#138: Jordan Peterson, Myth & Metaphor, Embodiment Cognition and Fitness Landscape with Tom Morgan
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Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Cheery Journal podcast. I'm your host Camilla Yang. My guest today is Tom Morgan. Tom is a return guest and we had a discussion around Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Jordan Peterson and Ian McGilchrist in episode 129. So today we shared our commentaries on David Fuller's article about Jordan Peterson.

where we talk about myth and metaphor, embodiment, cognition, fitness landscape, and Tom's number one advice for listeners. I hope you enjoy the show. It's been one month since Jordan Peterson has been suspended from Twitter.

And we all know David Fuller, the founder of Rebel Wisdom, wrote an article on Jordan Peterson and it generated a huge discussion online. We briefly chatted about Jordan Peterson in our last episode. And you mentioned you are very familiar with his work and attended his seminars. And I translated his latest book, Beyond Order in Chinese.

So I'm very curious to know your opinion. What are your thoughts about David's article on Jordan Peterson? Do you think it's fair? Firstly, thank you for having me back on. I really enjoyed our first conversation. And I think it's often difficult to have like a nuanced view

about very polarizing figures where you can start off by saying, this guy has said a lot of stuff that I really like trenchantly disagree with. And this guy has also said some stuff that I believe to be brilliant. And I feel like a lot of our discourse at the moment is,

It's sort of like, if this guy says something incredibly dumb, we have to throw out the man. That being said, and as we sort of discussed last time, I feel like the direction of travel that he's been on has been disappointing to me personally. And I say that as someone who's achieved almost nothing in their life and hasn't had anything like the impact that he's had. So who am I to have an opinion? But I say it as someone that

Jordan Peterson, seven years ago, had a really, really, really strong impact on my life. And I've subsequently spent more time thinking about him and his work than probably almost any person alive. And I almost feel guilty for that admission now.

because of the direction that he's taken. And I guess to step back to what David Fuller's been doing, I think David's whole enterprise with Rebel Wisdom has been unbelievably admirable in the sense that

What Jordan Peterson's trajectory has demonstrated to me about what they've done is they've managed to navigate this incredibly treacherous information ecosystem without ever getting kind of pulled down into false gurus and the really kind of nonsense debates of the intellectual dark web. To listeners who haven't read it, I would recommend going and reading David's piece as he talks about the fact that Jordan Peterson really put them on the map.

He attended a lecture and something maybe we should talk about in a second because it is weirdly weird and synchronous, but he attended a lecture and then wrote a piece that I think went kind of viral about

And then since that point, he sort of had to go further and further away from the Peterson phenomenon. And I think for very, very justified reasons. Now, David Fuller called Jordan Peterson a culture warrior. Because I remember Jordan Peterson emphasized that if you have something in your heart, you can't

You can't lie. You need to speak up. If he did feel like that, he needs to speak up. But the society won't accept the way he expressed his opinion. So what's your thoughts on that? I think that's such a great point. As I said to you last time we talked about this, I was like, I want Jordan Peterson to talk about myths and meaning because his expertise, in my opinion, is on psychology, where he spent his whole career studying.

myths and underlying meaning of mythology. And so it's like super selfish of me. It's like, who am I to tell this guy I've never met what he should be paying attention to? And to your point, if he, you know, he came to prominence because of a culture war issue in terms of Bill C-16. So his rise has kind of been inextricably associated with that. I think the point Fuller made, and I think is an excellent point, is that the nature of his,

of his engagement with these issues has changed very, very meaningfully. And at the start of a podcast, David with Ken Wilber recently, he played two clips, which was the first of sort of the content and rants that rant is pejorative. The content that Jordan's putting out now relative to the,

a very revealing piece where he basically says, I'm noticing that my reactions are getting very intolerant. And I think that's a sign of some internal corruption on my part. And that's like a really resonant phrase, like internal corruption. And one of the things that attracted me to Peterson originally was that his use of language was so precise. And he also seemed to be amazing at unpacking

like the nature of debates and also taking two sides quite effectively while also having a strong personal bias towards traditional conservative. It's just my sense that over the last few years, because his audience is made up

predominant or not predominant. There is more kind of alt-right in his audience than perhaps a lot of other people. He has had that sort of audience capture phenomenon where like it's very strange for someone of such intellectual diversity to have views on things like vaccines, lockdowns, climate change that all match up exactly with very right-wing perspectives if he is indeed an independent thinker.

Like it's very strange that you would have all these opinions that match up exactly with those audience that you've arrived at independently. It's not impossible. It would just be a surprise. And I guess the thing I wanted to say, and this is sort of, I think we're going to get into a little bit of weird territory here.

But it's a really interesting idea to me. Arguably, the most interesting podcast I've ever heard is his Jacob's Ladder episode, which I think is the number 13 in the biblical lecture, which also, funny enough, is the same lecture that David Fuller attended, which kind of blew him away. And I'd recommend anyone listen to this to go and listen to that after our discussion, because in there is almost every idea I've ever found interesting.

What he talks about in that piece is the nature of shamanism, a topic I myself have become very, very interested in. And he talks about the fact that shamanism in other cultures was associated with this psychological crack-up, but your ability to heal was determined by how you reassembled yourself afterwards.

Did you reassemble yourself around life, around the Tao, around beauty, around the flow? And when we spoke last time, I felt that his second book that you translated actually had a lot more in that. His first book was about rigidity. It was about masculinity. It was about self-control and order. And his second book was literally called Beyond Order. And I was like,

oh, okay, maybe he's kind of softened a little. And what's interesting is his trajectory has seems to kind of gone back even harder to this like heavy, heavy, like intellectualized, very, very rigid left hemisphere view. And there's two things I think are really interesting about that. The first is which,

He talks about having had a vision in a Q&A section of one of his early lectures where he was thrown into a Roman amphitheater by God and made to fight the devil. And at the end of it, he prevails. But he says to God, why did you put me in there? And God says, because I knew you could do it. And he sort of has already been thrown in with the devil in terms of his nine day medically induced coma.

I still feel he's wrestling with this kind of satanic edge because he has this passage that I found incredibly resonant, which I'll actually read in full if that's okay to you, because I think it's so interesting. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. He says, in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan is an intellectual figure

You see that motif emerge very frequently in popular culture. In The Lion King, for example, Scar is a satanic figure and also hyper-intellectual. That's very common. It's the evil scientist motif, the evil advisor to the king, the same motif. It encapsulates something about rationality. What it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan, is the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom. It's a psychological idea that the most powerful sub-element of the human psyche is the human intellect.

It's this thing that shines out above all within the domain of humanity and maybe across the domain of life itself, the human intellect. There's something absolutely remarkable about it, but it has a flaw. The flaw is it tends to fall in love with its own productions and to assume that they're total. Solzhenitsyn, when he was writing the Gulag Archipelago, had a warning about that.

with regards to totalitarian ideology. He said, the price of selling your God-given soul to the entrapments of human dogma was slavery and death. And I guess if it's not clear, I look at someone with a 170 IQ, who with this incredible verbal fluidity, who seems to have rather than transcended the intellect, has returned to it. But I think what drew a lot of people, including David and I, to Jordan originally, his understanding of the sacred.

that he was this hyper articulate, hyper intellectual person was like, guys, there's a there there. And you could tell he was really emotionally struggling with that, you know, that he kind of sensed the Tao. And every time he talked about it, he cried. I think maybe he was anticipating his own crack up.

and surrender to that process. But I feel that's a process that hasn't been completed. And I'm optimistic that maybe it will be. Sorry, I know that was a long, long talk, but I kind of felt it was important. Yeah, exactly. So for me, I feel like because I listened to many interviews of him after he finished his book, and he cried almost in every podcast interview.

And then he turned out to spread a lot of harsh comment on those genders or the climate change. Do you feel like he was like, want to use this

masculine expression to just hide his maybe we can't use the word weak to say because he was very emotional in those interviews and especially in his book Beyond Order I can feel the soft part of him

But it turns out he became totally into the different side. So I find this very interesting. I think it's so interesting. And it's something hard to reconcile, right? Because I do believe that this vulnerability and openheartedness is required in order for you to settle around the Tao. You need this strong external influence. And I feel like the fact that he constantly cried is so admirable and something, you know, I...

Ever since I went through sort of a relatively similar breakdown scenario, I find myself much more emotional and much more receptive. And I cry a lot more often than I did. And so I think that he's an excellent role model in that respect for being, you know, visibly and publicly emotional.

But it is interesting in that it doesn't seem to have been married to compassion, which is another great point that David made, is that he wasn't... If he has spent this much of his career working with people in psychological distress, why is he not more compassionate towards people that are obviously experiencing psychological distress, right? Like, it's a very, very strange idea. And I guess a secondary point that is interesting to me is that I've had a couple of experiences now...

with sort of conspirituality, where basically people that are exceptionally gifted when it comes to seeing hidden narrative in myth and story, then applying those pattern recognition skills to things that they don't understand.

or that they have no expertise in. And it's something you see in investing, which is sort of my field all the time, which is I can see all these hidden patterns in myth. So it's obvious that the World Economic Forum or Davos or the Bilderberg Group or all these things are controlling the world from behind closed doors, you know, sort of the lizard people, conspiracy theories. And I'm not close enough to any of those situations to know whether they're true, but I've spent a lot of time sort of in high finance to know that there's probably very rarely conspiracies. It's mostly just

bad incentives and sort of the Moloch idea of zero-sum games. I don't believe that Moloch actually exists in this context. I just believe that it's poorly set up systems. And it is interesting to me that Peterson, like a lot of other people I've run into, sort of has this thing of misapplying his own intellect to things that he doesn't understand. I see. So from an outsider's perspective,

What kind of a hero journey do you think Jordan Peterson follows? I don't know. I really don't know because...

it's not over, right? Like, I really hope it's not over. Like, it would be the greatest tragedy if this is just how it ends. You know, he talked about leaving Twitter recently and then was back in like 12 hours or two hours, which is the kind of thing you expect from a teenager, which is like, I'm leaving Facebook! And then they're back. Yeah. He clearly has an impulse control problem with that. So, like, you'll have this situation where, like, does he need to withdraw from the dopamine factories? Yeah.

which seemed to drag him away. And David talked about one of this very, he thinks under-discussed aspect, which is that creators in the information ecosystem are now getting dragged away from their own creativity.

by responses to their work, which is, as someone who's like a moderate creator, is something that's really, really tough to balance, which is you have to do something that the world wants. But if you end up moving towards only one side of the political spectrum, you lose a lot of your value. So I think, you know, to sort of address your question, I'd like to see more balance. I'd like to see more receptivity. I'd like to see...

a genuine openness towards alternative perspectives and him willing to consider them. Because I really felt you saw that at the start of his journey. And I think there is still, you know, using the traditional hero's journey, he's, I think he's, you know, he clearly went into the abyss and had a death and rebirth. Like a literal death and rebirth, right? Like this is not a metaphor, right? Like he went to Russia and was sort of in a death medically induced coma for nine days, right? Like, and then the rebirth,

in my opinion, and it's just my opinion, doesn't seem to have happened to a satisfactory degree. But that satisfactory is what I'm imposing on him. And I think what you said is a very interesting way of countering that, which is if he feels his role now is of a true culture warrior, then he's just waging a war that I personally disagree with, which is sort of my problem, not his. When we look at the writers or directors before the internet age,

They don't need to listen to audience requests. They can focus on making their content. And I mean in Jordan Peterson's case, since he's always on Twitter and he gets the impact from his audience and sometimes maybe lead by his audience.

So do you think as a creator, someone like Jordan Peterson, they shouldn't focus too much time to deal with the audience? I think there's a really interesting idea in here, right? Which is that I'm obsessed with mythical structure, right? And what's interesting to me is that if you construct a movie around, say, the hero's journey, which is my real obsession, right? That movie tends to be very successful.

And you need to base it on that structure and then you can play around. There's a lot of movies that have been really creative about playing around with that structure. And if you deviate too far from that structure, you go from Force Awakens, which I really enjoyed, to The Last Jedi, which I really did not. But also, that's a fairly contentious view, right? And then you end up with The Matrix, going to The Matrix sequels.

I believe that's like a fairly consensus view. So you have to have this adherence to an overall structure. And when you have people that think they're above the structures, they tend to make art that's very disappointing. Why that relates to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, I think is potentially really interesting, right? So what you get is these people

Like children think that myths are literal, right? Like they're like, this thing literally happened, right? And then adolescents are like, this is a children's story. It means nothing, right? And then adults are like, no, this story is a metaphor.

And what they do is they unpack this and then they say, this is actually what this really means. And that was the state that Peterson got to, in my opinion, where he blew me away. And I think a lot of other people by saying these biblical stories are not children's stories and they're not fantasies. There's a deep, deep psychological meaning to them. And I think he offered this incredibly deep well of meaning to people.

But what I would suggest he did not do was adequately apply those myths to his own existence. That this is the ultimate purpose of myth is for you to show you the disconnect between the way you're living and the way that you should be living. That was the way that Joseph Campbell understood it, which is that he says the purpose of myth is to harmonize the mind and body.

And the abstract brain could go and think about all these different things. But at the end of the day, when you get told a story about yourself that's true, it brings you back to this level. And I noticed that a lot of people that are great at deconstructing myth don't live myth. And that also is about kind of creativity and synthesis and you letting this thing into your life.

Perhaps that's what his next stage on the journey is and I think it's what a lot of people's crucial stage in the journey is. But in order to be creative, you have to be incredibly receptive. And I feel that's, for a lot of people, not what's happening right now. That the analytical stage and deconstructive stage is quite easy. The synthesis stage is really, really hard and something that kind of broke me as an individual. We talk about mindfulness.

Mike Hale's content on Matterverse, I was so surprised to see, wow, how come he can get so many detailed information from those Terminator movie Jurassic Park? When I was watching them, I just feel like, okay, that's like Hale's journey or blah, blah, blah. But he can get some father and son relationship.

Like, how can you make sure you are not over-interpreted the story? I think that's the same answer, right? So I asked both Ali Bina and David Fuller

How they never got pulled into the mud at least in my opinion. There were a few debates that they had that were that were kind of prickly but if you're on the edge of the information ecosystem and you didn't get tripped up that many times like I was just mind blown like because the number of times I followed gurus and got interested in very intelligent people that were completely wrong. I'm like, how did you do it?

And it's actually the same idea, which is that they both said to me that, you know, it was a question of personal practice. And actually that was something that Fuller talked about in the Peterson article, which is this guy became a lightning rod for the entire culture war and had no means of grounding himself because he's so intellectualized, right? And that's the purpose of myth. It's to pull you out of your head into your body. And if you don't have embodiment rituals, you end up

pretty screwed, right? If you don't have a way of literally grounding yourself in breath work, in meditation, but I believe sort of a more embodied meditation than just sort of thought control. There are interesting ways of doing this. And actually, there's a great real-time parallel happening, I think, right now between Jordan Peterson and

Canadian professor and John Bavicki, Canadian professor, who someone has interviewed as well. And Bavicki is like super hyper crazy thinking. He's like the most ludicrously like academic and articulate person I've run into. But what he stresses is what he calls this ecology of practices. And he's very Taoist in this sense. And he's like, you have to have all these things you do as a person because otherwise you just sit around and talk about it. Something I'm super guilty of as well.

But what I've noticed in my own transition is that my heart is kind of literally opening in a way that I definitively do not understand, but it's giving me a better BS filter in terms of my ability to be like, that sounds really clever, but it doesn't sit right. And I think that David made again, this sort of incredibly insightful point that he himself appears to have lived, which is that if you don't have a way of grounding yourself,

you're going to start applying you're going to do this same myth problem right which is you'll get into spirituality which would be like i can see these patterns and here they are everywhere yeah yeah you know the virgin mary in a piece of toast you start seeing patterns where they don't exist and i i'm sure i do this all the time because this is what i'm most passionate about and i have to catch myself and my wife does it all the time when i'm like this is what cain and abel's about he's like

No, it's not being unable to be about. Stop sounding so certain. And I think that's a really interesting idea. And I have to catch myself all the time because I think it's a really dangerous path to walk down. Exactly. Because that's the part I'm afraid of myself, just seeing the patterns that...

they wouldn't exist. But I'm just saying, okay, yeah, that's the pattern. I'm so certain. It's like I got a hammer that I look at everywhere is a nail. Totally. And that's something that my total man crush Ian McGilchrist talks about a lot. And he has this quote from Jonas Salk, the guy that developed the polio vaccine. And this is about this cadence that's universal. That's basically like, you have this intuition about something,

Then you deconstruct it. And then you return it back to intuition again to be like, all right, I've come up with this analysis. Does this analysis make sense in the context of the world? That third part is the hardest bit. Again, it's this embodied synthesis, right? But if you're not doing that third part, you're going to get stuck in dissective analysis. And that's a dangerous and kind of, it's a very abstract place to be. And one thing that I think,

I've detected and David's detected and is becoming quite obvious is that the entire quote-unquote sense-making space and people that are really concerned about the trajectory of all these cascading environmental, economic, spiritual crises is that we often get stuck in these kind of

galaxy brain dudes that sit there and they have these incredibly accurate dissections of what's wrong with the world and then like the last line of their 700 000 word essays will be like i guess we should do something about this right and it's all dissection and and again with all these things is i feel like a lot of these guys have a prescription that they've been given from the doctor but they haven't gone to the pharmacy filled the prescription and taken the pill

And that is sort of this stage that I feel is the most interesting stage we're at as a society. But I'm aware that exactly as I'm speaking, I'm doing the same thing, which is diagnosing a problem without providing a prescription. And I'm happy to talk maybe in a little bit more detail about the sort of the prescription areas. I think this is where you kind of have to go into the weird.

Because, you know, the whole Einsteinian idea about not being able to solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. I am hyper aware that

It's a very common problem in spiritual people to assume that we're going to this stage of this great phase shift in consciousness. A guy I really like called Jules Evans wrote a piece on conspirituality that I think is the definitive piece on conspirituality, basically saying that you can either go like lizard people conspiracy theory, or you can go, we're about to go through this great unveiling in human consciousness where everything's going to be great, right?

I'm very aware that I'm much more in that latter category. Like I literally coined the term phase change without realizing that it's a cliche that I'm now reading about it, which is like people that go through these spiritual experiences, then talk about phase changes in consciousness. And I was like, Oh no, have I fallen into like some conspiracy cliche, but I do believe it, which maybe makes me a moron, but I do believe it's true. And I'm seeing evidence around us that,

In short, I believe the hero's journey that we're actually undergoing as a population, and bear in mind this is something that might take another 300 years. I'm not expecting it to happen next week, right? In the scheme of things, in the scheme of human evolution, the 60s is a heartbeat away, and I see the 60s Summer of Lovers as sort of a phase that we're still in.

but now has moved to sort of a healing-based counterculture rather than a tune-in, drop-out kind of rejection of culture. I think that the articulation of the hero's journey that we're moving into is

is this reconciliation of analytical intelligence with embodied intelligence. And Philip Shepard, another Canadian, I don't know why there's so many of them. So many Canadians, yeah. He's written, he wrote a book called Radical Wholeness that's sort of like, it's about us being able to drop

the extraordinary power of the analytical brain into this like more holistic intelligence that reconciles the left and right hemisphere and that pulls us back together. And I think we'll, it's sort of in the McGilchrist terms, returning the right hemisphere to the guide, returning the left hemisphere to the guidance of the right and integrating us into the Dow and all of these sort of relatively thinky concepts, but it comes down to us thinking,

us completing the hero's journey in exactly the way that it's described. And also, as something I've written about a lot, the acceleration of hero's journey narratives

like the analytical brain would look at that and basically say hollywood's run out of ideas and i would be like nah frozen one was a successful movie grossed like 1.2 billion and so they were like okay we need to make an absolute banker we'll make frozen two and i tweeted something that's a bit snarky but is that basically like frozen two is like this hilariously literal reconstruction of the hero's journey and i'm like well why why does any of this stuff work and i believe

The human unconscious leads us into transitions. And so what we're unconsciously interested in is the best sign of where we're going. And there's no better sign of what we are unconsciously interested in than the myths that are becoming popular in society. You share the hero journey's graphic. You know, the old hero journey picture would be like a circle, but the one you shared is quite interesting. It's like a spiral. Yeah.

This is an idea that, again, I sort of refined from the Gilchrist work is that the true human progress is a spiral in that you're just going slow. You're circling truth. You're never going to get a full look at truth because it's sort of impossible for us to mentally capture because it's so big and it's too big for us. But what happens is you circle around it. And what you do again is you have like I found over the last few years, I've had the same idea like

Like 100,000 times, right? And every time I have it, I'm like, wow, that's amazing. And then I read something I wrote like six years ago. And it's just like, yeah, you have this idea. The difference between those two ideas is that when you intellectually understand something and when you embody it, right? And again, it's about this integration of myths. And that's what I think the spiral is, is that you get better and better at embodying and integrating what these actual ideas are.

And so that's why the hero's journey always ends up with the person returning to the place where they departed, but with a much better understanding of where they actually are, because it's they that change.

not anything else about the world. True. It reminds me about the Taoist sage. You remember that three phases, you look at the mountain, it's a mountain, it's not a mountain at the end, it's a mountain again. It's kind of like embodied the idea back to yourself again. It's also the connection with the hero journey back to where you start. It's precisely the same relationship again.

which is, you know, one of my favorite quotes is from Wendell Holmes. I can't remember, but it's like one of my favorite quotes. I would give not a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, which is that the child's

who hears a myth is just simplicity, right? And then there's the complexity, which is I'm going to take apart the myth and have all these pieces. And then there's the simplicity beyond complexity,

Where you put it all back together and integrate it into your life and you know what the part of that is and I think that's also the Zen saying right is that no for a while the mountains aren't mountains and the rivers aren't rivers but at the end of it the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers and what's funny is I think modern society has kind of Intuited this with the midwit me, you know the midwit mean what's that? This is bell curve of IQ

And it has, for want of better terms, an idiot on the left with a low IQ. And then it has the intellectual on the middle with the 120, 130 IQ. And then it has the Jedi master on the other end of the bell curve with the 180 IQ. And whilst I think IQ is a really dumb way to measure intelligence, the implication is interesting, which is that it often is something very, very simple.

that is this incredibly deep and elite understanding of something. But when you repeat it back to people, it sounds like a horrifying cliche because they don't have an embodied understanding of it, right? So you can say all these like fortune cookies on Twitter, but if you don't actually know whether they're true, you're going to get pulled into this kind of bad abstract intellectual headspace.

Yeah, so true. Today I was talking with a friend and I chatted with him about when my grandpa was alive, he taught me so many knowledge and wisdom. But back then, I just feel like, oh, such an old cliche. I don't want to listen to him. But now at my age, I kind of understand everything and I feel like, oh, my God.

I've already got all those gifts, but before I was too naive to understand that. You need to have a certain life experience or gain your wisdom and be able to understand that. Otherwise, you just see the mountain and the river as the mountain and the river. You don't truly understand. Right. And what's interesting is before my sort of transition point, I ran

I read a lot of Joseph Campbell, and I think that the highest return on information is kind of Joseph Campbell in many ways, because he dissected all the myths in a way that Peterson did, but seemed to do it in a way that was much more beneficial. And it seemed like his life was a pretty good one. And he followed his bliss very successfully for his whole life. And I kind of look at that.

as something where I read Campbell at the start of my journey and intellectually understood it, but the intellectual understanding of it did not save me any suffering. It made me, you know, Campbell himself has an expression, which is you can ask for it, but you have to be ready for it, right? And I believe I could have asked my own transition, but I wasn't necessarily aware of the price that I was going to be paying in terms of psychological suffering to get to a point. And what's interesting is that, like,

I was obsessed with the hero's journey legitimately five years ago and I feel like I only am starting to understand it at an embodied level now. The difference between intellectually understanding and embodying something is different and it's kind of the whole theme of this entire conversation which is how do you get to a stage of bringing all of this dialogue out of the head, right?

Like all these conversations, like one of the things I've learned from the investing world is what sounds smart need not have any relationship with the truth. And I learn that in you every day. I'm amazed at my own ability, surprised by that, which is this person sounds incredibly articulate and has this incredible thesis and it doesn't prove to be anything remotely related to reality. And I believe us all kind of getting pulled down into that process is going to be pretty interesting.

with a lot of this is that I don't want to apply my own circumstances to the world, but it is a relatively universal feature that I don't understand that the existing frame has to be broken before a new frame can be put in place. So the implication that we're going to go through to this kind of glorious utopia

without any major societal distress seems to me to be unlikely. And when you, like I spent a lot of time over the last few weeks and months understanding physical constraints and

So I read this great book that I'd recommend to anyone called How the World Really Works by this, what is it with Canadians? Another Canadian professor. What? Oh my God. I think he lives in Canada. He may not be Canadian because he's got a very strong attitude. His name is Vaclavs Bill. He's really salty and kind of a polymathic scientist. And he's basically like, you guys don't understand the energy intensity and size of

of the real world. And if we're going to make a transition to sort of environmental harmony, the number of comforts that are going to have to be given up are utterly unprecedented. You know, he makes the point that if low income countries were to achieve a tenth of China's growth, that's a 10xing of the number of cars on the road and a 40xing in the number of air conditioners.

And you're like, who am I to go to a monsoonal country and say, you can't have air conditioning because I don't like the carbon footprint. Like the arrogance of that. And so you end up with this real tension between like, I genuinely believe there's a shift in consciousness unfolding, as naive as that makes me sound. It just might take a really long time. But I see all these clues, which I'm probably overfitting, right? I see all these clues.

And I look at what needs to happen in the physical world, and the two just don't align. And I don't know which one of those is going to win. I feel like nowadays people kind of want to bike to the shamanism you mentioned before. And if you look at history, does that appear to

like repeated historical event before like people embodied the shamanism before the abundant aid then returned to aid have you found this pattern i do feel like there's so many spiritual people around me now but maybe 10 years ago i didn't see that people are so focused on this spirituality i don't know a lot about shamanism but i'm kind of interested i think it's a topic i need to get smarter on but what my understanding of it is again like super limited

is that shamanistic practices occurred independently throughout the entire world over a very long period of time.

that's a concept that always resonates very very tightly with me it's like well this thing if this thing doesn't have a purpose yeah why did it show up everywhere and a lot of like our modern reductionism is like well because they needed a way to explain things that couldn't be explained so this guy was like it's the sea monster making the waves or whatever it is right they just make up myths because they don't understand myths and i think that's like how an adolescent would understand shamanism rather than an adult or a sage right um i think that like i'm

a more mature conceptualization of shamanism is that the shaman fulfills the role of the prophet. They actually embody the myth. And this is something Viveki talks about, where he's basically like, the word prophet is misunderstood. People assume that a prophet is going to be saying, this is what's happening 300 years from now. Whereas actually what a prophet does is tell forth. Where he's like, guys, we've gone wrong.

We've gone wrong, we've gone wrong, we've gone wrong. This is what we're doing as a society, and it's not right. And what they do is they tell the truth in a fundamentally embodied way. When people can hear it, it snaps them in, and it snaps them back. And there's this very interesting concept of, again, sort of the phase transition, where suddenly all the molecules in a substance start resonating at the same frequency, and it changes state.

And I believe the same thing happens with human ideas, that when someone speaks the truth, that truth spreads because people can hear it. And there's something about it that's mysterious and misunderstood. And at the moment, I believe sort of my role as someone who isn't a prophet is to use my individual discernment to raise the profile of these people that I think are prophets. And I actually, I think, you know, to bring the conversation full circle,

I think Peterson was a prophet for a while. And Scott Alexander, who writes Fake Star Codex, wrote a book review of 12 Rules for Life where he's like, this dude's a prophet. It was very weird to have the most rationalist person in the world, Scott Alexander, who writes the most rationalist blog in the world, be like, this dude's a prophet. And it's this very strange blog that is brilliant. And I recommend reading it. And obviously, I think

I think he's deviated from that role quite radically. But there's something that Alexander says in that blog where he's like, when a prophet speaks, he talks about good and evil and he talks about good and evil in a way that they're actually real, that they're not these abstract concepts. And I think when we hear that,

Like we know when we're hearing it because it just hits us in a different part of our body I think it hits us in our hearts and I think that sort of like when I look at the response to the galaxy brain reduction diagnosis thing, I think that one thing we can all do that's inherently positive is do personal practice but then find people that we think are those profits and amplify their voices on social media and in our writing and

I'm waiting for my own guru to fail because all gurus fail. But my guru at the moment is this guy, Ian McGilchrist, that I think has been moved.

the definitive masterpiece of our time in this book, The Matter With Things, that I spend a huge amount of my day amplifying because it's a 1,400-page-long book and it's really thinky and it's very challenging. And I feel like my value as someone who's a lot less intelligent than him is to make it digestible for an audience that's relatively...

at my sort of intellectual level rather than his. And whether or not I proved to be right about McGilchrist, and I'm sure there will become a point where I'm pantsed by it and I end up feeling really shameful in the way that I have about other gurus that I found, I'm hopeful that it won't happen.

But maybe, you know, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. If you get caught up on an individual guru, you're probably not progressing. But I believe for this point in society, McGilchrist has the most value because he is a rational bridge to the transcendent in the same way that Peterson was for a while.

that he enables thinky abstract people to see that there's a there there rather than this kind of new atheist reductionist super crazy empty like meaninglessness I see I got a weird question for like Jordan Peterson and in the girl craze do you think they were born with this gift or through the nurture they developed this kind of sense I

I don't know enough about Ian McGillcrest's life to answer that question for him. But if you want weird, let's go weird, man. Let's go weird. Yes. Because you mentioned that you develop so many weird ideas as the Frederick and the Bill's podcast interview. I'm very keen to learn more. So let's talk about weird, right? So maps of meaning.

That's a weird book, right? That's like almost a fever dream of visions, but it's much closer to sort of the Peterson vision.

I enjoyed. And if you've read Maps of Meaning, I'm not even sure I've read it all the way through because it's so intense. But there's a bit in there he talks about a vision. Sorry, not a vision. It was more of an experience when he was younger. And I think it's super relevant to our discussion where basically he was really, really good at winning debates because, again, he's got like a 170 IQ, right? Like this guy's...

Like if you look at the Kathy Newman interview where he basically takes her apart, like I always felt that coming at Jordan Peterson with it in a debate would be the scariest thing you could possibly imagine. And he talks about his facility at winning debates and he was sort of doing it for fun. And then he underwent a psychological crackup where basically every time he said something, a voice in his head would say, you don't believe that it's not your opinion. And he would have a horrible anxiety attack. And that's super interesting to me because it,

For me, it sounds like a hemispheric breakdown, like Gilchrist talks about, where basically he was saying these things which were abstracted and intellectual, but they had no embodied meaning. And eventually he goes through the stage of only saying things that makes it through the censor. And he was like, I didn't know which person I was. And then eventually I realized I was the censor and I integrated that. And I think that's unbelievably interesting in the context of our entire discussion, which is that basically for a time, he seemed to develop this embodied sense of truth.

which like 250 million views on YouTube, right? Like how many did this book sell? Like 5 million copies?

It's not an accident. This guy doesn't get to that position by being a culture warrior, in my opinion. There's a lot of culture warriors out there. He got there initially because of his ability to discern the truth, real truth with a capital T. He had the hilarious interview with Sam Harris, where Sam Harris is like, there's no such thing as truth.

and maybe misrepresenting him, right? And Jordan Peterson was like, oh yeah, there's such a thing as truth. And it kind of scrambled his brain that he couldn't articulate what it was about. And if you listen to it, it's this kind of disastrous interview that he, I think he later blamed on having drunk orange juice or something beforehand or apple juice. But what was very interesting to me is it was sort of like his brain was trying to understand the Tao.

And what's interesting is that you see this very common motif of people trying to drag the transcendent into an intellectual framework and it burns them up. You know, it's like, right? Like they try and grasp with the ungraspable and your consciousness is too limited for that. And I think he went through this crack up and instead of saying, you know what, this, all this stuff's eventually unknowable. The Tao is unknowable. The Tao that can be named is not the Tao. If you try, keep trying to like recapture it,

in words, it's going to blow you up. And I think it did blow him up. I see. Yeah. So do you think the language is very limited for us to understand the true Tao? You just need to feel that thing in your head or in your heart to follow it. You can't

fully explain to other people. So you are the only person you know what kind of truth you are following. I got very scared about that for a while. That by trying to talk about these things and trying to articulate these things, you kind of, you're trying to capture the Tao and you're risking burning yourself up in that same kind of fire of the sacred, right? I think language...

is great for the construction of metaphor, right? That you can basically like say, if language is the truth and something that Peterson talked about a million times over, it's something I still don't think I fully understand, right? The logos, right? Where like you have a dialogue and it produces real, real truth. And you can't ever pull the full truth into it because again, the full truth is this crazy, complex, ineffable thing, right? But you can help people appreciate that through dialogue.

you know, kind of a proper conversation between two open people, something that Viveky talks about a lot, where you just kind of get closer to the blind men and the elephant parable, right? That maybe is the role of language. But again, if you kind of assume that language is absolute and you're going to get all the way there through language, you're going to end up back at the Gulag archipelago and Scar and Satan, where him saying that he has a total understanding of the world. And I think the value of McGilchrist

He always makes me think of Neo and Morpheus walking through the Matrix for the first time, where Morpheus is like, here's this construction, and you have to see past it. And a lot of people criticize McGilchrist for not having a long list of ways to see through the Matrix and to get yourself through.

out of the matrix. But what he is, is Orpheus walking through the matrix and being like, here are all these neurological reasons you can't see what's really important. But here are the ways that you can construct imagination and metaphor to help you get to a point that's much better than where you currently are. I think that gives a lot of ideas from the article you wrote, 21 Useful Ideas and One Big One.

And you mentioned the fitness landscape. I'm very fascinated with that idea, but I don't think I fully understand. Would you mind elaborating that term? I'm worried I don't fully understand it either. I always get this really awkward sensation of like, does this thing even exist? Am I using this metaphor correctly? Is a biologist listening to me right now and being really cringing that this guy doesn't understand what a fitness landscape is?

But I think it's so useful as a metaphor. I keep talking about it anyway. And it's hard. It's also really hard to do on podcast. It's a visual metaphor. I'll include it in the show notes picture. But it's basically like, if you imagine any ecosystem as a landscape,

covered in valleys and mountains, the goal of any organism is to get to the highest peak. But what it can do is get to a local peak where it gets stuck and just runs the same routine on a loop.

And in order to get to a higher peak, it has to go down into a valley and then up again into a higher peak and keep running this same subroutine until it eventually just becomes better and better evolved. This idea, I think, is kind of limitlessly deep because what it talks about is how you evolve as an individual.

So what happens is in super hyper competitive environments, everything ends up optimized for that environment, which then means if that environment changes in even a tiny little way, that thing goes extinct because it's only optimized for one environment, right? So a rainforest is so competitive. Everything's hyper optimized.

That basically if it deviate if you deviate from what you're specifically good at in any way, you'll just get eaten immediately Which can often make you very fragile so like people in Manhattan I think I see Manhattan as an unbelievably jagged fitness landscape where basically if you're me and you have to go from making a relatively high wage in finance to an experimental period of

where you try on a little, a lot of different identities, the amount of salary you have to give up for a really long period of time, even with relatively modest outgoings makes that experiment prohibitive. And it gets people stuck running the same routine for a very long time. And people die there literally and figuratively. And I see a lot of people in midlife

that have reached the top of their fitness landscape and they're wondering why they're not happy. And they're kind of looping, running the same routine every day and they're not interested in anything anymore. And instead they're just drinking and trying to numb the voice saying it's time to move on. And I believe sort of that one of the guiding ideas of my life, and what's interesting is that artificial intelligence research is starting to bear this out, is that when you get stuck, the most important thing that you can do

is start being guided by your exploratory attention because your exploratory attention is incredibly embedded in the environment and in fact, you know, linked to the Tao or whatever you want to call it, where you start to, if you start to follow things you're interested in,

doors will open what only there were walls and this is a thematic sense it's a feeling and it's something i'm writing about at the moment for this weekend it kind of a weirder piece but it's like that's what helps people get out of very stuck places which is this kind of faith that the thing that they're interested in whilst it has no obvious payoff now will be a step you know the expression of crossing a river by feeling the stones with your feet

That's how I think about people in transition phases where you have to make these decisions based on periods of very, very high uncertainty. But part of that is reaching out with your feet and touching as many different stones as possible. But in order to do that, you have to give something up. And so I suppose to...

to sort of relate this back to the Dow again, fitness landscapes aren't static in the real world. Everything is evolving around you at a relatively rapid pace. And so it's this undulating sea surface rather than a static landscape. And the people that end up being the best are actually suboptimal on a wide variety of different metrics that you have this slack in your system. And I believe this is going to become increasingly important to businesses and investments because it's basically...

If you have this just-in-time supply chain that suddenly gets blown up by COVID, you get blown up by COVID and you lose 10 years of earnings in one month, right? But in the natural world, if you're an ant, you have half of the ant colony in the nest at any one time, literally doing nothing.

which is anathema to modern capitalism. But what happens if there's a flash flood, half the ant colony survives. So nature is structurally resilient by having all these things that look like they have no purpose, right? But they do have a purpose because if something changes materially, they have resilience in their system. And that's this fundamentally Taoist idea that basically you become most resilient by competing less hard and by having room in your life

to take on these clues coming from your right hemisphere and these sort of synchronicities from the outside world that indicate you're on the right path. Because if you're entirely driven by your own ego, you're going to end up at the top of the fitness landscape really quickly. You might end up fabulously successful, but if that peak is so steep, it's very, very difficult for you to get back down again. Yeah. So that's what stops people to give up all these material things or...

People are just afraid of the uncertainty as they climb to the top. Yeah, it's fear. And it's typically about people get stuck because of something that's holding them in. And that can be money, but often the money represents something, a desire for security, a desire for safety, some sort of deep sense of insufficiency that is the core of people. And I'm speaking from personal experience here rather than judging other people, right? Like,

if you're not connected to life, you feel like you have no self-worth. And one of the most irritating things I hear spiritual people say is that you're always great and you're always wonderful and you just need to open your eyes to how perfect you are. And I'm like, try telling like a, like a psychotically depressed person that and see how that goes. Right. Like it's, it's,

it's insulting. And I feel that the way to reconcile those views is that William Green, a great author I've been lucky to come to know, he has this wonderful expression about being a clean pipe for life. And that it's basically the process of navigating the fitness landscape is of opening the pipe and letting emergence and life, the Tao, whatever, guide you a little bit. And once you're connected to that life,

things will start to go better for you and you'll feel like you have a sense of greater self-worth and value because you're connected to something if we're not connected to anything we have no value right we are a we are a system that eats itself um and that is a very very very terrible place to be that's the definition of depression a completely closed system um and i i think that

the opening up to that receptivity, again, true return to the same theme, literally opening our heart centers and allowing that deeply vulnerable connection to nature. That's sort of how we get ourselves through this very abstracted state. I see. So in your dark time, what dragged you from the deep abyss, gave you hope, let you want to move on? It's a difficult question to answer because one of my key...

One of the key things I wonder about is how consciously you can do this process without a death and rebirth, right? Like if you have to truly break the frame before you can move on, you know, the fight club, whatever it is, right? You, you're not free to do anything until you've lost everything. I'm not just murdered that quote. Right. But like, can you consciously engineer a death and rebirth experience for yourself? Yeah.

And therefore, if you're stuck in a lost place, is it sufficient to reorient towards the new? I don't know. For me, like I had to go through a full death and rebirth experience and like catastrophic suffering. And I think the grandiose part of me would like to say I am...

My gifts right now come as a result of that suffering. But I spoke to another spiritual person was like, we can get you out of the dark night of the soul in two hours. And I don't know if this is true, right? Like, if I got out of my dark night of the soul in two hours, I wouldn't know any of the things that I now know because I was so desperate during that transition period.

I spent all this time learning about transition periods and spirituality and their application to the real world, right? It didn't help me at the time, but now I'm on the way out of it and kind of have rebuilt. I'm continuously rebuilding myself. It gives me a very, very strong toolbox to rely on.

And I wouldn't have got that if I'd just been snapped out in two hours. And I think that there is a correlation between the length of suffering period and the length of dissonance and what you can do with it afterwards. You know, I think Solzhenitsyn was in the Gulag for 15 years, right? Like Mandela. These guys that became prophets had to do a very, very long time

in transition. Moses in the desert, 14 years, he becomes the prophet that can deliver the Ten Commandments, right? I don't know whether that's just a linear relationship, but I didn't answer your question. To answer your question,

I think it's still interestingness. But after I came from bottom, I then learned to be better at following what was interesting to me, but also integrating it with what I was historically good at, which was kind of finance and business. I wrote a bunch of very bad spiritual pieces, which I had no expertise in. But the moment I wrote it, it was about the combination of existential crisis, spirituality, and investing.

it ended up with me in my current role that's been you know the best 18 months of my life so like it it was interesting to me that like i had to mesh what i was interested in with what i was previously good at or at least not very good at right does that make sense yeah can you recall the feelings when you wrote about those spirituality piece did you feel the difference compared with when you wrote about the spirituality connected with finance

Did you notice the difference? Yeah, I think it's still a big failing of my work. It was just other people's ideas and there wasn't any integration as to whether they were true because I didn't have any embodied understanding, right? So I would just be like, here's what Jordan Peterson says about X. And it would be like,

cool. Is that true? Which is particularly funny in the concept of Jordan Peterson, right? So I wrote all these pieces, which is like, here's how to do X. And they just didn't feel right. And no one read them. I'll give you an example. So like, and this is something that I still don't understand. So, you know, treat, treat accordingly. Um,

But I had an incredibly hostile inner monologue that was just constantly telling me to destroy myself hundreds of times a day for years. And so I read a lot of books about essentially how to kill your inner monologue and how to silence your gremlin and how to change your thoughts

And I currently believe that that's a really dangerous thing to do because what it does, like that in a monologue is half of you, right? And if you set up half your brain against one half of your other brain, that doesn't seem like a productive way to live. And the way I live now, when I'm in a situation that I'm really happy with, what I do is I give my monologue a job. So like there's a great expression that I like, which is, um,

If you have a working dog and you don't give it a job, it'll find one, right? So if you have a beetle or a collie or, you know, a hunting dog and you keep it in your apartment in Manhattan and you don't walk it, it's going to tear your house apart. And I feel for people with like high level intellects, that's what can happen. But if you don't give it a job it enjoys, it will tear you to pieces. And when I was in places that I shouldn't be, my monologue tore me to pieces. And now...

I spend all my time wrestling with things that are really interesting to me. And my monologue and I get on really, really well. It doesn't, it doesn't tell me to kill myself. It just says, have you thought about X? And it rolls over these ideas for weeks and months at a time. And then eventually my unconscious gives me answers. So it's sort of, it's doing this very, very helpful job for me. And I feel that like, that's been a major change in the, I

I feel that's something that spirituality can really mess up in that it's like you have to kill the ego. I'm like, no, like the Taoist said that it's like strong masculine legs in service of the female energy. I know that those phrases are kind of loaded and triggering. Maybe there's a better way of saying it that isn't gendered. But it's sort of like having a really strong method of acting, but following the right cues.

It's like what you said, your left brain needs to serve the master of right brain. So you're like consciously tell your voice to do something. Yes. And then in the unconscious background, they will give you an answer. Sort of. I still am troubled by the idea of telling one side of your brain what to do. It doesn't sit right for me. Like I kind of hate it.

I can't articulate why. Maybe this is an example of the intuition, which is you can't trick yourself into finding things that you don't think. I read a book when I was in crisis that, I'll name it because I disagree with it. It's called Soul for Happy about a Google engineer that basically was like, every time I'm offered a sad thought, I tell my brain no and give me a good thought instead.

And that way of living life personally strikes me as quite dangerous and pernicious because I believe the ideal state that I don't live in, but would like to, is full receptivity, which is that like I'm feeling a really sad thought right now and that's appropriate. And I'm going to fully engage with the world and open myself to the really most awful bits of the world because that allows me a greater ability to react to what it's giving me.

Like the naive understanding of stoicism is like, no, you can control your emotions at all times. You can control how you respond to the outside world. And that kind of scares me because it's like, well, then you're just ignoring what the world's telling you. And that strikes me as a symptom of depression. And there are some studies that show that kind of a naive stoicism is associated with depression.

And so I just, whenever people are like, you've just got to think positively. I'm like, no, that really just seems like a really bad idea. Like don't think positively when you're in a bad spot, because sometimes you may have to just get out of the bad spot.

Yeah, true. That's the advice a lot of people give to depression people. Oh, think positively, you will be fine. I think it's a horrible idea. It's a disastrous idea. It's really only understood by people that have been through something like that, that

It's like going up to Insomniac and saying, have you just tried sleeping? Insulting an incredibly patronizing way of approaching something that's probably more complicated than we can understand. Don't get me wrong. Mild depression can be massively alleviated through habits. Right? Like,

getting out into the world and running and diet. And I'm not denigrating any of those things. But the idea that positive psychology is this cure-all, I think, is something that we're going to look back on and think is probably pretty naive. And one of the things I think, you know, Bessel van der Kolk has talked about in terms of embodiment and cognition is the idea that therapy is

We can use our left hemisphere to dig our left hemisphere out. We can use our intellect to dig our intellect out. I see a lot of intellectual people get stuck in therapy because they're using the same tool that's causing them all the problems. And something I've become very interested in is this idea that, you know, Eugene Gendlin talked about in this book, Focusing, which is they could tell within the first hour or session whether people were going to ever make it out of therapy, which is kind of sad. But it was basically determined on how

how granularly people could describe their own emotional state, which just means to me that they have a strong bridge between their conscious and their unconscious. They can really understand what their body is telling them and what the outside world is telling them rather than having some sort of like incredibly limited emotional response to things. And that's something that I wish I was given in my life. And I'm working very, very hard to give my children that.

but just telling people that your thoughts can control your thoughts. No. In the end, I'd like to talk about your father, Sir John Morgan, because you wrote an article about him. It so triggered my interest about his life. He crossed a path with Chairman Mao and his life in Russia and China. Can you share some stories with me about him?

The most important thing is a public service announcement that if you've made it this far in the podcast, I'm about to say the first useful thing to the listeners, which is record your parents' memories. Don't talk about it because everyone I've spoke to about it is like, yeah, I really should do that. And then I think that they're not doing it. Your parents, your grandparents, if they're still alive, everyone that's important to you,

Zoom them, get a professional to do it, send them emails, get those memories down because once they're gone, they're gone. And my dad loved being the center of attention more than like a nine-year-old in a school play. And even he had to be bullied by my sister for years and years and years to write down his memoirs. And now we have 150 pages of ludicrously rich memories, which I can give to my children

When they're interested, you know, probably two decades from now. So my dad's been dead for 10 years and it will probably be another 20 before my kids really truly care about who their dad was. Right. Because my oldest is three. So it's like if you're relying on your own memories, you're an idiot.

You're a complete idiot and you're being really irresponsible right now because you're not only depriving yourself, you're depriving your children, you're depriving their children, you're depriving their children, you're depriving their children. If people don't understand their inheritance, it's incredibly irresponsible. And I feel really strongly about it, as you could tell. And I can do that because I'm a hypocrite, which is that when I went on Jim O'Shaughnessy's podcast, which was one of my breakout moments, he was like, what's your advice to people? And I said, no.

record your parents memories and then like two weeks later my sister was like did you record your mother's memories not just your dad's and i was like no my mother for a series of weeks right like um with my sister so it's really really important um

I guess there's too many stories to talk about my dad, but he did live in Russia and China in the 50s, which is sort of amazing to think about now. Oh, wow, you're 50. Yeah, yeah. And he only encountered Mao twice or three times, I think, and both of them relatively superficially. He did tell a story that I think about all the time now, which is...

I don't think my dad was much for magical thinking, but he talks about going to a holy mountain, which name I forget, in China. And at the top of the mountain, he meets a Taoist sage, a class of person that I'm probably super crazy interested in and that they have some sort of shamanic aspects to them as well. And he says he meets this guy and he has dust on his shoulders and dust on his head because he's been sitting in contemplation for so long. And

The sage says to him, you know, listen, I can't talk to you guys for very long because I'm a very powerful magician and I need to go and make a thunderstorm.

my dad's like cool right thunderstorm I get it right and like you know completely blue skies and they go to sleep that night and there's this most enormous thunderstorm at 1am that you know coincidence maybe all of these things but as my life has moved on I believe in coincidence a lot less and I believe what I kind of take away from all of this is that

the ideal state of a human being is to get to this, you know, Taoist sage where you're, you're so integrated into the world around you that you can respond to it completely fluidly. You can flow across that fitness landscape with ease and you can, you can act in service of emergence in a very positive way. And so it's sort of funny for me that of all, I reread most of my dad's memoirs in order to write about him and,

Sitting back now, it's kind of funny for me that the Taoist sage anecdote, even though it's like two paragraphs, is one of the ones that sticks in my head the most. Yeah, this reminds me about the article you shared last year.

about the embodiment. Philip Shepard. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one. Yeah. I mentioned earlier he wrote that great book Radical Wholeness and his book is full of all these anecdotes that I think are amazing and I recommend seeking him out because he seems to be the real deal. He tells these two stories, one of which I think I told on my podcast with Bill Brewster a few weeks ago. It's this idea of sort of the heart as the guide and again, like I said,

I don't want to seem like I'm being too credulous here, but it's sort of, there's a great book that I was led to very synchronistically called, I think it's called The Secret Teachings of Plants, which is sort of the last book I think I've read. But anyway, the book is not about plant intelligence as much as it's about the human heart. And the long and short of it is that I think most people were taught that the heart is primarily an oxygenating pump.

to get blood around the body. Whereas actually relatively uncontroversial, it also generates an electromagnetic pulse every time it beats because of particles within it. Again, now understanding how little I, you're now seeing how little I understand about this, but there's this concept, which is that your heart's in constant reciprocal relationship with all of the organs in your body as sort of a regulator and communicator. But there's also a field that projects around your body and the,

the minimum sensitivity that you have to that field, I don't think it's well understood. But there's a story in Shepherd's book about the Songhoi tribe in Malaysia, and a Western anthropologist, psychologist called Wolf takes one of the tribe's people called Ahmed to the sea.

and the tribesperson stands on the shore of the sea for like a couple of hours, doesn't go in the water, doesn't even go close to the water,

And then goes back to the rest of the tribe and says, you know, I've just been to the big water. Underneath it, there's all these mountains and valleys and there's fish bigger than anything we've ever seen. There's these flatfish. And he has this long description of like what's under the sea. And Wolf is like, you didn't even go in the sea. How do you know all this? And he's like, well, the sea's in my heart. And he's like...

What the hell does any of that mean? And the strong ride talks about the ancient way of knowing. And they said they'd teach him. And so they took him into the jungle and he walks for like six days. And at the end of the six days, they're like, find water. And so he's like, tries to sniff and tries to listen. And the guy, Ahmed, the same guy is like, no, no, no. The water's in your heart. And he kind of drops in. The westerner does, drops into his heart. And suddenly he sees the jungle as an interconnected web.

And seeing that interconnected web, he can just see where the water is in a leaf and walks over and picks it. And I think to sort of tie a bow around our whole conversation again, the idea of integrating analytical intelligence with holistic intelligence, that maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe there is something in our hearts that gives us a more embedded integration into our environment and a more holistic understanding of our environment.

it is the right hemisphere that dominates in terms of connections to the heart center and to the body. That if we understand our hearts as reciprocal transmitters and receivers rather than just merely oxygenated pumps, that opens up the possibility in us for a more holistic integration into the world where we can start to get better signals to our brain, which tends in the Gilchrist terms to assume that it's absolute, like Satan,

In the Jordan Peterson example, it tends to assume that it knows everything. And a lot of that is very important, that if we were constantly questioning the nature of our consciousness, we'd get eaten by tigers really fast. The fact that the left hemisphere lies to us and confabulates is really important. It is a feature, not a bug. But we need to understand that its creations are not complete.

If we think that its creations are complete, we will end up in hell. And I think that returns us to where we started.

Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for sharing all these crazy ideas, which I'm super interested in. Yeah, I think you're the best person in my circle to answer all of my weird ideas. Thank you. So where can people follow you? I'll put your Twitter and newsletter in the show notes. Twitter and newsletter. My DMs are open. I love talking to people.

If you're a stranger, come grab me and we'll do a Zoom. And I live in Manhattan. Come grab a coffee or a beer. I drink much, much too much of both. My son was asked, my son was three. He was asked, what does daddy drink the other day? Does daddy drink water? And he was like, no, daddy drinks beer and coffee. And I was like, oh no. Truth be told, Dave. And if you want to add to either of those addictions, come see me.