Gratitude Without Loyalty
In How My Mind Changed, I was trying to tell the truth about the route I took, not the version that would make me look best. That meant admitting I did not emerge from my twenties as some pristine angel of epistemology, glowing with nuance and excellent podcast hygiene. I moved through the same ugly rooms a lot of people did. I consumed bad political content. I absorbed bad assumptions. I mistook confidence for seriousness. I treated borrowed certainty as if it were thought.
Part of that essay’s point was that a mind does not usually change all at once. It changes through pressure, accident, illness, friendship, media, boredom, shame, love, and the slow discovery that some of your most strongly held beliefs are just old furniture you never chose but kept walking around. My MS diagnosis mattered. My growing dependence on audio mattered. My best friend mattered. The glut of podcasts, audiobooks, and long conversations mattered too. In that earlier piece, I named Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris as part of the sequence. That was accurate then, and it is still accurate now.
What I want to add now is a clarification, or maybe a correction in tone.
They mattered. That does not mean they were right. It certainly does not mean they deserve loyalty.
The Door Was not the Destination
Rogan was useful to me once, which is now an embarrassing sentence to type in public, but here we are. I am not interested in pretending that every influence I later outgrew must have been worthless from the beginning. That is too clean. Too self-protective. Too much like rewriting the evidence after the verdict.
At the time, The Joe Rogan Experience was a step away from worse things. Compared with the right-wing content I had been consuming before, Rogan’s show felt more open, more various, less obviously trapped in one outrage machine. He brought on scientists, fighters, comedians, writers, hunters, nutrition obsessives, conspiracy cranks, and people with expertise that ranged from serious to decorative. The range itself was part of the appeal. For someone trying to leave a narrower media diet, even a flawed room can feel larger than the one you were in.
He also got me interested in Brazilian jiu-jitsu back when I could walk well enough for that to be part of my life in a more physical way. I valued his knowledge of martial arts. I still do. That is one of the weird things about influence. It does not arrive in clean moral units. A person can help you discover something real and still be, in other important ways, a terrible guide.
I never had the illusion that Rogan was the brightest bulb in the drawer, a place where no one should be storing bulbs anyway. The whole appeal was not that he was brilliant. It was that he seemed curious. He could sit there for three hours and ask questions. For a while, that felt like enough.
Then I heard him talk to Nick Bostrom.
Bostrom appeared on episode #1350 of The Joe Rogan Experience in September 2019, and one of the topics was the simulation argument. Very briefly, Bostrom’s argument is a trilemma: either civilizations like ours almost never reach a stage where they can run high-fidelity ancestor simulations, or civilizations that can run them usually choose not to, or a very large share of minds like ours are simulated. You do not have to buy the argument. I do not sign on to everything Bostrom has ever said. The point is not that the simulation hypothesis is obviously true. The point is that the shape of the argument is not hard to understand.
Bostrom kept making it simpler. Then simpler again. He offered smaller examples, smaller conceptual steps, smaller handholds. Listening to it, I remember having the awful realization that Rogan was not merely disagreeing. He was not wrestling with a subtle objection. He just was not getting it.
There are moments when a public figure’s limitations become visible all at once, like a cheap set finally showing the plywood behind the window. That episode did that for me. What I had taken for curiosity began to look more like momentum. Rogan could keep a conversation moving, but movement is not the same thing as understanding. A Roomba also explores a room. It does not mean the Roomba has developed a worldview.
After that, the broader pattern became harder to miss. Rogan’s skepticism often seemed to run in only one direction. He could be credulous toward the right guest, the right theory, the right anti-establishment mood. Over time, the show felt less like open inquiry and more like a massive arena where “just asking questions” became a ritual cleansing phrase for bad reasoning.
I stopped listening long ago. The later politics did not shock me so much as confirm the trajectory. By 2024, Rogan had endorsed Donald Trump, which felt less like a surprising turn than the destination blinking on the GPS after years of ignoring better exits. Maybe I should have seen it sooner. Maybe the signs were always there. What changed was not only Rogan. What changed was my ability to notice what I had once been willing to excuse.
Better Dressed, Same Swamp
Jordan Peterson is a different case, partly because he is clearly not stupid. That makes his decline more frustrating, not less.
When I first encountered him, he seemed like an upgrade from the shallow outrage merchants I had been listening to. He spoke about responsibility, meaning, narrative, psychology, literature, mythology, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jung, totalitarianism, suffering, and the moral seriousness of getting your life in order. Some of that was useful to me at the time. I was newly diagnosed. I was scared. I was trying to figure out how to keep moving. “Clean your room” may be reductive, but reductive advice can still arrive at the right moment.
The trouble is that the advice had limits I could not see at first. Peterson’s emphasis on individual responsibility helped me stand up, but my diagnosis also made it impossible to ignore luck. I had a family safety net. I had support. I had time. I had resources. I had people around me who could help. A great many people with chronic illness have none of that. The lesson could not simply be “take responsibility.” The lesson had to become “take responsibility while also noticing the enormous structure of luck underneath your feet.”
I moved past Peterson fairly quickly in that sense. At first, I moved past him philosophically. Later, I moved past him aesthetically, emotionally, spiritually, and in whatever category contains “I cannot listen to another hour of this man explaining Western civilization like a haunted substitute teacher trapped in a comment section.”
He has credentials. He has read books. He can make connections. That is part of why the whole thing is so annoying. Peterson is not Rogan bouncing off an idea he cannot grasp. Peterson can grasp plenty. The problem is that, over the years, he has dived headfirst into the right-wing culture-war weeds and built a permanent residence there. His current home in the Daily Wire ecosystem is not incidental; it is part of the shape of his public life now.
The result is exhausting. Everything becomes civilizational collapse. Everything is decadence, ideology, resentment, weakness, chaos, or apocalypse. There is a kind of mind that starts with genuine insight and then discovers that indignation is a renewable energy source. Peterson seems to have plugged himself directly into that grid.
Calling him a better dressed Rogan is unfair in several technical ways. Peterson has more vocabulary. Rogan has more elk meat. Peterson has a deeper bookshelf. Rogan has more kettlebells. Peterson can construct elaborate symbolic cathedrals out of myth and psychology. Rogan can ask whether ancient people maybe had lasers. These are different men.
Still, I am keeping the phrase because it captures something emotionally true. Both became, in their own ways, examples of the same danger: the guide who starts as a way out and becomes another room to get trapped in.
The One I Still Return To
Sam Harris is the least problematic of the three, though that is not the same thing as saying he is above criticism. He has blind spots. He can veer too far into culture-war territory. He is not always quick enough, or plain enough, when the moment calls for admitting he was wrong. His confidence can be useful when he is cutting through confusion, but it can become irritating when the same confidence hardens around a bad frame.
Still, Harris remains meaningfully different for me.
The first major crack in my attachment to Peterson came through Harris, specifically their 2017 conversation “What Is True?” Harris and Peterson spent much of that conversation tangled in the definition of truth, and at the time my tribal reflex was to defend Peterson. That reflex did not survive contact with the actual exchange. Harris seemed to be arguing for something much clearer and more stable, while Peterson sounded, to me, like he had wandered into the postmodern fog he usually claimed to despise.
That mattered. Not because Harris became my new guru. I do not want one. Gurus are spiritually expensive and rarely come with a good return policy. It mattered because he helped expose a weakness in someone I had been inclined to defend.
Where Harris has remained valuable, though, is not primarily politics. It is meditation. Attention. Consciousness. Nonduality. The strange and ordinary fact that the self, when examined closely enough, does not appear in the way we assume it does. His Waking Up app has brought together teachers and conversations across meditation, philosophy, and psychology, and that work has been genuinely important to me.
This is where I still find him useful. When Harris talks clearly about looking for the self, about the immediacy of experience, about the possibility of awareness not being owned by the little narrator in the skull, he is often at his best. More importantly, he has introduced me to teachers and traditions I might not have encountered as easily otherwise. Whatever criticisms I have of him elsewhere, that part of the work remains real.
That is probably the key distinction. I do not return to Harris because I need him to be right about everything. I return to the part of his work that points beyond personality. The best of it is not about Harris at all. It is about practice. It is about seeing.
Some Guides Are Temporary
This is the clarification I would add to the original essay now: I was not describing a conversion. I was describing a path.
That path included people I no longer listen to. It included people I now find embarrassing, frustrating, or genuinely harmful. It included people who helped me once and then became examples of what not to become. That does not make the path fake. It makes it human.
A person can help you out of one bad room and still not belong in the next one. A book can matter before you outgrow it. A podcast can open a door and then become unlistenable. An influence can be real without being final.
This feels especially obvious to me now because I have kept changing. I am not the same person who wrote that earlier essay, just as that version of me was not the same person who voted for Trump in 2016, or argued against medical cannabis in high school, or treated politics like a team sport with worse uniforms. I have been changed by disability, by parenthood, by books, by meditation, by losing abilities I thought were stable, by watching my children become themselves, by needing help, by receiving help, by seeing how much of anyone’s life is built on luck.
The old essay was about changing my mind. This one is about changing my relationship to the people who helped change it.
I can be grateful without being loyal. I can say Rogan helped move me away from worse media without pretending he is a serious thinker. I can say Peterson gave me a useful shove at a vulnerable time without following him into the trenches of permanent grievance. I can say Harris has been valuable, especially on meditation and nonduality, while still keeping my own judgment intact.
That may be the most adult position available, which is irritating, because I prefer my moral clarity with more theatrical lighting.
Still, it seems true.
Some people helped me trace a line out of trash. Some of those same people later devolved into caricatures of their worst tendencies. Some were always showing me who they were, and I was not ready to notice. Some still offer something real, provided I do not ask them to offer everything.
They mattered.
Then I kept going.
Still changing
What was I thinking?
Good back then
