't interested in credit per se.

00:44:34.200 They're not even necessarily interested in taking the quizzes that are available.

00:44:38.500 Fundamentally, they're there because they want to learn.

00:44:40.880 And lots of them, for example, are older people.

00:44:43.220 I wouldn't say that's the majority.

00:44:44.860 But, you know, lots of people wanted to go to university and couldn't.

00:44:48.420 And so we can provide them with an extremely high quality university experience.

00:44:53.200 And I suspect that that would be the case.

00:44:55.240 Yeah, so that's gratifying as well.

00:44:57.500 Yeah.

00:44:57.600 So yeah, so the full launch is September 9th.

00:45:01.380 Right.

00:45:01.600 And 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.

00:45:11.700 So that should be, hopefully, I've spent a fair bit of time on the social media platform so far.

00:45:17.500 And that's, it's a very positive place.

00:45:20.360 So that's very good.

00:45:21.480 And it has all the features of standard social media system.

00:45:26.000 So 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.

00:45:39.180 That'd be nice.

00:45:39.560 Who knows, eh?

00:45:40.440 Because a lot of those are quite toxic.

00:45:41.960 Very, very, I use Twitter a lot and I learn a lot from Twitter, but my God, it's a snake pit.

00:45:49.760 It's a terrible snake pit.

00:45:51.000 I use it as minimally as I can.

00:45:53.220 Yeah, well, I can understand that.

00:45:54.720 I 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.

00:46:04.100 And so it's worth wading through a fair bit of narcissistic toxicity to find the odd gem, you know.

00:46:13.260 And it's a pretty good way of keeping abreast with the dynamic shifts of the political environment.

00:46:19.040 How much that's useful is a different matter.

00:46:21.740 But 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.

00:46:29.320 But, well, part of what you do in a podcast is it speaks about the moment.

00:46:36.940 And so you got to have a sense of what that moment is for better or for worse.

00:46:41.060 And so, yeah, at least that's what I tell myself when I'm on Twitter.

00:46:45.360 But this might be a good, well, and we're also hoping it'll work well for people to establish social networks, you know.

00:46:50.260 Because at least you'll know that the people on the platform are interested in ideas, let's say.

00:46:58.280 It'll be a great place for open people to meet, for example.

00:47:02.020 The 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.

00:47:13.780 But they did that.

00:47:15.340 They wanted to, they started really bonding with each other because there was a shared journey and there was a shared set of ideas.

00:47:22.220 There was a shared discourse space.

00:47:23.880 Yeah.

00:47:24.180 Very much.

00:47:25.100 Yeah, well, soon people will have course-centered chat rooms.

00:47:31.120 And we're hoping that if we start to grow to a large enough size that people will start to spontaneously organize.

00:47:37.780 Well, you can imagine meetups where people get together to watch a lecture and to discuss it, you know.

00:47:43.680 There's, there's no reason to outsource a fair bit of the classroom organization, let's say, to the students themselves.

00:47:50.620 And 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.

00:48:01.920 Because, well, cruises, all things considered, especially compared to the cost of a, of, say, a private university education, cruises aren't that expensive.

00:48:12.160 You know, they're, they're actually quite remarkably inexpensive.

00:48:15.340 I, 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. 1.00

00:48:22.620 And the service is a lot better, let's say.

00:48:25.620 So, you know, we, we're going to curate meetings for students.

00:48:31.480 So, 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.

00:48:50.420 That sounds exciting.

00:48:51.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:48:52.440 And I just can't see why, you know, with some social events at night, it seems to me highly likely that this is possible.

00:48:58.760 And 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.

00:49:14.380 Oh, oh, yeah.

00:49:15.080 Yeah, I think you can see that now with, well, the tour we were on, for example.

00:49:18.820 Yeah, exactly.

00:49:19.580 Yeah, when, what did you think of the tour?

00:49:20.980 What was that like for, how many times, how many days did you spend with me?

00:49:24.980 Was it three or four?

00:49:26.560 I can't remember.

00:49:27.220 I think it was four.

00:49:28.040 Yeah, I think it was four.

00:49:29.060 Yeah.

00:49:29.740 I had a really good time and I enjoyed, I enjoyed our dinners.

00:49:36.020 You and I got to reconnect on a more personal level, which I deeply appreciated.

00:49:41.600 I thought that, I mean, it was like touring with a rock star.

00:49:45.720 I've told people, I enjoy touring with a rock star.

00:49:48.200 I don't want to be the rock star.

00:49:50.060 That's, you can, you can have that.

00:49:52.100 But I, I enjoyed it a lot.

00:49:55.720 Ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about something that matters.

00:49:58.440 Your wellbeing.

00:49:59.060 In a world where traditional values are under siege, it's crucial to stay strong mentally and physically.

00:50:04.700 Enter Responsible Man, a Daily Wire Ventures company that understands what it means to be a pillar of strength in these challenging times.

00:50:11.420 They've created the Emerson Multivitamin, not for the faint of heart, but for men who shoulder their responsibilities with pride.

00:50:16.740 The Emerson Multivitamin contains 33 key ingredients that work in harmony to fortify your immune system, sharpen your mental acuity, and maintain the strength of your heart and muscles.

00:50:26.540 It's not just a vitamin.

00:50:27.780 It's fuel for the culture battles that we face every single day.

00:50:30.940 And here's something to make you stand just a little taller.

00:50:33.740 Every Emerson Multivitamin is proudly made in the U.S. of A. 0.94

00:50:36.800 No compromises, no shortcuts, just pure American craftsmanship.

00:50:40.660 And now listeners of this show have an exclusive opportunity to invest in their health and values simultaneously.

00:50:45.760 Take advantage of Responsible Man's fall sale.

00:50:48.820 Visit ResponsibleMan.com and use code JORDAN to get 30% off your order, plus an additional $9 off your first order.

00:50:55.200 But hurry, because this deal won't last long.

00:50:57.740 Remember, a resilient society needs resilient men.

00:51:00.600 Start your journey to better health and a stronger America with Responsible Man Vitamins.

00:51:04.800 That's ResponsibleMan.com, code JORDAN for 30% off, plus an additional $9 off your first order.

00:51:10.500 Responsible Man, because true strength comes from within.

00:51:13.080 The staff was fantastic.

00:51:17.660 I enjoyed, there was electricity, some places more than others.

00:51:22.660 And then, you know, you and I having, it was really powerful in the way we were talking about earlier, after you gave a talk and that electricity was there and to sit with you and talk afterwards.

00:51:36.140 Or even before, you were gracious, you would have let me to sort of talk a little bit about who I was before I introduced you.

00:51:42.720 And feeling even that a little bit there.

00:51:45.840 And a lot of people, especially the last one, because in the last one, I was, I didn't go back.

00:51:51.440 I actually booked in a hotel in the, right across from the convention center.

00:51:55.080 And a lot of people were there from the event.

00:51:57.680 And I got to talk to a lot of them.

00:51:59.220 And there was a lot of them that, of course, they were expressing appreciation for you.

00:52:04.820 But a lot of them were expressing a lot of appreciation for me and my work.

00:52:08.540 And I, that was very, very, very, very encouraging.

00:52:12.520 So there was a lot about it I enjoyed.

00:52:14.940 But, 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.

00:52:29.860 Because I'm presenting things that are spontaneous.

00:52:31.940 And 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.

00:52:42.000 Because the proper critical sense is separation of the wheat from the chaff, not derogation of everything as chaff, right?

00:52:49.060 And so it's very, very helpful for people to see that modeled, but also to have it happen.

00:52:55.400 And so.

00:52:55.860 I thought we did a good job at that.

00:52:57.340 Yeah, I think so.

00:52:58.120 Oh, yeah.

00:52:58.460 Well, it was fun.

00:52:59.200 We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll do it again.

00:53:00.980 Yeah, it worked out real well.

00:53:02.980 It was good, too.

00:53:03.900 Because I had you and Constantine Kissin and Jonathan Paggio along.

00:53:07.600 And I've also traveled with Douglas Murray and Rex Murphy.

00:53:10.120 And so all of that, that's all been extremely good to have that second party in there to, third party in there to interrogate, right?

00:53:18.440 And to make a different kind of connection with the audience.

00:53:21.160 And if you'll allow me, you, behind the curtain off camera, you treat your people very well.

00:53:29.140 And that impressed me throughout.

00:53:30.840 You've risen to quite a bit of influence and notoriety.

00:53:35.800 And people have been twisted by that in certain ways.

00:53:39.460 And I was very impressed by how gracious you were with your staff, with your people, how kind you were.

00:53:47.280 You know, well, part of that, there's, there's kind of a, what would you say?

00:53:52.280 I think that's an important thing to note.

00:53:53.560 It, it's an important thing to watch for when you're evaluating people.

00:53:57.520 That's what I was doing.

00:53:58.340 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:59.380 No, I understand that.

00:54:00.420 And it is, it is a real marker for that.

00:54:03.180 You know, like I've traveled with lots of people and you learn very rapidly who kisses up and kicks down,

00:54:09.840 which is not a testament to the integrity of their personality.

00:54:13.600 But it's also a management style in a way, because we're very selective about who we hire, but also who we keep.

00:54:24.560 And so there isn't anybody around at Peterson Academy or on my tour who isn't doing a stellar and necessary job.

00:54:33.300 And 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.

00:54:40.740 And many things can go wrong, especially if you're trying to sustain it across multiple years.

00:54:45.700 Like it's a very unlikely endeavor.

00:54:47.760 And so everybody who is involved, they're, they're given at a hundred percent.

00:54:52.460 And I'm very grateful for that.

00:54:54.940 And they make my life a lot more straightforward than my wife's life as well.

00:54:59.300 I saw you, you know, I saw you delegating.

00:55:03.060 Yeah.

00:55:03.500 Without question.

00:55:04.620 Yeah.

00:55:05.120 And that's a marker too.

00:55:06.960 That, I look for that in people.

00:55:08.340 I look for, can they delegate authority?

00:55:10.140 Can they trust people to run with things?

00:55:13.580 And you were basically, to my mind, you were managing things from sort of 30,000 feet above.

00:55:18.820 Yeah.

00:55:18.960 You're giving sort of general orientation.

00:55:20.560 Oh, I want that.

00:55:21.120 And you'd have specific things here and there.

00:55:22.520 But other than that, people would say, we need to do this.

00:55:24.780 Yeah.

00:55:24.880 Or we need to come here.

00:55:25.500 And you go, okay.

00:55:26.220 And you were just like.

00:55:27.540 Yeah.

00:55:27.960 Well, the other advantage, I mean, there's a bunch of advantages to that as a managerial style.

00:55:32.540 I mean, the first advantage is for me, it frees me up to concentrate on only what's necessary.

00:55:38.500 So, and I thought through, well, what's necessary for the tour to work and to continue?

00:55:43.680 Well, it's necessary that Tammy comes along with me and that she has a role and that that works. 0.86

00:55:49.620 Okay.

00:55:49.960 So, that has to be set up.

00:55:51.160 And it is.

00:55:51.940 Then it's necessary for me to get there.

00:55:55.160 Like, no matter what.

00:55:56.460 Right.

00:55:56.660 I have to be there like an hour ahead, period.

00:55:59.960 And then I have to do a good job.

00:56:01.640 And that's really the three things.

00:56:03.100 And so, everything else has been farmed out to other people.

00:56:07.100 You know, the hotel logistics, the flights, the meals, all of the scheduling of my days.

00:56:13.640 Other people take care of that.

00:56:14.780 And then if they do that fully, then I'm very happy about that.

00:56:19.300 And they have something that's really crucial to do and can take pride in their work and are committed to it.

00:56:24.820 And if they can't do that, well, then we figure that out very quickly and say, look, this, you know, this, this isn't working.

00:56:31.200 And it's just, I learned this even more intensely on the tour than when I was supervising graduate students.

00:56:38.000 There's more play in the system with graduate students.

00:56:40.540 It's easier in a way to not be quite as cut and dried with your decision making, even though that's not a good idea.

00:56:47.280 But on tour, it's like, there's no room for mistakes because it's too fast paced.

00:56:52.300 You can't, you can't mistreat any member of the audience.

00:56:56.020 Anybody who ever does that is like, no, you can't do that.

00:56:58.860 That's once.

00:56:59.540 Do it again.

00:57:00.640 You're gone.

00:57:01.500 Because I know this, for example, once you, all the people who come to these talks, they want to be there.

00:57:08.860 And in a way, they've opened themselves up, right?

00:57:11.960 Because it's a hopeful enterprise.

00:57:14.080 And hope is a dangerous emotion because it can be dashed.

00:57:17.780 And so they come there and they're excited and maybe they meet me.

00:57:21.500 And if I'm polite and welcoming and so are my staff, then they walk away even enhanced in their hope and their trust.

00:57:30.800 If there's a mistake there, you know, and they get the cold shoulder or anybody's rude, they will never forget that.

00:57:37.760 Never.

00:57:38.200 And they will tell everyone.

00:57:38.700 And they will tell everyone.

00:57:40.160 And you don't have to do that.

00:57:42.320 It's a very small number of people that you do that to before an enterprise like the one we're discussing, craters.

00:57:50.180 Right.

00:57:50.680 Like, it's way faster than you think because a disaffected person can tell a thousand people and quite effectively.

00:57:57.320 And so if you have a hundred of them, that's not so good.

00:58:00.500 But you make it sound, as it is, rational.

00:58:04.260 But there are many athletes and celebrities who have not learned this lesson.

00:58:10.180 Yeah.

00:58:10.880 Well, 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.

00:58:21.640 Like, it could have easily gone that way.

00:58:24.060 And so, you know, and I've had a taste of that more than now and then.

00:58:29.100 And the fact that that isn't happening all the time, that's something to really remember.

00:58:34.060 And, in fact, I have the opposite of that pretty much wherever I go.

00:58:38.780 I'm so fortunate because people are very good to me.

00:58:42.520 They're good to me in airports, wherever they meet me.

00:58:44.860 And I'm more than pleased to return the favor.

00:58:48.340 And, you know, you're asking for too much if you have a public face and the benefits of that.

00:58:56.340 And you're not also, like, thrilled that people are responding to you in that positive manner.

00:59:02.660 You said that to me multiple times.

00:59:04.360 Oh, yeah.

00:59:05.040 You did. 1.00

00:59:06.560 You're a fool if you don't, if you're not continually appreciative of that. 0.99

00:59:12.300 So, and, you know, all the people around me, all my staff, they're all like that. 0.99

00:59:16.980 They're all wonderful people.

00:59:18.100 Good, good, good.

00:59:19.040 Well, I'm glad to hear that.

00:59:20.360 Let's talk about what you're up to.

00:59:23.560 You told me when we were, you're writing a book and you're on sabbatical in January.

00:59:28.800 Tell me what you're doing practically and then what ideas you're trying to flesh out.

00:59:32.700 Like, what's on the intellectual horizon for you?

00:59:34.780 So, first big news, the book Form of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is coming out the 29th of this month.

00:59:43.240 So, part one, 400 and some pages.

00:59:44.900 So, it's not just like a transcription from the series.

00:59:49.580 It's a companion.

00:59:50.420 We've taken it.

00:59:51.420 We've rewritten it, updated it.

00:59:53.820 We've added figures, references.

00:59:56.540 My great writing partner, Christopher Master Pietro, has rewritten entire sections.

01:00:01.880 So, he's a co-author with me.

01:00:04.040 And then we all...

01:00:04.880 How long is it?

01:00:06.240 So, the first book is like 400 and some pages.

01:00:08.540 Yeah.

01:00:08.820 And the second one will be probably something like that.

01:00:11.300 And where can people get that?

01:00:12.840 Well, 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.

01:00:23.000 I'll get you a copy if you want one.

01:00:24.460 Yeah, definitely.

01:00:25.440 Okay.

01:00:25.840 And so, why should people purchase it and spend the time with it?

01:00:29.320 What is it that you're...

01:00:30.680 I mean, I know you had a long history at the University of Toronto of being a very, very popular professor.

01:00:37.900 And people regarded your work as existentially altering in the positive direction.

01:00:43.540 That was very consistent.

01:00:44.900 I saw that for years.

01:00:45.900 And that's a very difficult thing to pull off.

01:00:47.860 It's very rare.

01:00:49.200 And so...

01:00:50.080 And you've had the same impact on people in the broader public sphere as well.

01:00:55.140 But we should zero into that, you know?

01:00:57.200 Like, what do you think it is that you're doing right?

01:00:59.660 And what is it that you have to offer in general, but also in relationship to this book?

01:01:05.000 Well, the book is my best attempt to...

01:01:08.960 There's two halves.

01:01:09.740 The first is sort of the historical half.

01:01:11.620 The second half is the sort of cognitive scientific half.

01:01:15.580 It's my attempt to...

01:01:17.600 The first half is, like, how did we get into the meaning crisis?

01:01:21.440 What is it?

01:01:22.360 Why is it?

01:01:23.600 And then the second half is, well, what do we mean by this meaning in life?

01:01:26.200 What's the best cognitive science?

01:01:28.000 What do I do?

01:01:29.380 I think I'm very good at integrating material across different disciplines.

01:01:41.040 And looking for patterns.

01:01:42.040 And looking for patterns.

01:01:42.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:01:43.240 And getting kind of a synoptic integration.

01:01:45.580 And then also making it clear how it has that kind of existential import that you mentioned a few minutes ago.

01:01:52.280 Right, so it's a gathering from multiple places and then also a practical specification.

01:01:58.560 So you and I are similar in that regard, I think.

01:02:00.980 And we were reacted to it in a similar way at the University of Toronto for that reason.

01:02:05.300 Well, I mean, you have an acknowledgment in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis as the person who galvanized the public to the Meaning Crisis.

01:02:13.740 Oh, good.

01:02:14.300 Oh, good.

01:02:14.780 Well, that's another thing you do, too, though, is that you're very...

01:02:20.300 You have a gift for pointing to the problem of the moment and then encapsulating it in an articulate manner, right?

01:02:28.740 I mean, merely to be able to...

01:02:30.640 Jonathan Paggio did this quite well in the course he teaches for Peterson Academy, too, by the way.

01:02:35.020 Because he provides an encapsulated formulation of nihilism and what it means and what it signifies.

01:02:42.680 And then dispenses with it as an existential necessity quite quickly and elegantly.

01:02:47.280 Which is a big deal to be able to do that because it's a real problem for people.

01:02:50.180 But you're highlighting of the Meaning Crisis as a phenomenon.

01:02:53.780 Just that is helpful to people in the same way often that psychological diagnosis is helpful to people.

01:03:00.440 Like, you know, people will come in to see a clinician and they think their particular brand of existential suffering is absolutely unique to them.

01:03:09.500 Yeah.

01:03:09.740 And so then you say, no, no.

01:03:11.680 A, it follows this pattern and these are the limits.

01:03:15.280 And so now it's in a box.

01:03:16.640 You know, and there's a bit of something that might be dismaying about that because it's no fun to be diagnosed.

01:03:20.980 But it's also no fun to be the only member of a crazy club.

01:03:25.000 That's not a good thing.

01:03:26.320 But then you also want to ally that to a pathway forward.

01:03:29.760 And, 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.

01:03:41.100 And that's the problem I have with approaches like the selfish gene or the more rationalistic atheist movement.

01:03:47.240 It's like, well, no wonder you have a meaning crisis because things are meaningless.

01:03:51.780 There's, that's, I think the fact that there is a meaning crisis is actually evidence that, evident that things aren't meaningless.

01:03:59.580 I agree.

01:04:00.120 Because it's not a neutral state.

01:04:01.600 It's a very negative state.

01:04:03.360 And 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.

01:04:11.680 Yeah, 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.

01:04:28.720 They 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.

01:04:47.000 Right, 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.

01:05:01.220 This, 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.

01:05:10.960 They're the same thing.

01:05:11.980 And so it's also very useful to know that this death of God phenomenon is not new.

01:05:18.100 It's a recurrent theme in human history that a crisis of meaning is a condition.

01:05:24.180 It's not a permanent state and it's not a statement about the nature of the world.

01:05:27.780 It's one of the various ways you can be in the world.

01:05:30.940 And it isn't, it isn't the final solution for those who are rationalistic, rational enough to see through, let's say, the protective superstitions of religion.

01:05:39.860 That's not a good way of thinking about it.

01:05:41.980 It's not an accurate way of thinking about it.

01:05:43.740 Now, 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.

01:05:56.700 And 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.

01:06:08.100 So, 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.

01:06:18.060 And only, I would now say, I wouldn't have said it then, but retrospectively looking back after therapy, by the way, I did extended Jungian therapy, that it was quite traumatic.

01:06:30.540 Some of the most, I think some of the most horrific experiences of my life were around that.

01:06:35.100 I belonged to a version of it that had a notion of the rapture, and I came home once when I was 10, and there was nobody home.

01:06:43.000 And that was a very rare event.

01:06:44.620 First time it had occurred to me, I'd come home from school, and I was convinced that everybody had been raptured.

01:06:49.160 I had been left behind because I was clearly a sinner, condemned to the Antichrist and to hell.

01:06:55.160 And for a 10-year-old, you can imagine how horrible that is.

01:06:59.920 Or I remember when I was reading the Bible, I came across the passages that talk about the unforgivable sin.

01:07:05.040 Right.

01:07:05.440 And I was just riven with anxiety.

01:07:08.080 And my mother, trying to help me, took me to the pastor of a church, and he gave me the most platitudinous useless. 0.99

01:07:14.840 And even as a 12-year-old, I was able to recognize, you're useless.

01:07:20.000 So I was a fan of science fiction because I was always intrigued by speculative thought from very early on.

01:07:27.940 And I read a book by Roger Zelazny called Lord of Light that introduced me to Buddhism and Hinduism and the power of myth.

01:07:35.420 And it opened me up, and I rejected Christianity. 0.80

01:07:38.560 And I became, well, I became that person you were criticizing earlier, the very antagonistic atheist materialist.

01:07:47.840 Yeah, well, that's a very standard pattern of reaction.

01:07:50.960 And it's, I mean, I've seen that in the atheist community.

01:07:55.240 I mean, there's two things that make someone a committed atheist, as far as I can tell, speaking generally.

01:08:00.620 One 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.

01:08:13.600 That's one thing.

01:08:14.220 But that's not enough.

01:08:15.780 It'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?

01:08:26.260 And there's a lot. 0.99

01:08:26.780 Yeah, well, it's a, well, you know, Christ himself was killed by the religious hypocrites, essentially. 0.98

01:08:34.540 We talked about this a lot. 0.75

01:08:35.460 Yeah, well, it's a cardinal part of the story.

01:08:38.360 It'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.

01:08:48.980 I 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.

01:08:58.500 Yeah, right, right.

01:08:59.800 That's another danger, of course, or a casual antithesis to any other creed, because you see that within denominations as well.

01:09:07.480 Right, it's not a good answer.

01:09:08.820 And, yeah, it was very illuminating to me to think more deeply through the significance of the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers.

01:09:19.300 You know, the lawyers are those in the gospel story are those who use the law as a weapon.

01:09:24.620 And, boy, there's plenty of them running about at the moment.

01:09:27.720 The scribes are basically academics who use their intellect as a destructive force, like the postmodernists. 0.97

01:09:34.100 And then the Pharisees are the religious hypocrites, and they're the enemies of the Logos, right? 0.93

01:09:39.120 And, yes, obviously, obviously. 0.59

01:09:41.720 D.C. Schindler, my friend D.C. Schindler, talks about mythology, the hatred of the Logos. 0.60

01:09:47.720 It's a good word.

01:09:49.480 Right, right, right.

01:09:50.720 I left, and I went through a profound personal meaning crisis, deep nihilism.

01:09:59.680 How long? For how long?

01:10:01.100 For about three or four years.

01:10:07.640 And how old were you when that happened?

01:10:09.640 Sort of 15 to, like, 18.

01:10:12.620 Right, right.

01:10:13.480 Well, it's interesting, too, and I would say significant, that you turned to science fiction.

01:10:17.400 That definitely happened to Elon Musk, too.

01:10:19.100 And it happens to a lot of smart, rational people who lose their religious connection.

01:10:24.740 And I think it's because the science fiction contains the emergence of a new mythos, right?

01:10:30.960 Especially the new wave that I was reading.

01:10:32.880 People like Roger Zelazny.

01:10:34.180 I mean, Lord of Light is about a planet where people have sort of mutated themselves and done sort of hyper-technology,

01:10:40.780 and they've assumed the roles of the Hindu pantheon.

01:10:43.200 And so, Hinduism, and so, this is one of Zelazny's themes about the relationship between myth and science and philosophy and religion.

01:10:50.600 And so, I was deeply, you know, interested in all of this.

01:10:55.500 And then I got to university.

01:10:56.700 Heinlein does the same thing with Stranger in a Strange Land, right?

01:11:00.540 Yeah.

01:11:00.680 And it's so interesting, because Musk named his AI Grok after Valentine Smith, right?

01:11:06.480 And that's not accidental.

01:11:08.220 You can see that mythos re-entering the engineering sphere in the guise of science fiction.

01:11:14.340 It's not a triviality.

01:11:16.420 So, okay, so you got turned on to...

01:11:20.980 Starting a business can be tough.

01:11:23.200 But thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.

01:11:27.380 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

01:11:31.880 From 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.

01:11:38.800 Our 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.

01:11:46.320 With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools,

01:11:51.780 alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps, like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.

01:11:58.280 Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.

01:12:06.620 No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.

01:12:13.060 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.

01:12:18.580 Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.

01:12:24.340 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

01:12:30.960 Philosophical and theological ideas.

01:12:32.760 I took an intro to philosophy course, and we read the Republic, and I met Socrates.

01:12:38.040 Aha.

01:12:38.480 And what did that do?

01:12:39.840 Well, see, the thing about my upbringing is it had left a taste in my mouth for the transcendence.

01:12:46.260 You know, missing a sage, if I can put it that way.

01:12:52.280 And then I met this figure of Socrates who made the logos come alive and gave me a new way of understanding rationality

01:12:59.940 and made me a way of understanding spirituality and transcendence in a way that was consonant with my burgeoning interest in science and reason.

01:13:10.300 And that—

01:13:12.300 Right, so that was a defragmentation process.

01:13:15.040 Profound.

01:13:15.580 Mm-hmm.

01:13:15.940 Profound.

01:13:16.200 That's why I will not follow—I will not follow any religion, any pseudo-religious ideology, any political vision that says,

01:13:27.720 you must abandon your loyalty to Socrates.

01:13:29.680 That's not going to happen for me.

01:13:31.260 That's not going to happen for me.

01:13:32.600 And, okay, and so what was it specifically about Socrates that attracted you, do you think?

01:13:38.300 Well, there was a lot originally, I thought, but that's—but you see, Socrates talked about that himself.

01:13:44.080 He talked about how he seduced people into philosophy, right?

01:13:47.640 Because at first it was, oh, look, he wins all the arguments.

01:13:50.480 Yeah, right, right.

01:13:51.420 And 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.

01:14:05.640 And 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—

01:14:21.980 Yeah, so that's—is there something about the essence of higher order meaning that is either analogous to or identical with self-correction?

01:14:32.020 I think—well, I think that's the Axial Revolution.

01:14:36.320 The 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.

01:14:56.800 Because, 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?

01:15:11.020 Right, right, right, right.

01:15:11.180 And so you get this tremendous—

01:15:12.680 Yeah, because questioning improves, but it also destroys.

01:15:15.240 Right, exactly.

01:15:16.240 And so you need a figure that is—like Socrates, you know, he's open to following the Logos.

01:15:22.020 Wisdom begins in wonder, but there's tremendous courage.

01:15:24.300 He demonstrates it unto death.

01:15:26.520 He demonstrates it unto death.

01:15:28.200 This is tremendously encouraging for—that was tremendously encouraging for me.

01:15:32.760 And 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.

01:15:42.180 Yeah, right.

01:15:42.560 And the love of wisdom.

01:15:43.680 And you get into all of these arguments about meta-ethics and meta-epistemology, and those are useful tools.

01:15:50.420 They're useful for science, and so I kept going on for that reason, but this hunger was not being satisfied.

01:15:57.940 So literally down the street from me, there was a Tai Chi meditation center, so I went there, because I decided to give Eastern philosophy, because I'd been reading some Hermenessa, a chance.

01:16:07.320 And I started doing, practicing Tai Chi Chuan and practicing Vipassana Metta.

01:16:12.580 I was introduced to Lao Tse.

01:16:13.980 I was introduced to Siddhartha.

01:16:15.780 And so these things opened me up.

01:16:18.140 And around that time, I started to read Pierre Hadot and how our ancient philosophy, the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists and the Skeptics, they also practiced philosophy as a way of life.

01:16:29.940 And then I started to realize how much this overlapped with early Christianity and some forms of existing Christianity.

01:16:36.720 And it started to help me, a rapprochement to Christianity and to religion, because I became very—

01:16:44.720 Well, you've always struck me at your core as a religious thinker.

01:16:53.260 That is—

01:16:53.720 And that's partly because you're grappling with deep ideas, and that's the same thing, but—

01:16:58.600 You're right.

01:16:59.600 And—

01:17:00.600 It'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.

01:17:09.080 And I also think it accounts to some degree for your impact on students.

01:17:12.840 I think that's true.

01:17:14.500 My—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.

01:17:25.780 Yeah.

01:17:25.960 That was one of the best presentations of Agape.

01:17:28.120 Agape, and then—

01:17:30.180 And define that for everyone.

01:17:33.000 So, other than sort of desire, there's three kinds of love.

01:17:37.220 Eros is the love that is accomplished by consummation.

01:17:41.200 So, 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.

01:17:49.100 And we consummate a marriage, right? 0.95

01:17:51.280 And you consummate a relationship in, you know, in sexual intercourse.

01:17:55.120 And then there's philia, and this is the love that is born out of reciprocity.

01:17:59.760 This is friendship love.

01:18:00.820 This is the love that emerges and affords dialogos.

01:18:04.820 That's why it's philia sophia.

01:18:06.680 It's the dialogical love of wisdom together.

01:18:09.200 And then there is the love that a parent has for a child.

01:18:13.680 You don't love a child because you want to be one with the child.

01:18:16.180 That's exactly the wrong project.

01:18:18.000 You're trying to make the project autonomous.

01:18:20.260 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:20.880 And, of course, your child isn't your friend when you bring the child home from the hospital.

01:18:24.580 They can't do anything.

01:18:25.700 They're not even a cognitive agent.

01:18:27.080 They're a moral person, but they're not a cognitive agent.

01:18:29.620 You love a child.

01:18:31.380 It's like this magic.

01:18:32.900 You love them because by loving them, you turn them into a full-blown cognitive agent.

01:18:40.600 It's like if I could stare at a sofa and turn it into a Ferrari.

01:18:44.100 It's that kind.

01:18:44.960 And in that sense, it is the most fundamentally profound, creative, and we're not just creating meaning.

01:18:54.820 We'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.

01:19:10.120 So agape is the deep recognition of that in that sort of voluntary necessity and being compelled to draw into it.

01:19:18.340 And Jesus is, right, Jesus, you know, in the epistle of John, God is agape.

01:19:25.340 Jesus is the sage of that.

01:19:29.000 Think about what agape means.

01:19:30.920 Jesus 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, 1.00

01:19:41.860 all 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. 0.99

01:19:54.200 And agape is the God power that turns non-persons into persons.

01:20:00.360 And that conquers the Roman Empire.

01:20:01.760 And that's why—

01:20:02.860 And the whole ancient world.

01:20:03.880 And that's why it conquers the Roman Empire, right? 0.97

01:20:06.980 And precisely.

01:20:08.860 And so—and my partner, Sarah, who's not a Christian, right?

01:20:12.920 And I don't profess to be one, but she took me aside at one point, and she said,

01:20:18.420 and I want this understood, that I'm saying this at an arm's length, okay?

01:20:24.160 And you're a good friend, so I'll trust you for that.

01:20:27.340 But she said, you're actually the only real Christian I've ever met.

01:20:31.520 Mm-hmm.

01:20:32.360 And what did she mean by that?

01:20:34.840 And well, I—of course I asked her.

01:20:35.960 Yeah, yeah, right.

01:20:37.000 And she said, because you—you know, she said, I get it.

01:20:41.900 You don't identify with a set of doctrines, but you—you try to live agape, and you try to follow—

01:20:49.400 Embody it, yeah.

01:20:49.960 Embody it, and you try to follow the logos.

01:20:52.320 Yeah.

01:20:52.460 And you've structured your whole—your whole life and the cultivation of your character around that.

01:20:58.920 Right, well, that's what belief—that's belief.

01:21:01.080 Believe it, to give your heart to.

01:21:02.760 That's what—that's the original meaning.

01:21:04.240 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:21:04.260 It's to stake your life on it.

01:21:05.540 That's why I have a certain amount of problem with the propositional—the reduction of belief

01:21:10.460 to the propositional.

01:21:11.220 Propositional tyranny.

01:21:12.360 That's what it is.

01:21:13.060 Well, it's also—you know, it's propositional tyranny, but it's also substitute—it's a substitution.

01:21:18.520 It's like, well, now I've got the propositions down.

01:21:21.040 You know, when I talk to some evangelists in Washington, I know some very, very wise evangelicals

01:21:28.640 in Washington.

01:21:29.780 They do remarkable work.

01:21:31.900 They're involved in the prayer breakfast there and have been for decades, really committed

01:21:36.160 people.

01:21:36.700 And we were having a very serious conversation one day about the errors, let's say, of the

01:21:42.520 evangelical movement, one of them being the substitution of the propositional for the

01:21:47.400 existential.

01:21:48.600 And then the counting of souls, you know, the number of people who accept the propositional

01:21:52.960 creed, which isn't nothing, you know—

01:21:55.740 It's necessary, but it's not sufficient.

01:21:57.220 It's also maybe one way that the propositional can echo down through the emotions and the

01:22:03.140 motivations and become something embodied.

01:22:05.080 But that's a—there's a large journey from the purely propositional, let's say, the

01:22:09.720 Apostles' Creed to actually embodying—

01:22:13.440 There are so many—we mentioned this earlier.

01:22:15.960 This is Piaget, this is Socrates, this is Plato, through and through.

01:22:19.820 There are truths that are only disclosed to you after you go through fundamental transformation.

01:22:25.380 And that is different from assenting to a proposition because you have been convinced

01:22:29.960 of its truth.

01:22:30.800 That it's a very different—see, this is the Cartesian problem.

01:22:33.500 The Cartesian project is, here's a universal method that does not require you to undergo

01:22:38.540 existential transformation.

01:22:39.980 You just apply the universal method, it will give you access to all the universal propositional

01:22:44.580 truths, and that's all we need.

01:22:46.320 And that is a big mistake.

01:22:48.020 This is why I practice a form of cognitive science that emphasizes that—I have a new

01:22:53.140 paper out, I think I shared it with you—why relevance realization is not computational.

01:22:57.800 Because ultimately, you can't capture all of that relevance realization, all that binding,

01:23:03.100 all that transformation, all that meaning-making in a formal set of propositions.

01:23:07.300 It's just not going to—it's not going to do it for you.

01:23:09.100 Right, right, right, right.

01:23:10.780 So, yeah, yeah.

01:23:11.720 Well, that's an extension of the argument that the propositional isn't sufficient.

01:23:15.460 Yes.

01:23:15.940 Right.

01:23:16.240 Okay, so now, personally, you wandered through the gospel seminars with us, and you've been

01:23:23.600 investigating the idea of the logos, and you've been doing that from a cognitive science

01:23:29.840 and a philosophical perspective.

01:23:31.380 And psychological.

01:23:32.240 And a psychological perspective.

01:23:33.980 And you've had Jungian psychotherapy as well, so you're interested in the narrative end

01:23:38.120 of that.

01:23:38.780 What has that done to your understanding of Christianity?

01:23:41.620 And I mean this in two ways—intellectually, but also personally.

01:23:45.900 I'll do the personally first.

01:23:46.940 Yeah.

01:23:48.280 Although it bears on the intellectual.

01:23:50.520 So, I'm very cautious of the fact that I shouldn't ever come to the conclusion that my intellectual

01:24:00.900 or philosophical assessment is somehow swinging free of my idiosyncratic bias that has come

01:24:07.480 from my own personal background.

01:24:09.020 Right, right, right.

01:24:09.980 Okay, so that's why I have—and sincerely, by the way, and with affection, especially for

01:24:15.600 a lot of people like Jonathan and Paul, I take a very—and I think I showed it in the gospel

01:24:20.680 seminar.

01:24:21.220 I have a—I showed it to Bishop Barham, for example.

01:24:23.600 Yeah, definitely.

01:24:24.380 Definitely.

01:24:24.940 Very—even more than respectful.

01:24:26.880 I'm open.

01:24:27.460 I'm listening.

01:24:28.020 I want to hear.

01:24:29.300 Right?

01:24:29.620 So, but on the personal, like I said, what it did for me is it—it's almost like, you

01:24:39.440 know, Kierkegaard's thing.

01:24:40.440 I realized I'm not going to ever return to Christendom, but maybe I've—and I don't

01:24:48.500 mean to be offensive to any Christians here.

01:24:50.360 I'm trying to answer your question honestly.

01:24:52.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:52.580 But I've found a way to follow the logos towards agape and towards wisdom and towards

01:24:58.880 ultimate reality.

01:25:00.420 And I mean in a sacred sense that's, you know, ultimately real, ultimately transformative,

01:25:05.300 ultimately antonormative, you know, the most real and the most relevant, God, if you would,

01:25:12.880 all of that.

01:25:15.800 In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual

01:25:20.840 peace.

01:25:21.760 But here's the thing.

01:25:22.980 Prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind.

01:25:27.120 It's a skill that needs to be developed.

01:25:29.460 That's where Hallow comes in.

01:25:30.860 As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series

01:25:35.360 called How to Pray.

01:25:37.160 Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launchpad for profound conversations with

01:25:41.340 God, how to properly enter into imaginative prayer, and how to incorporate prayers reaching

01:25:46.880 far back in church history.

01:25:49.100 This isn't your average guided meditation.

01:25:51.300 It's a comprehensive two-week journey into the heart of prayer, led by some of the most

01:25:55.600 respected spiritual leaders of our time.

01:25:57.820 From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi, known

01:26:03.040 for his role as Jesus in the hit series The Chosen, you'll discover prayer techniques

01:26:07.200 that have stood the test of time, while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's

01:26:11.640 challenges with renewed strength.

01:26:13.840 Ready to revolutionize your prayer life?

01:26:16.100 You can check out the new series, as well as an extensive catalog of guided prayers, when

01:26:20.300 you download the Hallow app.

01:26:22.100 Just go to hallow.com slash Jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month

01:26:27.140 trial.

01:26:27.940 That's hallow.com slash Jordan.

01:26:30.320 Elevate your prayer life today.

01:26:34.360 And that's what my new series is going to be about.

01:26:37.300 That has become very powerful for me.

01:26:41.120 So...

01:26:41.560 Well, I think what we'll do, for everybody watching and listening, I think we'll continue

01:26:45.360 this thread of conversation on the Daily Wire side.

01:26:49.020 Because, and this is what we're going to discuss, and maybe this will be an enticement to you

01:26:53.460 as well to join us there.

01:26:56.240 Whatever you're doing is very similar to what Paul van der Klee is trying to do.

01:27:00.700 It's very similar to what Bishop Barron is trying to do.

01:27:03.020 And Jonathan.

01:27:03.500 And Jonathan.

01:27:04.560 Yeah.

01:27:04.780 It's similar to what Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Neil Ferguson are doing.

01:27:09.200 Yeah.

01:27:09.420 Yeah.

01:27:09.660 So there's something emerging.

01:27:11.320 And part of the reason I'm really excited about Peterson Academy, by the way, is because

01:27:14.780 I think that we can, at least in part, make it a center of whatever this is.

01:27:20.260 I'll tell you, Jordan.

01:27:20.900 When I came to the Gospel Seminar, and I did the Peterson thing, because I have, and I talked

01:27:27.400 about this with my crew, I have a sense that that's a place where the advent of the sacred

01:27:34.620 can be occurring.

01:27:35.720 Right, right, right.

01:27:36.740 Well, that's the hope.

01:27:37.620 That's the hope.

01:27:38.380 And so what I want to talk to you about on the Daily Wire side is, I want to delve more

01:27:44.240 into this idea that you just laid out in a way of a logos track that's parallel.

01:27:50.220 Because, and maybe we could do that by referring to the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov.

01:27:57.260 As long as we put it with Notes from Underground, which I just taught for a course.

01:28:00.440 I did a course on literature and the meaning crisis.

01:28:02.820 And so I-

01:28:03.360 And you used notes.

01:28:04.320 Yeah, well, good.

01:28:04.960 Okay, we can pull that in too.

01:28:06.340 That might be an interesting book to do a course on.

01:28:08.540 That's one we could do together, you know.

01:28:10.460 That would be fun.

01:28:11.480 I did a course on Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Notes from Underground, Death in Venice, and The Plague.

01:28:17.360 One course.

01:28:18.140 One course.

01:28:18.660 Oh, yeah, that's fun.

01:28:19.640 That's fun.

01:28:20.600 All right, so everybody watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:28:24.160 And that's where we're going to go to investigate whatever this new advent of the sacred, because

01:28:30.140 I think that is what's happening.

01:28:33.000 We're going to delve more into what that means, especially with regards to its relationship

01:28:37.720 to, let's say, institutionalized religion.

01:28:39.980 Because the advantage to institutionalized religion is that it does preserve the tradition.

01:28:49.180 And you need that.

01:28:50.200 Yeah.

01:28:50.420 Well, and something preserved can be static and even rotten to some degree.

01:28:55.780 But that doesn't mean that you—see, this was the problem with Timothy Leary in some ways,

01:29:01.120 right?

01:29:01.460 Tune in, turn on, drop out.

01:29:03.320 It's like, yeah, that's all well and good, and now you're a free spirit.

01:29:06.580 But that's not something that's going to last through the ages.

01:29:10.460 It's not going to socialize and structure people.

01:29:12.400 So I talk—I use a biological metaphor that's also important in 4-Ecock's side. 0.99

01:29:17.200 Exaptation.

01:29:18.200 The tongue has been exapted for speech.

01:29:20.400 Many organisms have tongues, but they don't speech.

01:29:22.560 Right, right.

01:29:23.000 Or they don't speak.

01:29:24.400 Evolution doesn't have to make things from scratch.

01:29:26.640 Right, exactly, exactly.

01:29:28.220 And we—I would say that part of what the advent of the sacred—because that's what it's

01:29:32.000 done in the past.

01:29:33.200 It calls us to exapt the past.

01:29:36.460 Not just repeat it, but, okay, yes, take it.

01:29:40.240 But find—repurpose it.

01:29:41.620 Yeah.

01:29:41.800 Draw out from it.

01:29:42.940 Induce from it.

01:29:43.720 Okay, that's exactly what we'll talk about when we go on to the Daily Wire side.

01:29:46.940 So to everybody watching and listening, thank you very much.

01:29:50.760 What's the summation?

01:29:52.260 Well, I would recommend, if you're interested in this sort of thing, check out Peterson Academy.

01:29:57.800 Check out John Vervecki's courses.

01:29:59.640 Check out Jonathan Paggio's courses.

01:30:02.020 My courses.

01:30:02.920 They definitely make a tight unit, and there are other thinkers on the site whose thought

01:30:08.540 is—what would you say?

01:30:10.180 Well, sometimes opposed to that.

01:30:11.440 I invited Richard Dawkins, by the way, to lecture for us.

01:30:13.880 So, you know, and we don't necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything, to say the least.

01:30:17.660 So, but there is a developing consensus around the kinds of issues that John is bringing up,

01:30:24.080 and I think you can be most rapidly—perhaps you can be most rapidly exposed to what that

01:30:29.220 is on the Peterson Academy site.

01:30:30.600 So, if you're interested in that, well, you know, give it some thought, because it might

01:30:34.560 be worth your time.

01:30:35.440 Otherwise, you can join us on the Daily Wire side, and we'll delve more deeply into, well,

01:30:40.440 the relationship between meaning-seeking, let's say, and meaning-preservation, and what

01:30:44.100 that means for the present moment, and how we might contemplate revivifying our past traditions

01:30:51.640 in a manner that makes them alive again, so that we have the advantages of exploration

01:30:55.760 and of preservation.

01:30:56.600 So, we'll delve into that more deeply on the Daily Wire side.

01:31:00.600 Join us.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 19, 2024

482. The Meaning Crisis： Resolution ｜ Dr. John Vervaeke

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript