Modern Wisdom - #294 - John Vervaeke - Creating A Life Of Meaning & Wisdom

Episode Date: March 13, 2021

John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor at the University Of Toronto. There is a meaning crisis upon us. People are revisiting Stoicism and Buddhism and mindfulness and psychedelics in an attempt to understand themselves and connect with the world around them. John joins me today to try and give us a route out of this trench. Expect to learn the different types of learning, how John would construct a person who is ready to become wise and find meaning, the daily practises that John uses to continue to grow every day, what the relation is between being too cerebral and lacking wisdom and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on all pillows at https://thehybridpillow.com (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out John's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/johnvervaeke/  Follow John on Twitter - https://twitter.com/vervaeke_john  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is John Viveki, he's an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and we're talking about creating a life of meaning and wisdom. There is a meaning crisis upon us. People are revisiting stoicism and Buddhism and mindfulness and psychedelics in an attempt to understand themselves and connect with the world around them. John joins me today to try and give us a root out of this trench. So expect to learn the different types of learning how John would construct a person

who is ready to become wise and find meaning, the daily practices that John uses to continue to grow every day, what the relation is between being too cerebral and lacking wisdom and much more. Just the title of this episode should explain that it was one I was really looking forward to and we get to go so super deep here. The last half or the last third of this episode is some of the most impactful and profound lessons that I've had from a guest. John is a wonderful

thinker. He has this fantastic YouTube series which we talk about and you can find on his YouTube which is linked in the show notes below. So listen to this episode if you enjoy his work which I'm sure that you're going to go and check out the YouTube series. It's 51 hour long lectures so there isn't awful lot for you to get into but I'm very happy to expose you to John Viveki's work because I recently was introduced to him by Tim Bishop and I'm very, very glad that he's in the world. So yes, get ready for this one.

You might need a little bit of caffeine before. But now it's time for the very wise and wonderful John Viveki. John Viveki, welcome to the show. Thanks Chris, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm really, really happy to have you here. I've heard you say that people often study what is most lacking in their lives. Is this true for you with regards to awakening from a meaning crisis? Yeah, it is.

That was when I was in grad school, I had a friend and he said, people went into psychology often to study what they were lacking. And so I study relevance and meaning. And there's, yeah, there's definitely existential truth. I'm very much about trying to understand how we are connected to ourselves to each other to the world in ways that really matter to us and to others. And yeah, that's because I very much suffered my own personal version of a meeting crisis and this task of sifting through all of the available information to find the relevant information

has been something that I've needed to get better at in my own life. So yeah, in some ways, I am the proverbial doctor trying to cure his own disease, yes. You professionalize the personal challenge. I mean, being honest from my side with this show as well very much, I took a big left turn when I just before I started it, and I needed to find answers. I didn't even know what the questions were, but I just wanted some sort of answers, and I think often you can actually end up bearing pretty good fruit from that. One of the things that I've been really interested in over the last couple of years has been

evolutionary psychology, and I find there to be an interesting intersection between your work and that. Given that we're biological creatures, why do we need meaning structures? Like it seems like our default setting as humans is so far away from what's optimal for flourishing and pursuing wisdom and meaning and flow. Like why do we have to do all this work? Is it just a mismatch with our genes being there to make us effective and not happy? Is it a weird quirk of having a phenomenological experience of being like a human? What's going on? Well, there's a lot there. There's two points I'd want to pick up on. There's one is I think

there's an implicit standard, and I don't mean this in any accusatory fashion, is I think there's an implicit standard, and I don't mean this in any accusatory fashion, but I think there's an implicit standard behind your question that I'd like to explicate and perhaps challenge. And then we also face the issue that we are not just biological creatures where cultural creatures,

and that has an important impact. But let's do the first one first. Why does meaning matter so much? Well, we really tried in psychology for 40 years to not deal with meaning, was the behaviorist period, and we thought, no, what we could do is we could just look at observable behavior

and the observable properties of the stimulus and just get those chains and we had Watson and we had Skinner and we had literally a hundred thousand of hours on working with the rats. And it turned out it doesn't work. And that's why there was this thing in the 50 called the Cognitive Revolution. Because by and large, you don't respond to the physical properties of a stimulus. You respond to, well, I'll use it vaguely here and then we'll make it sharp as we go along.

You respond to the meaning. So I can shout fire, which is an acoustic stimulus, and you'll run from the room. You can see yellow flame, totally different stimulus, and you'll run from the room. You can smell the smoke, totally different stimulus, and you run from the room. Why are all the behaviors the same, even though the stimuli are so different in their physical properties, well, because they all mean the same thing to you. But here's the way to get up the meaning. They're all relevant to you in a particular way,

of all the information available to you. This is what you have to get right from the beginning. There is an astronomically vast amount of information available to you at all time, both without in the environment. And within your long-term memory, it's never full. You never go, nope, can't take any more in, right? And so you have a vast amount. And yet out of all of that, you have to do this coordinated search between these two

and zero in on the relevant information. And what's happening right for you or even the, you know, any other organism when in all those instances of the fire is you're grasping the relevant information that it right that you need in order to solve your problems. So you are framing the environment in a particular way. So I want when I say you're responding to the meaning, I don't want you to hear like semantic meaning. I don't want you to hear like semantic meaning. I'm not, that's only one species of what I'm talking about. We do use words to zero in on our attention, but way before and all the other organisms

don't use words, we had to develop the intelligent capacity to pay attention in the right way. And so that ability is fundamentally adaptive. And I don't mean just that it makes us more adaptable. What I mean is how it unfolds is in an adaptive process. So what I've proposed is, and this is following up on the work of Evan Thompson and work up done with other people, that our ability to do that is deeply analogous

to how evolution works. Evolution works by creating a large variation in the population, right? And then it puts selective pressure and it windows it down and then the variation comes out of that again and it windows it down and you get, right? This feedback cycle of reproduction with change. I argue in the theory that I've worked, and I'm talking about this at many levels, complex and recursive, so don't hear overly simplisticly. Your brain is doing the same thing. It's opening up attention for various possibilities.

That's why you get distracted. But it's also slamming your attention in to try and select. That's why you can get fixated. And you're constantly trying to go between fixation and distraction, fixation and distraction, and it's your daily life. And you say, why can't I just get to the perfect place? Because there is no such thing. And that's the standard I want to challenge.

You can get an optimal grip. You can get an equilibrated state for right here, right now, in this environmental context. But all species go extinct to pick up on the biological analogy. There is no final solution to how you should shape yourself to the environment or how you should shape the environment to you. There is no final way. So we have to, I know this sounds paradoxical, but we always have to be perpetually hungry for insight and for that adaptive evolution of our cognitive fittedness to the environment.

And so looking, and one of the things I think we need to give up, and this is where I get into many arguments with a lot of people, we need to give up the idea of perfection as what we're seeking, that what we're trying to do is get to some final state, where like, why is it so difficult? Why can't I just get to the final state where everything works and I have that optimal fit? Well, you would have to be in an absolutely unchanging in all dimensions environment. And you know where you don't absolutely want to be? You don't want to be in that environment.

So you're right, you're basically committed to the fact that relevance realization is an open-ended evolving process. And what I've been trying to do in some of my work, especially with the help of Chris Master Pietro, is to shift our sense of what is most meaningful, what I call sacredness, off of of perfection and onto this ongoing evolution of your evolvability. So that's how I would answer the first part. The second part is, as I said, this isn't just going on biologically, right? Yeah, so biology has shaped me. So I'm a particular size.

So notice my hand is shaped because parts of the environment are shaped so that I can actually pick up Pods for those environment that are graspable to me and I can make tools, right? And so biology and evolution of shaped me But you know what culture does you know culture teaches me how to use objects that is as shaped so we constantly fit together but culture is in standing still either And then you as I just said your own dynamic cognition is constantly doing that too. So I think when you put it that we're cultural beings, you have to see that we are operating... This goes back to Plato. We are operating it, although it's also in modern work by Christopher Honey, great neuroscientists.

We're working at many different scales because adeptivity isn't a one shot deal. There's what's adaptive now, there's what's adaptive a little bit broader contact, what's adaptive, right? And those are in tradeoff relationships, right? So I'm wired to gorge on sugar and fat, and I eat the chocolate cake, but the problem is in this environment, chocolate cake is too available. And so I better look for more long-term goals of health, et cetera.

And so that fact that we exist at multiple levels, that were cultural, and that our adeptivity is unfinished shop. You can't finish it. This is not a finishable project. That's how I would do it. You have to reframen. I had this Alan Watts quote floating around in my head for years and I can't get rid of it. It says, if we are unjuly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether how to live them. Yes, yes, yes. And that process of being and becoming the balance between being tough enough on yourself to motivate further action and delicate and compassionate

enough on yourself to be able to have gratitude for the things that you have done, this to me seems like being comfortable with our sense of lacking wisdom for people who desire wisdom seems to be one of the most difficult things to bear, because it's both the poison and the tonic. Yeah, well, pharmacon, pharmacy, medicine means both poison and medicine, the Greek word. It means both. and medicine, the Greek word. It means both. So, I mean, Socrates talks about this in the symposium, right? We are never wise. We are always lovers of wisdom. If someone says they're wise to you, that's

often very good evidence that they aren't. So, when you love something, love is this weird thing. Like, love is to recognize a lack, but also it gives you, it starts to shape you in your seeking. And part of the trick of love, I think, is taking that lack and right, taking that gap, that whole, that opening, that vulnerability, and shaping it into receptivity, shaping it into sensitivity. Because you're never going to grasp wisdom, but you can progressively learn how to reshape your lack into a sensitive space that's better and better at receiving it. And so I think that the task of being a good bi-law

Sophia, philosopher, a lover of wisdom, is exactly to go through that transformation. And I think that's constant with many of the ways we have to learn how to love. The difficult thing, and I find it personally difficult, I'm not speaking as somebody who's on the other side of this mountain, I'm still very much slogging in the foothills trying to make my way up. But getting from, you know, love as not sort of trying to hold on but hold up, right? And so that you can get

into this reciprocal opening with something or someone. I think that's a big part of this. But that's what I was meaning when I was talking about an optimal grip. This is a term for Marloponti. Like whenever you don't think of yourself when you're observing, let's just do visual perception. You're not static, you move around. So what you do is you move closer to the object if you want more detail, you move farther out if you want the bigger picture. And there's no perfect place to be because you constantly adjusting that according to, well, the needs that you have that are changing and the environment that

is constantly changing. In a similar way, if you'll allow me a bit of a stretch, you have to get an optimal grip on yourself and you have to get an optimal grip on your lack of wisdom so that you come in some sense to start to know yourself in the shaping of your love for wisdom. Is that why you've got your tattoo? Yeah, this one you mean, know thyself? Yeah. Yeah, the one on my back is because I want Socrates constantly behind me. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I keep coming back to that again and again and again and how often I'm going through something over and around this right now where I've found ways in which unbeknownst

to me, I have been inertial. I have not been knowing myself so that I can open up properly to the world. Yeah, that and so that keeps coming. And the secretive sense of this, right? No, thyself isn't to recount your autobiography. We're all wonderful at that. And we glory in it. And we how unique my autobiography is and all that largely full shitty thing we do. But more really it's almost like I say it's not an autobiography. I sometimes say it's more like an operating manual. Like how do I function? How do I work? How am I stuck? How am I ignorant? And even more important, can I get some sense, often, with the help of others, of how I'm self-deceptive? That's what it means to know yourself from the socratic point of view.

If you were to write an Ikea manual, you've just mentioned the operating schedule there. Yeah. And I often, my first ever brief, for the website that came attached with this podcast three years ago, was life doesn't come with an operating manual. Yeah. If you were to do that, Ikea, put it together book. What would the, what would the broad chapters be? What would it look like? The broad chapters would be learning about the different ways in which we learn, the different ways we know. I mentioned the perspective on the participatory, like the procedural and propositional as well.

So learning the ways in which we are intelligent learners and then learning the ways in which the very use of that intelligence makes us vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And then learning how to cultivate an ecology of practices, multi-level, recursive self-organization, checks and balancing and ecology of practices that can ameliorate the really, really complicated and often screwed up dynamical systems that we become. And then paying attention to the dimensionality of that, that this is not just a cognitive task. It's not just coming into a cognitive maturity. This is also, and these are interwoven. We separated them in our culture, but they're not separated in our brain. The way our emotional maturity, what does cognitive maturity look like? What is emotional maturity?

How do those two forms of maturity bump up against each other? How do they afford each other? How do they support each other? How do they interfere with each other? And also existential maturity, which has to do with what you know, what kind of, what I hate, I hesitate to use this with, but what kind of self do you have, we're talking about know that self, what kind of self do you have, what kind of roles is it capable of, how well coordinated are those roles, how much do they conflict with each other, are, how are you getting an optimal grip between,

this is from Velman, being sort of like what he calls a wanton behavior, where you're just acting on impulse, or you're so up here, you're hamlet, and you're reflecting yourself to death, and everybody's dying around you. What kind of, like, are you in between, is yourself getting you in between those two? Is it helping you aspire to a better future self?

Is it, like I said said allowing you to assume the roles that allow you not only to function in a socially or even morally acceptable way but in a way that affords the making of meaning, the making of those real connections. So yeah, I think that's those are the things I put in as the chapters. Yeah, I think that's those are the things I put in as the chapters. Eric and you could construct a fairly good human from that. Eric and you could. Okay, so looking at the meaning crisis that we've got at the moment, I've spoken to a lot of people on the show about breakdowns of tradition and loss of faith in religion and all

of the kind of obvious trope that people getting married later, people starting the challenges of women having to actually make a choice between having a career and having a family now, that is a difficult decision for a woman to make. Moving forward with regards to meaning right now, what's your sort of sense? Because I know that the circles that you speak to are very, very positive. The David Fuller's of the world, the Jordan Hall's of the world. I mean, Jordan's not necessarily positive. He's like, he's sort of cataclystic, cataclysm side of stuff, but it's people who understand what's happening. It's people who have a sense of the direction that we need to go in. I've spent

a lot of time dealing with 18 to 21 year olds on the front door of nightclubs. I've watched a million of those people go in and out. They're fantastic people. They're wonderful. They don't seem to be contemplating a meaning crisis. How do we bridge a gap in a world of TikTok and booty pictures and funny cat videos

of getting people to think about the thing which makes life worth living. Okay, well, first of all, it tends like you were in a different place, because I meet those 18 to 20-year-olds elsewhere, of course, because I'm a university professor. And the courses I teach that have to do with meaning and wisdom are overwhelmingly my most popular courses. And my colleague, Jordan Peterson, when he spoke about that, that's what helped rocket

him to the position. So I think there's good evidence that there is hunger and there's good evidence that there's suffering. Remember, if you don't properly cultivate the gap, it can run and run. We have, you know, that group, even worldwide, it's ameliorated by contextual things, some countries, often countries that are not as well off economically, therefore tend to be more religious. But overall, that group is going through an increase in suicide, increase anxiety disorders, depressive disorders,

increase related phenomena. For all of this connectivity, there's increased sense of loneliness, which is really paradoxical, given what we keep getting told by our culture. given what we keep getting told by our culture. And you see a hunger for religious behavior in these people. They flock to superhero movies, they dress up in costumes, they play endless role playing games. There's the virtual exodus, the escape into virtuality in one way or another to try and find. So they may not be explicitly saying,

I'm suffering from a meeting crisis, but they're showing a lot of the signs that they are. And when you start to give them just the first preliminary vocabulary to start articulating it, this is what I've seen. They get very, very excited about it. And very like, oh, right. In fact, that was one of the most prevalent responses I got from people I still continue to get is like both in my classes and in my series is you gave me vocabulary to talk about this

stuff, right? And sorry, my phone thinks I'm trying to talk to it. Yeah. And so I mean, Chris, Mr. Pietro and I, we published an article in the side view, the journal, where we basically laid out, I'm just giving you a snippet. There's a whole symptomology of stuff that's happening. Positive stuff too. There's positive signs.

These people are way more interested in mindfulness. They're taking up an ancient philosophical practice, stoicism. Stoicism is going through a boom right now, right? Because they're looking for ways to cultivate wisdom. And so yeah, granted, I won't go into the history, but let me say there are perennial problems we face of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. So we will perennially need ecology as a practices that help us deal

with that. And our culture isn't offering wisdom cultivation in any and that's why people are so easily sucked in to conspiratoractuality as Jules Evans talks about it, right? Because they're looking for anything that will give them the discernment they're hungering for. We'll give them some sense of connection and self-transcendence. And so I do think that Jordan Hall is right that we are going through a kind of complexification in our culture, the technology and the communication and globalization that is just putting even more pressure on the perennial problems. It's like an accelerant on those problems that have made it very, very much more urgent for people. So, mean there's there's mounting evidence that Instagram and TikTok are really bad for your mental health. Right. And it's interesting when you went because my son is

didn't that well he's just passed that generation. My younger son is just coming into it. My older son is like 25 my younger son 16 so they're bracketed around this group. And I see them resting with that a lot, that this stuff, it's simultaneously very salient, and at the same time, it's not satisfying. We spoke about this before we started that I wonder how much we can take of the good of social media, the things that you have enjoyed and relish and cherish and the same for myself without so much of the things which makers feel even in the moment moment not great and afterwards retrospectively pretty terrible. And I've also read a lot of existential risk over the last couple of years which fascinates me and terrifies me in equal measure. combine that, which is, I guess, civilization-wide, geologically-wide, interstellarly-wide, with what's happening on an individual level, on a cultural level, locally, in terms of

people not binding to you. I don't know who my next- I don't know my next-door neighbours name. I don't know the person that lives next door to me. That wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. And is it a break point that's coming? Is it the sort of thing that's likely to require a big wall to hit, or is it the sort of thing that's going to slow down gradually? Is civilization the kind of thing that's going to slow down gradually? Or acceleration towards what could be some very, very maladaptive practices for humans, the way that we act, the way that we interact with each other, the things that we value.

Yeah. Yeah. So, when I was going to do awakening for the meeting crisis, I mean, I was being encouraged by people, the videos here is a lot of people said, there's no way people are going to sit through an hour and do 50 of those. And they were wrong. People did. And then communities grew up around it and continue. So, I mean, but on the other hand, to your point, I mean, I won't get, you know, I won't get like millions of views or something like that, that you might get for a cat video or something like that, right?

So I get what you're saying and I'm not trying to be dismissive. I do want to point out though that there is evidence that people are capable and they will seek out deeper, more long-term stuff, even in social media. And so that means there's at least a viable vehicle by means of which we might do what I've been suggesting, which I have this sort of slogan and it's been put to music where I talk about stealing the culture. I don't know. Jordan Hall and other people are better at sort of the economic, socio-political, environmental factors. I do know something about complex systems theory and the Bronze Age collapse of civilization. And there are things that are genuinely very worrying about what we're doing right now. So I think there are too many, how do I say this when

not sounding conspiratorial? There are too many bad faith actors in the social media world. And they're not even human beings. Many of them are just algorithms that like to manipulate us into a narrative mode, like to excite us into outrage, make us feel needy, make us feel insufficient inadequate because then they can sell us ideas and products and manipulate us. And we have increasing evidence that this is at work and increasing evidence that it's what it does is it just takes those self-deceptive patterns within individuals, like individually, and then just accelerates them between individuals collectively, and then people internalize that, and you get all of this crazy stuff happening.

There's so, and I'm not right-wing or left-wing on this, but I have no deep faith in the corporate machinery and corporate culture. There are individuals. I want to be clear about that. I've been approached by businesses, one person said this very well. He said, you know, I'm not just in the bottom line. I mean, for the top line, I do want to make a profit, but I really believe in the meeting crisis and I really want to try and bring what you have to say.

So there are individuals. I don't want to deny or dismiss them because they are. I meet a lot of them. But I think they are the exception that proves the rule, right? That by and large, we are in a situation that's being surrounded by social media that is taking us further and further away from wisdom and starving us more and more for meaning. And so what I mean by steal the culture is,

this vehicle is viable the way the early small, and this is the only way, there's the only dimension along which are making the comparison in which the early Christian communities took shape and started to create a different way in which people could be with each other, different sense of what it was to be a self. I mean, Augustine invents the sense of self,

the interior self that we now think is natural. You can see Kerry's book on it is beautiful, just brilliantly argue. So Christians are creating a new sense of self, a new sense of community, a new whole way of seeing and being, and they're doing it outside the huge manipulative machinery of the Roman Empire until eventually.

As the Roman Empire starts to weaken, that culture takes over. The empire still falls, but that culture then goes on and becomes Christendom, which of course then had its own problems. And again, there is no final state, there is no final solution. So I think the solution is to try and steal the culture.

And that's a long-term intergenerational project, and that's where the work of Zach Stein about we've got to bring back education as a long-term intergenerational project and that's where the work of Zach Stein about we've got to bring back education as a long-term intergenerational project I think is really really pertinent. So that's what I'm that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do something analogous to and I don't mean to set myself up in any other way but I'm trying to do something sort of analogous to St. Paul and to Augustine. Because I don't think we can... So when I was growing up and I'm old, you maybe guys still know it, there was a rock group called the police. Sting came out of that, right? And they have spirits

in the material world, which is a really nostic song, and they have the line in there. There is no political solution and I know people get angry at me when I say this, but I don't think there is a political solution. I think what we need is a cultural solution and that's much more difficult to generate. And I don't think the machinery of the state or the machinery of the market is going to be particularly helpful for that project. I think I agree. I mentioned to you before we started that I often get drawn into conversations

around politics and sort of collectivist. So I, someone commented to you the day saying that they couldn't work out my political standing and I replied and just said good. Like that's the, I don't want to be someone who leads with his group think ideology belief structure first. Getting back to the personal, getting back to the individual, relevance realization is a term that you've popularized. Can you take us through that and why it can cause us problems and also liberation? Oh, well, I was mentioning it earlier and so I was talking about this fact, you know, that the brain is doing this process analogous to evolution, right? Where the way your attention is widening out and getting distracted, introducing variation,

right, and then it zeroes in. And then sometimes when you get sort of, you think you've got a problem framed, and then you realize, and you get an insight, you go, oh, right, I'm looking at it the exact wrong way. I'm finding the, and here's where I want to say, I'm finding the wrong thing salient. I wasn't actually picking up on the relevant information. That's an insight. So this process is like evolution itself, organizing self-correcting insight is your most common experience. When you chain a bunch of insights together and you get the flow experience and people find that optimal. So as I said, this is the core thing, the core difficulty facing us to try to make AI, right? Making an AI that can do great logic and math, we've been able to do that for decades,

decades, getting an AI that can zero in on the relevant information to solve a problem at hand. That's the hard problem. It's often called the frame problem and artificial intelligence. And yet you're doing it right now. Think about how so much is obvious to you. And here's the thing you can rely on in your everyday life. Things being obvious to you. But my job as a scientist is I can't rely on that. I have to try and explain how you do that.

How is it that it's just obvious to you? Right? That when I'm saying you, you know, that I'm talking to you right now. And but also you want to, you know that I'm talking to you right now, and but also you want to, you have a sense that it could apply to people in general, and you're following up on some implications and not others, and you're paying attention to everything I say, but not literally everything I say. Like, how are you doing all of that? And what associations you're calling to mind? But the problem with that, the problem with that,

is that zeroing in. So this is not what you're doing. Your brain isn't checking all of the information to see if it's relevant. So is that, no, is that, no, no, because that would take the rest of the history of the universe. So this is like a Zen Cohen. Somehow you're intelligently ignoring most of the information, overwhelmingly most of this vast amount of information, and zeroing in. And you can't do it perfectly for reasons I've already discussed, but you're really, really good at it. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. That focusing of your attention and ignoring information that makes you so adaptive also means your attention is biased that you sometimes ignore things you shouldn't

ignore. So I go into a place where while people used to do this, but then phones took this away. So this is now disappearing as a death rate. But until phones, this used to be a big deal. People would go into a dark place where they knew flammable glass was dispersed and they needed light. So they would strike a match because they wanted light, and that's relevant, and they didn't pay attention to what they thought was an irrelevant side effect because it normally is, which is the heat of the match. But in that situation, it turned out to be relevant and they blow themselves up. So you have part of wisdom is learning how to improve that relevance realization so that it is better and better at being self-corrective, better at being insightful so that when you have mis-framed things, because you always have to frame things, you always have to frame things. That's relevance realization.

But wisdom is to enhance that so that you get better at being more insightful and cutting through ways in which you might be potentially misframing the situation. Upon hearing your work, because I came to you after going through the rationalist movement, and I hear echoes, I don't really have the, I'm not Elliott Zayukowski's toenail, but I hear things like Bayesian updating or like becoming a Bayesian agent or mental models, the mental modeling view of the world and how we perceive our mental model rather than we actually perceive what's going on in reality.

Sure, sure. Where how much cohesion is there here? Does it sort of move away from the rationalist movement, is the rationalist movement some of the things that you have come upon under different names? Sure, yeah. So, I mean, there's one level at which the version of the Bayesian stuff that I'm interested in is called predictive processing models.

And I'm actually working with two other people right now, Mark Miller and Brett Anderson, to try and integrate relevance realization theory with predictive processing because we think they need each other. And so at the scientific level, that's going on right now and I hope it will be done this year and hopefully published this year. And I think this could be maybe the last sort of big thing I do in my career. I mean, my academic career because I'm getting old. But at the level at which it's taken into popular culture,

I mean, you can't be Bayesian. So if you were to try to be Bayesian, and Gilbert Harmon made this point a long time ago in the 80s in a book called Change in View, if you tried to be Bayesian, right, that's computationally intractable. You'd be combinatorial explosive. You can't do it. Okay. So what we see organisms doing is they're Bayesian with respect to what they find salient or relevant, which then just brings back the question about, okay, how do you do that? That's why you can really piss off a person

from the predictive processing model you asked them, but which model? What do you choose to model? And then they'll do a circular thing, which turns out to be most adaptive, which is a teleological explanation. He's like, yeah, but how do I build a machine that will do that? Right? I get that that's how it works, but how do I build a machine that would do that? How do I update the model? How do I bring insight into the model? How do I

compare models of different scale, right? And so there's all of that. And I suppose that's points to the deeper issue, which is we have to overly simplistic a model of rationality to my mind simplistic a model of rationality to my mind because we have these different ways of knowing and we have we have over limited the model of rationality to the logical right implication relations between propositions. We've limited rationality to inference to inference management. Now that's an important part of rationality because changing your things changes your behavior. But that that is only a small sliver of what makes you a cognitive agent. Your procedural knowledge, you're knowing how to do things, your skills. That's a big part and you can be there's ways in which you can be rational or irrational in that because you can you can transfer a

skill inappropriately right and and people And we catch people doing that all the time. And it's like, no, no, that's not the right skill here. You can be perspectivally irrationally. You can be totally logical with the completely fixated egocentrism. And if you don't know how to transform your perspective on knowing, you're going to suffer from a kind of self-deceptive behavior. Same thing with the participatory knowing.

If you're not paying attention to the relationship between the agent or rena relationship, that can spiral downward into addiction. So we have to see that for all the kinds of knowing, there are perennial and profound patterns of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And so rationality is any kind of systematic and reliable and systemic set of practices for ameliorating our self-deceptive behavior. So it's not just the logical education of our inference machinery. It's also the education of our procedural abilities, our prospectival ability. So for example, under my definition mindfulness is a form

of rationality because mindfulness has to do with training attention so you get better skills that's procedural. So your prospectival knowing is more optimally and reliably functioning. And so we have many rationalities and then we have sort of a meta rationality of coordinating them together so that they optimally function together. So we have sort of a self-transcending rationality of rationalities. That's what I think wisdom is. Can we go through your four types of knowing? Sure.

And understand how explain how the hierarchy of those fits together. So the one with from knowing with, as I said, is propositional knowing. This is the knowing that is the vehicle of it is believe, are propositions. So I know that cats are mammals. And by either believe it or I don't believe it. And then the normativity of that is truth or falsity. That's my sense of realness. And there's a form of memory that goes with that.

It's called semantic memory. This is where you know that cats are mammals, right? But there's procedural knowing. This is knowing how to do something. This is knowing how to catch a ball. This is knowing how to ride a bike. This is knowing how to kiss somebody that you love. And knowing how to do it, depending on what kind of love you have for them.

Right? And so that is, that's not about beliefs. It's about skills. You don't have a, you don't, when you're done that, you don't have a theory. You have expertise. And it's not about true or falsity. It's about power. It's about how apt your skill is. How powerful it can intervene. We have different

senses of realness. Yes, we have the conviction of truth, but we also have the sense of power is another sense of realness. And of course, we have a different kind of memory that goes with that. And it's it's brilliantly in psychology called procedural memory, because it gives me right. Right. Now we have perspective on knowing. This is knowing what it's like to be here now in this state of mind. I know what it's like for me to be me here now in a sober reflective state of mind. This is what it's like. This is what my salience landscape is like when I so I know what it's like to be here now in this state of mind and that gives me it doesn't give me a theory doesn't even give me a skills. It gives me the situational awareness that tells me which skills I should apply or acquire. But that's dependent on me ultimately being,

oh, I didn't give you the sense of realness there. The sense of realness is, we know this from VR work, which is reality. It's the sense of presence. It's the sense of being in the game, right? Like, oh, I'm really present. And that's why we crave for that because it's what gives us our sense of realness, right? And it's not the same thing as very similar to the Limitude. You can get that sense of presence in a game like Tetris that has very little to do with how the world is really set up. It has more to do with, again, this optimal gripping thing I was talking about earlier. Below the perspective, if I'm going to have situational awareness, I have to be fitted to my environment.

There have to be affordances. That's the level of the participatory knowing. That's the level at which evolutionary biology, cultural history, and the dynamics of my ongoing cognition are shaping my identity, shaping the identity of things so that they fit together in an adaptive manner. So what's most ancient and most fundamental ontologically is the participatory, because if you don't have that, the other ones can't work. And then once we get beings that plausibly have consciousness,

you have a perspectival and procedural, right? With us, we get this weird thing where I can make noises come out of my face hole and it creates thoughts in your mind. We get language and we have to justify statements and we get justification systems as Greg and Rico says around propositions and we get we get really fixated on that as that's where we are and that's where all knowing is and that's where all reasoning is and and and this of course this leads to something you mentioned

earlier. You get the pseudo-religion of ideology. You get that what I need is a set of propositions and I have to be really clear on what all those properties and what I believe in what my belief system is. And the problem with ideology and belief systems and people who want to understand everything just as political is and this is why precisely why it's to the religious is it ignores the procedural the procedural, the perspective and the participatory. And if you pay attention to traditional religions until maybe the Protestant Reformation, they cared a lot more about those other

peas than they did about the propositions, right? They cared much, much more about knowing how and knowing what it's like to be. And, right? And so, the participatory knowing, right, that gives you affordances, gives you a sense of belonging, when it goes wrong, you can fall into addiction. And, like I said, that has its own kind of memory. Prospectival knowing has episodic memory,

this is your ability to remember situations in like a scene. And participatory knowing has that has episodic memory. This is your ability to remember situations like a scene. And participatory knowing has that weird sense of memory. We don't even know, we sometimes forget that it's a sense of memory. The sense of memory we call our sense of self, our sense of identity. And that also is in a different place in your brain. So those are all the kinds of knowing, the relationships they have with each other, the normative standards as they're judged by, the results, the vehicles that they operate in, and the different kinds

of memory. And so, like, you have to think about all the different ways in which we're connecting to the world. And most of the meaning-making machinery is not at the propositional level. It's at the level of the other three. Right now in 2021, we're being championed for knowledge workers, remote working from anywhere on the planet via Zoom. The cerebral scientific rationalist utilitarian revolution,

is this why we're being taken out of the embodied knowledge and up into the brain? While we've been doing it, you Well, we've been doing it. We've been doing it for a very long time when, for example, when Christianity came increasingly credibly oriented, and that doesn't happen for the first four centuries, in which to creed. And this is even paradoxical.

Credo, I believe, originally meant like I give my heart to believe in. I love it, rather than I believe it, right? But we've lost that. Now we think of belief as assertion, right? And then it gets really increased by the Protestant Reformation Cartesian. So we've had a long history that's tutored us, the normalism of the milleges, like I

go into this series. But the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the movement towards written contract as the way in which we bind ourselves together and so on, we have increasingly seen propositions as the place in which we live and quote the Bible, and I don't mean to be secular, in which we live and move and have our being in these propositions. And I think you're right. I think the printed word and the textual word are really emphasizing that even more so. The Zoom brings the possibility of a bit more of the perspective, but it's limited not too much of the perspective, much more of the participatory, that's what I'm involved in this project,

the Dialogos project, and really broaden the set of skills we should be bringing to this medium so that we can offer an alternative to left and right wing to Tolitarian approaches. so that we can offer an alternative to left and right wing to Tolitarian approaches. And I don't mean to Tolitarian just in the governmental sense. I mean that that propositional knowing that that kind of tyranny of the propositional way of knowing can be challenged. I know that you're a fan of Tai Chi and for a long time while I was a teenager, I practiced, I taught, I did a lot of kung fu for the same thing.

And there was something there, first off, there's a fondness when I look back, like I really, really enjoy that memory. Every time I drive past the church that we did it in back home, it gives me a very unique sense that I don't think I really got from much else. a very unique sense that I don't think I've really got from much else. But there was a particular type of knowing in that a sense that I don't really get, I don't get it from mindfulness, I don't get it from sitting, I don't get it, I don't get it from yoga. Actually, now I find that I don't get get it from that either, but there was something to do with the sort of movements, the connection from body to brain. Totally.

Yeah, I mean, so I think what's really cool about Tai Chi Chuan is precisely because it goes into some of the nuts and bolts of the operating manual. So there's a story about me. I was in grad school and I had sort of given up on academic philosophy as a place where it cultivate wisdom. I continued to do it because I liked the meta science and meta cultural critique skills it was giving me. And then of course it fed into the cognitive science in a powerful way.

But I'd taken up Tai Chi because I thought well it was a it was actually a school nearby and I could do the past in the meditation, meditation, meditation, contemplation and Tai Chi, chuan. And so that's where I'll go to cultivate wisdom when I was doing it. And there's particularly the Tai Chi. And I remember my friends coming to me after I'd been doing it for a couple of years and saying, what's going on with you? I thought, oh crap, because when you're in a grad school, you're always worried that you've done something wrong, right? And what do you mean? What do you mean?

And they said, you're different. You think differently. You're more, and this is a wonderful, wonderful way, wonderful evidence of, I, acceptation. You're more balanced. You're more flexible, right? And you're thinking, and I hadn't even realized it.

I've just been doing it. And like you said, like for you, I enjoyed it. But this transformation had been percolating up. And to me, and there's other evidence, but that's to give anecdotal evidence, right, that Tai Chi Chuan is designed to work at the, like, it starts out at the sort of procedural level. You're learning skills. But it starts again at the sort of procedural level. You're learning skills. But it starts again at the perspectival level. You realize the skills start to shift the way you're seeing

things, right? And the language for the connection between the skills and the seeing is this language around Chi. And then it gets even deeper, translating it as energy is a really bad translation, right? And then it drops to the participatory level You start to become a different agent right within a different arena and

I think when you can then do the thing that Tai Chi does in those three when you can get into the flow state in Something that's aligning and enhancing in something that's aligning and enhancing the procedural, the perspective on the participatory in a way that seems to transfer out and be exalted out into multiple domains in your life. Of course you would love that. Of course you would love that. In fact, isn't that precisely the kind of practice you should love? It's difficult not to and it makes me every time that I think about it, it makes me sort of wistful. It's like a hunger. It's like a, it's the same way I

imagine a smoking craving must be for. So I've never smoked, but I imagine it must be the same way that a craving for nicotine works. That's that, that's that hunger we were talking about earlier. That's that lack. That's that hunger we were talking about earlier. That's that lack. That's that hunger for connection. I call that religio. And because religio originally meant to bind together so that things belong together.

But of course, it's one of the purported etymologies for the word religion, right? But it's that hunger and something shaped it for you for a while and it's shaped it from just being a hunger into being a receptivity, a potential for connectivity. Sorry, I'm being presumptuous, but I'm trying to suggest you that I think that's what the whistfulness is for, is that hunger was shaped into a receptivity that enhanced the religion, enhanced that connectedness that's at the foundation of our cognitive agency. Let's say that there's some normal person like me who's listening, who wants practices to cultivate

their meaning on a daily basis. I know that you have, I wouldn't go as far as to call it a prescription, but some perhaps some best practice practices of how you try and ensure that it happens in yourself. How can you instantiate this with daily work? So you need, like I said, you need an ecology of practices, you need, you need, you, because each practice has strengths and weaknesses and you have to send them into complementary relationships with each other. Um, so for example, you should, you should have a mindfulness practice that will shut off the inferential processing to enhance the insight processing, but you need But you need active open mindedness, which is the other practice.

It's shut saw, it dampens down the insight machinery. You say, why would I want to dampen down the insight machinery? Remember what I said earlier, the thing that makes you adaptive also makes you subject to maladaptive? You know what makes you jump to conclusions inappropriately when you're thinking

in an inferential fashion? It's that same insight machinery. So sometimes you need to shut in an inferential fashion, it's that same insight machinery. So, sometimes you need to shut off the inferential machinery because you need insight. But sometimes you need to dampen down the insight machinery. So you run a more careful argument, careful inference. You don't jump to conclusions inappropriately. So you have to cultivate both mindfulness for the insight and active open mind and this for the better inference. And then they have to constantly do a point of processing, push and pull on each other

in a dynamically self organizing fashion. You should definitely, you need to take up a psychophysical practice like Tai Chi Chuan and yoga that will put you more readily into the flow state that's quantitatively, but qualitatively. So you flow more, but you also want to flow better. What I mean by flow better. Learn how to flow in a way that is acceptable, transferable in an adaptive manner to many different domains in your life. You need to get a dialogical practice, like we are doing right now,

because we primarily learn how to transcend ourselves through internalizing other people's viewpoints on our viewpoint. That's how kids do it and that's how adults continue to do it. We need to bring back practices that have us not only communicating, like all of this wonderful technology, but communing, which, right, right.

So, like, we can, we can, we can together generate reciprocal religio, such that we get better at connecting to what is more real. We can, what if we can bring flow into how we communicate with others? It, it, it, right? And so you need practices like that. You need practices drawn from stoicism

to help you overcome way, not just stoicism. Any practices that help you understand, and like I said earlier, the different kinds of maturity, cognitive maturity, emotional maturity, existential maturity, find out ways in which you're stuck, emotionally, stuck, existential, not just ways of course, in which you're stuck cognitively. And so you need practices of what I call serious play. We used to have ritual. There's a reason why cultures across history and cultural content have ritual. Because you have to engage in serious play in order to, that's why play is such a

developmental necessity for all intelligent mammals and especially for human beings. We have trivialized play. We have made it just entertainment, just for pleasure. We have forgotten, and that's what ritual used to be, and I don't mean like neurotic ritual. That's a misuse of the word ritual. That means a routine that you can't get out of, a compulsive routine. I'm not talking about what we used to do when we would engage in ritual. Tai Chi Chuan, practice properly practice, is a ritual. It is a form of serious play in which you can taste and play with other identities, other perspectives, other ways of seeing and being. So you can make a more appropriate, and dare I say, rational choice of whether or not you want to undertake that aspirational journey towards that

different self in a different world. People go to therapy because they don't know how to seriously play because that's what therapy is. People want to be, what people know, propositional, I want to be over there. This is how I want to be and they'll give you a great propositional description and this is the world I want to be living in and I can't get there. I don't know. I don't know how I don't know what it would feel like I don't know how to be notice all the other peas that are missing they know that but they don't know how they don't know What it would be like they don't have to be that kind of person so they have to engage in this serious place So they can taste that and decide In that liminal space and am I going to commit to that? So we need practices of ritual.

And what that looks like, I mean, maybe that's journaling for you. Maybe it's philosophical, maybe to join practice with other people. Like, I've got some videos out there, philosophical fellowship. How do you get together? Read a philosophical text, and then don't read it for information. Read it for communication and commuting, and trying to almost make present. It's almost like a secular say-ons. The perspective of the author of that text,

so that you can come into a perspective awareness of what it might it might taste like to be wiser than you are. There's all kinds of things that you can do. If you're interested in that, I mean I did a, you know, when COVID started, I did a live stream and we recorded it all on you know, meditating with John Raveki and then contemplate of practices and some movement practices and then wisdom practices drawn from the Epicurian tradition, the stoic tradition, the neoplatonic tradition, that's all there, that's all there for people who want to make use of it. All on your YouTube channel. Yep, all on my YouTube channel. That will be linked in the show and it's below of course. Yep,

and there's also the whole voices with Raveiki series that I've been doing where I'm trying to figure out and and I'm also writing on it and writing articles and books on it with other people. But I'm trying to figure out, because what's emerging now are all these dialogical practices. People are trying to figure out, like Socrates, how do I get into authentic dialogue, what I call, theologos and and so voices with Raveki is a bunch of instances of me trying to figure that out, exemplify it, talk about it, live it, reflect on it, explicate it, exemplify it again. Like that's what that whole series is all about.

Speaking personally and I think I'm probably a pretty good avatar for the people that are listening as well. It makes me feel almost a little bit uncomfortable how much I have put the cerebral, the rational, the utilitarian on a pedestal. And it's only, I shit you know, within the last year, half year, six months, that I've even started to put the word sacred back into my vocabulary. Right. And it's not just it's I, unless I'm even more of a freak than I thought, it's not just me. It's this not this profane. We had this example. Think about how many people still wear their shoes in their bedroom, the shoes that they've been outside in, in their bedroom, in which society would that

be allowed? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that it's kind of like a silly example, but it sort of explains what I mean, the transactional transient nature of sex. The pick, pick your example. And this has been speaking from somebody who wants growth, who feels that growth in all directions is a good idea. And I can see in myself some huge lacks, L-A-Z-K-S.

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like having been exposed to your work, it reminded me and sort of opened my eyes to just how much work there is for me to do upon doing a podcast where you speak to people for, you know, it's nearly a thousand hours of me talking on the internet available now. So I've spent an awful lot of time developing up here, but it's been at the cost of various other types of knowing, various other types of practice as well. The practices that I've been drawn to,

and maybe a lot of the people that are listening to have been ones that have facilitated my cognition. They've been ones that have allowed me to perform better within the arena of play of cognition. Yes, yes. You and me, brother, both, right? My best setting sin is I tend to bring in my capacities for rational argumentation and

scientific theorizing into places where they do not properly belong. That is one of the things that I have to pay very careful attention to. It's one of the proclivities for self-deception and the mistreatment of others that I have to pay a lot of attention to. So I totally get what you're saying. I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm just sharing. And so I think, and I mean, I'm doing scientific work on this with people like Jennifer Stellar, Michelle Ferrari, and Jensen Kim, and Brian Ostefen on awe. We're like awe.

And so remember how insight is like opening up to a frame. Well, and this is the difference between curiosity and wonder. Curiosities when you're trying to fill a hole in your knowledge, wonders when you're willing to call your world and yourself more into question. That's why Socrates said wisdom begins in wonder. And then when you, if you push it a little bit farther, you get awe. And there's a reason why we like awe because that is where we are really opening ourselves up to this non-propositional transformation that we've been talking about. They see awe as an experience. An experience is have to be cultivated by a virtue and we have lost the virtue that

gets us to appropriately grip the awe experience. What do you mean? Well, so, all right, so let's just get, sorry, quick, quick, wrist-to-tillion thing about, right, I'm trying to cultivate my character. And so there are things in my environment that are fearful. And I write, and my response can be wrong in access or deficit. I can show, I can be overwhelmed too easily by my fear, I become a coward. But I can then not pay enough attention

to the reality of fear, what fears try to get me to see, and then I become a fool, and I become an impulsive risk-taking idiot, right? And I harm nobody and myself but others. And so what I do is I create these sort of, like again, this opponent processing, I create habits that make me confront fear more, sort of open up the variation, you can hear the evolutionary language here, and then I create counter habits that pair it down, and put selective pressure on it. And by doing that, I steer between these two until I get better and better at getting an optimal grip on how fear is relating me to the environment.

Is that okay? Did that make sense? So think of awe, and if you push off too far, it starts to create a kind of fear. So think of awe like that. You're opening yourself up. There's a sense of exposure. The sense of self gets small.

So how do you properly steer awe so that you don't overwhelm people or get them blowing away or get them hardened or traumatized or on the other hand, how do you coax them out of their comfort zone? So they just want to stay home and never leave home like Luke Skywalker, right? Do you have to blow their home apart in order to do that, right?

So Woodruff talks about this. He talks about the virtue by which we appropriately relate to what awe is showing us about the environment. He calls that virtue reverence. See, reverence is relevance. So when you look at the things that create meaning in life, meaning people think it's a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose is one of the things,

but it's not the most important thing. That's kind of like, that's a little bit too market-oriented, right? The other things that make you feel connected, religion, and that sense of meaning in life are a sense of intelligibility. Like this has to make sense. I have to be zeroing on the relevant things

in the relevant way, right? Significance or depth, it has to be real. It has to be sense. I have to be zeroing on the relevant things in the relevant way. Right? Significance or depth, it has to be real. It has to be real. I have to be able to discern the real patterns from the illusory patterns. But you know what really makes a difference to meeting a life? It's mattering. So, what Susan Wolf talks about, that sense of being connected is something larger than yourself, something that has a value and a reality beyond your egocentric perspective. Reference is the sense of mattering. It's the sense of being connected to something, not because of how it is important to your egocentrism, but of how you are important to it,

about how you are plugged into something bigger than yourself that is going on. And that's, and I think reverence, reverence is what helps tutor awe into a sense of the sacred. A lot of the words that you use in your work have been things that I've come upon over the last year and awe is certainly one of them. Whenever I hear the word, I always think about the night sky, you know, big, open, expand, making you feel small and insignificant and framing your problems and your finite capacity framed with infinite complexity that you can see above. Yes. Beautifully said.

Beautifully said. I did that. I did that. I had this tweet a while ago saying you were a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity. Of course, you're going to be scared. Yes. Yes. But what all says is, again, you can shape that lack. You can shape that fear into a receptivity because it also means that you're a creature that can, as Schlagel put it, we are finite beings longing for the

infinite. Right? So you can shape that exposure, that whole, that vulnerability. It's not easy. I'm not claiming to be a master of it by any means, but I have some sense of this that you can shape that so that, yeah, the fear is more awe and it's more of a sense of how the infinite affords you, it affords you the escape from the prison walls of your own ego. And that sometimes when our ego is being diminished, that's death.

But sometimes when our ego is being diminished, that's overcoming the prison of our ego-centrism. I mean, when we moved from transient sex to the really difficult commitment to being in love with somebody and really reciprocally opening with them. Because it's hard and it hurts. Right? Like it it's hard and it hurts again, again. Right? And if you're just in egocentric mode, you'll just become afraid of that. And then you close up and you just have a transient sex. But if you're capable of, if those little holes of grief become apertures

through which you see beyond yourself and you through a moment, you have some awe about, wow, that person really does transcend my grasp of them. That's what keeps you going. And that's what makes, that's what takes you into the depths of yourself and other people in reality. And then again, what else do you want?

I don't know. I really do think that the common thread between a lot of your work is a lot of things that I've been thinking about recently. And I think that's one of the reasons that it does have a sense of dread is perhaps to significance significance in the same way as when you stand on the edge of a cliff and you look down That's that's the sort of sense that I get and I hope that a lot of the audience will be being introduced to you for the first time some not but a lot certainly for the first time You have been talking about we want to bring up after Socrates in a moment. One of the allegories that Plato's allegory of the cave, which I was taught about, only again within the last year by a friend called Jordan, you know, I'd heard it before but I didn't

understand its significance. For people who are seeking whatever we want to call it, truth, wisdom, actualization, transcendence, growth, whatever term it is that you want to give yourself, you are inevitably going to put yourself out and on a limb and you are a participatory being. You are someone who wants to be wanted, liked, accepted for being a part of the group. But inevitably, you've changed. Now, your friends thankfully said you're balanced. You see more balanced. But equally, people can be very, very unhappy at seeing friends change and grow because it often highlights their lack of change and their lack of growth. What would you say to people who have a desire to make change in their life,

but don't necessarily have that support, that community and they've got that fear of the being ostracized for doing it? First of all, I want to express deep compassion because that has, you said I studied what I lacked. And so yes. When you undertake this, and again, this isn't like a slot machine, put the thing in and pull the lever or something like that. But when you undertake this kind of journey, you will lose relationships. I don't want to mince that at all.

I have a marriage, right? It's, and that's not to make me myself heroic. I also did shitty things that caused the demise, okay? I don't want to, I don't want to avoid responsibility, but it's fair to say that was also a factor. I can say that, I think, honestly. I think the person who was involved would say that, honestly, too. So, and, you know, you can, and that's a difficult thing.

We sometimes face in our relationships when we realize that there's a significant differential in our growth, and that can be extremely, and I think that's not recognized enough as a problem in our relationships. And the problem is because of the decadent romanticism and our culture, we basically try to turn our romantic relationships into a religion. And so we put tremendous pressure on them. And they really can't bear it. They really can't bear it. And we should stop doing that. We need other things. And I'm guilty of that too. Again, I'm guilty of that too. I do it. I've done it recently and it's been problematic. And I have to take a step back and go, oh, crap, I'm

doing that. I speak about this and you know, here I am doing it. Right. And so all of this stuff is going to, it's, yeah, you're going to lose relationships. But what seems to be the case is you will gain, and I'm playing on this word, I wanted to mean both meanings, you will gain virtuosity, and that virtuosity will allow you to discern, but also attract to you kind of people who are also seeking virtuosity. And so different kinds of relationships will become available to you. And it takes and I'm sorry, it takes longer than the lifetime of a movie. That's the problem with movies. We feel wonderful because it only takes two hours for things to be resolved. And this can be years in the

making. But you will also find friendship where you might not have found it before. You might find you might you might befriend your body and your mind in a way you haven't before. I have a wooden sword I do touch she with and I have befriended that. I have learned how to more deeply defend the Socrates and Spinoza. So, some of their friendships will be ones that might not be sort of with living people, but they'll nevertheless be living relationships for you. And that is not paradoxical or self-contradictory. And then hopefully, again, this is not deterministic, but it does increase the probability that you will more likely come into the kind of relationship that is supportive of you cultivating

wisdom. I think that's one of the defining differences between buddies and friends. We call a lot of people our friends, but they're not, they're our buddies. A buddy is somebody you enjoy doing something with, and you should have buddies. That's good, that's why we have this term. A friend is somebody that is committed

to you becoming wiser, and you are committed to them becoming wiser. And that's a different thing entirely. And you will increase your chance of real friendship. So you might find, again, I can't promise you there isn't an algorithm here, I'm a magical formula, but I have found it, I've seen it in others that you get a trade off in the quantity of relationships to Minishes, whereas the quality of them improves. And so some of it takes you actually instead of finding a community, sometimes you have to make it. Also, so it can be lonely and it can be alienating, but it can also, if pursued with a genuine love,

it can be liberating. It can liberate you and put you into real relationships with real patterns and real people in real ways. So, that's what I have to say about that. What do you think that 80-year-old you would tell current you? What would 80-year-old John tell? Try to focus more on the love you find in your relationship. And I hope you meet, no, I don't mean just romantic love. I'm not excluding that, but I don't mean just romantic love. Try to focus more on the love you find in your relationships,

then the fear that you find in your relationships. That's a wonderful way to finish. Talking about what's happening next for you, I mean, terrifyingly discussing the potential precipice at the end of your academic career, which might come to fruition, but hopefully you'll be tempted to stay on the audience side. What can we expect from you over the remainder of 2021? I'm going to start filming tonight with Greg and Ricketts, Chris, Mr. Pietro, the elusive I, capital I, the elusive I, the nature and function of

the self, trying to do sort of the best cognitive science on what is this thing we call the self, how does it work and how does it function? What is it? How does it function? And then hopefully when COVID will allow me, probably a 20 to 30 part series called after Socrates, where I'm going to go back to the Socratic practices of authentic deal logos, see how it worked, what was dialectic, how did it bring us into the flow state of deal logos, see how it worked, what was dialectic, how did it bring us into

the flow state of deal logos, do that historical analysis, and then do a structural scientific analysis and participant observation because I've already been doing it, of all these emerging authentic discourse communities, circling practices and the empathy circling and, you know, insight, dialogue and inquiry, there is no coincidence that we have this proliferation of practices that are designed to reintegrate communication and and transformation together. And so I want to do the best historical analysis of theocratic heritage, follow it all the way through, all the people that came after Socrates and Socrates and the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonus and the existentialists, right, all of that. So that's one sense of after, but also people who are taking after Socrates right now who are trying to create, right,

the steel the culture bottom up by creating new ways of entering into the logos. And then if you'll allow me to pun, put those two into dialogue with each other, the history and the analysis. And we've already published a book on, well, seeking publication on a book on this right now called Internutter Dialogs

where we have Chris Machiavriatro and I, we're editing, we got all the people, and this, well, not all of them, but a lot of the people in this community, the people who are both practicing it and theorizing about it and trying to put the two together. That's hopefully coming out this year, after Socrates is gonna be coming out this year.

There'll still be more voices with the Veki, there'll be the, like I said, the elusive I. And then after Socrates is done. They'll be the, like I said, the elusive eye. And then after Socrates is done. I want to start working on, sort of always had a trilogy in mind. The third series, the third sort of big scope series, series is called The God Beyond God and the Inventio of the Sacred. Because the Latin word Inventio of the sacred because the Latin word

Inventio means to discover and to make. It means both of them together. And so those are the things that John Vivek is going to be working on. Where should people go if they want to be kept up to date with what's happening? They can follow me on Twitter. They can subscribe on YouTube channel. That would, I'm also on LinkedIn. I don't use it, but through HootSuite I sort of post on Facebook. So there's a bunch of places. But especially on Twitter and YouTube, that's where you could most readily get the information i do a monthly live stream q&a on my youtube channel that's one the next one is actually this friday at three p.m. eastern standard time if people want to come on and ask questions awesome all of that will be linked in the show notes below

john thank you i really really love your work i'm, very glad that I found it. And yeah, I'm looking forward to being terrified and satisfied in equal measure, hopefully as I continue to dig deeper into it. Well, thank you, Chris. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, it was great. And if you ever want to talk again, I'd be open to it.