https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sQ8azJ4KPrY
Hi, this is Paul and I’m having another conversation today with John Vervecki who is obviously no stranger to the channel. So thanks, John, for accepting my invitation this morning. Paul, I was really looking forward to talking to you. I can’t tell you really how much I’ve missed talking to you. It hasn’t been that long, but things have been so busy for me. Psychological time has built up. And so I was really, really pleased when you reached out. And so thank you very much for doing that. I appreciate it, too. And this conversation was provoked by provoked in sort of the productive term, not emotional term. John recently did a question and answer with The Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server and then also your conversation on Rebel Wisdom with Jonathan Roussen, I thought. Oh, that Jonathan was astonishing. Yeah. I told him afterwards, I said, I think that was one of the best interviews, dialoguos, it became dialoguos very rapidly that I had been engaged in. And he was amazing. He was fantastic. I thought that was that that’s now my go to introduction. Who’s John Vervecki? I said I send him to that video because that, I think, really reveals a lot of what’s happening. And I, both John and I share something in this in that I’m going to set it up this way. I wrote a little something that I shared with John and I’ll read it and I’ll just flesh it out as we go. Both John and I have worked careers in two institutions, myself, the church, John, the university. And we’re both about the same age. And we’re getting to the point now where we have to think about what comes next. And that might be retirement, but both with ministers and university professors, you don’t really retire so much often. You just have to stop doing certain duties for the institution. And then what I think pastors and university professors switch over into is sort of legacy and wisdom inheritance modes. Yes. Yes. where we’ve used all of these years to sort of accumulate wisdom, accumulate skills, and now we get to the point where it’s time to sort of take all of these things and turn them over to the world for the next generations, that they could pick things up. And I was thinking about the fact that now both, we were just talking a little bit before this, in a lot of these areas, regardless of the subject matter, Jordan Peterson sort of went first in a big way of a lot of this. He had a long career as a university professor. Obviously, he had been on public television, Ontario Public Television, very regularly, had been a public intellectual. But obviously, with C16 and a bunch of these things, a big transformation happened, and he’ll never be a university professor like he had been before. He’ll never be a clinical psychologist like he had been before. And what he is now is something we don’t really know. It isn’t institutionalized, but it’s caught up in the emerging institutions, if we can really see it in that light yet, of social media and the Internet. And both for John and myself, that’s increasingly been a part. John was just talking about the fact that this summer he’s got a busy travel schedule coming out. He’s more in demand in different places for speaking. That’s not unusual for university professors, but it’s taking on a different balance. And the same is true for me. I’m a local church pastor, but I’m trying to get estuary going. And so I don’t know. Let’s start there and then we can talk about some of the rest of the stuff that I wrote as we go. But that I mean, John and I have sort of been less intense versions of some of what happened with Jordan Peterson in terms of disruption of a career institution narrative into this new Internet social media space, which on one hand is full of possibility and opportunity, but also full of other things that we know not what even threat. I would even say that it’s a threat in the sense that unforeseen or at least even if foreseen, maybe you can’t ameliorate risks that are out there. So, yeah, that’s definitely the case. Luckily, well, luckily, I did not have and I do not think I will ever have Jordan’s experience. Mine has been much more gradual and I don’t think we’ll ever get to the degree of his. But I do get a taste for it, like as I was mentioning to you before we started recording the sort of lecture tour, the UK, things have really heated up for me since then. Now, fortunately for me, and I don’t know if this was the case for Jordan, but I think about the nature of the rise that I went through. Fortunately for me, the interest has been both publicly social media, but also professionally the more and more interaction, collaboration with academics. So for me, right now, these two things are not right there. They’re simultaneously being enhanced. And I think for Jordan, I’m only surmising, but I think it was much more lopsided. And obviously, and the relation was filled with conflict for him. And I’m not trying to take sides about that particular battle or anything like that. I’m just noting that. So for me, right now, I can feel right that I keeping feet sort of equally in both worlds. But I don’t I don’t see that being the deep future for me. And I’m not quite sure what my future looks like. I was mentioning to you just before we started recording, I just had to do we do an annual review at the University of Toronto. What are our annual activity report, which is basically what have you been doing? We give you all this money. What have you been doing? Right. And, you know, what are you teaching? And and fortunately for me, I had the one foot because all of that stuff I can put into the report and it looks like and it’s all better. And it’s oh, that’s good. But all this stuff, all the social media stuff does not fit on the form. And I started to become aware of this after when Awakening for the Meaning crisis sort of took off. It was I think I honestly think that it’s one of the most important works of my life, Awakening for the Meaning crisis. And I think there’s good reason to believe that hundreds of thousands of people have found that to be the case. I would not have both of those for any of the professional so-called professional academic work I did. I maybe reached in total 30,000 students in my entire career. I think I’ve done important scientific work, but not of this cultural scope of Awakening for the Meaning crisis. But if I look for somewhere to put that on the form, there was a little minor category with sort of anything extra interesting that you did. Oh, yeah, I happen to do like I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be self-promotional. But, you know, the point I make, I happen to do Awakening for the Meaning crisis, where I happen to do right. Be doing Voices with Hraveki or I happen to be doing the Cognitive Science Show where I’m doing all the COGSCI series. And I’m working with and the thing is, I’m working with other professional academics, Gary Hovenicien, Greg Enriquez, right. And we’re producing, we’re actually showing people the process by which scientific theorizing and framework is done. And they’re getting to participate that rather than seeing the monologue polished product. And I think this is, again, I’m biased, but I think this is tremendously pedagogically important. Like we and this is making use of this medium in a way that is pedagogically important. Where does that go on the form? Right. And so although I didn’t I wasn’t pulled into the split that I’m surmising Jordan was subject to, I nevertheless feel that these two are not that we do not have them. I’ll use one of an advert that’s appropriate to the conversation. We do not have them institutionally connected. Right. I feel like I’m still in the paper and pencil academic world in one side. And for all the talk about media and social media and all we had to use it during covid. And then and the other and the other one, I’m in this wild west where right. And I am experimenting with all kinds of new ways of pedagogical practices and also not just teaching people the theory, but like teaching them the practices, doing something that and I don’t mean this as an insult, Paul, something that’s like missionary work, going to all of these communities and trying to help them and network them together and build them in. Like and none of that fits the form. But if you if they honestly came to me and said, you got to stop doing that, I I’d fight it. I’d fight it. I I have tenure now and I’d fight it. And I’d say, look, I’m still doing all this other stuff because. And this is I’ve always been very loyal to you, because they’ve always treated me well since since I came, since they tried to get rid of me in 2008 and then I got back. That’s another story. Institutions can be fickle that way. Yeah, they can be fickle that way. And I have I have I mean. Psychology has always treated me very well, but that I can say definitively. And then since 2010 or so, Kogsai has been treating me very, very well. But the point is, what I’m about to say is not out of any kind of disloyalty there. I just want to lay my cards on the table. I think the work I’m doing here is as important, if not more important, because my. I mean, I really do believe in the actuality and the trajectory of development of the meeting crisis. I think it is a thing. I think it is a real thing. And I’m getting increasing evidence and reason to believe that I’m correct about this and that this is a tremendously serious problem that hamstrings us as we tend to attempt to deal with the crisis. I think that’s all plausible, highly plausible. And therefore, when I look at, well, where where of these two places, where am I making the most impact? There’s no question about where I’m making the most impact. And if they were to tell me you have to shut this off and come back and just be inside the economy, I would fight it as much as I could. And then one more thing, and I’ll let you speak because I’ve been speaking for a long time. I mean, I’m heading towards retirement and I’m just sort of thinking, you know, I’m going to try. I’m going to keep trying to do a good job here, but. It’s not a long term for me, it’s not long term anymore. It used to be right. But that’s and also. It’s I don’t I’ve been I’ve been working for the COGSIDE program since 1992 for for for for almost 20 years. I was the only faculty member. That program is my baby. I have built it. I have lived it. I have loved it. I’m currently I’ve been the acting director a couple of times and now I’m the current director. I care about it a lot, but the program has to be reconfigured so that I can leave. I don’t want to leave a gaping hole when I go. And that’s also part of like so there’s there’s a selfish concern, I guess. But it’s selfish because I want to work on the meeting crisis. But there’s also I actually I have an actual I think real concern for for the academic program. I it needs to readjust so that it will flourish when I’m not there. Because I don’t want to. Sorry, I don’t want to. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s dependent on me. There’s other great faculty there now permanent. But there’ll be a hole and I don’t want that hole to be a gaping hole. So I’m trying to juggle all of this in some responsible fashion. And I have no training, no preparation, nothing. I’ll read Plato and that will help. That doesn’t help. Like there’s no like it’s so de novo and you get nothing from social media world, nothing from the academic. I don’t know where to turn. So that’s why I was so there’s a long, long way of saying I’m really glad to be talking to you about this. Well, and I didn’t know how many other people I knew that you were likely having a very similar experience to what I have been. Yes, partly because of the parallels here. And I’ve got some more parallels that I’ll I’ll bring into the conversation. But I mean, the same with me. I mean, for someone of my age, the usual institutional trajectory for my career would be larger pulpits, denominational positions. You basically use the institution as a platform and the the career and the institutional platform sort of go together. Right. And what we’ve both had is that these other platforms, which is what we call them YouTube, Twitter, sub stack, Discord, these other platforms have become platforms for other transformations, opportunities and threats that are completely new. And, you know, for example, I, you know, Saturdays, I post my rough draft for Sunday videos. You know, this past this past rough draft did quite well in terms of my analytics. You know, one or two thousand people saw the rough draft before 50 to 100 people saw the sermon itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, and so as I think about, I mean, I just got actually I got a I got a letter of interest from a church that I had almost. And I, you know, even if the denomination came and said, we’d like you to have a denominational position or a larger church came around and, you know, more money, more prestige, more access, etc. And turn them all down. Yeah, because I don’t see those opportunities in line with my calling as much as I see these new possibilities. But I’ve got grave, grave. I don’t know. I’ve I’ve got concerns about these platforms. And I and I wanted to talk to you because I think we need to take this aspect of the transformations that are undergoing and do a lot more analysis, the logo sharing between each other. If we’re actually going to achieve and a little bit later, I’ve got some things where I want to kind of connect the meeting crisis to some more Christian themes, because I think I think we can see how. Institutional development from from from the altar, the cult, the temple, which eventually grows into monarchy. You know, synagogue church university. I mean, that’s sort of the evolutionary. Yeah, we’re both within this same evolutionary curve. And you’ve done some conversations about awakening from the meeting crisis or the religion that’s not a religion. And I’ve, of course, been been concerned about estuary, which so. So anyway, so so that again, I’m watching both of us. And again, I thank God that I’ve told people I do not expect myself to ride the status rocket. And neither do I want to, because I love my institution. I love my profession, but it’s clear with the rapid technological disruption that is impacting all of these institutions, certainly church and university. Yes. Those of us who are sort of now in these liminal spaces really have to take a little bit of care and shine a light on to our journey. And I think David Fuller, if I thought about it, I might have invited him into this, too, because in some ways he’s doing parallel thinking. Very much journalism and that rebel wisdom. Very, very, very much. Yeah, very much. David feels himself. I won’t say too much because it’s confidential, but David feels himself in a very transitional place right now. And yeah, yeah, I talk to David quite frequently. And he it might be a good idea if the three of us spoke. Actually, I let’s let’s try and make that happen. I think that would be very, very good. OK. Yeah, he’s another person. I speak with him frequently. Like I said, I won’t say too much, but he is definitely deeply reflecting upon all of these issues. You’re putting your fingers on. And he is. He’s talking, you know, he talks frequently, both in public and privately about, you know, where we are post legacy media, although the legacy media won’t admit that. And and and and again, I try I I’m staunchly committed to my meta perspet, meta political perspective. But the way governments and the legacy media are trying to sort of like prop each other up, I think is becoming increasingly apparent. And so what I mean is they’re both they’re both adopting a conservative strategy rather than like, how can we? Adapt to this. And they’ve largely taken a I’ll use the term the way you use it, a colonialization attitude was what we can do is the legacy media can just colonize social media and the government can just take over social media. And what just happened yesterday is Elon Musk gave the finger to that. That’s right. I’m not a big Elon Musk fan. I’m not. But whatever whatever else it’s showing. And I think there’s tremendous risk and opportunity around this. It’s a Kairos moment is what I’m saying. What Elon Musk did is a Kairos moment. I think that’s clear. Yeah. So David sees all of that. And I agree. I think that’s largely right. So and then he sees the heterodoxy, but he sees the heterodoxy is the problem with heterodoxy is it remains chaotic. And chaos, chaos, chaos. I want to use it almost in the Greek sense. It is it is hungry for form. It is it is ancient matter, hula. And it will receive any form. It is hunger, hungry for any form. And David’s come to see the deep downsides of that and the way in which social media is is like, that’s my way of seeing it is hungry for any form. And he sees that he’s basically like we need to create institutions. We can’t remain with forever within the hula of of of of of of social media. And so, you know, I feel like he sort of sees himself like in The Magnificent Seven, the Wild West is ending. And there’s some there’s some sort of there’s there’s some loss and grief. But it’s like, yeah, but it’s it’s it’s needs to end because it’s it was it’s a really violent and nasty place. And so I I’m I’m increasingly interested in the possibility that this corner of the Internet can. I’m going to use my terms, but I’m going to have a bit of crooked guardian irony around all of them. Right. That this corner of the Internet can solidify not into homogeneity, but into something like a dynamically alive small world network and can serve. And I’ll use two different languages here. It can serve as an exemplar and which is a secular way of putting it, but it can serve as a beacon, which is a religious way of putting it to social media. Because I think any attempt to impose, I think what we’re seeing from the government and legacy media will fail. It will make things worse. The deal on my strategy is not a viable one because he can do it because he’s the richest man in the world kind of thing. And so I’m hoping that I’m hoping for this. And I know you’ll be charitable about me about this, but I’m hoping for kind of like a spiritual exemplification, you know, the biblical model of the light on the hill that can serve as a way of. Tutoring people into. Something that because we have somehow managed to all really help and talk to each other in a deep way that other people, I mean, it’s attractive. It draws people into this corner of the Internet. And I think now that it’s been going on enough to say this, it doesn’t it doesn’t for good reason. There’s good reason for why that’s happening. So I think including David and then trying to get a little bit clearer on the project of networking this corner of the Internet. I’m working with Nathan Vanderpool, trying to do exactly that, getting all of these emerging communities to talk to each other. But the emerging communities need to also talk to the established communities. It’s like I said, and the learning curve is almost precipitous, right? It’s like, I don’t know. But but but but it’s like it’s usually when I don’t know, I upset myself because that’s epistemically responsible. It’s like, well, I don’t know. But then I reasonably believe this. I don’t think anybody else does. And I’m not going to leave this space empty because I want to work with the people that I trust. That’s the position I find myself in. I think so. And I think precipitous is is the right. But in terms of a I mean, when we see when we think of precipice, we think of a down. But I think it’s up. And I think in many ways, what we are doing is we I mean, if you climb, you are it is feeling. Yes. Grasping, grappling, too. Yes. And that is very much what we’re doing. And it’s it’s slow. So, you know, for me, you know, for me, estuary has been the the imagery and the symbolism that I’ve gotten into. And so, you know, the I’ll just read a little bit. You know, we’ve both worked at church and university or have increasingly been disrupted by the Internet and social media to a degree that probably neither institution is fully cognizant of. Church is very much in denial about it. I would imagine there’s a lot of denial in university because once you have your institution, part of the dynamics of an institution is institutional preservation. That’s what makes institutions so durable. And you need that. But the the difficulty is always institutions are always adapting and must always adapt. And so you have, in a sense, that opponent processing going on. But they don’t always the guilds are gone. True. They do die. Yes, they do die if they do not appropriately adapt. And I’m feeling a bit of sort of late medieval guild, guild, guildness. Wow, that’s a weird property. Right. It’s like, yeah, because there’s a little too well, this is how we do it. And this is how we evaluate each other. And this is how we judge our performance. And it’s like, that’s like, that’s no longer relevant. The right. It’s not completely irrelevant. That’s unfair. We do need people doing the academic work, but it’s like if we don’t make ourselves more culturally responsive. And here’s the thing. The university thinks that as long as it’s responsive to the market, it had so it’s done this long and nasty negotiation with market forces. And there’s still acrimony around this. But the university has basically said, you know how we’re culturally relative. We prepare people for the marketplace. That’s how we’re culturally relative. And it’s like, I get it. I get it. That that was a hard battle. And there’s a sense in which people feel, I think, mostly unconsciously that there’s been a selling out to the corporate world and all of that. So it hasn’t been it hasn’t been a cheerful marriage. It’s been a long, you know, being sort of dragged into the. And because of that, I think there’s a there’s a largely implicit attitude if we’ve done we’ve already done it like we’re culturally relevant because we sold out, we’re relevant to the market. And that’s all we have to do now. Leave us alone and let us do our thing. And and then that’s in reaction to know the way we are. Right. There’s that. And then the and then what’s in opposition to it within the Academy is no, no. The way we’re culturally relevant is taking a clear sign in the side in the culture wars. That’s how the university is culturally relevant. The activist point. So it’s like to my mind, both of those attitudes are actually missing the issue that is at hand in a profound way. I think that, well, I’m not going to review all the arguments I’ve given, why I think the culture wars are a symptom of the meaning crisis and not a response to it. I won’t repeat those arguments here. They’re extent people can look at them. And obviously, the idea that the only the only form of cultural responsibility is responsibility to the market. I think that that just loses the fact that culture is more than the market. It’s an intergenerational thing like science talks about, and it’s all about meaning and other things. And the university is not responding to the meaning crisis to put it in a sentence. Yeah. And what’s interesting, you know, you bring this up in terms of the university and the market. So George Marsden was one of my history teachers at Calvin years ago. And Marsden has is sort of the foremost Christian scholar on American fundamentalism. But he also has been tracking the story of the university in America. Right. And he’s I’ll send you the link to to his his work on this. But, you know, he notes that, of course, in the colonial period, universities were training for clergy. And in Calvin University, the one I grew up in, that’s my denomination, was clergy training. My grandfather went there when that was that was basically what it did. And then because the Christian Reformed Church had Christian day schools, the second job was training teachers for those Christian day schools. And and, of course, at the you know, before the 19th century and then into the 19th century and decreasing as it hit the 20th century, theology was the queen of the sciences. Yes, yes, yes. And theology in many ways gave birth to humanities. You know, when I was reading a bunch of C.S. Lewis biographies, I was shocked to learn that after, you know, in the 1930s and 40s, English as a university discipline was brand new at Oxford and Cambridge. And it’s like, yes, English has been around a long time. Oh, no. But and so what Marsden sort of puts together is that in many ways, theology and this, of course, gets far afield of a bunch of things. Theology gives birth to the humanities. And part of the crisis of the university currently, I think you said it well, is is sort of humanities simply births activism. And the let’s say the other credibility of the university is the marketplace. But in this, you know, what we’ve seen in the last 10, 20 years is, in fact, the crisis of the humanities in the university to the degree that even a even a university like Calvin, which is owned by my denomination, drops their classics department. I agree. I do think there’s a crisis in the sciences. The replication crisis is spreading. And I think it’s reasonable. There’s two two reasons for that. One is the sciences need an overarching worldview framework in order to properly orient themselves and to afford synoptic integration, et cetera. Many people are arguing, for example, and I add my voice to this argument that the reason why psychology is suffering the replication crisis is it has no overarching framework. Hence all of my work with Greg Enriquez trying to like what right. And so that that so the the lack of an orientation to and let’s remember that theology has also shrunk. The if you the original meaning for phyllo and for proclis is it is that it is your deepest theory of what’s the deepest reality. Right. Right. And it isn’t it wasn’t bound to, you know, a particular well, a particular I guess this is the right word, a particular denomination. Right. Right. It wasn’t bound to promoting a particular like it was bound to promoting a particular interpretation. But you understand what I’m trying to get at, Paul, here that it was a much more comprehensive thing. Right. It was much more like that neoplatonic courtyard that I’ve been talking about. And so and science needs that. And it’s lost that. And then I can see it within psychology, but I can see it. It’s it’s spreading through all the sciences. Right. But also there’s the the corruption from the market. And we know this. Another thing driving the replication crisis is funding and funding prioritizes innovation, because that’s what the market is hungry for and innovation and individualism. And they direct at the expense of collective integration. And that is also driving the replication crisis. So I put it to you that the sciences are also suffering an increasing crisis. And I so for me, one symbolically, one way to try to get these together and I think to in some ways connect the meaning crisis with more traditional language that the church deals with is, you know, is again, the relationship between heaven and earth. And an estuary for me was symbolically, you have the fresh water, which comes from the heavens. Yeah. And you have the salt water, you know, the great sea, the Tohu of Oahu, out of which order, you know, God calls heaven and earth or earth out of in the Genesis story. Oh, that’s I didn’t realize you were doing that with that. Yeah. That’s beautiful. You’ve got an emergence and an emanation. That’s right. I’ve interrupted you. So let me just squeak in on this interruption. I really admire you for doing this, by the way. I want to say that because I know this is not without cost for you. And again, we share a lot of parallels, so I think I can have some empathy for what this means. But when I I sort of celebrated you in my mind when I heard you doing this and why I’ve seen you doing this, because to my mind that I hope this is not presumptuous on my part. That’s where the church needs to be. And I think you are deeply right about that. And I imagine it’s not coming free of significant cost for you. And so I just as your friend, I would just like to encourage you to keep going and say I deeply respect you for doing that. Well, thank you. I do. I do, though, see it as the mission of the church and part of the reason I said estuary. So there’s church and I’ve never tried to place estuary within the church, even though it is happening in church buildings. It’s next to the church because churches need a certain order. And so you have tradition and order and all of those things. But you also need a boundary area that can be productive because the church is, you know, what you said about theology is true and what happens over time and what happened, you know, you had Harvard, but then you had fights in terms of all of that’s going on at Harvard. So then you have Yale and then you have Princeton and you have Andover and then you have Brown. I mean, and and now in that chaos and ordering, there’s also production and development because institutions are expressions that they become material and existential expressions of, you know, of greater, higher, heavenly things, spiritual things that get worked out. And then there’ll be there’ll be conflict. There’ll be, you know, resolution. There’ll be all of this stuff that we’re always doing down below here. But, you know, I also see this in terms of a religion that’s not a religion. I don’t. Yes, I see a religion that’s not a religion, an estuary very much pursuing similar things. I agree, I agree. And I think, well, you know, and I’ve said this before, it’s continues to be that you’ve had a huge influence on me. The whole. The whole DLogos project was engendered by you and Jonathan responding to my original work. And then it’s and there’s been parts along the way, points along the way, I should say, where those interactions have have also turned me, reoriented me. I think the two projects are are are very isomorphic in some important ways and they’re intertwined, at least for me in deep ways. I know Chris feels the same way. Chris Master Pietro, he feels the same way as well. So I deeply agree with that. I think I’ve been talking with Brendan Dempsey Graham and Laman Pascal around this around the religion that’s not a religion. And one of the things we did talk about, I like to hear your thoughts about it is, I mean, originally we had this we had this trifecta. We had the university, the monastery and the church, and they had overlapping but different functions. And maybe Augustine would come in here and say, oh, the Trinity or something like that. But I’ll put that aside right now. Right. But right. But they were overlapping, but different distinct. So they had this small world network and they really acted acted as dynamic checks and balances, but also affordances on each other. And we’ve lost that. And and then we sort of plugged in the state and the market. And that’s what I’m seeing from the university side. And that’s I don’t know. That’s been very problematic in a lot of ways. And I imagine you’re seeing that the church is kind of in some ways hungry for the functions that were sometimes used to be taken up by the monastery and the university. And and what I I sort of see this space, sorry, I sort of see this space as trying to again, not nostalgia, not just but trying to fill out those functional holes. Right. And so part of what I’ve been trying to this is more of a problem formulation than anything positive, like a positive proposal. But I see that what we’re trying to do in this space is we’re trying to get some of the functionality of I’ll speak from my pool. You can speak from yours for my pool. I’m trying to see how can we get the functionality of all three of these like the university, the church and the monastery out there? Like I did awake. I did awakening from the meeting places that felt very university to me. And then I did I did I did the whole meditating and cultivating wisdom, which I’ll make you that very monastic saying are formed. And then I do all this stuff where I’m trying to build these communities of communities. That feels very it feels very much like church. Yes. Right. And I wonder what you thought about that as a mapping. That’s how I’m trying to make sense of like some of the dimensionality. I’m trying to get all of this and trying to cleave some dimensionality. Plato’s cut me cutting nature at its joints, trying to figure out what are the dimensionalities of this space and what functions? At least what healthy functions is it trying to instantiate? I mean, there’s all kinds of bad actors and the nefarious stuff going on. But what do you think about that? I think. Part of the part of the difficulty for from the church side of this is that church is a very is very much a an essential word and concept. But part of the reality of church and this is where there’s tensions within church traditions, obviously. Right, right. Is is institutions and morphing because. As I said, so so in Genesis, I’ll just use the biblical because that’s my phrase. Please, please, please. You know, in Genesis, sort of the first soft institution that you find in the book of Genesis, you might say might be marriage. But marriage is interesting because it’s both prelapsarian. But Jesus basically says it doesn’t go into the age to come because there’ll be no marrying or giving in marriage. You’ll be like the angels. That’s what Jesus said. So so that’s interesting. But marriage isn’t the topic of this. The first one of the one of the most interesting things about the book of Genesis that I never heard any any preacher ever mention is that the first instance of an altar. We find with Cain and Abel, right, right, right. There’s no altar in the garden, and I should probably talk to Pichot about this because I’m sure a lot of ideas. But part of the reason there’s no altar in the garden is one of the first videos I made ever before Jordan Peterson or anything. I made a video about how alters work because alters connect heaven and earth. Right, right, right, right. And and the flame you read the book of you read the Torah. The flame is very much God. I’m a consuming fire. You take the animal, which is the substitute. It goes into the flame. The animal gets translated up to God. It’s a pleasing offering. So so altar is sort of the first connection of heaven and earth after the divorce of heaven and earth that happens in the rupture in the fall, let’s say, to use that logical framework. But it’s also situated in the first murder. Right. Yes. Right. The first the first instance of culture war. Right. Yes. Because my understanding is Cain kills Abel because of the meaning of their sacrifice. One of them is the reception of the sacrifice. But it’s very murky. Yes, yes. And and and so altar is right there at the beginning. I think I think we can take your meaning crisis and and really map that onto a ton of theology about brokenness and transformation. I see a lot of those connections. So so altar is right there. And altar, of course, becomes because cult where you have priests who minister around the altar. If you look at, you know, if you look at the origins of monarchy, monarchs, you can even see this in the Bible, judges where all of, you know, Samuel was a prophet. Samuel was a priest and Samuel was a king. Yes, yes. Yeah. But in that story, you know, the it’s breaking down Samuel’s sons, just like Eli’s sons are unjust. The elders of Israel’s come and say, give us a king. You know, you have this whole narrative. This is a betrayal because the Lord is their king, but the Lord says, OK, but warn them what kings will do. And so really, you begin with altar. It goes to cult. It goes to temple. And out of there, pretty soon you’ll get palace and temple. Right. Right. And and very quickly, you’ll have prophet, priest and king, because the prophet holds the king accountable, but not really as a priest, because very quickly, kings sort of co-opt priests and prophets. As always. And so over history, we’ve seen this development of institutions. And and this happens, obviously. So synagogue after temple is destroyed, you get synagogue where instead of the sacrifice, you have the book and you minister to the book. And that gets into heaven and earth because heaven is sort of mind, mind, spirit, heaven. And the lower register is is matter, flesh, earth. And of course, the Bible is all about the the the renovation of heaven and earth and the relationship between them. So and so then as history goes, of course, you. You have a proliferation of institutions and market will will have. And, you know, our Jonathan’s great is great video on Enoch was just fascinating because you have technology and you have all of these things developing. And, you know, by the time you get into, you know, then you have church, but then you have monastery churches and the relationship to church and monastery is sort of interesting. And in the Catholics, you have clergy that are in the church. You know, they’re the secular clergy that are in the church. You have the monastics that are in the monastery and, of course, always tussling with the kings. And, of course, monastery will sort of give birth to to university in a way. I mean, Luther was an Augustinian monk. Yeah, and you have monks teaching in the universe because the monks are the scribes and they’re attending to the texts and all of this stuff. So we’ve had, you know, as as the story has progressed and I’ll use that word cautiously, but I think, yeah, properly. You have these proliferations of institutions and, you know, in terms of David Fuller and his work, that’s very much sense making. And, you know, churches before there were before there was the printing press, churches, prophets, you know, monasteries, these were all the sense making. Yes. And so eventually, you know, with democracy, you’ve got, you know, Protestant Reformation, democracy, you’ve got journalism, you know, this new estate that does truth telling. And and when you listen to David Fuller talk about, you know, journalistic institutions, they very much had a prophetic role. There’s very much, very much. And and and so that, you know, university and so we have all of these institutions and I don’t think we’re going to have less institutions. But, you know, part of why I see the importance of estuary, you know, for the church is that what happens, especially with technological dislocation, is that there needs to be a. Once things are disrupted by chaos, there needs to be a new formation. And so you do always have this, you know, this back and forth. And this has happened in the church. And so part of what we have in the church is we have the Orthodox who we do not change. I mean, we really do not change. And the Protestants look at them and say, yeah, but I appreciate the stalwart hanging on to not changing. But another part of me says, Jonathan Peugeot is living in the 21st century. He’s not living in the fifth century. And so and so even the Orthodox and the Orthodox have been remarkably astute at using podcasts and YouTube. I mean, social media has been their vanguard into American culture. And Jonathan Peugeot has been, you know, in many ways, one of their key leaders in this. So so we’re in this period now where, you know, in Protestantism, what Protestantism basically did was made. Institutions church as institution, very malleable and even disposable. In ways that the Roman church is not and ways that the Orthodox church is not. So even in the even in the migration of church through time, we’ve seen a lot of conversation and renovation in terms of institutions. And so this moment that we’re participating in, I see that as part of what we’re doing. And so for me, estuary is a continuation of this. And and so and so church doesn’t go away. It just, you know, the story with church just has to continue to figure out how how how this works. So, so I guess I agree with all of that. And that was a beautiful history. And I have a question I want to ask you about it in a sec. But what I guess what I was saying is. One of my critiques of the church, and you’ve heard me make it, is it’s lost a connection to a place that was dedicated to the cultivation of wisdom, the monasteries, the self transformation. And, you know, and the Protestant church played a significant role in that severance. And that Luther left and destroyed the monasteries. Yes, which literally. Yes, yes. And then and then there has been. Not as rapid, but as still as profound as severance between church and monastery and university. And that and I think that so that it’s such and and I put it to you that. The university and arguments I’ve already made in this discussion is hungering for a religious framework. And that is part of what is going on right now with I don’t know if this is quite the right term, but the woke ism. I think I’ve been arguing and Jonathan has been arguing that that you have to see this as a religious phenomena. It is not just a political phenomena. I’m not saying it’s not a political phenomena, but it’s like and sorry. And I only mean it in this sense, everybody. I only mean it in this one sense. It’s like Nazism in that Nazism is not just a political movement. It’s also a religious movement, only in that sense, only in that sense. Right. And so I and I see people trying to create monasteries all around the world. Yes. I talked to Daniel Thorson and the monastic academies, the secular monasteries, the build on movement in Europe and the and the Scandinavian. And they’re and they’re and they’re still I’m talking with people where the Scandinavian countries are still keeping that and trying to figure out how to revive it. So what I see, like I see the fragmentation and then I see the hunger for some kind of reintegration going on. That’s what I was trying. And I see this medium as being particularly because it’s hungry for form. I see it particularly receptive to that endeavor. Now, the question I have for you is there was something in that history that I wanted to ask you about, which is to my mind, it was almost specific to to Protestantism. Broadly construed, although there were some notable exceptions. But and I’m talking I’m talking about the rise of and these two things were deeply interconnected. The rise of the megachurch and the televangelists, because they blurred, right. They they looked like they were connecting a lot of things, but they weren’t really connecting a lot of things because like people were being connected as individuals in the televangelists. And the problem with well, I’m not going to go into it. You have much more expertise and you’ve been reflecting on this. The megachurches, right, where we’re we’re doing something that was kind of I don’t want to speak teleologically, but there was a high probability that they were going to do what they what’s happened to them. They were going to frack. They were going to implode in very powerful ways. And to me, both of them and I want to I’m trying to be charitable here, but both of them were taking their grammar from the market as how how Christianity should succeed. And to me, that represented again, there’s a hunger to connect the church to something other than the church, right. That will right. And I think I think they we’ve been again, there are exceptions to everything I’m saying here and I don’t deny them. But I’m so I’m speaking overall. I think we’ve realized that that connection like it it it largely failed. I think in a very, very powerful way. And so that’s what I’m trying to get at. I like I’m trying what I was trying to do is I see the hunger for these polls. I’ll call them rather than institutions, but like the monastery, the church, the university. And now, like you said, the market and technology and then the state wanders around trying to figure out where it should be right now. It’s just, oh, the market. Right. But but but also, oh, the universities, that’s increasingly happening, especially in Canada. Political parties are looking to activism is, oh, that’s the next big way to get elected. So that’s happening, too. Right. And so I see this medium as how can we negotiate? We’re trying one of the potentials and one of the things that people are trying to is how can we reinstantiate these polls and how can we renegotiate their needed reintegration? That’s that’s what I’m proposing to you. I think what you say about televangelists and megachurches is very true. And I first have to say something about Protestantism. Yeah, I’m sorry, I was just an observation. It seems that most of the television, it’s it’s dead on. OK, dead on. OK. I first have to say something because these are fundamentally Protestant. And that’s not incidental. Yes, and I know a lot of what I say, the Catholics and the Orthodox cheer and Protestants sort of squirm. But hey, we’re supposed to make our own people squirm. So I remain a Protestant. But you know, what is it I read in the substack I wrote today? I referenced a tweet that Jonathan made in July of twenty twenty, where he said, If you want to build a civilization, you cannot do so on words like dark rebel and heterodox by using these identifiers. You can criticize existing systems effectively, but you will never build anything of value and coherence part of Protestantism right there in the word is the protest. Yeah. And and I’ve said often at some point the protest needs to end because it itself, like Jonathan pointed out, is a reactive, it’s hopefully reactive in the spirit of reformation that the goal is not to build a new church and this is what the reformers wanted. And of course, Luther, you know, when he starts, he’s an he’s a faithful, loyal Augustinian monk that says to the church, I’ve got these ninety five points. I’d like to have a deal logos with with my other colleagues. But the political was, you know, anyway, it’s the Protestant Reformation. So televangelists are clearly. Protestants saw the potential. Of mass communication, yes, and many were corrupted by it. Roman Catholic Church is interesting because they’ve, you know, they they’ve also become quite savvy mass communication users. And we’ve seen that in the 20th century and and Bishop Barron is very effective now. Social media missionary, let’s say. But mega churches have become. So mega churches are a tiny fraction of the churches in North America, but a majority of Christians in North America worship in mega churches. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, my conversations, I should probably have another one with Dr. James Wellman from University of Washington, who has studied mega churches. I had one conversation with him on my channel so far, and I referenced his book. On one hand, he looks at mega churches and says these are the now he’s speaking from a particular perspective, of course, these are the most effective churches in North America, of course, you can ask effective at what? Yes, what he points to is that they actually they have way more bank than their buck in terms of social benevolence than than mainline or traditional churches. And they do a lot of things effectively. They also tend to invite corruption and let’s say catastrophe at a very high level. But one of the things that a lot of people don’t realize about mega churches is that when mega churches are done effectively, what they actually breed are small little groups within them. Yeah. So there’s a there’s a there’s a former member of my church. So when people leave my church, they either go to no church or they go to a mega church, that’s usually one of the two paths. And so a friend of mine who left this church a number of years ago went to a mega church, joined that mega church, he and his wife start, you know, went to a small group in that mega church because that’s made that’s mega church practice that once they come in, everybody needs a small group. So they organize people in small groups. It’s very interesting because as a small group, they all left that mega church. And as a group, they started plugging into other mega churches. Right. So you have a church within a church and and and it circulates between other mega churches. That’s right. And the mega church. And this gets into the social media dynamic because. On one hand, and you and I know this very well because we get the emails on one hand, people that you and I have never met. And to a certain degree between us, we you and I have never shaken hands. That’s right. Yeah, we’ve spoken a fair amount, but people that I have never met and I have never spoken to feel a degree of intimacy with me, it’s always startling, it’s always startling. Yeah, because they see me on this screen. And so on one hand, this medium is highly personal. But highly impersonal, too, but highly impersonal. It’s it’s ephemeral and permanent. It crosses the line between speech and writing that Plato worried about. It crosses the line between impersonal and personal. It crosses the line between public and private. And it crosses the line right now between institution and commons. Right. And and that’s the thing we’re facing. Yep. And this has been happening in churches. That’s that’s my question. No, that’s so fascinating because the televangelist, I mean, people. So it got corrupted and it is corrupted often because people send in money. Now, I don’t know that Livingstone’s church would have made it through the pandemic if it hadn’t been for the donations of people who have never visited this place. I’m grateful for that, but they watch me. And so now it’s a small and so it’s not corrupting the local members still out give the the those who get. But that could change. And when that changes. We don’t know. And, you know, you said the same thing. Let’s let’s say and I know no ill will against University of Toronto. Let’s say at some point, I’ll just use my example. I it would part of the reason that this has worked at Livingstone’s is because this is a very small church and this has always been a very generous church. And they’ve always been generous with me. Yeah. And so they share me with the world. But it would it would be I in almost any other church that I would work in. I would expect the leadership of the church to say, how much time do you spend talking to people on the Internet? Yeah. How much of your attention are you devoting to these people out there that are not giving a dime to this church? So all you are our employee. You know, whatever good you might be doing out there, we don’t care. We own you market again. You’re our employee. We pay you to service us. And the only reason this has worked is because this church says, no, we do pay you, but we pay you to work in God’s kingdom. So God’s kingdom is the all that’s wonderful. We will share you with the all. And but there there, you know, there could come a day when there might be a new pharaoh at Livingstone’s. And they say to Paul, you know. We pay you to care for us. You’re our pastor, not the pastor of the IDW or the religion, the religion or what have you. So so and and and I would probably at this point, just by virtue of the way the Christian Forum Church works, ordination, all those details matter. I would probably say I’ll probably find a church that will call me to do this ministry and it will pay for itself. But. As you and I well know, I mean, let’s say, let’s say you got four or five times the viewers that you get now. Money starts coming in with Patreon. Money starts coming in from Google Analytics. Now you’re getting you can fill up. You can fill up nine months of your year doing touring junkets, speaking to groups. Now suddenly, John Vervecky is a brand. So I want to two points about that, first of all, thank you for sharing that because I’m like you right now, because I’ve always and it’s been sincere. I’ve always spoken well of the U.F.T. My fame and U.F.T.’s reputation have gone up together. Yep. And that’s even had an impact on people trying to get into the cognitive science program and it’s sort of it’s it’s known but not acknowledged, which is a strange thing, but I think I see. The real possibility, I there definitely seems to be a growth arc. And so I don’t know about four or five times, but moving in that direction, it seems probable. And and I kind of yeah, I expect that that conversation you just made sort of in your imagination, I expect I’ll be having it. I have two things that I can sort of put up. One is I’m close to retiring and I’m bringing a lot of people in. So you can just leave me alone. I’m hoping that I’m hoping that will happen. The other one is and this this this will be more this will be more fraught. And I hope I don’t have to do it. But it’s like you’ve got to have a consistent policy. You are rewarding people who are activists within the academy by giving them often jobs ahead of the usual sort of tenure like they’re getting a prioritization, which is again part of the religious, the religiosity around this. And it’s like, why am I not an activist? Right. Why can’t you see it that way? Because I’m talking about stuff that isn’t this particular activism. But then aren’t you distinguishing between activism and indoctrination in some important way, and if not, you know, that’s kind of the conversation. I hope I don’t have to have, but I fear I might have to have. And I’m worrying about that. And before everybody jumps on this, I’m not opposed to, you know, the the goals of the university, like we should be really trying to make, you know, discrimination should not be a factor at all in people’s education. I just want to say that. And people who know me, I was I was like I was encouraging that way only before it became an official university policy. So this is not something I’m jumping on a bandwagon about. But I’m talking about a particular overarching thing that’s happening. And so I do worry that my because my activism isn’t on brand, if I can put it that way, but is directed towards a problem other than the problem of racism again, just to be clear, I think it’s a problem. We need to address it. I happen to think there are other problems. And I think I happen to think that these other problems are causing as much, if not more, suffering. That’s a reasonable thing to say, I hope. Right. And I want to address that problem because that’s where my expertise can be effective. Right. And so why doesn’t that act is if the point of activism is ultimately to reduce suffering, mine should count too. I expect if I make that argument, I’ll lose because the circumstances in which the argument would be held would be one in which I’m destined to lose. But I’m hoping that that one’s later and closer towards retirement. And it’s just like and, you know, and that’s a completely selfish answer because that’s only due to my particular idiosyncratic position. It’s not true of my son who’s finished teachers college and is going to be a high school science teacher. He’s starting his career and he’s facing all of this. In powerful ways. So again, I wish I wish I wish I had something to say to this other than to say, you know. I feel encroaching pressures on me that I would not have felt thought I would feel five years ago. And I could easily remove the pressures by just saying, well, I’ll just withdraw into the academy and I’ll be quiet and I’ll keep my head down and I’ll just try and do a really good job, but like you, I can’t do that in good conscience. I can’t do that in good conscience. But on the other hand, I don’t want to be automatically associated with everything in social media because I think a lot of it is sewage, right? To put it mildly. And so. I want I really would like somebody who had some wisdom about this would say, John, we have for thousands of years wrestled with this profound problem. And here are the parables and here is the philosophy. And instead. And I certainly can’t take that role. And I’m not requesting that you do either be unfair to you. I feel like I’m almost engaging in a biblical lamentation here. It’s like this is really important and I don’t know what to do about it. And I can’t I can’t divest myself of responsiveness and responsibility to it. And so that’s sorry, I’m using a lot of words to just basically do that. That’s what keeps coming up for me again and again and again. And when I, you know, and when I want like what David Fuller worries about this and I think there’s you can see this in Jordan Peterson and the televangelist, I think, and the megachurch are instances of audience capture. Yes. And I worry about that. And so it’s like what relationship do I like? I have in you, I know, you know, don’t have a I have constant pressure from Twitter and other things, be more responsive, answer me, talk to me. And he doesn’t believe in his principles because he’s not talking to me. And it’s like, I can talk to everybody like, come on. That’s like you’re not being like you’re being really individualistic and egocentric. Like I try, but like I can’t. Right. And so it’s like I one way, I guess, in which this cashes out for me is I don’t know. I feel there is a real responsibility to my audience, but I don’t know what the wise and virtuous way to undertake that responsibility is. I don’t want to be caught in audience capture, but I don’t want to be also unresponsive. There’s no model in the televangelist and the megachurches are exactly not the model. That’s the point I’m trying to make. And I. Part of it is that. You know, I listen to the evolutionary biologists and it’s like, yeah, we weren’t quite made to have our Dunbar number exploded like it has been. Yes. Yeah. I you know, OK, I little little church of, you know, so yes, there are. I say it on my channel often. There are days that I want to delete my YouTube channel and delete. I delete all my accounts. I’m going to go back to being the being the pastor of Living Stones on Florin Road. And you’re going to shut it all up. I can’t do that. Can’t do that. Well, I hope you don’t. I would miss you. I would miss you tremendously. Well, but then but then, you know, so then I’m pastor of Living Stones, plus John Verbeke, plus John. So plus plus the high status individuals that I have created first, because that’s what happens when you go up a hierarchy. Yes. Now Jordan Peterson and this is nothing against him. Now he can with Joe Rogan visit Elon Musk’s house. Yes. Or, you know, or, you know, become friends with Barack Obama or, you know, and not I don’t want to put a political balance on any of this, but just to say that part of and so I part of the reason I keep my randos cal and lead line open and I want to talk to random people on the Internet, not selected by me, is because that is a grounding practice, but I have to in a sense have it be a token practice because I can’t talk to Randall’s all the time and not at the same time serve the larger function. Yeah, I try to do something similar. Yeah, that I try to talk to people, you know, of high status on voice with Reveke. But I also try to talk to people who are emerging in the communities and people who are in the trenches of trying to deal with this, if I can put it that way. So I try to do something similar. So I think I think I think I interrupted you. But the Institute. So this is where this is where I think part of the realities of, let’s say, mega churches aren’t so bad because most people who are not involved in the church world, they hear about the mega churches with Hillsong or high balls. But there are actually thousands of mega churches that are actually doing at least better work. Tell evangelists that’s a whole other story. But part of the crisis of both mega churches and televangelist is again the crisis of institutions because institutions are these. These beings, you know, the hyper objects or whatever we want to. Yeah, we want to construe them spirits even. They are these beings that are designed to to handle a lot of these things. We just don’t have the institutions form institutions almost always get corrupt, but are almost always set up to resist corruption. OK, so that that I think that’s OK, that’s really good. And then I would say that that that hole is being filled not necessarily well, but it’s being filled by audience capture. And so what you’ve got is audience capture is doing that kind of self perpetuation cycle and setting up the creedal boundaries, right, that institutions. But David’s right about that, I think, in that that there’s something problematic about that with respect to this medium. So I don’t think that. And first of all, I’ve been trying to resist that in it, right, because first of all, I’ve been I’ve been trying to do as much like where the material is being presented collaboratively as I possibly and dialogically and not as an individual. And then also creating these these overlapping relationships. You and I agree on a lot of things. We disagree on other things and so on and so forth. And also doing the circulation series. Come on your series. You come on like I do that. Also, I’m experiencing with experimenting with the medium to try and prevent audience capture being the dominant thing. And I’m trying to and I don’t know. I’m trying to is there a way to bleed audience capture into this corner of the Internet so that it becomes something like what you’re talking about, like like an institution, but it but its purview and its complexity is beyond that of audience capture. That does that make sense as a proposal? Yes, it does. And I well, a couple of things. Number one, we will fail because we will fail. Number two, even what when we when we talk about the success that we’ve had so far, yeah, has been it hasn’t been institutionalized in terms of a hard or formal institution. But I think the best way to understand it is, in fact, there’s a spirit that we are sharing in this little corner of the Internet. Yes, I think that is well said. And it is a spirit. So it’s it’s something we are participating in. It’s nothing that any one of us controls, but God and I mean literally. And it’s but but that’s I think that’s the right conceptualization of it. And and it’s in many ways, I think all of us would say it’s a gift to us. None of us had it and has given it to the other. It’s something we all discovered, received. It’s something that has to be nurtured and protected. And I think we all have senses of propriety and respect by which, you know, we want to be careful with what we say and we want to hold with with respect. We’re not going to sabotage each other’s reputations, you know, all of this stuff. But at some point there and this is, you know, so when I talked to Jordan and Tammy in Santa Rosa, one of the things that I really challenged Jordan on, because this is what I didn’t challenge him very hard, but this what when I tried to explain what I was doing sort of downstream of his work, I said, you know, what one of the things that I’ve seen is there needs to be some institutional thinking down the line that and of course, because of my background in church, an institution that can sort of hold people. Yes, and create spaces and facilitate because churches mean a lot of different things and churches have a lot of different functions. But one of the one of the things that church does, it’s a it’s the ecclesia. It’s the gathering. Yes. And so to create a space to facilitate, of course, that’s where for me, estuary comes comes in. But so, you know, Jordan, of course, sort of there was a spirit that created, you know, just kind of broke something open and then there’s all things all over the place and as a pastor, what is a pastor? He gathers, you know, wandering sheep. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. That’s wonderful. I’m going to start to gather some of the wandering sheep that after Jordan Peterson exploded some of the existing walls, I start gathering, wandering sheep and let’s create spaces. And so I think and when I first announced estuary, there was a there was sort of a rush. People are like, are you going to start estuary, Inc.? And I said, no, I would rather have estuary be an institution more like a than Tony Robbins inspirational speaker. I don’t want it to be the I don’t want it to be Paul VanderKlay, Inc. Yeah, I get that totally. Totally. And so and so I think I think, you know, now, especially after we’ve had this interesting, it’s a strange word to use for it, but a Sabbath created by Covid. Yes. And I mean that in terms of the the the Hebraic Sabbath, it’s a pause without a covid pause of some of the busyness. But I think maybe now it’s time to continue to talk along the lines of, you know, institutions. We have to be thinking institutionally with respect to these things because institutions, both that they are, they’re they’re susceptible to corruption because they are holding things and organizing things and ordering things. But they also, you know, part of the reason that you sometimes see less corruption in small churches and old churches is because we have all of these practices about identity and money and other ways that we relate to each other and and it’s probably going to be, you know, these kinds of new practices and orders and relationships that we’re going to have to figure out in the light of this mass disruption that the Internet is bringing to our world. So I want to reply to that as deeply as I can, because, first of all, although I would never apply the title of pasture to myself, I have been doing something similar about gathering people after the Jordan Peterson shockwave. And I was even doing that before the Peterson shockwave because it was happening within the university for me. And so so I definitely feel. I definitely feel a deep similarity empathy with you there. For me, I guess. I something that’s sort of emerging in my thinking right now as I’m talking to you about this, because I think I want to propose something to you, but we’ve been noting how much this medium blurs boundaries. That have been long standing and almost archetypal for us. And if you note, I agree with you. I’m saying I feel all this pull towards institutionalization and the reintegration. I totally acknowledge that. But I also see something else. And this is why I think David’s hesitant about audience capture. And also notice whether or not it’s his motives or not. Elon Musk’s justification is he wants to create. He basically wants to create the commons and see there’s always been this thing other than the institution, which is the commons. And this is something that Jordan Peterson has been not Jordan Peterson. Jordan Hall has been talking a lot about that. We’ve lost the commons and the commons was this was this other place of distributed cognition that was outside and it was sort of literally the earliest, the earliest version of the secular because it was outside. Literally often outside the institutions, the buildings of the institutions, if I can put it that way. And so I think. One way this I’m starting to well, right now, literally right now, the logos, the logos, right, is I think this medium is blurring and needs to blur because it’s calling in both directions. It needs to blur the hard distinction we’ve had between the institution and the commons. It wants both the institution and the commons and it wants and I propose that can happen chaotically and messy and adversarially, or we might be able to configure it in opponent processing like it has done in the past where. And so. I guess I’m proposing that to you as something to consider. I think this medium is it’s it’s it’s hungry for form, like I say, voracious for form, and it is I think I and I’ve argued for it with you here that I think there are definitely these polls towards creating multiple institutions and integrating them, so that’s going on. But I think there’s I think there’s an important counterpull towards the commons. And because this medium blurs all of these boundaries, I think it’s highly plausible that it’s trying to blur that boundaries, trying to create a bleed between them and that we there are multiple ways in which that could be configured. And I’m proposing that given my other work. That an explicit opponent processing model might be the most appropriate way of relating the institution and the commons together. I think that’s that’s I think that’s really good. And I hadn’t I hadn’t really until this conversation, I hadn’t really pondered. I was going to participate with you. I’ve never done anything with Jordan Hall, and I was going to do it with you and Jordan Hall on the Stoa. And I in my dyslexia, I messed up the time zone and I missed that meeting. And it was about commons. And I was very excited about that because I think you’re right that. That I think you’re exactly right in the point you just made. And I’m connecting it right now to so rebel was just an interesting conversation with Mary Harrington and Paul Kingsnorth. And, you know, Paul Kingsnorth made the point that part of what the machine does is it’s always it’s always basically it’s always fencing. Yes, you you you you fence the commons, you destroy the commons in a sense. Yes. And and, you know, one of the interesting things is that the you know, so my my my brother in law who who who was married to my deceased sister is a his family is a member of Park Street Church, Park Street Congregational, which is right on the Boston Commons. And, you know, in a New England village, you had the commons, which today now is merely a park. But in the past, it was where sheep would graze and it was it was the commons. And then, of course, the church was right there. You had the commons and you had the town square. The square is always sort of a commons. Yes, but it’s more. Yeah. Yeah. And so then the church was, you know, that all these things were sort of next to each other. And you’re really right in that part of part of, you know, government, government is having fits trying to figure out what to do with the Internet, obviously, yeah, because it has no borders. And that’s the great wall. Firewall of China makes a border around. So, no, that’s really good, John. And when I think about estuary, estuary is very much a blurring because I’ve always said as story has to be outside of church, yes, yeah, it’s it’s out, you know. And so it is, you know, it is the freshwater that so Eden for Peugeot Eden is up on the mountain. The city of God is up on the mountain. The rain comes down, but then it flows down the hill, then down, of course, towards the ocean. But but before it gets to before it becomes salt water, it’s a space of salt and fresh. And of course, estuaries are one of the most productive ecosystems that we have. They’re critically, vitally important. So, no, I’m going to have to that’s going to be one of my real takeaways from this deal logos thinking more about because I think you’re right in terms of the spirit of this little corner and what’s nice about corners are that they’re they’re half wall and half common. Yeah, I thought that’s beautiful. It wasn’t that a great name she gave. Yeah, yeah. It’s so it’s turning out to be just symbolically rich and deep. Yeah. So, I mean, she’s always making great contributions, but whatever else those contributions are, that naming and hashtagging of of this corner, we are forever in Sevella’s debt. I think for me and I mean this seriously, that was one of the first sacred art acts. This was an act of sacred art. Her naming, it’s almost Adamic. Right. She’s almost like Adam. Like she’s naming something into existence. It’s a work of art. It’s a work of polices. And it’s obviously it is in its very nature. It’s obviously meant to be taken symbolically. Like you’re not looking for any kind of literal corner. That makes no sense in the Internet. So I’m really grateful for her having done that. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think I think there’s a deep connection between corner and the interplay between. I’m seeing the apex of the corner as the institution and then the openness as the commons and then the estuary is like the bleeding and the blending of them together. If you sit and you watch an estuary, I mean, tides come in, tides go out. You’ll have rain will you’ll have times where it’ll be flushed with fresh water, times when the salination will be higher. It’s a very living ecosystem. It’s also a zone of high evolutionary turnover because it requires creatures that can adapt to a much more unstable and much more polarized environment. Yeah, some very, very powerful ways. That’s very, very good. See, this is also what needs to happen. What’s happening right now, what we’re exemplifying, right? An emerging understanding that’s not just conceptual, but is resonating with some of the spontaneous art and poesis that is emerging for trying to coalesce all of this together. Yeah, that. Yeah, that’s very, very powerful, very, very powerful. Well, maybe that’s a good place for us to stop, maybe. Yeah, unless you’ve got something else. But that but I wanted to I wanted to because I’ve been watching you and listening to you and it’s like he’s going through the same thing I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I and. There are lots of young influencers who are out there in Internet land, creating brands, you know, accumulating clout, and I watch this younger generation. Both you and I know the world without the Internet. Yes, we do it. Yeah, it formed us. We were formed prior to the Internet. But now we see people who are being formed by the Internet. And maybe we’re just getting old, but we’re looking and saying. Yeah, you know, and the meaning crisis is not simply a product of the Internet, but I think in many ways, the Internet is an intensifier and accelerant for sure and accelerant. Yeah, so I think as you know, as both of us who love our institutions, I love the church and you love the Academy, I mean, that’s clear. And both of us are have been successful within our spheres and we know them well. And in and both will, you know, both will continue to be morphed. There’s there’s something that there was there was something of the Academy before there was the Academy that, of course, became instantiated and and now church is this very ancient institution. But, you know, we’re we’re undergoing these transformations. And I wanted to I wanted to get this out there. And I and I will I’ll send you a copy of this. And I’m going to I’m going to send a copy of this to David. I’ll probably post this tomorrow. But I’m going to send a copy of this to David and say, hey, take a look at this and I know he’ll be interested in it. There’s Fuller and and then maybe I’d love to hear what he has to say about this. And maybe then the three of us will will continue to talk about this because this this needs to be a part of what this little corner of the Internet can perhaps give to the next generations to yeah, to think through what this is going to you know, and Peter Lindbergh, I mean, what Peter is doing with the stoia. Yes, very much. Yeah, very much, very much the same sort of thing. Yes. And yeah, perhaps including him in the conversation as well would be very good. Yeah. And so we’ve sort of come full circle, but not not a vicious circle, a virtuous circle, because the idea of this little corner of the Internet being an exemplifying spirit, a, you know, like I said, a beacon in some way. And so I’m also thinking of there being a light in the apex of the corner shining out and it attenuates, but you can’t draw the line of attenuation in any fashion. And it’s a very neoplatonic image. So I’ll end there with that and just say, well, thank you very much. Please include me in the future conversations. I very much like to talk with David Wishes, the three of us, maybe also with Peter, the four of us. However, this sort of progresses, I do want to be involved in this because for me, it’s like it’s a Kierkegaardian point where the deeply personal and the deeply impersonal are deeply relevant to each other. And those are those are kind of existential kairos and you have to treat them with great care because you can just absorb the in and become inflated and egocentric. You can just dissipate out and then not actually meet your personal responsibilities, your calling, as Kierkegaard might put it. Right. So, yeah, I wanted to go. I want I guess I say I want the help of all of you in trying to negotiate this as virtuously as possible because I do feel a pregnant ignorance that I can’t respond to by doing what I often do, which is, well, I’ll just move away from there because I’m ignorant. I can’t do that. I can’t do that here. I can’t do that here. Well, and part of the I mean, part of why I won’t give this up is because when I started this, I thought, oh, what’s going to happen in the comments section? Because, you know, you heard just tales of you just seeing Internet YouTube comments section that were horrible. And very quickly after I started my channel, I was I was gleaning wisdom. Yes. Yes. From the commenters and the people who came to me and the people who sent me emails and the people I was having randos conversations with and the people on the Discord server, it was no, this is the yeah, there’s there’s there’s jeopardy and and and that’s the yes, there is. But there’s also wealth and beauty. And and I have been, you know, even even if nobody ever gave a dime to to Living Stones or Patron or anything like that, even if nobody ever gave a dime, I’ve been so richly blessed by, you know, hundreds and thousands of people who have I mean, it struck me when you’d always end Awakening from the meaning crisis. Thank you for your time and attention. I stole that. But it’s so right. I mean, people, when people give you their attention, it’s it’s a little tiny act of worship in a in a certain sense and and the potential of this. I’ve I’ve grown enormously both from, you know, from you, from Jonathan, from Jordan, but but also from Sam and Paul and Lightner and how many people out there that you and I have now gotten to know. Yes, yes. Through this. Yes, very much. Very much. Yeah. Great gift. It’s been a great gift. It is. All right. So maybe we’ll we’ll land the plane here and we’ll continue this and I’ll contact David and I’ll send you a copy of this and I’ll contact Peter, too. And we’ll see, you know, we’ll see what develops. And I’m sure there’ll be more conversations. Excellent. Thank you for this, Paul. OK, John, it’s so good to talk to you again. Really wonderful. OK, take care. Bye bye. Bye bye.