In this conversation, PF Jung and I trace the line from the 2016 Jordan Peterson explosion to the strange moment we’re in now — a moment where many young men look at Peterson’s “Daily Wire era” and feel the shock of a cultural father who seems to be collapsing under the weight of his own contradictions.

We talk about what it means to laugh at the fallen father versus what it means to cover his shame — a theme that emerges right at the start of the episode when we discuss the shift from the playful, truth-oriented Peterson of the early lectures to the embittered, hyper-political version many see today.

From there, the episode moves into the deeper symbolic and psychological machinery underneath:

• Dark Centrism — PF’s own model, a circle of dots “all equidistant from the center but all out on the extremes,” an attempt to honor the good ideas on the fringes without becoming captured by any single tribe.

• Identity cycling — the pattern of moving from evangelical → atheist → woke → reactionary → centrist without ever crossing the “wall” that stops the protest-loop.

• Why intelligent, high-openness people struggle to form a stable identity — the temptation to “try on” new isms, new selves, new aesthetics, without integrating them into a personhood that can endure.

• Liberalism’s limits — using Peterson’s own lectures to show how hyper-individualism fails without nested identities and social structure.

• The covenantal stack — Adam, marriage, house, tribe, nation, kingdom, church — as a counter-vision to individualist liberal anthropology.

• The “memetic feudal hierarchy” — why ideas don’t spread virally but travel through respected leaders, pastors, and digital figures who act as vassal-lords in a medieval-like ecosystem.

• The digital-medieval return — the idea that podcasting and online discourse have reintroduced testimonial culture, digital pastors, and new forms of communal authority.

• Peterson as catalyst for religious re-entry — and why young people are turning to various Christian traditions but hitting the barrier of intra-Christian disagreement.

The father theme returns when PF describes using Peterson’s own early principles — the Geppetto/Osiris archetype, the need to rejuvenate the father — to critique Peterson’s current persona.

This isn’t a takedown of Peterson.

It isn’t hero worship either.

It’s an honest look at what happens when a generation builds its first symbolic structure around a father who later falters — and what it takes to separate the wheat from the chaff without losing the truth that changed you.

If you’ve lived anywhere in the wake of the Peterson phenomenon — fascinated, helped, burned, confused, or still searching — this episode sits directly inside that experience.