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

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in person with associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, author, and podcaster, Dr. John Vervaeke. They discuss the alignment between the Gospel accounts and Western civilization; Neoplatonism as it applies to Christianity; the voluntary necessity of reason, love, and beauty; and what really caused the Roman Empire to fall. John Vervaeke is an associate professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. John researches and publishes on the nature of intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and meaning in life, emphasizing relevance realization, non-propositional kinds of knowing, and 4E cognitive science. This episode was filmed on September 5th, 2024. Watch “Depression & Anxiety” - https://bit.ly/3XxsOTv Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in person with associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, author, and podcaster, Dr. John Vervaeke. They discuss the alignment between the Gospel accounts and Western civilization; Neoplatonism as it applies to Christianity; the voluntary necessity of reason, love, and beauty; and what really caused the Roman Empire to fall. John Vervaeke is an associate professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. John researches and publishes on the nature of intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and meaning in life, emphasizing relevance realization, non-propositional kinds of knowing, and 4E cognitive science. This episode was filmed on September 5th, 2024. Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson  - Sponsors - ExpressVPN: Get 3 Months FREE of ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/jordan Responsible Man: Be the man America needs you to be. Shop Responsible Man, and get an exclusive discount with code JORDAN at https://responsibleman.com/ Jeremy’s Razors: Get the Precision 5 from Jeremy's Razors at www.jeremysrazors.com  - Links - For John Vervaeke: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ Vervaeke Foundation Website: https://vervaekefoundation.org/ John Vervaeke's Lectern (Walking the Philosophical Silk Road): https://youtu.be/Foz0VaTUuEw?si=odQyamOGhiOspuyk

Music Hello everybody. I have the privilege today to speak yet again to Professor John Vervecky. He's a repeat guest on my show, maybe more than anyone else, that's possible. John and I have been involved in a conversation now that spans more than a decade. We've been both working assiduously in different ways on defining the meaning crisis

and also exploring potential solutions to that crisis and with some success, I would say. And one of the things that we do in today's conversation is to continue that dialogue and to delve more deeply into what the meaning crisis signifies and also what it means, say in John's terms, that there's a new advent of the sacred and what that means, what the sacred means, what a new advent might look sacred and what that means, what the sacred means,

what a new advent might look like, what that means philosophically, what it means scientifically and theologically for that matter. We spend a fair bit of time as well discussing Peterson Academy. John's one of the lecturers there. He's done three courses for us,

which have been very, the first one is released already. It's been very well received. And along with Pagio 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. And that, God only knows what that means, but it seems to be a genuine phenomenon. And so, and phenomenon, that means to shine forth, by the way. And that does look genuine. And so, and phenomenon, that means to shine forth, by the way, and that does look genuine. And so, well, John and I had the opportunity to delve more deeply into all of those issues

and that's great fun. That fun, that's an enthusiastic fun, you know, that's, and when that makes itself manifest in a conversation, you see that in itself as something like the advent of the sacred, because a conversation that takes you outside yourself and beyond yourself and into the future and up into the realm of higher possibility is a manifestation of the sacred that's been characterized for centuries as part of the process of the logos and

It's so useful and interesting to understand that you can experience that and that you do experience that when you get caught up in let's say an exploratory conversation. We talked about other ways you can get caught up in love and in what, in raptured by beauty, but the thrill, the enthusiastic thrill of a conversation that's transformative is a marker for the emergence of something that the world depends upon, right?

And that's something sacred. And there it is, tangible as hell. So that's a very useful thing to know. So join us. So, good to see you again. Good to see you too, my friend. We spent a lot of time together this year on the tour in particular, eh? Yeah, yeah, on the tour. So, you got any thoughts about the tour? Well, I mean, and the gospel seminar too. Right, right, right, yeah. So, you got any thoughts about the tour? Well, I mean, and the Gospel Seminar, too.

Right, right, right, right. The Gospel Seminars was a very profound experience for me. As you know, I was a little bit hesitant because I don't consider myself a Christian, but you were extremely welcoming. You were good to your word, as you always have been with me. And of course, there was a lot of people there that I'm very fond of, Douglas Headley, Jonathan Peugeot, Stephen Blackwood. And I became fond of some people like Greg Horowitz. And so I had a really, really amazing time. But yeah, well, I'll give people the background on that. So John came down to, we tempted Nashville.

It was Nashville, yeah. Yeah. So we did, as many of you watching and listening know, I did a seminar with a group of people on Exodus that we released a year ago on the Daily Wire. And it's become the most popular thing they've done apart from What is a Woman by Matt Walsh. And it was quite a trip to go through the Exodus story with a group of eight scholars. I learned a ridiculous amount. And so, we decided to duplicate that procedurally with the Gospels. And so, we had many of the same crew, but John came along for the Gospel seminar, and that worked out very well.

That's going to be released between now and December, by the way, on the Daily Wire platform. And so, they're very happy with the way it's turned out, and there'll be more images in it, more interviews, and so it'll be a little pepped up on the editing side from the Exodus Seminar. So, why did you like the gospel seminar? I'm not making a comparison to the Exodus, because it wasn't there, but well, as you know, I was brought up in a very sort of fundamentalist Christianity, so I've had a very slow, at times therapeutic, you know, reproach mom. I hope that came through in my, I showed up at the gospel seminar. Oh, definitely.

And I came to, I came to like a sort of a profound, this sounds like a hallmark card, so I know you won't take it up, but I came to a sort of profound sort of reorientation, reappreciation, reapprehension of Jesus with Nazareth. And this may sound, I'm asking for charity in the next thing I'm going to say. Sure. I'd always missed being a Christian in some sense. And I missed going to church, I miss the community, I miss that sense of having a mythos that you belong to. And a community.

And a community, yeah. But I'm trying to make this positive. I lost that longing at the gospel seminar, not because I became a Christian, but because I felt I came close. Well, there was a moment, if you remember the gospel seminar, where I said, I consider myself a deep follower of the Logos. Yeah, right. And that became, and that wasn't just a statement for me. And because of the people that were there and the way they received it, I don't want to get too overly egocentric,

but that was a very healing moment for me. Well, it's a remarkable thing to realize. 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. And, you know, Musk has a world-class intellect, so it's not surprising that it happened to him early. 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.

And it took him a number of years to resolve that. And I think essentially the way he resolved that was by realizing his identity with the logos. Now that's not exactly how he put it, but then he didn't have the benefit of the gospel seminar, for example. But what he discovered was that he could find intrinsic meaning in life by pursuing the path of the

exploration of truth, right? And I don't think there is any real difference between the logos and the pursuit of truth. Now what that means theologically, well, you could unpack that for millennia because human beings have been unpacking it for millennia. But it is perfectly reasonable, and I think in keeping with your work, to point out that investigation into truth itself, A, is a form of truth, Jean Piaget said that, is that if we're gonna understand knowledge, what we really wanna understand is not the structure of knowledge,

but the process by which knowledge builds and is regenerated, right? And so Piaget figured that out. And to follow that deep commitment to the truth and that continual exploration is identification with the logos. And that certainly characterizes your work. And it's good to put that back into context. 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. They're the last one of four is coming out this week, I believe. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, two in Jerusalem. And one of the things that's remarkable about the conjunction of Greece and Jerusalem is the Greeks posited the existence of a logos that was embedded essentially in the material and corporeal world, that there was an

intrinsic logic to things, that the world itself was comprehensible and that comprehending the world was good. And the Jews, essentially in the Christians, had an embodied Logos idea that the human being was a rational creature and an exploratory creature and that there was a match between that and the world and that combination of Greece and Jerusalem is one of the sources of Western civilization. But it's very good to be able to conceptualize the Gospel account in that manner, because it, well, it starts to put rationality and the mythos that you described back together, which is, I think, you know, something of cardinal importance

for our, and I think it's what's occurring in our current time. Thank you for saying that. I think that was very well articulated. For me, it afforded, because the kind of truth we're talking about is existential truth. We're not talking about just propositional truth. Right. We're talking about the truth that's only, and P.I.J. would agree with this, the kind of truth that only is realized through personal transformation.

And embodiment. Yes, of course. And it was, so Jesus of Nazareth and Socrates could properly dwell together within me. Right. Well, and that's kind of a classic, that's a classic Western view as well. I mean, even Dante put the Greek philosophers in the uppermost echelons of hell, right? I mean, which was a compliment in a fundamental way. Justin Martyrs said that Socrates was a Christian before Christ.

Right, right, right. And that was part of that juxtaposition of Greece and Jerusalem, right? Because it was evident that the same spirit was trying to make itself manifest in two different ways. You have two different notions of the Logos that are complementary, right? The Greek notion is this notion of gathering things together so they belong together, so they're intelligible. 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. Of course, we do it in a very limited fashion, and then the idea is there's some sort of ultimate aspect of it. And then they're brought together.

So we could start by talking about Depression Depressed people are sad and Frustrated and disappointed they tend to feel all negative emotions simultaneously in a manner that's paralyzing Depression is fundamentally a biochemical disorder one of the things I tried to determine as a good behaviorist was whether the person who was suffering was suffering because they were ill in the strictly physiological sense or whether they were suffering from the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of life. the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of life.

The probability that tossing an antidepressant into the mix is all of a sudden going to fix your life that are absolutely catastrophically out of order is zero. The more unstable your life is, the less serotonin your brain produces, and that makes you hypersensitive to negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion You take the problem I'm suffering and then you think well, why are you suffering? It's exposure therapy and then you can practice

Encountering the obstacles that are stopping you and it'll make you braver and it'll help you deal with your problems Voluntary confrontation with the forces of darkness and chaos is the fundamental story of life. 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. Rest We Who Rest With God. We Who Rest With God. I've read it, of course. Right, of course, of course, and we're on the tour with me. Yeah. heavily on Richard Dawkins for parts of the book. We Who Rest With God. We Who Rest With God. I've read it, of course.

Right, of course, of course. And we're on the tour with me. And so Dawkins makes a strong case and repeats it again in his newest book, which is just out that an organism, any biological organism has to be a microcosm of its environment, has to be a model. So it has to reflect the environment

at every level, right, from the molecular all the way up. Christen says the same thing. Right, right. Christen says you don't have a model, you are a model. Right, right. And that's exactly what I guess Dawkins would say both. You have a model, or you are a model and you have a model, and that would be particularly true for people.

And well, the fact that you're a model and that you have a model, so that's the interior logos that might be more associated with, say, Judeo-Christian thought, but it has to match the external logos of the world because otherwise it has no connection point. But that also begs a question, which is one of the questions I 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 then that the human being as a personality is a reflection of the essence of the cosmos, let's say. Or... Pretentious, but... Well, not pretentious.

I mean, it could be taken as pretentious or you could reframe it as, you know, there are potentialities in reality that are only actualized in our personhood. And they reflect. And without us, access to those principles in reality would not be available. Well, that seems to be akin to something like emergence. Well, yeah, very much. You can think about us as random, like as the consequence of random processes,

which I think is a fairly absurd way of looking at the evolutionary process. But you can also look at us as manifestations of the potential that was inherent in the material substrate right from the beginning of time, right? And we know that these potentials exist because while hydrogen and oxygen join to make water and what that and so on up the chain of complexity and what that seems to indicate to me is that there's an unrealized potential, even in the simplest of material forms that contains within it, well, whatever possibility is, it's very difficult to define,

but it isn't that that possibility makes itself manifest in an entirely random manner. It reflects something like an implicate order in those lower order material properties. Or yeah, properties. So you're turning in, and this is a great joy for me, you're turning into a neoplatonist. Because I mean, you have emergence up, right? But emergence up has to be constrained.

There has to be an ordering to those possibilities because of the possibility, this is a point even made by Whitehead much later. Yeah, it'd be just chaotic. Right, right, so you have emergence up. And if you had emergence up without constraint down, the top level would just be an epiphenomena. But the top level as a level has to constrain what's going on. And this is in the book I'm working on with Greg Enriquez, Unconsciousness, that you not

only have bottom-up emergence, you have top-down emanation. Yeah, yeah. And that's the neoplatonic view. and that's the view that went into the heart. That seems to be the same view that Pagio holds, I would say. Well, of course he does, because he's an Eastern Orthodox Christian, as we're going to say. Christian Neoplatonism is at the core of people like Jonathan Pagio and Bishop Maximus. Eastern Orthodoxy, like, well, all of Christian mysticism is profoundly influenced by Greek Neoplatonism, but especially Eastern Orthodox Christianity, yes, very much.

Yeah, so I really enjoyed the gospel seminar. I learned a lot. It was quite a cognitive effort to get through that in a week. You did a good job. To keep all that on track. Well, thank God for that. I was pretty much out of it for the next three weeks in consequence, but it was well, well worth it.

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. This seminar certainly helped me flesh that out to a tremendous degree as well. I'm just in the writing now. I'm just getting to the story of the crucifixion and resurrection, which is of course the most complex and challenging part of that entire narrative. And so, yeah, I remember when we were in the gospel, that was, yeah, that was, everybody was worried about that.

Oh, yeah. Well, we were all, we were worried about the seminar, period, about, but I thought it went extremely well and we were very happy to have you there. And I mean, everybody, one of the wonderful things about the Exodus Seminar and the Gospel Seminar is that that Logos spirit, everybody abided by that Logos spirit 100% of the time, because everybody was trying to extend their knowledge instead of trying to prove that they were right. Exactly.

And that's maybe that's something like the opposite of that pharisaic religious pride that's often conceptualized as the ultimate sin, right? Is that, you know, when you're trying to hammer home your status because you're right about something, that's a completely different game than trying to build something together that expands you both in the course of the conversation. I think the seminars were flawless examples of that. Everybody played extremely well together despite very, very few... Like the way you play music.

Yeah, right. Socrates made a distinction between phyllo Sophia, the love of wisdom, and phylonokia, the love of victory. And he said the greatest thing that thwarts the love of wisdom is the love of victory. I wonder if there's any difference between the love of victory and the worship of power. I mean, most of the opponents that Socrates is wrestling with are the sophists, and they are definitely advocates for, you know, that reality is power and that having power is what you're after. They were deeply political animals in that fashion, yes. Right, 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 that can lead to something approximating a higher order unity and power would be one. Cause you can unify to some degree with power. I mean, it produces a counter position because if you use power on people, they tend to rebel. But at least for some periods of time, you can use command and force to bring together.

But I have a sneaking suspicion use command and force to bring together. 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, which is that game of genuine exploration and self-transcendence. But maybe there could be a corollary to that, which would be that if God dies, if the God is logos and it dies, the deity that rises to replace it is power. Wow. You do what you frequently do. That's very pregnant with a lot of possibilities.

I mean, first of all, that notion of dialogue by means of logos. And then I think that's something we should practice and do a lot of work about trying to help afford people being able to practice that as an explicit practice. So I think that's a very valuable thing to say. I think power is one of our senses of realness. I think, and we need it. You talk about this. You talk about the fact that we don't wanna be overwhelmed by anomaly.

We need to have some power. We need to be able to, our skills have to get a purchase on the world, right? So- Yeah, I'm thinking not so much power. That's more of a Nietzschean notion of power, I would say, a functional. I'm thinking more of compulsion, right?

Like that I can force you to abide by the dictates of mind. Power as force, not power so much as ability to. That mark of reality. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's move to there because what's really interesting is this, and talked about this in the course on the Peterson Academy, the primacy of beauty. You got this

really interesting thing because you want reason to be compelling but voluntarily. Yeah, right. The volunteerism is a crucial element. Right, but you don't want it to just be arbitrary. You're like, no, reason compels me. We say things like that and we don't think the person's insane. We go, oh, I get what you mean. That's a really good argument. And then, and this is, you know, this goes towards Frankfurt's notion of, well, reason is voluntary necessity. But then there's another thing that seems to be voluntary necessity, which is what his book is about, Reasons for Love. Love is a voluntary necessity. It seems like you're compelled, but yet it seems to be totally what you want to be doing. And then if you think about what love picks up on-

That might be something like the concordance between calling and psyche. 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. And beauty has that same thing. It's kind of like it calls you. It's this voluntary necessity. You're response to beauty. And beauty has that same thing. It's kind of like, it calls you. It's this voluntary necessity. You're struck by beauty. You're compelled, but you don't feel forced.

It's like, right? And so you've got this interlocking between reason and love and beauty, which I think. I wonder if that's something like, see, you object to someone's arbitrary imposition of compulsion over you because this is one way of looking at it, 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? So it strikes you as counterproductive with regards to your own aims, let's say.

And that produces a sense of disharmony and rebellion. It could be that the reason that beauty and love can be compelling without being powerful in that compulsion way is that they speak to something like an emergent harmony of value that's part and parcel you might say of the soul so beauty could compel you forward in part because If you it might be that if you integrated your values properly

You would be naturally oriented In consequence of the makeup of your soul towards those things that beauty and love are pointing to. Right! And let's remember beauty and love are also overlapping with reason and you need reason because you have to care about the right things to reason well. Yes, you have to care about the right things which implies that there are right things to care about. And so notice what you're doing and that goes back to the microcosm, macrocosm.

Yeah, right. It's that moment where the grammar of my cognition and the grammar of reality are calling to each other. They could. And it could interpenetrate. That's right. And I can't give you an argument to prove that that's the case, because every argument presupposes that in some sense,

the grammar of reason and the grammar of reality must have some deep harmony. And the same thing with love and the same thing with beauty. And these are profound ways in which- Go ahead. Well, I think faith is actually the willingness to posit the reality of that truth in the absence of final proof, right?

Okay, let's talk about that, because I think that's really important because that's a different, there's different notions of faith. And what I hear you saying, I might be wrong. What I hear you saying is faith is a recognition of the power in the good sense that we're talking about here, the power of these primordial presuppositions that are central for participating in the logos, participating in the true, the good, and the beautiful. And that's a different notion of faith than the assertion of belief without evidence. Yes, very, very much so.

Well, and 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. Well now, because the Christians are all annoyed at me because I haven't proclaimed my faith in the propositional manner that many people

who've adopted a creed would require. And so they're upset about that and on my case. And I find it quite distasteful in some ways. There's an invitational element, but there's a compulsion element. And the compulsion element is, first of all, the insistence that the faith that's necessary to define something like Christianity

is actually propositional. Now, it should be the Christianity is actually propositional. Now, it should be the case that your propositional content is in alignment with your existential commitments. But for me, the fundamental move of faith is an existential move. And the danger in the propositional, this is the pharisaic danger as far as I'm concerned, is that you substitute the propositional for the existential. Totally. Well, and this goes, you know, I talk about the four kinds of knowing, the propositional,

the procedural, right, the perspectival, and the participatory. The participatory, look, when you, look, think about the two levels of the, you've had to, 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. You're now two steps removed from the actual knowing that is you being the microcosmic model of the macrocosm. That's participatory knowing. That's the knowing that makes all the other knowings possible.

Would that be understanding? No. I think all the kinds of knowing have their own... I think understanding is a way of grasping the significance of what you know. And this isn't my idea. 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.

Because science will often say things that are false in order to generate understanding. Here's the atom. It looks like a solar system. Well, no, it doesn't. Right. Not at all. Right. Here's how gas works.

Here's the ideal gas law. Well, there's no such ideal situations in reality. Right? Catherine Elgin writes about this in True Enough. So under— True Enough, yeah. Right. Right. Why do you do this? It's not that you don't care about the truth. 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. There's a difference there. And so I think understanding, and I get the illusion, you know, faith-seeking understanding. I understand, but I think they're a little bit different. I think you have these primordial propositions that are your primordial participation that make your cognitive agency possible, right? And then you properly orient and identify with them. And when you understand that, it's to step back and let them see how those primordial propositions are playing out.

What's the significance landscape that they're creating for you? That's what I think it means. When you're means. Well, that seems to me to be associated too with this idea of higher order ethical virtue. So let me walk through this with you for a second. Tell me what you think. Well, I've been thinking more and more about general psychopathology as a failure of maturation. Right? So...

You mean like being a psychopath? Well, being a psychopath is a good example of that because two-year-olds, for example, are radically egocentric. They can't play with others. They can't occupy a shared mental space. They can't take turns. There's some proto-sharing that emerges, but they're not sophisticated, for example, at sharing toys.

So the typical two-year-old, and some of them are much more like this than others, 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. 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 and to unify their desires, their whims, their motivational states with that of another. That's how they make a friend. Is that what you mean by going up this hierarchy? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. Okay.

So now you can imagine these primordial motivational states and emotions, and we kind of know what the basic ones are. They're all pointers, fractionated pointers, in an upward direction. But the upward direction actually emerges as a consequence of their interactions across time, but not only across time, across time in a social space. And they weave themselves together. And this would be something like Jacob's Ladder from the bottom, and they weave themselves together. And this would be something like Jacob's Ladder

from the bottom up. 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. I don't think there's anything arbitrary about it. I mean, you and I have been able to have a relationship

because of the pattern of interaction that we fall into when we converse, you know, you make an offering and then I assess it and incorporate it and then I make an offering and you assess it and incorporate it and we're able to do that in a way that jointly gratifies our desire to explore and integrate, right? And that is a cognitive act and a embodied act, but it's also something that indicates our fundamental concordance with each other at a level that's more than merely personal, right?

You're doing something, this is the dialogus that you referred to, right? You're making an offering that I'm accepting and vice versa, but we can do that in a manner that makes both of us want to continue the process. That's definitional. That's not an arbitrary definition of a moral interaction, right? It's very practical. 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. And that I think that's manifest in something like play. 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, 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. And so, and I don't think that this seems to me to be a very powerful argument against something like moral relativism. 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, and not just time, let's say, also different domains of inquiry. There's nothing about that that isn't highly constrained and orderly. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is very,

first of all, I think very highly of what you're saying. It's convergent with a lot of things that I also think highly of. I mean, this is Habermas's proposal of universal pragmatics, that there is in the very act of communication, and he doesn't mean simply information exchange. He means in the very act of dialogos, which I agree with him,

he is necessary for a properly functioning society, let alone a properly functioning society, let alone a properly functioning democracy. That 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.

Now the products, like a conversation, there are universal principles. That doesn't mean the products are universal. Right, right. No, the process. The process is like- Well, and you added another layer to that, which is relevant with regards to emergence because you could say, well, we have to conduct ourselves in a certain manner like all the participants did, let's say at the gospel seminar,

in order for everyone to want to continue the process in the highest possible manner. But then you could also say that, so that works for you psychologically because it's compelling and interesting. And it works for both of us practically because we learn. But then as you expand the social, as you expand the size of the group that that process is operating in, you start to see a concordance between the operation

of that dialogus and the possibility of sophisticated complex societies emerging that aren't predicated on power. And I think that's why we have, for example, in the United States, we have the First Amendment. It's because it's a recognition that something like you have the right to engagement in the dialogos, not merely because it's a right, let's say, because you're made in the image of God, or it's a right because the state grants it. It's actually a right because it's a necessary precondition

for the maintenance of the society as such. And that's not arbitrary. It's like, it works for you. It works for the people you're immediately communicating with, but it also works to stabilize society across long spans of time and to make it grow. And so you can't dispense with that without bringing the whole hierarchy. I want to add to it.

Yeah. So, and this goes to work I've done with Dan Shapi and a whole bunch of other people. When you get dialogical systems, you get the possibility of distributed cognition. The way the internet is distributed computation and releases powers that know where is the internet. Notice the problems we can solve with the internet that we couldn't solve with individual computers. When you get the right dialogical machinery going, you also afford distributed cognition. And distributed cognition gains access to reality and can solve problems.

That's basically the argument of the Austrian School of Economics, right? With regards to distributed systems. I've had some very good discussions with Robert Breedlove around that, exactly, about exactly that. And, you know, and Dan Giapie, we talked, we did a thing about how the NASA scientists do this. They create these dialogical narrative practices in order to coordinate distributed cognition to move the rovers around on Mars. Right, right, right. I remember you saying that.

So you taught a course for Peterson Academy. Let's talk a little bit about your experience, first of all. So as you remember, and you graciously said recently in the Toronto Star interview, I offered you the possibility of coming to teach for us about absolutely anything you wanted to teach about. So walk us through the experience and the course, and then I'll update you a little bit about the state of the art with regard to this endeavor. First of all, I want to thank the reporter.

The reporter reached out to me at the last moment and said, I'm going to do this. And I said, do you want to talk? And and said, I'm going to do this. And do you want to talk? And I said, I bet. I really do want to talk because I wanted to be clear. And I didn't. I'm not attributing anything to this person, but I get this. I've been misquoted before.

Yeah, right. And so then there's a couple of things I want. And I was very insistent on. So I'm happy that it came out the way it came out. So I just want to express, as far as I can tell, the reporter was true to their word. And I think that's honorable. And when reporters are honorable, we should honor them.

Absolutely. So that being said, first of all, let's talk about the first course that's out right now. But I did, I've done three for you so far. Right, right, right. So the first one is intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and spirituality. Right, and it's already up on the site. Yep, and I've got feedback from some of your people that it's getting very well received,

which I'm very happy. That's for sure. I'm very happy to hear that. So, first of all, let's go, going through the experience, pleased throughout all three times. I don't know if I should mention any names, but like Vincent, the person, excellent, just fantastic. Your crews are fantastic. Super professional, gracious, careful, competent, inviting, good, welcoming, constantly checking with me about my needs. How can we improve this, how can we do this, right?

And just... Good, good, glad to hear that. That's what I've said consistently to everybody who asked me about it. It's very, very professional. I want to make clear what I made clear in the interview. When you reached out to me and I wrote you an email and I said, you know, I don't consider myself a conservative or a Christian. Do you want me on this?

And you said, of course I do. I want you to, and you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course. You said, and I've said this on video, so I'm happy to say it again. I want you to teach the course you've always wanted to teach. Yeah. And true, true to your word all the way through for all of these courses so far.

I'm proud, genuinely proud of all of the courses I've done for you. Great, great. Well, we're dead serious about that. I mean, my intention in identifying people is that I am bringing people to the platform whose views I want to hear. And I actually want to hear them.

And so that means that the constraints have to be lifted. It's like, no, I want to hear what you have to say. And 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. And it's not helpful because you can't wander where the spirit takes you. Can't follow the logos. Exactly, exactly. And you need to be able to do that. And I think we, I've taught three courses for Peterson Academy too. And I certainly felt the freedom that this new format allows. And so I should bring you up to date a little bit too.

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 and to also assess whether we got the price right and to assess the reaction of the market, all of that. And so we onboarded 30,000 people. No kidding.

No kidding. So that exceeded our expectations quite nicely. And the price point seems good. And I could delve into that a little bit because the odd person says, well, why isn't it free? 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. Second, on the social media side, because it has a sophisticated social media system, there's an open question about social media platforms now. You know, if they're free, they're instantly invaded by bad actors, because your attention isn't free.

And so it's very valuable. And so you get hordes of trolls, you get hordes of bots, you get like bad corporate actors, the whole thing can deteriorate. 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 eradic it's about $40 a month and a relatively stringent price point

eradicates 95% of the bad actors. I would have expected that, yeah. Right, so that's cool. That's worth something, you know, because you have to ask yourself, if you're gonna use the social media network, how much is it worth on an ongoing daily basis? Like, is it worth a dollar a day?

Because that's approximately, or $1.25, that's what we're talking about. Is it worth that not to be chronically annoyed by the pathology of the system? And I would say it's worth something for that to be the case. So, and people are pleased with the price. The indications we've had so far is that people would have paid more and still been happy.

So I think we probably undershot the market limit, but I'm fine with that. That's perfectly fine. And now we've raised enough capital because we have enough students to start doing the AI language translations. And so we should be able to translate all of the courses into, God only knows how many languages eventually. And that technology is really coming along quite nicely. 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, and hopefully we can bring the advantages of elite higher education to anyone who wants it. And I

think we actually have a crack at doing that. So it's quite, and our system worked, it didn't, there were some bugs and people were quite patient while we worked through them and the team worked very hard to rectify them as soon as possible. But- Yeah, I was your first course recorded, so yeah. Right, right, right, right. Well, congratulations on that too. So that's a good thing.

So yeah, I'm very excited about it and we're working. We have jurisdictions that are interested in working with us towards accreditation. So we're working, we have jurisdictions that are interested in working with us towards accreditation so we're happy about that. But we've also found that probably 75% of the people on the platform aren't interested in credit per se. They're not even necessarily interested in taking the quizzes that are available. Fundamentally they're there because they want to learn. Lots of them, for example, are older people.

I wouldn't say that's the majority, but lots of people wanted to go to university and couldn't. And so we can provide them with an extremely high quality university experience. I suspected that would be the case. Yeah, so that's gratifying as well. So yeah, so the full launch is September 9th. 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. So that should be, hopefully, I've spent a fair bit of time on the social media platform so far and that's, it's a very positive place, so that's very good good and it has all the features of standard social media System 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 that you know say because a lot of those are quite toxic. Very, very. I use Twitter a lot and I learn a lot from Twitter, but my God, it's a snake pit. It's a terrible snake pit.

I use it as minimally as I can. Yeah, well, I can understand that. 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, and so it's worth wading through a fair bit of narcissistic toxicity to find the odd gem, you know, and it's a pretty good way of keeping abreast with the dynamic shifts of the political environment. How much that's useful is a different matter, but because I run this podcast, that's something I have to be on top of that, in order to stay conversant with the current.

Well, part of what you do in a podcast is it speaks about the moment. And so you got to have a sense of what that moment is, for better or for worse. And so, yeah, at least that's what I tell myself when I'm on Twitter. But this might be a good, well, and we're also hoping it'll work well for people to establish social networks, you know, because at least you'll know that the people on the platform

are interested in ideas, let's say. It'll be a great place for open people to meet, for example. The students who are in all three courses, they, I want to, I try not to be too self-serving, but they all found it a very transformative experience. But they did that. They wanted to, they started really bonding with each other because there was a shared journey and there was a shared set of ideas. There was a shared discourse space. Yeah, very much.

Yeah, well, soon people will have course-centered chat rooms, and we're hoping that if we start to grow to a large enough size, that people will start to spontaneously organize, well, you can imagine meetups where people get together to watch a lecture and to discuss it, you know. There's no reason to outsource a fair bit of the classroom organization, let's say, to the students themselves. And we're also with an eye to the future starting to think things through like, well, one possibility that we've been investigating are cruises, specialized cruises, because, well, cruises,

all things considered, especially compared to the cost of say a private university education, cruises aren't that expensive. You know, they're actually quite remarkably inexpensive. I saw a retired couple, for example, who booked 51 cruises back to back because it was far cheaper than staying in an old folks' home.

And the service is a lot better, let's say. So, you know, we're going to curate meetings for students. 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 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 and also... That's exciting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

And 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. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think you can see that now with, well, the tour we were on, for example. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, what did you think of the tour? What was that like for, how many days did you spend with me?

And was it three or four? I can't remember. Yeah, I think it was four. Yeah, I had a really good time. And I enjoyed I enjoyed our dinners, you and I got to reconnect on a more personal level, which I deeply appreciated. I thought that I mean, it was like touring with a rock star. I've told people I enjoy touring with a rock star.

I don't want to be the rock star. That's, you can have that. But I enjoyed it a lot. Your staff was fantastic. I enjoyed, there was electricity, some places more than others. And then, you know, you and I having, it was really powerful there was electricity, some places more than others. And then, you and I having, it was really powerful in the way we were talking about earlier after you gave a talk and that electricity was there and to sit with you and talk afterwards.

Or even before, you were gracious, you would have let me to sort of talk a little bit about who I was before I introduced you and feeling even that a little bit there. A lot of people, especially the last one, because in the last one, I didn't go back. I actually booked in a hotel right across from the convention center and a lot of people were there from the event and I got to talk to a lot of them. And there was a lot of them that of course they were expressing appreciation for you, but a lot of them were expressing a lot of appreciation for me and my work. That was very, very encouraging.

So there was a lot about it I enjoyed. Like I said. It was really good to have you there to provide an informed overview of what I had presented, because I'm presenting things that are spontaneous. And so it's very good to, and for the audience as well, to have that reflected and then criticized in the proper critical sense. Because the proper critical sense is Cause the proper critical sense is separation of the wheat from the chaff, not derogation of everything as chaff, right?

And so it's very helpful for people to see that modeled, but also to have it happen. And so- I thought we did a good job at that. Yeah, I think so. Oh yeah, well, it was fun. We'll do it again. Yeah, it worked out real well.

It was good too, because I had you and Constantine Kissin and Jonathan Paggio along and I've also traveled with Douglas Murray and Rex Murphy. And so all of that, that's all been extremely good to have that second party in there to, third party in there to interrogate, right? And to make a different kind of connection with the audience. And if you'll allow me, you, behind the curtain, off camera, you treat your people very well. And that impressed me throughout. You've risen to quite a bit of influence and notoriety,

and people have been twisted by that in certain ways. And I was very impressed by how gracious you were with your staff, with your people, how kind you were. You know, part of that, there's kind of a, what would you say? I think that's an important thing to note. It's an important thing to watch for when you're evaluating people. That's what I was doing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I understand that.

And it is a real marker for that. You know, like I've traveled with lots of people and you learn very rapidly who kisses up and kicks down, which is not a testament to the integrity of their personality, but it's also a management style in a way because we're very selective about who we hire, but also who we keep. And so there isn't anybody around at Peterson Academy or on my tour who isn't doing a stellar and necessary job. And so, and I also understand that, you know, like it's a very fat, well, you saw, it's a very fast paced enterprise to run a tour like that.

And many things can go wrong, especially if you're trying to sustain it across multiple years. Like it's a very unlikely endeavor. And so everybody who is involved, they're given at a hundred percent. And I'm very grateful for that. And they make my life a lot more straightforward in my wife's life as well.

I saw you delegating without question. And that's a marker too. I look for that in people. I look for, can they delegate authority? Can they trust people to run with things? And you were basically, to my mind, you were managing things from sort of 30,000 feet above. You're giving sort of general orientation, or I want this. And you'd have specific things here and there.

But other than that, people would say, we need to do this, and you'd have specific things here and there, but other than that, people would say, we need to do this, or we need to come here, and you go, okay, and you were just like, I don't know. Well, the other advantage, I mean, there's a bunch of advantages to that as a managerial style. I mean, the first advantage is, for me,

it frees me up to concentrate on only what's necessary. So when I thought through, well, what's necessary for the tour to work and to continue? Well, it's necessary that Tammy comes along with me and that she has a role and that that works. Okay, so that has to be set up and it is. Then it's necessary for me to get there. Like no matter what, right?

I have to be there like an hour ahead, period. And then I have to do a good job. And that's really the three things. And so everything else has been farmed out to other people. You know, the hotel logistics, the flights, the meals, all of the scheduling of my days, other people take care of that. And then if they do that fully,

then I'm very happy about that. And they have something that's really crucial to do and can take pride in their work and are committed to it. 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. And it's just, I learned this even more intensely on the tour than when I was supervising graduate students.

There's more play in the system with graduate students. 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. But on tour, it's like there's no room for mistakes because it's too fast paced. You can't mistreat any member of the audience. Anybody who ever does that is like, no, you can't do that. That's once. Do it again, you're gone. Because I know this, for example, once you, all the people who come to these talks, they wanna be there.

And in a way, they've opened themselves up, right? Because it's a hopeful enterprise. And hope is a dangerous emotion because it can be dashed. And so they come there and they're excited and maybe they meet me. And if I'm polite and welcoming and so are my staff, then they walk away even enhanced in their hope

and their trust. If there's a mistake there, you know, and they get the cold shoulder or anybody's rude, they will never forget that, never. And they will tell everyone. And you don't have to do that. It's a very small number of people that you do that to before an enterprise like the one we're discussing,

craters. Like it's way faster than you think because a disaffected person can tell a thousand people and quite effectively. And so if you have a hundred of them, that's not so good. You make it sound as it is, rational, but there are many athletes and celebrities who have not learned this lesson.

Yeah. 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. Like, it could have easily gone that way. And so, you know, when I've had a taste of that more than now and then,

and the fact that that isn't happening all the time, that's something to really remember. And in fact, I have the opposite of that pretty much wherever I go. I'm so fortunate because people are very good to me. They're good to me in airports, wherever they meet me, and I'm more than pleased to return the favor. And you know, you're asking for too much

if you have a public face and the benefits of that, and you're not also like thrilled that people are responding to you in that positive manner. You said that to me multiple times on the talk. Oh yeah, well it's, you're a fool if you don't, if you're not continually appreciative of that. So, and you know, all the people around me, all my staff, they're all like that.

They're all wonderful people. Good, good, good. Well, I'm glad to hear that. Let's talk about what you're up to. You told me when we were, you're writing a book and you're on sabbatical in January, tell me what you're doing practically and then what ideas you're trying to flesh out,

like what's on the intellectual horizon for you. Okay, so first big news, the book form of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is coming out the 29th of this month, so part one, 400 and some pages. So it's not just like a transcription from the series, it's a companion. We've taken it, we've rewritten it, updated it,

we've added figures, references. My great writing partner, Christopher Mastro Pietro, has rewritten entire sections. So he's a co-author with me. And then we all- How long is it? So the first book is like 400 and some pages. Yeah.

And the second one will be probably something like that. And where can people get that? Well, it's gonna 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. I'll get you a copy if you want one. Yeah, definitely.

Okay, and so why should people purchase it and spend the time with it? What is it that you're, I mean, I know you had a long history at the University of Toronto of being a very, very popular professor and people regarded your work as existentially altering in the positive direction. That was very consistent. I saw that for years and that's a very difficult thing to pull off. It's very rare.

And you've had the same impact on people in the broader public sphere as well. But we should zero into that. What do you think it is that you're doing right and what is it that you have to offer in general, but also in relationship to this book? Well the book is my best attempt to, there's two halves. The first is sort of the historical half, the second half is the sort of cognitive scientific half. It's my attempt to, the first half is like how did we get into the meeting crisis? What is it?

Why is it? And then the second half is, well, what do we mean by this meeting in life? What's the best cognitive science? What do I do? I think I'm very good at integrating material across different disciplines. And looking for patterns. And looking for patterns.

And getting kind of a synoptic integration, Right. Different disciplines. And looking for patterns. And looking for patterns. Yeah, yeah. And getting kind of a synoptic integration and then also making it clear how it has that kind of existential import that you mentioned a few minutes ago. Right. So it's a gathering. Yes. From multiple places and then also a practical specification. So you and I are similar in that regard, I think.

And we were reacted to in a similar way at the University of Toronto for that reason. Well, I mean, you have an acknowledgement in awakening from the meaning crisis as the person who galvanized the public to the meaning crisis. Oh, good. Oh, good. Well, that's another thing you do too, though, is that you have a gift for pointing to the problem of the moment and then encapsulating it in an articulate manner, right?

I mean, merely to be able to, Jonathan Pagio did this quite well in the course he teaches for Peterson Academy too, by the way, because he provides an encapsulated formulation of nihilism and what it means and what it signifies and then dispenses with it as an existential necessity quite quickly and elegantly, which is a big deal to be able to do that because it's a real problem for people.

But you're highlighting of the meaning crisis as a phenomenon. Just that is helpful to people in the same way often that psychological diagnosis is helpful to people. People will come in to see a clinician and they think their particular brand of existential suffering is Absolutely unique to them. Yeah, and so then you say no no a it follows this pattern and these are the limits And so now it's in a box, you know And there's a bit of something that might be dismaying about that because it's no fun to be diagnosed

But it's also no fun to be the only member of a crazy club. That's not a good thing. But then you also want to ally that to a pathway forward. 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's hopeless. And that's the problem I have with approaches like the selfish Gene or the more rationalistic atheist movement.

It's like, well, no wonder you have a meaning crisis because things are meaningless. I think the fact that there is a meaning crisis is actually evidence that things aren't meaningless. Right, because it's not a neutral state. It's a very negative state. And the more thoughtful atheists like Alex O'Connor that we have talked to are responding to that fact that you just stated because I think it is a fact. Yeah, I mean, the most consistent feedback I get from my students who watch it online, comments, or my friends

and colleagues like Jonathan Pageau or Paul VanderKlay, is I gave people a conceptual vocabulary, a theoretical grammar, 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. Right, that's another huge advantage is that you're taking these ancient thinkers and you're pointing out how they conceptualized and what they knew is actually of great practical utility

in the moment. This is something I also found extremely useful, for example, in the Exodus seminar, because the Israelite sojourn in the desert is the crisis of meaning. They're the same thing. And so it's also very useful to know that this death of God phenomenon is not new.

It's a recurrent theme in human history that a crisis of meaning is a condition. It's not a permanent state, and it's not a statement about the nature of the world. It's one of the various ways you can be in the world. And it isn't the final solution for those who are rationalistic, rational enough to see through,

let's say, the protective superstitions of religion. That's not a good way of thinking about it. It's not an accurate way of thinking about it. 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. 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. Um, so as I said, I was brought up in a, not only in the nuclear family, but an extended family with a very fundamentalist kind of Christianity. Um, and only I would now say, I wouldn't have said it then, but retrospectively looking back after therapy, by the way, I would now say, I wouldn't have said it then, but retrospectively looking back after therapy, by the way, I did extended Jungian therapy, that it was quite traumatic.

I think some of the most horrific experiences of my life were around that. I belong to a version of it that had a notion of the rapture. And I came home once when I was 10, and there was nobody home. And that was a very rare event. First time it occurred to me, I'd come home from school and I was convinced that everybody had been raptured. I had been left behind because I was clearly a sinner, condemned to the Antichrist and to hell.

And for a 10-year-old, you can imagine how horrible that is. Or I remember when I was reading the Bible, I came across the passages that talk about the unforgivable sin. And I was just riven with anxiety. And my mother, trying to help me, took me to the pastor of a church and he gave me the most platitudinous, useless. And even as a 12-year-old, I was able to recognize, you're useless. So, I was a fan of science fiction because I was always intrigued by speculative thought from very early on. And I read a book by Roger Zelazny called Lord of Light that introduced me to Buddhism and Hinduism and the power of myth.

And it opened me up and I rejected Christianity. And I became, well, I became that person you were criticizing earlier, the very antagonistic atheist materialist. Yeah, well, that's a very standard pattern of reaction. And it's, I mean, I've seen that in the atheist community. I mean, there's two things that make someone a committed atheist, as far as I can tell, speaking generally. 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. That's one thing, but that's not enough. 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? And there's a lot. The phariseic type. Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, Christ himself was killed by the religious hypocrites, essentially. We talked about this a lot in the gospel. Yeah, well, it's a cardinal part of the story. 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. 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. Yeah, right. Right. That's another danger, of course, or a casual antithesis to any other creed, because you see that within denominations as well. Right, it's not a good answer.

And yeah, it was very illuminating to me to think more deeply through the significance of the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. The lawyers are those in the gospel story, are those who use the law as a weapon, and boy, there's plenty of them running about at the moment. The scribes are basically academics who use their intellect as a destructive force, like the postmodernists, and then the Pharisees are the religious hypocrites, and they're

the enemies of the logos, right? And yes, obviously, obviously. Yeah, D.C. Schindler, my friend D.C. Schindler, talks about misology, the hatred of the logos. It's a good word. Right, right, right. So anyways, I left and I went through a profound personal meaning crisis, deep nihilism.

How long? For how long? For about three or four years. How old were you when that happened? Sort of 15 to like 18. Right, right. Well, it's interesting too, and I would say significant that you turned to science fiction. That definitely happened to Elon Musk too.

And it happens to a lot of smart, rational people who lose their religious connection. And I think it's because the science fiction contains the emergence of a new mythos. Especially the new wave that I was reading, people like Roger Zelazny, I mean, Lord of Light is about a planet where people have sort of mutated themselves and done sort of hyper technology and they've assumed the roles of the Hindu pantheon. And so Hinduism, and so this is one of the lasny's themes about the relationship between myth and science and philosophy and religion.

And so I was deeply interested in all of this. And then I got to university. Heinlein does the same thing with a stranger in a strange land, right? And it's so interesting because Musk named his AI Grok after Valentine Smith, right? And that's not accidental. You can see that mythos re-entering the engineering sphere in the guise of science fiction.

It's not a triviality. So, okay, so you got turned on to philosophical and theological ideas. I took an intro to philosophy course and we read the Republic and I met Socrates Aha, and what did that do? Well see the thing about My upbringing is it had left a taste in my mouth for the transcendence, you know Missing a sage if I can put it that way. And then I met this figure of Socrates who made the logos come alive and gave me a new way of understanding rationality and made me a way of understanding spirituality and

transcendence in a way that was consonant with my burgeoning interest in science and reason and that. Right. So that was a defragmentation process. Profound, profound. That's why I will not follow any religion, any pseudo religious ideology, any political vision that says, you must abandon your loyalty to Socrates. That's not going to happen for me. That's not going to happen for me. And okay, and so what was it specifically about Socrates that attracted you,

do you think? Well, there was a lot originally, I thought, but that's basically Socrates talked about that himself. He talked about how he seduced people into philosophy, right? Because at first it was, oh, look, he wins all the arguments. Yeah, right. And that know, 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 phylo-Nikea, not Philosophia. 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 talks about... Yeah, so that's, is there something about the essence of higher order meaning that is either analogous to or identical with self-correction? that is either analogous to or identical with self-correction? I think, well, I think that's the axial revolution. 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.

Because I mean, think about the Dhammapati, you know, the mind is the beginning of everything. And 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? And so you get this tremendous- Yeah, because questioning improves, but it also enemy you can have is your mind, right? And so you get this tremendous... Yeah, because questioning improves, but it also destroys. Right, exactly. And so you need a figure that is like Socrates, you know, he's open to following

the logos, wisdom begins in wonder, but there's tremendous courage. He demonstrates it unto death. He demonstrates it unto death. This is tremendously encouraging for... That was tremendously encouraging for me. And so I got caught up in this and then I wanted to follow this, accept academic philosophy at the time after first year stops talking about wisdom and the love of wisdom. And you get into all of these arguments about meta ethics and meta epistemology and those are useful tools. They're useful for science. And so I kept going on for that reason, but this hunger was not being satisfied. So literally down the street from me, there was a Tai Chi meditation center.

So I went there because I decided to give Eastern philosophy, because I'd been reading some Hermanness a chance. And I started doing, practicing Tai Chi Chuan and practicing the past and Meta. I was introduced to Lao Tse. I was introduced to Siddhartha. And so these things opened me up. And around that time, I started to read Pierre Haddow and how our ancient philosophy, the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists and the skeptics, they also practiced philosophy as a way of life. And then I started to realize how much this

overlapped with early Christianity and some forms of existing Christianity. It started to help me, I remember Prochamont to Christianity and to religion because I became very, I became very... Well, you've always struck me at your core as a religious thinker. That's probably right. And that's partly because you're grappling with deep ideas and that's the same thing. You're right.

And 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 professer in general. And I also think it accounts to some degree for your impact on students. I think that's true. My, around this, when I, the episode I did for awakening to the meeting crisis on Agape, I had Christians, Christian ministers like Paul Van der Kley said, that was one of the best presentations of Agape.

And then- And define that for everyone. So other than sort of desire, there's three kinds of love. Eros is the love that is accomplished by consummation. 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. And we consummate a marriage, right? And you consummate a relationship in sexual intercourse. And then there's phylaia, and this is the love that is born out of reciprocity. This is friendship love. This is the love that emerges and affords dialogos. That's

why it's phylaia Sophia. It's the dialogical love of wisdom together. And then there is the love that a parent has for a child. You don't love a child because you want to be one with the child. That's exactly the wrong project. You're trying to make the project autonomous. And of course, your child isn't your friend when you bring the child home from the hospital. They can't do anything. They're not even a cognitive agent.

They're a moral person, but they're not a cognitive agent. You love a child. It's like this magic, but you love them because by loving them, you turn them into a full-blown cognitive agent. It's like if I could stare at a sofa and turn it into a Ferrari. It's that kind of, and in that sense, it is the most fundamentally profound creative, and we're not just creating meaning, 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. So agape is the deep recognition of that in that sort of voluntary necessity and being compelled to draw into it. And Jesus is, right, Jesus, you know, in the epistle of John, God is agape. Jesus is the sage of that. Think about what agape means. 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,

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. And agape is the God power that turns non-persons into persons. And that conquers the Roman Empire. And that's why it- And the whole ancient world.

That's why it conquers the Roman Empire, right? And precisely. And so, and my partner, Sara, who's not a Christian, right? And I don't profess to be one, but she took me aside at one point and she said, and I want this understood that I'm saying this at an arm's length, okay? And you're a good friend, so I'll trust you for that. But she said, you're actually the only real Christian I've ever met. What did she mean by that? Of course I asked her. And she said, because you, you know, she said, I get it, you don't identify with a set of

doctrines, but you try to live agape and you try to follow the logos and you've structured your whole life and the cultivation of your character around that. Well, that's what belief... Believe it to give your heart to. That's the original meaning. Definitely, to stake your life on it. That's why I have a certain amount of problem with the reduction of belief to the propositional. Propositional tyranny, that's what it is. Well, it's also, you know, it's propositional tyranny, but it's also a substitution. It's like, well, now I've got the propositions down. You know, when I talk to some evangelists in Washington, I know some very, very wise

evangelicals in Washington. They do remarkable work. They're involved in the prayer breakfast there and have been for decades, really committed people. And we were having a very serious conversation one day about the errors, let's say, of the evangelical movement, one of them being the substitution of the propositional for the existential. And then the counting of souls, you know, the number of people who accept the propositional creed, which isn't nothing, you know. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient.

It's also maybe one way that the propositional can echo down through the emotions and the motivations and become something embodied. But that's a, there's a large journey from the purely propositional, let's say the Apostles creed to actually embodying... There are so many... We mentioned this earlier. This is Piaget, this is Socrates, this is Plato, through and through. There are truths that are only disclosed to you after you go through fundamental transformation,

and that is different from assenting to a proposition because you have been convinced of its truth. That is very different. See, this is the Cartesian problem. The Cartesian project is, here's a universal method that does not require you to undergo existential transformation. You just apply the universal method,

it will give you access to all the universal propositional truths, and that's all we need. And that is a big mistake. This is why I practice a form of cognitive science that emphasizes that... I have a new paper out. I think I shared it with you why relevance realization is not computational because ultimately you can't capture all of that relevance realization, all that binding, all that transformation, all that meaning making in a formal set of propositions. It's just not going to do it for you.

Right. Right, right, right. So yeah, yeah, well, that's an extension of the argument that the propositional isn't sufficient. Yes. Right, okay, so now personally, you wandered through the gospel seminars with us and you've been investigating the idea of the logos and you've been doing that from a cognitive science and a philosophical perspective.

And psychological. And a psychological perspective. And you've had Jungian psychotherapy as well, so you're interested in the narrative end of that. What has that done to your understanding of Christianity? And I mean this in two ways, intellectually, but also personally. I'll do the personally first. Yeah. Although it bears on the intellectual. So I'm very cautious of the fact that I shouldn't ever come to the conclusion that my intellectual or philosophical assessment is somehow swinging free of my idiosyncratic bias that has come

from my own personal background. Right, right. Okay, so that's why I have, and sincerely, by the way, and with affection, especially for a lot of people like Jonathan and Paul, I take a, I think I showed it in the gospel seminar. I showed it to Bishop Barham, for example. Yeah, definitely.

Definitely, even more than respectful, I'm open, I'm listening, I wanna hear, right? So, but on the personal, like I said, what it did for me is, it's almost like Kierkegaard's thing. I realized I'm not going to ever return to Christendom, but maybe I've, and I don't mean to be offensive to any Christians here, I'm trying to answer your question honestly. Yeah, yeah. And I don't mean to be offensive to any Christians here. I'm trying to answer your question honestly. But I've found a way to follow the logos towards agape and towards wisdom and towards ultimate reality.

And I mean in a sacred sense that's ultimately real, ultimately transformative, ultimately antonormative, the most real and the most relevant, God, if you would. All of that, and that's what my new series is going to be about. That has become very powerful for me. So I think what we'll do for everybody watching and listening, I think we'll continue this thread of conversation on the daily wire side because, and this is what we're gonna discuss and maybe this will be an enticement to you as well to join us there. Whatever you're doing is very similar to what Paul VanderKlaay is trying to do.

It's very similar to what Bishop Barron is trying to do. And Jonathan. And Jonathan, yeah, it's similar to what I.N. Hersey-Alee and Neil Ferguson are doing. Yeah, yeah, so there's something emerging. And part of the reason I'm really excited about Peterson Academy, by the way, is because I think that we can at least in part

make it a center of whatever this is. I'll tell you, Jordan, I came to the gospel seminar and I did the Peterson thing because I have, and I talked about this with my crew, I have a sense that that's a place where the advent of the sacred can be occurring. Right, right, right. Well, that's the hope. What I want to talk to you about on the Daily Wire side is I want to delve more into this

idea that you just laid out in a way of a Log track that's parallel because, and maybe we could do that by referring to the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov. As long as we put it with notes from underground, which I just taught for a course, I did a course on literature and the meaning crisis. And so I thought- And you use notes, yeah, well good, okay, we can pull that in too.

That might be an interesting book to do a course on. That's one we could do together, you know, that would be fun. I did a course on Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Notes from Underground, Death in Venice, and the Plague. One course. One course. Oh yeah, that's fun. That's fun. All right, so everybody watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side, and that's where we're going to go to investigate whatever this new advent of the sacred, because I think that is what's happening.

What we're going to delve into more into what that means, especially with regards to its relationship to let's say institutionalized religion, because the advantage to institutionalized religion is that it does preserve the tradition. And you need that. Yeah, well, and something preserved can be static and even rotten to some degree, but that doesn't mean that you... See, this was the problem with Timothy Leary in some ways, right? Tune in, turn on, drop out. It's like, yeah, that's all well and good.

And now you're a free spirit, but that's not something that's going to last through the ages. It's not going to socialize and structure people. So I talk, I use a biological metaphor that's also important in Forikog's, acceptation. The tongue has been accepted for speech. Many organisms have tongues, but they don't speak, right? Right.

Or they don't speak. Evolution doesn't have to make things from scratch. Right, exactly. Exactly. And we, I would say that part of what the advent of the sacred, because that's what it's done in the past, it calls us to exact the past. Not just repeat it, but okay, yes, take it, but fine, repurpose it, draw out from it, induce from it. Okay, that's exactly what we'll talk about when we go into the daily wire side.

So to everybody watching and listening, thank you very much. What's the summation? Well, I would recommend if you're interested in this sort of thing, check out Peterson Academy, check out John Vervecky's courses, check out Jonathan Pagio's courses, my courses. They definitely make a tight unit and there are other thinkers on the site

whose thought is, what would you say? Well, sometimes opposed to that, I invited Richard Dawkins, by the way, to lecture for us. So, you know, and we don't necessarily see it eye to eye on everything to say the least. So, but there is a developing consensus around the kinds of issues that John is bringing up. And I think you can be most rapidly,

perhaps you can be most rapidly exposed to what that is on the Peterson Academy site. So if you're interested in that, well, you know, give it some thought because it might be worth your time. Otherwise you can join us on the daily wire side and we'll delve more deeply into, well, the relationship between meaning seeking, let's say, and meaning preservation and what that means

for the present moment and how we might contemplate revivifying our past traditions in a manner that makes them alive again so that we have the advantages of exploration and of preservation. So we'll delve into that more deeply on the Daily Wire side. Join us.