This Past Weekend - E462 John Vervaeke

Starting point is 00:00:00 So, money is a thing, but it's not everything. I think you really look at the importance of what are you doing with your time. The conversations that we've had with our financial advisor is very much built, building what that framework looks like that helps support those important things. The place is where you're investing your time and your resources, your family clearly, and those closest to you. Edward Jones. We do money differently. Visit Edward Jones dot CA slash different.

Starting point is 00:00:30 All right, I have some new tour dates to let you know about. I'll be in Norfolk VA Virginia on November 9. I'll be Rowan Oak VA November 10, Huntington, West Virginia, November 11th of it. There at the mountain health arena, formerly known as the Big Sandy. I'll be in Evans, Valindiana on November 1, 5 at the Ford Center and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, November 17th, as well as New Orleans, Louisiana on November 24th at the UNO Lake

Starting point is 00:01:03 front arena. Louisiana on November 24th at the UNO Lake Front Arena. All tickets are available at Theovon.com. Slash T-O-U-R. We have been moving into some bigger venues. Really grateful for it. And we'll do a mix of bigger and smaller ones at the time and just because we don't want to be on tour forever. You know, we want to be on tour for a while. We just don't want to be on You know until We're deceased or whatever so thank you guys for your support theovon.com slash T.O. You are and if tickets are too high price just wait will come back through some time gang Dr. John Verveki is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Starting point is 00:01:49 He currently teaches courses on thinking and reasoning with a focus on cognitive development, intelligence, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom. He is a smarter guy. He's an information man, you know. He's also an expert in Buddhist psychology. He has a 50-part lecture series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I've personally been thinking a lot about meaning and would it, what, just meaning of life, meaning of self, things like that, you know, we had a call about it on the last solo episode.

Starting point is 00:02:28 And that's one of the things that Dr. Verveki is highly informed about. So we're going to spend some time today with him and delve into that and some other things. I'm very grateful that he's here today. Today's guest is Dr. John Vervaki. Shining out on me. I'll spin and tell you those stories. Shining out on me. And I will find a strong

Starting point is 00:03:05 I was thinking about this. Yeah. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it.

Starting point is 00:03:14 I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it.

Starting point is 00:03:22 I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it. A lot of my friends have been turned on to you and just like your ability to like share your thoughts like in a concise and informative enough way where I guess people are able to absorb them. And they don't sound too monotonous where it sounds too much like you're studying kind of. Yeah, you know. Well, I mean, I really believe in, I don't just believe, I really believe in the work I'm doing, it's like it's a calling for me.

Starting point is 00:03:51 And it's something that I live. And I, I mean, I've been a teacher for a very long time and I think part of being a good teacher is to always be yourself learning. And so I try to teach by sharing the enthusiasm of the learning I'm going through. Like even when I'm doing a lecture, I'll learn something will come up and that moment will jazz me. And that's the style I've tried to develop. And it seems to work. At least for the material I've been privileged to get to teach.

Starting point is 00:04:21 Yeah. Yeah. And you teach, I guess, I mean, a lot of people, like, I guess that a lot of things that I get shared for about years are about meaning and looking in the meaning. Yes. And especially at a time where it feels like people are, for me, even, I mean, it feels like we're getting into this cold of sack in America where it's like, is there a lot of value to my life do I? Yeah. Am I just a cog in the wheel? Am I just a consumer? in America where it's like, is there a lot of value to my life do I?

Starting point is 00:04:45 Am I just a cog in the wheel? Am I just a consumer? Is there any, you know, what is the purpose for me? I think a lot of people are starting to ask themselves that. Yeah, yeah. I call that the meaning crisis. And I think there's good evidence that it's becoming very prevalent in the West, whatever that means

Starting point is 00:05:07 these days, but, you know, sort of North America, Europe, you know, Japan, Hawaii, Australia, things like that. And the symptoms are, you can sort of see symptoms of it all through the culture. And I've also seen a significant increase in the work I'm doing both academically and in the public sphere, especially since COVID, COVID really ramped a lot of these issues up for people in a powerful way. What the issues of like questioning themselves, what's going on.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Yeah, so the thing, one of the interesting things that COVID did is it threw people back onto their inner life. And what's interesting is our culture, especially North American culture, right? And I'm not the first to observe it. It has a hyperponderance of a tendency towards narcissism being very... So people have oriented their lives in a very self-centered way, but they thought that, or they can maybe better way of putting it, they confuse that with having deep, rich, inner resources.

Starting point is 00:06:21 And when everything sort of stopped and they couldn't focus the world on them and they had to focus on themselves in order to find resources and what you found was a bifurcation like a division. Some people were like, whoa, that like that really threw them. So I'll say something to you and I'm of two minds of it because I'm a a happy voter to the scientist, because I made a prediction, and I'm sad about it as a human being, because it's not a good prediction. So just as the pandemic was hitting, I said, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get a rise

Starting point is 00:06:56 in a term that Julian Evans made famous called Conspirituality, this mixture of conspiracy theories and spirituality, and that took off. And then I said, as we come out of the pandemic, we'll get a mental health spike. And then a little bit later, sort of an increase in crime. And all of these things are coming to pass,

Starting point is 00:07:14 because what had happened is many people are thrown into the interior life only to realize for all of the self-centeredness, they've actually not given any wise attention to their inner life. And they were suddenly without resource. Other people saw this as an opportunity, and they framed it that way. And so what's been springing up, where all of these online communities, where people, not to sound too high for gluten or anything, but people started to say, I really want to cultivate wisdom. I mean, there's tons of information, there's a lot of bullshit mixed up with it,

Starting point is 00:07:50 there's all this stuff and there's science in that, but I want wisdom. And I've gotten involved with quite a few of these communities. There's both, you have both negative and positive symptoms in the culture. Like, you know, the number of close friends people have is reliably declining, even for all of our social internet connections. Loneliness is becoming epidemic and loneliness is like, it's very unhealthy. We are, we are, we are naturally social, cultural beings. Right.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Loneliness is just like. What's becoming a hobby too for some people in a way. It's becoming almost so common that it's like, or not common, but it's, well, I guess common, I guess. And once you start to become something, you, there's a part of you that will want to find the most organized way to be it and to engage in it. Yes. So even in loneliness, it's almost becoming a culture.

Starting point is 00:08:47 You know? It is, but it's a culture with great cost. I mean, we have weird things happening, like the UK has set up a ministry of loneliness, which sounds like something out of Orwell, right? Like the Ministry of Loneliness. Yeah, and it's like, whoa, how did we get there? Yeah, it sounds like an Aussie Osborne album. Maybe. Yeah, and it's like, well, how did we get there? Yeah, it sounds like a Aussie Osborne album. Oh, yeah, maybe

Starting point is 00:09:11 Yeah, I wonder how he would say that He probably would get one of his kids this I don't even talk anymore, but But yeah, well, so so to go back so you're looking at someone you look at like so COVID you're saying had a was an opportunity or caused a lot of us to like Interflict. Yes, look inside of ourselves. Yes. Yes. Okay, and some people did it like in a healthy way Yes, where they kind of looked inside of themselves and we're like wow I haven't looked in here in a while I'm gonna find ways to challenge myself and see what's going on here. I'm going to join other groups and people that are curious about their inner self and then other, and then what the other group what happened.

Starting point is 00:09:57 Well, I mean, a lot of them sort of fell into the things that were already at work in the culture, the meaning crisis predates in COVID by like centuries. But you know, you saw a rise in mental health issues. So depression and anxiety have gone up and they have continued to increase. And this is quite independent of how affluent. So Silicon Valley has a tremendous problem with depression and I'm glad here are the people who are supposed to be at the pinnacle of our society. We idolize them, right?

Starting point is 00:10:32 And yet their kids are in trouble and they're in trouble in certain ways. Have we always do out time? Have people always searched for meaning in their life? Yes. There's always been like, are we at like a, because you're saying that COVID kind of put us

Starting point is 00:10:49 in this place where it kind of put us in a fast forward of people really going to start to look at that because the fabric of society kind of stopped and paused and so you're left with yourself really. Yeah. But people have always looked for meaning. That's exactly right. I mean, so in the series I did, and in the book on zombies, the book is the idea that zombies are

Starting point is 00:11:13 a myth that arose to try and give people an image of the meaninglessness in their lives. But we talked about two kinds of issues. One are what we call like perennial problems. Like you said, there's issues that human beings always have confronted, and we can get into why that might be the case. And then there's also historical factors that have been growing since the late middle ages and accelerating and things have, you know, there's been a lot of major things

Starting point is 00:11:42 that are accelerants on those historical forces. And what happens is the historical forces sort of undermine the, like you said, the cultural fabric that normally helps people to address the perennial problems. And then what happens is you get a vicious cycle, the perennial problems get worse, the social fabric cares more, the perennial problems get, and you start to spiral. And that's where it feels like kind of like we're at. Yes, yes, that's, that's, and that's, that's amazing. So when, when I, I didn't, I didn't, like how the awakening for the meeting crisis came

Starting point is 00:12:17 up was actually a former student of mine took a class with me and said, you should turn this into a YouTube series. And the awakening for the meeting crisis is your YouTube series, right? Yeah, I have two major YouTube series. I have awakening for the meaning crisis is your YouTube series, right? Yeah, I have two major YouTube series. I have awakening for the meaning crisis, which is about what we're talking about. And then there's after Socrates, which is an attempt to do an in-depth

Starting point is 00:12:36 reconstruction, reverse engineering of a socratic way of life, as a way of cultivating wisdom, both individually and collectively. What does that mean? A socratic way of life. We way of cultivating wisdom, both individually and collectively. What does that mean, a socratic way of life? We're not gonna know what that means. Right, so the unexamined life is worth living. So this is a socratic quote.

Starting point is 00:12:53 He says this at his trial, and they basically say to him, stop doing philosophy, we'll let you go. And he said, or if not, we'll kill you. Oh, wow. And he says, well, the unexamined life is not worth living. I'd rather die. And so, Socrates is very, very interesting.

Starting point is 00:13:17 He has two sort of influences. One influence, he's influenced by the first scientists that are emerging in ancient Greece. He takes a look at the natural science, and it's a breakthrough, like as opposed to a mythological way of thinking, these early thinkers are using observation and reason to try and understand the world.

Starting point is 00:13:34 He thinks that's powerful, but he finds that the scientific information isn't existentially relevant. It doesn't lead to personal transformation. It doesn't tell me how to become a better person So it gives him a lot of information and it makes him understand things But it's not helping him as a person as a in his soul and you see and that's what how a lot of people feel about our scientific world view We have a scientific world view that explains everything except how we generate science and how we have lived

Starting point is 00:14:03 Live how we should live meaningful lives within that worldview. So, Socrates says, that's not good enough. The truth seeking is good, but it's not giving me any relevance. And then there's the sofas, and that literally means sort of the wise guys. And these are the people that invent rhetoric. You know, the first sort of, first good use of bullshit in a technical sense, and Harry Frankfurt sense.

Starting point is 00:14:25 The liar tries to manipulate you because you care about the truth and they try to convince you that something is truth. But the bullshit artist is something different. They try to get you unconcerned about whether or not something is the truth and just caught up in how catchy it is. Advertising, all advertising works this way.

Starting point is 00:14:41 You watch the alcohol commercial, right? Here's a bar and somebody gets a drink and there's gorgeous people and happy music and everybody's well dressed and smiling, go into a bar, right? That's not, that's not. And we all know it's both. It's not the same in there.

Starting point is 00:14:55 No, but it's catchy. It triggers all, you know, sexuality and vibrancy and sociality, and all that, and it's, so it gets very catchy. And you don't care about the truth, and you get caught up on how catchy it is. And this is what the sophist discovered. They learned how to make things catchy,

Starting point is 00:15:17 so they would really go deep into people and change them. Now, they did it in a manipulative fashion. Now, Socrates said, well, they're the opposite. They're giving me lots of relevance, well, they're the opposite. They're giving me lots of relevance, transformative power, but no truth. And what he did is basically said, I want the two together, I want transformative truths.

Starting point is 00:15:33 I want to go on a quest to find those truths that catch. Wow, he was like a gangster, huh? Yeah, he was. Well, he's a hero to me. Yeah, well, it sounds like I said what I'm saying. It sounds like he was like a gangster, huh? Yeah, he was. Well, he's a hero to me. Yeah, well, it sounds like I guess what I'm saying. It sounds like he was like a John Wayne of like, let's do, we're gonna do this a new way and this is the way that it needs to be.

Starting point is 00:15:54 It just sounds like he was a real pioneer kind of. He is, I mean, it's called a secratic revolution. I mean, he's an astonishing individual. He was extremely brave. He had a reputation, like he was a soldier. And at several times in battle, he showed tremendous courage and presence of mind when everybody else is panicking. Wow. He could stand in one's place, like in profound meditation for like 24, 48 hours. meditation for like 24, 48 hours. He was, his life was threatened several times and he never sort of capitulated to the forces. He was brave. He is brave. I mean, he creative,

Starting point is 00:16:40 it sounds like. Yeah, and he's, and he invented this way of interacting with people. He would ask them questions and he would try and draw out. He compared himself to a midwife. I help people to give birth to themselves. And so he wasn't, he wouldn't, like, he would often show people that their claims to being wise or to knowledge didn't work. He would often show people that their claims to being wise or to knowledge didn't work. He would get them into this, people said it was like being stung by a stingray or a spell cast on you, you'd get into this state.

Starting point is 00:17:17 And he did this for a particular reason. So the Athenians had oracles, like the oracle at Delphi. Have you ever been to Delphi? I don't think so, I have. Is it? Nope. I haven't. It puts the zap on you, man.

Starting point is 00:17:29 Yeah, yeah. Like you stand in front of the own phallus, the naval of the world, and this chasm drops away and then this, in front of you, and this mountain goes up. And you know, in this woman, she would sit in a cave and there's some speculation that she was getting intoxicated and then she would speak, answer people's questions.

Starting point is 00:17:48 Now, when you're on Oracle, right? If you wanna stay in business as an Oracle, you don't give really clear answers to people, right? Right, because you need them to come back. You need them to come back. So, you know, should I marry Cassandra? Well, sometimes the squirrels don't gather nuts. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 00:18:02 What do you say? So, well, there was, so a friend of Socrates went to the Oracle. I have no basis for saying that, but I always picture them sort of smirking and nudging each other. We're going to ask this really cool question. And so she goes up and they say to her, is there anyone wiser than Socrates? And they're expecting this really cryptic and she said, no, no human being is wiser than Socrates.

Starting point is 00:18:32 Straight answer. Wow. So she went back. So he went back and they tell Socrates, no, you and I were honest. If they said, we got that message from the gods, we go, yeah, yeah, I always knew it, right? I always knew. He does this other thing, and this tells you how so

Starting point is 00:18:47 critical it is. He says, well, the gods can't lie. By the way, that's one way and he's revolutionary. The gods aren't like the ancient gods, just superheroes. The gods are like moral exemplars for Socrates, so they can't lie. But he also says, but I know I'm not wise. How can those both be true? And he turns it into this quest.

Starting point is 00:19:07 So he goes and he keeps asking people, right? So somebody claims to know something. They know what a particular virtue is. They know what courage is. And he'll ask like two generals. And he'll constantly question them. And he's trying to draw it out and he's trying to find out. And what typically happens is,

Starting point is 00:19:26 the, what's called a dialogue played a role, it ends with no clear answer, no clear definition. But socrates isn't deceptic. So the, so he, so he doesn't get a clear answer, but that's okay. The goal is, is the goal to get a clear answer just to create conversation beyond that. See, the goal is to get people to take up his quest.

Starting point is 00:19:47 Oh. See, so if you look at, so you're talking to these two generals, and the two generals about courage, one of them does the, I just know, you just speak from his intuition and Socrates destroys that with so zoom in the contradictions, the problem. The other quotes, so the first person speaks from like a first person perspective, well, I just know and Socrates destroys that. And the other person speaks from this third person, well, here's a technical definition

Starting point is 00:20:12 I got from the sophist and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah. And Socrates destroys that. And then there's, and Socrates can't offer definition. And you think, what was this all for? But you have to see in a dialogue, you have to pay attention to the drama, not just the argument. Because what the two generals say is, we want our sons to come and spend time with you and live with you, socrates.

Starting point is 00:20:33 Because our sons are going to get courage from you. Socrates can't explain. He can't define courage. Courage, courage, if you think you can put courage into a definition, you don't get it. You have to get into this, not the first person, or the third person, the second person, you, us together, you catch it, but it's just caught truth. Remember, we were talking about it. And what happens is, Socrates exemplifies what it is. And he lives it in conversation with people so that they start to catch that orientation and catch his quest.

Starting point is 00:21:08 Wow. And was that a new thing at the time to have that sort of energy, to have that like for people to really start to question things like that? So as far as we can tell, and this is why they call this a credit revolution, and there doesn't seem to be any of the ancient sources

Starting point is 00:21:22 that contradict this, Socrates' invents, discovers, we don't have to, there's a Latin word that's much better. Inventio, it means to discover or invent, right? He inventios this way of helping people to give birth to themselves. So the people I work with, we've tried to reverse engineer this practice, we call it dialectic

Starting point is 00:21:46 into de-logos, and we have workshops that sort of get people to take this up. And so what we do is we'll have them do, these practices around a virtue, like courage, more honesty, authenticity. And what happens is, they, and we tell them this, but they also realize it, right? You're not, the point isn't to be right about this. The point is to come into right relationship with the virtue, and that's what happens

Starting point is 00:22:13 when they do these practice. People come out and go, I'm kind of experiencing something like, ah, and a love for, I always knew what honesty was, like the technical definition of the intuition like the two generals. But now I don't, but I like Socrates. So you get this right orientation, and now we go back to Socrates, because he finally resolved that paradox that he had from the gods.

Starting point is 00:22:39 He realized that he was wise in that he knew when he did not know something. But not in the shallow sense that I don't know about Alban knew when he did not know something. But not in the shallow sense that I don't know about Albanian tin production or something like that. But in this sense we're talking about, which is like, I really don't know what honesty is. I have a love for it. And I'm oriented, I wanna be in the right relationship.

Starting point is 00:22:58 I wanna open myself up. I wanna learn more about it. Football is back in full swing with another week of epic games. And who's got you covered on the action? Every single one of them, Draft King Sportsbook and Official Sports Betting Partner of the NFL. New customers can bet $5 on football

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Starting point is 00:25:00 searching for like meaning, right? Like as a person, you know? Do we do it? Is it something that we do as individuals? Like are we do, is there any value in finding meaning as an individual? It feels like to me sometimes more like the value is finding meaning as like a species or like a group, right? Like I guess when I think about meaning,

Starting point is 00:25:23 I don't think like, what is my, what is the meaning for me? What is the purpose of my life? I find my brain often thinks more like, what is our purpose, right? What is our meaning? So the individual poll is, you need to cultivate wisdom.

Starting point is 00:25:44 But what's the collective poll? And you put your finger on it. So what is this meaning thing? So a lot, if you do research on it, there's four dimensions to it. And the one that people think it's synonymous with is having a purpose. That's only one of the dimensions. It's actually not the most important one of the dimensions of meaning. Yeah, meaning and life. So we're not talking about like the meaning of a sentence. We're talking about what makes your life worth living, even though it has all the frustrations and failures and faults and flaws in it.

Starting point is 00:26:13 Right, because I think especially you get to like a middle of your life kind of or ballpark, you know, and you start, that really starts to hit home. You're like, oh, well, my youth is disappearing. Yeah. What is the, what is my purpose here? And then is it the purpose of just me or am I part of a group?

Starting point is 00:26:29 And we have a purpose. Those are the questions, yeah, that I've really kind of, right, see us getting hit with a lot. So purpose is important, but there's other factors. One was, it was in the literature, was called coherence, but some of the original experiments have felt to replicate, and so it's a broader notion. It's more like, your world has to make sense to you.

Starting point is 00:26:48 It can't be absurd. Right? Because if the world becomes absurd, then you start to really feel that reality is meaningless. Well, that's starting. That's another thing that's starting to happen. I mean, we can go into that. Yeah, we can.

Starting point is 00:26:59 We can. And that's very different. People can act on purpose, even within an absurd world. Well, a lot of my meaning I've noticed, like, recently, like, it seemed like, recently, it seemed a lot like the texture or the fabric of society is kind of eroding in America, right? Like a lot of traditions are being said that they're no good. We're trying to renegotiate our past to make it look a certain way. Everything's in question.

Starting point is 00:27:32 Yeah. A lot of things are in question. A lot of people are saying that's even the pledge of allegiance for just things that gave us all commonality seem to be disappearing, right? And so I realized that that started to hurt me because I was like, man, a lot of my meaning as a person, I had attached to a lot of these commonalities. And I didn't realize that until they started to go away.

Starting point is 00:27:55 I'm like, well, if this stuff doesn't mean anything, like, then do I mean anything? Okay, so notice that, notice that. So that's the two missing dimensions. One is people, right? then do I mean anything? Okay, so notice that, notice that. So, that's the two missing dimensions. One is people, right? And one is, the reality can't be flat. It has to have a depth.

Starting point is 00:28:13 They have to be able to point to something to say, this is really real, right? If everything feels sort of illusory, then you're also in a kind of a nightmare situation, right? But the one you just pointed to, this is the crucial one, and this is the one, and I'm going to pun a little bit here. This is the one that matters. It's called mattering.

Starting point is 00:28:29 This is the one that matters the most. And mattering is this. There's a really good book by Susan Wolf called Meaning and Life and White Matters. And you know, when you, what the metaphor people use is I want to feel connected to something larger than myself, something bigger than myself. And here's a way of seeing if you have this in your life and why it might have come into question like you were just talking about. Ask yourself, what do you want to exist even if you don't?

Starting point is 00:28:58 And how much of a difference do you make to it now? Okay, so take me through an example of that. So let me think, what do I want to exist? Even if you don't, even if I don't exist. Yeah. Um, probably families. Yeah. So these are people you want them to exist, even if you don't. Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy children. Yes. Happy families. Maybe it would be something I would say. And do you think you make much of a difference to them right now? Not a ton. Right. So you need a good answer for both of those to have a strong sense of meaning in life.

Starting point is 00:29:30 Okay, so take me through an example of somebody that would have a good answer. What would be an answer that would probably leave somebody feeling fulfilled after they asked themselves those questions? Well, I want to point to something that you put your finger on. There's a decline in the bigger picture, a worldview. And the worldviews, we experience them and I'm trying to use this term very broadly, religiously. So I don't mean just like Christianity or Judaism or something like that, but I also mean what used to be called American civil religion. Like, you have their heroes and things are sacred like the flag and you pledge allegiance, which is a kind of prayer, right?

Starting point is 00:30:10 And so, and both of those religious frameworks, and even though they're tearing each other apart about it right now, they're falling, right? And so, people used to say they would die for their country. People did it in World War II. They want the US, the United States, to continue existing. They think the universe is a better place if the US is in it. And they are making a difference. They're in Germany and they're liberating the world from tyranny.

Starting point is 00:30:41 And so they're making a real difference, right, to this overarching worldview, American democracy, Americanism. They had, meaning, so much meaning in life, like, like, Socrates, they're willing to die for it. And they must have, I mean, to think like, yes, I mean, they had people that were lying to get into the draft. Like, I want to go serve my country. I will die from my country.

Starting point is 00:31:06 They believe that much in it. It feels like we're further from that now for sure. So that the idea of your country being that thing is probably less. Right. So that's the other poll now. Remember we talked about the individual poll? Then there's the worldview, the poll that we creek. No one, you didn't invent English, right? These are the things we invent together

Starting point is 00:31:31 and we evolve together and we participate in together. And one is, like, there was a great metaphor, an academic called Peter Berger, he called it the sacred canopy. you had this world view that basically gave you, it told you how to be an agent in the world and it made the world a meaningful arena. So there was an agent arena relationship and they were attuned to each other. So you knew what to do, you knew how to fit in. And so you had this world view that grounded things and this is the bigger picture, and then people could connect their personal wisdom cultivation to this bigger thing and enhance their meaning in life. And this is what religions, both civil and religious, sorry, we don't have any other sacred or supposed, civil and sacred religions, they were both doing for people

Starting point is 00:32:26 and these have been breaking down for a whole, so those are the historical factors. And when they break down, people's ability to find purpose and depth and clarity and mattering gets undermined and their self-deception exacerbates because they get isolated, like we were talking about in COVID, they get disconnected from a shared worldview that gives them these ecologies of practices.

Starting point is 00:32:53 You can't do them on your own, right? You'll fall prey to sort of, you know, if you're just an auto-diedec, like a self-learner, you'll fall prey to all your biases and all your egocentrisms and your unrealized comfort zones. You need other people to be, so we need each other to have meaning. You, yeah, we transcend each other through each other. Like, I train, like, this is Socrates.

Starting point is 00:33:13 You know how I can most transcend myself and overcome my bias and my narrow frame? Is you challenging you? We're the keys to each other's locks. Yes, yes, yes. And so what happened is, right, you need that worldview to home those ecologies of practice. Right. Give them legitimacy, give them tradition, right,

Starting point is 00:33:31 which is not the same thing as nostalgia. And then what we've done is we've undermined that worldview. We've torn apart the ecologies of practices. And people are like, they've largely abandoned the legacy religions. They're now abandon, abandoning the civil religions. Even the very weak religion of popular culture is breaking down. Oh, there's more Fortnite players than there are Protestants probably. Right, right. Yes. But look at how, look at how those, like a symptom of the meaning crisis is

Starting point is 00:34:02 an attempt to create worldviews that have a myth, when I say mythological, I don't mean that negatively. I don't mean like a lie. Myths aren't ancient stories about the past. There are stories about perennial problems and patterns. And so think about the whole MC universe, and we call it a universe. We're trying to create this entire worldview in which basically we have Bronze Age gods who nevertheless are Socratic heroes and Pursue Virtue and they fly around and do all this stuff. And it's falling apart. We can't even keep that running.

Starting point is 00:34:34 Right? Like, this is how bad things are. And so the perennial problems start, they start to get worse. They tear out what's left of the world view. The world view can't home the ecology. People get more foolish, more self-dust. And the whole thing just spirals. And so, was that a good answer, by the way, to the two poles? Yeah, I think it was really good, man. I think it was really good.

Starting point is 00:34:55 I'm doing a decent job, I think, of keeping up. Good. I'm trying to make it accessible for listeners at the same time. I think you're doing a great job at that. Thank you. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:35:07 So what happens historically in a time where we get to a place like this? Is there a path? Have this happened before in time? Yes, okay. So we don't need to be alarmed at the point like humans have never been through this. That's right.

Starting point is 00:35:21 We've been through it before. Now, there's two, there's two stances on this that are both sort of wrong because they're extreme. One is, oh, this is human beings have always said their meanings in pro, and they're just a dismissive thing. And the other one is, no, this is completely absolutely unique. And there's truth to both. What's unique is we face a set of problems that are global in a way that was never global problems that were this complex and growing.

Starting point is 00:35:53 Like we face an interconnection of the advent of AGI, we already facing the growing impact of social media. People are looking at issues around the environment, energy. As you said, our political economic system is breaking down. It's gridlocking and people are losing faith in it. And I use that word deliberately in a deep way. And so those are, I think, unique things we're facing. And when we are in a meeting crisis, it sort of hamstrings us.

Starting point is 00:36:31 It really weakens our ability to turn our best wisdom towards these problems, because when we're in a meeting crisis, right? So especially now, if we're all isolated and we're isolated, and we're not our best, it's very self-motivated. It's not our group's conscience. We're acting out of fear, a lot of people. Yeah, and we're acting out of an ability to cut through the bullshit

Starting point is 00:36:55 and to realize when we're in self-deception is being seriously challenged. Oh, yeah. So, our ability to handle this is very weak, but it is also the case that there have been other points in time in which there have been night, not globally. But like in the ancient west, the Hellenistic period, there was a a a meaning crisis at that time too. What was that about? So it's basically so there's Alexander the Great, exosocraties.

Starting point is 00:37:25 Was he great or not? Oh, it depends. So, because that's a straight, I mean, that's like, you're not even leaving any, you know, you're saying, hey. So, he changes the course of the history of Western civilization in a profound way. And if that's what you mean by great, just sort of changing the course of things, he's great. Okay, I'll give it to him then. Well, but I also want to say, like, that's so my partner,

Starting point is 00:37:54 like she's Persian, and Alexander great is the bad guy in the Persian world, right? Oh, so he's really vast, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like, right, but what he does is like he conquers most of the silk road and, you know, some of the major civilizations in Asia, Europe, and Africa. And then he dies at a young age. And so his empire breaks up into, first of all, there's a period of fighting and the generals carve up his empire and then there's just ongoing warfare. Now, I just want to compare two people. Somebody living at the time just before Alexander, the time of Aristotle, who taught Alexander

Starting point is 00:38:41 by the way, right? This is their life. They live in a, like a, a, a, a, a, a city. They've lived there and their ancestors have lived there for all their life. Everybody around them speaks the same language and everybody practices the same religion. If you're an Athens, you participate,

Starting point is 00:38:56 well, if you're a male. So it's a, right, you participate directly in the government, right? You know, you, you know know by in person, the leaders. So, right, this is like, after Alexander, you're now in a world in which the people, you might have been operated. People have been operated, moved around.

Starting point is 00:39:17 There's a little more global than at that point. Exactly, but that's exactly the parallel, right? So people around you speak a different language. They haven't been there for years. You might not have your answers. There's might not have been there. They have different religions. You've conquered.

Starting point is 00:39:29 There's an area that's made conquered. So now there's more of you to consider whenever you're making laws and rules. And these kingdoms are constantly shifting. So you may go to sleep in the Talameq empire and wake up in the Salusia empire and you don't know. And that's the thing. The government is thousands of kilometers away from you.

Starting point is 00:39:45 So people felt there's a term for this. It's called domicile, which is the killing of home. They felt they didn't feel that home in the world anymore. So this has been called an age of anxiety. And now what happened at that time? And in some ways, this is the project I'm trying to do now. What happened at the time is philosophy changed in order to address this meaning crisis. So before it, with Socrates and Plato, you already have these questions about meaning and wisdom.

Starting point is 00:40:15 But what gets added to this existential ethical dimension is what you might call a therapeutic dimension. Epicurus, who's one of the prototypical philosophers from this time, said, call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. The philosopher became the physician of the soul. And what happened is, philosophy took on this dimension of how to alleviate anxiety,

Starting point is 00:40:40 how to increase people's sense of meaning and connectedness. And we got Epicurianism and Stoicism. And then eventually we got Neo-Platonism that drew them all together. And we got, and you also had the emergence of new religions that we're trying to, right? There was syncretic religions in which people were merging gods,

Starting point is 00:40:59 like, or the mother goddess is, because when you don't have a home, a mother goddess becomes a really big thing. ISIS becomes a big deal. Of course, Christianity emerges in this mix too. Wow, so that's interesting because it's kind of where we are. I see that where we've been now for a little bit, like people are gathering around speakers,

Starting point is 00:41:20 of men and women who are able to share a message of hope or give them, make them feel like they have meaning or purpose. Why people listen to, or have started to listen to people like, I mean, at Jordan Peterson's an easy win because he's been very popular. Guys like you who are able to converse, or just, you're able to put into words But a lot of people can't that's one of the problems that a lot of us have we can't put certain things in a word So we start to especially in times like this you start to look to somebody who seems to have it together I think yeah, does that make any sense or you know it does and it lands it lands very well, but it lands with a sort of It does and it lands. It lands very well, but it lands with a very strong sense of responsibility.

Starting point is 00:42:10 That's true. Maybe it's putting too much responsibility on those people. I guess I'm not looking at it from that perspective. I'm looking at it more from the people in the, in the polis, in the city or whatever, who are like, what do we do now? And you know, and like, like as other things start to fall as the fabric of our society, the traditions and stuff,

Starting point is 00:42:31 start to like get more opaque or whatever, there's opaque, let me know, opaque like, like, you know what they seem as well, yeah, yeah. What do we do, you know? And so you go to somebody who I think sounds like they know what they're doing. Right, so it's again, there's a do, you know? And so you go to somebody who I think sounds like they know what they're doing.

Starting point is 00:42:46 Right. So it's again, there's a risk there, right? Like there's a tremendous risk of, and there's risk both ways. There's a risk of the person, the figure being wrong. Well, being wrong or not caring if they're wrong. There's a lot of bullshit, right? And, and then, and then there's

Starting point is 00:43:05 also risk for the person, they might be sincere, but, you know, for every myth we have in the Greek tradition of the hero, we have an equal myth of hubris. Hubris is when you try to be the gods and the god like Icarus, you try to fly to the sun and the right, you try to, or fade on, you try to steer the chariot of the sun and you, right? And Zeus has to kill you, right? All that, right, humility, basically. Right, right, and socratic humility, right?

Starting point is 00:43:32 Yeah, I mean, one way of understanding the human task is to keep a, keep a, hold on both the fact that we're finite, we're prone to error or self-deception, and unforeseen fate. But we're not just animals. We're also called to virtue. We have a capacity to transcend. We have to hold the finitude and the transcendence together. We just did the transcendence. We can fall prey to thinking we're gods.

Starting point is 00:43:55 And then the hubris falls. And that's what a lot of these thought leaders do. And then on the other hand, but if we don't give people something, they can just collapse into their finitude. And then they're subject hand, but if we don't give people something, they can just collapse into their finitude and then their subject to tyranny and servitude and despair. And Plato is all about trying, he uses Socrates to represent somebody who Socrates described himself as Mataqsu between.

Starting point is 00:44:18 He was always holding those two together. And so I try to take on the responsibility you put your finger on in, and I try to live it that way. And so, I mean, one of the things people say to me, and it's really a profound compliment for me, there's a lot of people say, John, you gave me the vocabulary. Like you were talking about a few minutes ago to talk about this, to think about it, to

Starting point is 00:44:51 talk to other people about it. But I have to balance that off with a tendency to get too self-absorbed in my own terminology. And that's the fallacy. It's one of the, I don't know if the fallacy is a word, but not weaner. I'm talking about the other thing, the, which one? The, like a, like a confusion.

Starting point is 00:45:13 Fallacy, and I'm talking about. Yeah, yes. Okay. Yeah, that's one of the fallacies of just being human. It's like you can, if you, when things start to go, well, this happened to me before in my life. I started to get some popularity and things seem like they were going good. And I start, there was a moment where I was like, well, I started asking myself,

Starting point is 00:45:32 does God have some special plan for me, you know, which is a dangerous thing to start asking yourself? It's, it's okay to ask to be curious and see if, you know, what the, how I can be of service. But part of that gets real tricky because then you start thinking you have some special power and that's where it can just get scary and I think there's, it's just being human.

Starting point is 00:45:55 It's part of the, you know, that's what that fulcrum is right there. It's just trying to keep that even, you know. Until I think about this daily, I think about this daily, I think about this daily. I have an amazing team of people around me. I have a non-for-profit organization, the Verveiki Foundation that keeps the money

Starting point is 00:46:12 and the power at an arms length for me. I'm not in charge of it. I have a bunch of people around me who have been given ongoing non-negotiable permission to tell me if I'm starting to believe my own bullshit. Okay. Hey, you don't strike me as that person at all. Well, I wasn't trying to say that.

Starting point is 00:46:30 No, no, no, I'm just trying to examine this. It's really interesting. I examine it for myself sometimes because I have people that will say, man, you really helped me with this or you've helped me. And that's good. Think about those things. Right, it makes me feel like I'm being of service, right?

Starting point is 00:46:42 Yeah. But then I have to be careful like that. I don't let that leave the room with me in a... It's like beautiful music, right? Yeah. You enjoy in it while it's happening because somebody is sharing with you. Right.

Starting point is 00:46:58 And you don't want to rain on somebody when they're sharing with you because they need that. But then it's like music. When the song's done, the song's done. Don't keep him in your self as you lead, right? Yeah. John is great. John is great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Today's episode is brought to you by Better Help. Indeed. Better help. They can help. They'll do it. They help me. I tried them out. I needed help. I called them And I've gotten help. That's it. You can do it over your phone. It's easiest discrete. You can do it on FaceTime

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Starting point is 00:48:27 That's betterhep.com slash the O. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I want to let you know that Morgan and Morgan has teamed up with Richard Childress Racing to support Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon and are offering one lucky this past weekend listener the opportunity to attend race day in Las Vegas on October one five. That's right. They are giving one lucky winner $2,000 and two tickets to see Kyle Bush race live in Las Vegas this October. Entering to win is easy. Just go to morganvegas.com slash this past weekend. That's morganvegas.com slash this past weekend. No purchase necessary, open a legal residence. So the 48 contiguous United States and DC,

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Starting point is 00:51:13 down with industry leading carrier discounts while your holiday orders roll in. So set your business up for success this holiday season with Ship station. Simply go to shipstation.com and use code Theo today and sign up for your free 60 day trial. That's two months. That's shipstation.com code Theo. So one thing that I think about when I think about meaning is like, if you look at like some past cultures, they had, they would give their, when people were dying, they would give them like weapons to go in the afterlife with like medallions, maybe a couple, you know, chocolates or frickin',

Starting point is 00:51:58 I don't know if they have butterscotchers or whatever back then, but a couple little candies for the road. You know, they would put that in their basket, right? Yeah. So imagine what life was like when you thought that death, like there was a whole, like you, this was just a preparation. That must have added so much, I feel like that would have added so much meaning. It can. To be in a live where it's now that doesn't seem.

Starting point is 00:52:23 It's not as prevalent. I mean, nobody's, I don't,, nobody, I was at a place one time somebody maybe put a couple of quailudes or something in a dude's pocket and a casket, but I've never been there where they're armor and them up and putting them in like, you know, underarm or anything, you know. So that's a really important thing.

Starting point is 00:52:40 There's a really great book. I'm teaching an online course for the Halking Academy on Beyond journalism. And we started it with Tillix book The Courage to Be, which is a really great book. The Courage to Be about Tillix, you said? Paul Tillix, yeah. And he talks about these things that can really take people into spare. And he talks about the man, politically, but he's very aware that they can interpenetrate and you can have multiple ones at the same time. One is when you just mentioned, it's

Starting point is 00:53:12 mortality. But you have to broaden it. I've to understand mortality. We talk about a fatality. The base of that is not death. The base word in there is faked. This is the idea, your death is just an example of how the universe is perpetually, profoundly, beyond your control. You can have met the woman of your life and you both know it and you're gonna have, and you step into traffic and then truck hits you. And it's not the case.

Starting point is 00:53:43 It's like in a romantic comedy. The great narrative that is unfolding, like me, Joe Black, that's what happened I think in that. Yes. So we confront, we confront fatality, which ultimately in our mortality, that's one. One is one we've been talking about, meaninglessness. The world can just suddenly seem flat and futile and we can feel alienated and anxious. And then the other one is guilt. Not just in the everyday sense of like, oh, you know, I shouldn't have said that to Peter. It's in a more profound sense of, I think I'm just a bad person, right? I like, and not necessarily evil.

Starting point is 00:54:29 I just, the weight of your flaws and your failings and your faults can be magnified, especially if you're very honest. I mean, feel I don't want to live forever because I don't want to try and carry that bolder that will get larger and larger of my flaws and my fates, my finitude, right? And that can weigh you down. And so I think one of the things that I think you write, one of the things that most people have lost, although not as many as you might think. So although participation in the legacy religions, the world religions is declining, even in America now, America was always the weird exception, but now it's starting to decline. So in a couple generations, most people in America won't be religious adherents.

Starting point is 00:55:20 Wow. That's scary feeling. Well, that's domicile. So welcome to it. Sorry. That's domicides. So, welcome to it. Sorry. That's domicides. It lost of home. Oh, the loss of feeling at home. The loss of feeling at home in the universe, right? We used to call it a cosmos. Cosmos was like cosmetic, beautiful, and now we call it universe, right? It's flat. We don't, there's no depth to it. So, those all three of those intersect. Now,

Starting point is 00:55:44 one of the things, and I wanna go back to, remember I mentioned, like, the Hellenistic philosophers like Epicurus, even Socrates, they tried to address the problem of more, Socrates said all the philosophy is a preparation for death, right? And they tried to address it in a different way. Can I try?

Starting point is 00:56:05 Just to give people, first of all, one thing, other cultures, so I have a lot, I've been practicing with endowism and Buddhist practices also for three decades. So, see, so if you look in, even in Vedanta, if you're looking within Hinduism, at least important, I mean, I don't wanna talk about them as they're homogenous, but at least large swaths

Starting point is 00:56:24 of Hinduism, Buddhism, right? And mortality is a curse. Immortality living forever is a curse. They all viewed it like that, you're saying. Yes, okay. Because the idea is reincarnation, you come back again and again and again and again. And like I said, this is kind of like karma.

Starting point is 00:56:41 The faults and the flaws and the feelings pile up. And it becomes just horrible. And what you seek for is moksha. You seek for liberation from rebirth or reincarnation or you seek nirvana. I don't want to be reborn. Oh, so in some of those religions where there's reincarnation, they seek to be freed from that. That is the core of Adata. You want to realize, Moksha, by realizing that the ground of your being, your soul and the ground of reality are one, and

Starting point is 00:57:18 that liberates you from being attached to, I want this, I want this to survive, I want this to survive, and let go of that. And Buddhism has something similar. It tries to convince you that the idea that you have a substantial soul, Atman, is ultimately false. And if you can really truly, not just as an idea, but like we were talking about earlier, if you can let go of it all the way through, then you'll be liberated from that. So it's a different response. Now, the Hellenistic

Starting point is 00:57:45 philosophers did something very similar in the West. Epicurus, he was famous for this. He didn't try and convince people that they were immortal. He tried to get people to change the way they frame their mortality. So he famously said, where death is, I am not, where I am, death is not. What he's doing there is not what he's trying what he's what what what's he's doing There's you playing games what he's saying is you can't actually experience being dead Because if you're dead you're not there. Mm-hmm. There's no experience and as long as you're experiencing you're not dead You can never have the experience of being dead and so what do you you, no, and people will say, that's not good enough. That's not the point.

Starting point is 00:58:26 The point is, so he's trying to get you to be more discerning. What is it you are afraid of? You're afraid of dying. You're afraid of going through the process of losing your vitality, losing your relationships, losing your body. You're not afraid of death.

Starting point is 00:58:42 You're afraid, like you're not afraid of all the time before your birth when you didn't exist, right? So, right, so what is it you not afraid of death. You're afraid. Like, you're not afraid of all the time before your birth when you didn't didn't exist. Right. Right. So, right. So, what is it? You're afraid of diet. You're afraid of losing. Losing. So, here's what we could do. Find the things that you can keep up until the very last moment of consciousness. And he said, the one thing, the two things that you can always have are wisdom and friendship, cultivate wise friendships and friendships that support wisdom. And he was he was suffering horrible illness as he was dying and he took that right through and he right and he also taught people how to not fear the gods right and and and and so that was one response. The Stoics, you know, Marcus Rillius,

Starting point is 00:59:25 people all know Marcus Rillius from the movies, right? And Marcus Rillius, what the Stoics said is, look, the problem is what we set our hearts on, what we identify with, right? Like, we're always assuming and assigning identities. For example, right now I'm assuming the identity of like, you know, this academic person, I'm assigning an identity to you

Starting point is 00:59:46 But this isn't the identity I would have with my partner when I go home at night. That would be weird, right? And I wouldn't assign the other. Whoa. Sorry. Are you gonna interview me now? Right? That's weird, right? And so we're always assuming and assigning identities and we're doing this in this interlocking manner that agent arena But here's the thing most of the time we do this unconsciously, we do it mindlessly, yeah, automatically, reactively. And so we set our, we identify with the wrong things. And so what the stoic said is, I'm gonna use, I know, your viewers can't see, I'm drawing a horizontal line,

Starting point is 01:00:15 we identify with horizontal things, we identify with trying to extend our life, have more fame, have more power. And they said, that's ultimately doomed. You're pitting yourself against the universe, your universe is going to crush you. Yeah. Instead, go vertical. Seneca said, even when you're painted into a corner, you can jump into this guy. So the vertical is, don't try and get the most extension of your life. Try and get the greatest depth. There's a book. Wow, that's so powerful.

Starting point is 01:00:45 That's really, really cool. Yeah, and so you lived that and you try and realize that now. They did this and even when you're painting a corner, you can jump into the sky. Yeah, and so things people can do when they feel like they're painting into a corner, they can help somebody else. That will, that creates probably some, and they can get more in touch. They can, and this is helping other people, services definitely a way to do this.

Starting point is 01:01:08 They can get, think about, they think about this as the, I mentioned earlier, people don't want a flat world, they want a world with depth and height to it. And you can, you can, you can touch the depths of reality and the heights of reality. And you know, of course, you can do this with mindfulness practices and other kinds of practices. And I just think, I get a lot of questions,

Starting point is 01:01:27 people ask me like, hey man, I'm in a tough spot right now. I feel like there's no way out what I do right now. So that's what, and a lot of times I'll say to the people you know, try and be of service, try and help someone else. It is. Get out of yourself, we get trapped in ourselves. Definitely, that's very much the case. That's what I'm thinking.

Starting point is 01:01:45 What other things would you recommend you think? Well, so let's talk about this. Let's talk about, and I think this will have personal relevance to you too. I don't want to push any buttons inappropriately. But let's talk about when people, one of the worst versions of that, which is addiction. Okay. And so my friend and colleague, Mark Lewis, has one of the best theories of addiction. It's basically a reciprocal narrowing theory. So your world is getting really problematic. So you take a substance to alter your state of consciousness so that it doesn't seem to be so threatening.

Starting point is 01:02:25 At least for a bit, the problem you pay for that is you weaken your cognitive abilities. Now, when you weaken your cognitive abilities, your ability to solve problems in the world goes down. So now the world's more threatening. So now you've got to take the substance and now you've got to take more of it. And then you weaken your cognitive abilities more. And you see what's happening. The world is getting more and more oppressive fewer and fewer options

Starting point is 01:02:45 And there's you have less and less cognitive flexibility you less have less and less ability to move maneuver in your mind to change until you Can't be any different and the world has no future and that's addiction You've was so quickly narrowed your way all the way all yourself all the way down now I was having dinner with Mark lunch with Mark Lewis Mm-hmm, and I said to him and Plato was in the back of my mind because I got this from Plato. I said to Mark, I said, well, if you can reciprocally narrow,

Starting point is 01:03:12 can't you reciprocally open? Can't you bring some flexibility to each your mind and that opens up the world. You start to see the world in more depth. And then that actually opens you up into the depths of yourself and the world and you can reciprocally open. It would make sense. Yeah. And that's what Plato talked about when he talked about the myth of the cave, you know, and we turned that into

Starting point is 01:03:33 the movie The Matrix. So, right, you can you can you can wake up. You can reciprocally open up. And what's important about that is that's jumping into the sky. That's like a set. The word for that is in Greek is anaghogate, it means a scent. Like when the people are in the cave, right, and they ascend out into the real world. And so you can open up. And what's interesting about that is, like when you do that, this was Plato's great insight. Three things are happening that are really, really important. Two, well, I'm going to use Matt again, two meta desires. So in addition to whatever you

Starting point is 01:04:09 desire, you desire that what is satisfying your desires, you have peace of mind, you have, you're not at war with yourself, you're not in conflict with yourself. Okay. The other is you desire that what is satisfying in your desires is real. You may say, well, that doesn't seem right. Let me give you just one clear example of this. So we've tried to take everything that used to be carried by God and civic and sacred religion and culture and tradition and heritage and legacy and put it into our romantic relationships. They're going to do all of that for us.

Starting point is 01:04:44 This is the weird messed up. We're, oh yeah, we make someone our power. That's right, that's right. And we say to one person, you're gonna do all that for me and they can't and so the relationships break inevitably because our expectations were insane. Your relationship shouldn't be your ultimate, right?

Starting point is 01:05:00 Your relationship should be nourished by what is ultimate. There's a different thing, right? So you ask people, I do this with my students. I'll say how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships? So, so the number put up their hands. And I say, of the ones that have their hands up right now, keep your hands up. If you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that would destroy the relationship, and almost all of them keep their hands up. If you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that would destroy the relationship, and almost all of them keep their hands up. And then you ask them,

Starting point is 01:05:29 well, why do you keep your hands up? And they said, because it's not real. I want it to be real. I don't want it to be a fake. I don't want it to be fraud. I want it to be real. Now, what's happening with this reciprocal opening, the opposite of the addict,

Starting point is 01:05:42 in which everything's becoming unreal, is they're getting more and more integrated as a person. The world is making more sense. It's getting more real. They're getting more at peace and these open. Those are the two things. You're satisfying those two things in a joint way. And here's the third thing. When you do this with a person or with reality. So mutually accelerating disclosure is the technical term But if I open up to you and then you open up to me and then that enables me to open up more to you And we do this reciprocal opening with each other. That's love That's what and it doesn't I'm not talking about romantic love. It can be yeah, right? So buddies. Yeah reciprocal opening gives you peace of mind

Starting point is 01:06:22 gives you a deep reality, and it causes you to love. That's leaping into the sky. Yeah, you notice I get that a lot when I go, so I go to recovery meetings and so I'll go to meetings and like one of the things that's nice about it is, I sit in a room a lot of times and people just share what's going on with them, right?

Starting point is 01:06:41 And everybody just listens, you just listen. You don't even, no one replies to that person, no one judges them, right? And everybody just listens. You just listen, you don't even, no one replies to that person, no one judges them, no one, it's just this place where somebody can share. And whatever their feelings were with that, they can just be in the room. And there's no, you start to create this sense of comfort in people that you can share. This, that the world is a safe place to share, which probably got closed up if they were really narrowing in and isolating. It's like, so this thing starts to grow.

Starting point is 01:07:12 It's almost a comfort. It's just a comfort that grows. But then it becomes like a positive algae on other things and then everything starts to grow a little bit. It really is. It's expansive though. Yeah. It is very expansive is what it feels like.

Starting point is 01:07:27 And it expands out and in. Is that fair to me? Yeah, I agree. That's really what's interesting about it. You're like, before you know it, you're kind of feeling okay a little, but it grows on itself, you know? So imagine if you're Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, right, or perhaps Socrates, and that is how you

Starting point is 01:07:45 are always living. The answer to the problem nihilism is not some argument. The answer is to fall in love with being, with reality again, in this way we're talking about. And when you do that, you get that vertical dimension. Well, let me tell you a story, right? So this is a Julian Barnes wrote a book, History of the World in 10 and a half chapters.

Starting point is 01:08:10 There's this one story about this. Guy dies and there's an afterlife and goes to heaven, St. Peter's is there. Oh, and do whatever you want. And the good place made use of this, but I won't do any spoilers about it. But anyways, the great ending, they made use of this. And he, you know, he wants to play, and he gets,. And he gets golf and he gets the place where he can play golf absolutely best every single

Starting point is 01:08:30 day all the time, then tennis and then any painting and then after a while he comes and it's like, you know, I'm kind of done. And he's like, and St. Peter goes, good, good. You go, what good? The point of heaven is not for you to live forever. I always think of the line from Moby Dick, what is man that he should want to live out the lifetime of his God, right?

Starting point is 01:08:54 The point of heaven is for you to be ready to die, to ready to cease to be, because you're immortal, you shouldn't be forever. And then stoicism is, can you live now, so vertically that you're ready to die? Not like in some stiff upper lip. We misuse the word stoic. We think it's about being stiff. stoicism is about joy, not pleasure. It's about joy. It's about this vertical jump. It's about this vertical, like deep depth, right? Can you have such joy in this way we're talking about that you're ready to die?

Starting point is 01:09:28 Well, that's a great question It's interesting and then how would people get there, you know? And how does a man like, you know, how do people get to that place today? The responsibility? I think men are feeling a ton of responsibility right now. Yes, it's true. And that's okay, it's interesting. That's what's being brought on by the world and by society. I think men are realizing that they have to be the,

Starting point is 01:09:53 I don't know if it's the ruler of their kingdom, but they have to really start to step up and be a leader in their home and in their environment. I think it's really, I mean, for me, somebody that's been of help for me is Marcus really. So he's a great stoic philosopher, but he was also the Roman Empire. He runs the whole Roman Empire. He's the last and props the greatest of the five good emperors. And he said something that you have to really let it reverberate inside of you,

Starting point is 01:10:24 And he said something that you have to really let it reverberate inside of you Because it really it he said many things if you read his med- The meditations chatty kind of yeah, thank God. Yes. Well the meditations aren't written to anybody else They're actually if you the Latin to him the other written to himself So he's doing a spiritual practice and this is a practice you can do by the way and it it starts to work But one of the things he wrote to himself. He said, it's possible to be happy even in a palace. Hmm. Right. And that, that's so interesting. Because you think the last sentence is going to be even in a prison or even in a desert island or something, right? Desert island. And it's like, nope, it's possibly happy even in a palace.

Starting point is 01:11:03 And it's like, there's a way in which, although all those things that are catchy, but don't have depth, we can learn. And we can help each other. Tiktot Hans said, the next boot is actually the sangha, the community, right? We can learn to discern through all of that and get to where we can find to discern through all of that

Starting point is 01:11:28 and get to where we can find that vertical, such that we can leap into this guy. I love that man. I love that feeling when you're stuck, you're painting in a corner that you can still leap into this guy. There's a way to find. Fascinating, reciprocal opening. There's a way, and let and let's let's be clear

Starting point is 01:11:45 I mean you have Marcus really is on one I'm not saying still I have criticisms of stoicism But you know Marcus really is as an emperor epic teetus is a slave the the two poles of and they're both saying you can do this Both they're both saying at the extremes You can you can find this and and they're not saying they're the extremes, you can find this. And they're not saying, they're not doing it like at a hallmark card. Yeah, right? They're like, you have to, you have to practice a lot,

Starting point is 01:12:13 you have to do a complex ecology of practices that you not only do by yourself, but deeply with other people, honed properly, and then you can make progress on doing this what we're talking about. Where did we start to lose that? I mean, obviously religion was something that was big that kept people in like a common out, like a common practice, right? That was a, and that was bigger in the past centuries.

Starting point is 01:12:39 I feel like that has been here in America. Yeah, well, I mean, and that provided a place where you would go together, you would, there were certain practices that you guys did each week, and there were, you know, religious get-togethers, and people thinking about their God, and thinking with their God. And singing together.

Starting point is 01:12:59 Yes, singing together, stuff like that's powerful, man. I've been in a church where people will start even in an audience with a band sometimes. But it's specifically at a church and people start saying and it's like it'll open up, you know, it'll make you feel connected, you know. Your feelings will just start crying, just start emoting, you know, or feeling something. So there's something about that, doing something as a community and feeling as a group. Yeah, and also there's the horizontal, and like in some of the practices that we do,

Starting point is 01:13:34 there's the horizontal, like you and I reciprocally open to each other, but there's also the vertical, you and I, sort of, we're not only opening this way, we're opening vertically as well. And it's really interesting when you do some of these socratic practices, dialectic and deologos, philosophical fellowship, things like that. People who are often not religious at all secular, they'll get into this and they'll start to feel

Starting point is 01:13:57 that collective flow state and that sense of, oh, reciprocally opening to each other. And then they all start talking about like the third, the we space, like the collective intelligence that neither, it's not coming just from you or for me, but it's being co-created and emerging and taking on a life of its own, right? And then they start to talk about this in religious language.

Starting point is 01:14:21 And we lost that. So that feels like as close as we can get to God a lot of times. I feel like there's the best ways people start saying things like that it might be God for them. I want to be really careful here. I'm very respectful of people's religious adherents. I'm not anti-religious by any means, but no neither. But people, well, what happens is, right? And this is a platonic

Starting point is 01:14:47 point, a neoplatonic point. So what happens is initially when they're doing these, they get an intimacy with each other that reciprocal opening, they fall in love, it's philella love, it's not right. But that's in the word philosophy, it's fellowship love of wisdom, right? They get that. And then they start to feel intimate with this, the guise, the spirit. We call it the logos, the, the, right, this, this thing, this emerging collective intelligence that is making everything more intelligible. And people start to reciprocally open with it, right? And then they start to reciprocally open through each other and through that logos And then they start to reciprocally open through each other and through that logos to the depths of reality. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:27 And then they start to feel like they're in relationship to what is ultimate. And some people think about that as God. And some people think about God personally, some people think about God impersonally. Some people think about it more like the ground of being or ultimate reality. But what everybody starts, well, all the people that talk this, what they're doing is they're trying to express a connection to something that's profoundly, transformatively real and meaningful. And we have a word for that. It's sacred to them. And there's a deep connection between having a sacred canopy and the cultivation of wisdom. So another thing I'll ask my students,

Starting point is 01:16:10 where do you go for information? Without thinking, they hold up their smartphones because we're all cyborgs now, right? And I say, where do you go for knowledge? And they'll sort of like, well, science, the university, but they're, yeah, something, right? But then I'll say, and this is where it's but they're not well. Yeah, something right But then I'll say and this is where it's really interesting Where do you go for wisdom and there's an anxious silence?

Starting point is 01:16:39 Now if you'd ask people that two hundred years ago they'd say oh my church my temple my mosque Like right right right my sangha Those answers don't come out occasionally. Very rarely, somebody will say like my church, but sometimes they'll, they'll say it kind of like, but not really. And what's happened is it's most, so the, the, the, the largest growing demographic are the nuns, the NONESs, they have no official religious identity. Now that doesn't mean they're overwhelmingly atheist. Most of them are spiritual but not religious or seekers, or they have weird supernatural beliefs. But what's happened is most people are abandoning religion not primarily because they've come to some deep conclusion

Starting point is 01:17:26 that it's false. Although religion has a problem, the religions generally have a problem with the scientific worldview, at least some versions of them. But it's a little bit of a truth issue, but it's much more a relevance issue. Most people feel that these institutions are no longer relevant to them. They're not vibrant, they're not vital. They don't speak to them, they don't call them to their better self, they don't call them into

Starting point is 01:17:54 these experiences. In fact, the ecology of practices has generally withered and we've tended to emphasize giving each other propositions and reciting them to each other as opposed to this complex set of rituals and ecologies and practices. So yeah, as we lost, and I'm not, and I'm not, and I'm not, you can put this on my tombstone, neither nostalgia nor utopia. I'm not nostalgia. I'm not saying we need to go back, right?

Starting point is 01:18:23 Right. Right. Right. Right. No, We're just looking at it. Right. We're looking at it. But when we lost that sacred canopy, we we lost a lot. You know, Nietzsche said it really well. He said he runs into the marketplace, the madman, and he's he doesn't confront Christians. He confronts the atheists who are all sort of tittering about the death of God. And he said, you don't know what and Nietzsche is the guy who pronounces the death of God. And he said, you don't know what, and Nietzsche's the guy who pronounces the death of God. So he's not, he's not there to argue against them as atheists. He said, you don't realize what you've done. You've taken it as sponge and you've wiped out the sky. Right? You've unchained us. Like, we're no, we're forever falling. We have to become worthy of this. We, like killing God, we have not, like to put it in affective terms. We have not

Starting point is 01:19:07 grieved to the depths we need to and in a healthy way in order to be worthy of that. That's what he's basically saying. Yeah, it's like, if you when you take that type of thing away, right? I mean, and then you take away the religion of the family, right? Like a lot of families, if you've evolved, you see a lot of single parent families. Both parents have to work, you know, the kids are being raised by, you know, by their smart phones and by whatever the first thing you can get to them. And then you take away also, you know,

Starting point is 01:19:41 there was a time like in the 90s where like everything kind of like, and this is a smaller version, but everything is like, you know, there was a time like in the 90s where like, everything kind of like, and this is a smaller version, but everything is like, you can watch or consume whatever you want when you want it. There used to be like, sure. We would, that work. Yeah, it cared experiences. They were called networks for a reason.

Starting point is 01:19:56 Right? We were a network together. We would all watch a show and then we would go out in the street and like impersonate the characters from it. We would, like you were excited as soon as the show went over, especially in the summer because it was still light outside. We go outside and impersonate our favorite acts from it. We'd all laugh and have a shared experience, whereas now everybody is fragmented. Yeah, everybody's just watching whatever when they want.

Starting point is 01:20:20 It's all separate. You don't really feel a connection. I think that's profoundly right. That's what I meant earlier about how popular culture used to have a religious fun, religio to bind together. It used to do that. And now we've even lost that dimension.

Starting point is 01:20:36 I think, I think, well how do we get back from there? Do we get back from there? Or is this like an evolutionary time where how we meet and the things that the glues that connect us or make us feel like part of a society or part of a universe or existence that they're just being challenged like I mean they're always being challenged but like, I mean, they're always being challenged, but do you think there's a way out of this kind of space or do you think we're in like a never before?

Starting point is 01:21:09 I do think there's a way. And I like, so a big chunk of my scientific work, my work as a scientist, is to try and figure out what is this meaning making machinery, what is wisdom, how can we get a better understanding so we can cultivate it better, but also working with communities of practice, practitioners, leaders of these communities. I've done a lot of participant observation. I've done a lot of participant experimentation. I did a Rayfick Kelly's Return to the Source last July. Is that a series?

Starting point is 01:21:43 You go out? It's an ecology of practice, evolve, move, play. He's been very influenced first by Jordan Peterson's work and then more so, more recently and I think you would say more in depth by my work. And we'll put links to all of these things that he's mentioning and talking about. We're going to put links to those in the information on YouTube so you guys will be able to access these different things.

Starting point is 01:22:06 Go on, sorry. So, you know, and what you have is you have, so, you say there's a father or mother out there, right? They're in charge of their home, right? And they wanna have a different future. They want their, you know, what can, what do they do? What do they start to do like all time? Like as a person or as a leader of a home that can help. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:32 So good, good. Here's the answer. Sorry. I'm enthusiastic. Don't misread my, my energy for like, I know. Like, I hope I have no way. We're waiting. Yeah. Okay. my energy for like, I know, like, I hope I have no way. We're waiting.

Starting point is 01:22:47 Okay, so like, and this comes from work I've done with Nathan Van De Poole and other people. Like I said, I've done a boat. I've been in the room virtually or in person with all of the scientists, when we're all sat in the room and we, what is wisdom? And we really, we produced a consensus paper, and then I've done, I've got, you know, lots of participant observation,

Starting point is 01:23:09 and we got a lot of the leaders of the community together in one room, and we did a bunch of discussion and practice, and I'm gonna go to another one next week in France, or same thing, and so what's coming out of it is like, there's sort of three dimensions you want to pay attention to. You want to pay attention to view, care, and action. You want to pay, remember that framing? You want to do, you want to really become aware of how you're framing and you want to become really aware of that process of how you're assuming and assigning identities. Stop

Starting point is 01:23:41 letting all of that go on mindlessly, automatically, reactively. Try and, you gotta bring it more into your awareness, right? That's view. Care, reciprocal opening. You gotta learn how to reciprocally open, how to, you know, what communicate, share information, accept information, that you mean by that.

Starting point is 01:24:02 But also reciprocally open, you need, one of the defining features of wisdom is an ability to take other people's perspective in a way that makes a difference to how you're behaving. I can understand. So you and I, right? You can know that, you can know as a set of facts, John's different, he thinks differently than me.

Starting point is 01:24:24 But you can have this kind of moment. Let's say it's not me, where you go, oh, I thought she was angry, but she's actually afraid. You have to cultivate that kind of Daniel Siegel calls it mindset, like insight into other people's minds, and not just facts about their mind, but the ability to get their world and where they're coming from so that you can be responsive and responsible to it. You care. And then that automatically, those two, you can now see what they lead to the third thing, action.

Starting point is 01:25:00 How are you interacting? And you want to be doing that so you can tune in to connections. How are you connected to yourself? How are you connected to other people? How are you connected to the world? And how are you connected to something ultimate that gives a verticality to your existence? And then you want to cultivate an ecology of practices in four domains. You want dialogical practices. This dialectic into deologus, and we run workshops on that, and there's a whole bunch, there's circling practices.

Starting point is 01:25:30 There's all over the place, so people are trying to get back. This kind, what's happening between you and I, where it takes on a life of a zone, and we both get to a place we couldn't get to our own, and it's emergent and it's transformative. Yeah. Then you want the imaginal.

Starting point is 01:25:43 You have to, remember we talked about the experiment with you have to learn how to properly use your imagination again. Yeah, that's disappearing. That's just an extinct animal, the imagination. And we've also relegated it to something that we're looking at. I want to compare two different senses of imagination.

Starting point is 01:26:04 One is the imaginary. This is on record band, he was a philosopher. And that's like when I, you picture something in your mind, like picture sale book. Yeah. And does it have, are the sales upper down? It's an al in a shop. Okay, so there you go. Now that's one thing. Now I want you to consider that in comparison to this.

Starting point is 01:26:23 So a kid picks up a stick, ties a blanket around him and says, I'm Zorro. You're not picturing anything in their mind. What they're doing is they're trying to take the perspective and the identity. That's stuff we were talking about earlier, of Zorro. They're trying on what it's like to be Zorro in order to see if they can catch any of his virtues.

Starting point is 01:26:45 That's serious play. That's what you do in ritual. You do that. Imagine the augmented awareness. So when I'm teaching people Tai Chi, right, and they're novices, and you have to teach them how to inhabit their body differently. You say to them, okay, I want you to imagine you're standing in a shallow river and your knees to your feet are sinking into the mud.

Starting point is 01:27:05 You want to have that sinking feeling there. Your knees to your navel are like the flowing water. You want this to feel like flowing water, right? And then from your navel up, this is like the air. You want it to feel as insumstantial as possible. And when people are doing that, they're imaginally augmenting so they can become aware of very subtle patterns,

Starting point is 01:27:24 sensory motor patterns that they would otherwise be unaware of, and they can re-enhabit themselves in a new way. And a new possibility, a new developmental pathway opens for them. That's the imaginal. And that's what ritual properly does. So you need the biological, you need the imaginal, you need mindfulness practices, you need meditative practices and contemplative practices. They're not the same thing. You need citted versions, you need moving versions, you got to create that ecology. And then you need embodiment in practices. You need practices that involve you knowing through your body, being embedded in your environment, negotiating with the world. So, rave, Kelly, you evolve, move play, you do parkour in the wilderness, so you get nature connection,

Starting point is 01:28:09 and you're also moving your body, and having it be challenged. So it's not a postcard that you sit back like I'm a nape, and you, oh, it's not lovely. I just really like, no, it's challenging you. It's forcing you to transcend. When I was there, I'm like, I'm like 60, and I'm there with all these 20 somethings, right?

Starting point is 01:28:26 And I talked about every day you went to the horizon of horror, and they were so good at taking you to this place where you're like, oh, I'm really scared. I made a vow to myself. I said, no matter what it is, there's a couple things I can't do because of my minirs. And I took, I said, other than those things, anything that's presented to me, I'm gonna do it.

Starting point is 01:28:47 And the more afraid I am, the more I'm gonna do it. Oh yeah. I did that. Today I got in the ice, I have an ice bath here and I got in, I didn't really want to, but I was like, I need something. I just want to alter, I just want to challenge my perception today.

Starting point is 01:29:01 I want to do something I don't want to do. It's something small, but it's like doing that thing that you don't want to do or Putting yourself up just committing to it, you know? Do you think we used to get so much more out of that just in our sense? Because if it seems like these things you're speaking of earth's things that seem like Necessities to our soul, you know, they are like nothing seems more thirsty these days than like soul. Like whatever, there's some, I almost can feel this part of underneath me. A lot of times just, almost like my soul is trying to order part like oxycons.

Starting point is 01:29:37 There's someone's like, dude, what am I? What am I even doing here anymore? If these are the practices we're doing a lot of times, it's like you can start to feel it feels bored, you know, or it feels like thirsty. What? It's a better word. It doesn't feel bored. It feels thirsty.

Starting point is 01:29:53 Well, yeah, thirsty, but it can vacillate between profound boredom and extreme anxiety. So you get to, and by the way, thirst, that's the word that's actually used in the Buddhist scriptures for what's usually translated as desire. It's more like thirst and craving, it's not a simple desire. So yeah, and that craving, it's that reciprocal narrowing, it's identifying in a mindless fact, it's all that stuff we talk about. And I like the contrast that I'm playing around with it

Starting point is 01:30:28 in my mind. It's like we have to learn to not thirst because we properly nourish our souls. And when you get people to do these for, like these three dimensions of eukaryaction and do dime, you know, the theological, imaginal mindfulness embodied, embedded, extended, enacted all that stuff emotional to all the ease, right?

Starting point is 01:30:50 And they do it not only individually, but collectively, right? Then people start to talk about that nourishment. And that nourishment, that's where the language, your soul is sort of your vehicle, your way of being profoundly connected. In some parts, people make a distinction between your soul as sort of how you're profoundly connected to your body and to, and you're grounded, and then your spirit is how you're profoundly connected to that capacity for leaping into the guy, right? And then yourself, yourself is paradoxically how you're profoundly connected to other. We only become

Starting point is 01:31:30 selves through other people. If you're raised in isolation, you don't become a self, you don't become a person. We become selves, we become selves by, I'm taking a perspective right now, right? And you're taking a perspective on my perspective. What a kid does, and this is like the Zoro, the imaginal, the kid, imaginally, not imagine, imagine, but imagine, right? The kid will try and take on the perspective of the teacher or the parent. That's why they'll imitate them, right? And eventually they can imitate them to the point, they endure that, that parent's parents perspective and then they imitate it more and more and more. And what that means is they start to be

Starting point is 01:32:10 able to do that for themselves. They start to internalize that. And what does the parents perspective have that the kids perspective doesn't? The parents perspective can see the biases that the kids perspective has. The kids can't see it because they're in the bi, they're in the perspective. And the parents perspective can also see broader deeper goals that the kids perspective has. The kids can't see it, because they're in the bi, they're in the perspective. And the parents perspective can also see broader, deeper goals that the kids perspective can't see. And so this is by Gatsky and other people's notions,

Starting point is 01:32:32 by internalizing the perspective of the parent, they get a capacity to take a perspective on their own perspective taking. And that's how they start to become a self-aware agent. If you ask a three year old, even a three and a half year old, what's going on in your head right now? They'll say blood. Blood.

Starting point is 01:32:51 They can't introspect. Oh yeah. But, and I kept track of this with my younger son. It must be bad if your father's a car game scientist, but, oh yeah, the kids, not gonna. But, I kept track of the first time, the first two times he introspected. He was foreign a bit and we were driving in the car and he said, Daddy, it's snowing outside,

Starting point is 01:33:11 but only in my head. And he's imagining it. Right. And he can introspect. He's got that interior, imaginal space because there's no literal space inside your head. Yeah. And then the other time, as he came up to me, he said, I have a backwards camera in my head. And I was, what?

Starting point is 01:33:28 What does that mean? And then I realized he was saying, he has autobiographical memory. He can go, he can remember his past. And then this is great. I said to him, does anybody else have that? And he said, no, only me. Right.

Starting point is 01:33:42 Right. So we become capable of introspecting, reflecting on ourselves, correcting ourselves, pretending to themselves, through other people. We become selves through each other. And so the soul is perhaps, I mean, I'm trying to rehabilitate these terms so we can re-enhabit them. And there's a connection between those two words, rehabilitate, re-enhabit, right? I'm trying to rehabilitate the notion of soul. This is how we, right?

Starting point is 01:34:10 This is our deep connectedness to our body, to our groundedness. Ourself is our deep connectedness to each other. And our spirit is our deep connectedness to the vertical, to what is ultimate. And then we could bring those back so that they can be simultaneously scientifically understood, members of the entities and spiritually, transformatively real for

Starting point is 01:34:30 us again, then we can do that nourishment you're talking about. And I think it's going to become a necessity. I think it is. That's what I think. I don't know if that part of us can die. The part of us that is desperate for just like this understanding or this comfort of this piece, not even like the comfort of a blanket or of, but the comfort of just some connection to this greater energy that we're supposed to be working with.

Starting point is 01:35:08 So we're just talking about how that we need each other. We need each other. And what's interesting I've noticed about time recently, especially since like social media and the computer, really, the sense of smartphone is, I started to notice this with reality television, right? So people would watch a show that was on reality television. Did they have it in Canada reality TV?

Starting point is 01:35:37 So people would watch it. We pretty much have everything you have. Okay. Well, you don't want everything we have, so. You know, no, and we also get some of the stuff that we don't want to have, but we still get it. Sorry. And I want to apologize about that. But like people would originally, they would watch a reality show because the shows were like trying to capture like people in their real lives, behavior in a certain way. But then after like a generation had gone on for some of those shows that were still on and it'll become bullshit

Starting point is 01:36:06 Yeah, well the people were now they'd seen people behave a certain way so they were now just Being the characters that they'd already seen right in script. Yeah, right and they don't even do it by by The well you couldn't really have reality TV anymore because the people that grew up watching it were now just impersonating what they'd seen. So now the next contestant, a generation later, on these same shows were just impersonating what they... So I just... And I noticed it even with like trends like they'll have on social media.

Starting point is 01:36:42 People will be like, okay, we'll do this dance, do this thing. I just wonder, do we start to get in this because of the mirror of social media and of our cell phone where we're just impersonating, where we're not even, like how far are we getting from like original ideas and thoughts of generation, or every generation we just start to impersonate

Starting point is 01:37:03 what we've already seen. Yeah, I mean, and that's a pro, and Plato actually starts worrying about that problem way back just with the, with the invention of writing, and alphabetic writing. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that happens is, like Bodhriard and the, you know, Simma Crow,

Starting point is 01:37:20 we, we, we, hyper reality, we start to get, we start we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, in powerful ways. And one of the ways in which that ability can get sort of twisted and hijacked is it's an idea from Eric from that he got from the Stoics, we were talking about this Stoics earlier. And so, remember why he's talking about, you know, we're always assuming identities and assigning identities. And then I have an agent arena relationship. That's my existential mode. That's the language we use for talking about that. Okay, let's say agent arena, what is that mean?

Starting point is 01:38:13 That means I'm assuming a certain identity, so I can act as an agent. I can pursue goals, solve problems. So, right, and the arena is, the world makes sense and is shaped. So, I don and the arena is, the world has, the world makes sense and is shaped. So, I don't go, I don't go in with a tennis racket with my tennis skills into a football stadium. Right, I see what you're saying. Like, when I go into a gas station, going there and I'm a patron, so I don't act like a police officer when I'm in it. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:38:40 I act like a patron in a gas station because that's what fits the world that I'm in. So, that's the agent in the arena. And we can often forget that. And so one of the personal problems I've wrestled with and I'm still wrestling with it is I will tend to carry the professor persona into areas where it doesn't belong. I see. Right. And so that's what I mean when we're doing it unconsciously.

Starting point is 01:39:04 Right. Okay. So that's your existential mode when you're doing it unconsciously, right? Mm-hmm. Okay, so that's your existential mode when you're doing all of that. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay, and so from talked about sort of two modes we have, and the modes are both needed, and they're both organized around different kinds of needs. So one mode called the having mode. This is the mode in which you need to have something.

Starting point is 01:39:25 You need to have water. You need to have oxygen. And it means you need to control it, consume it, and you need to have a categorical relationship with it. Like water, it just has to be water. It doesn't have to be this particular water. It just has to be healthy water. Right?

Starting point is 01:39:40 And so, what I do is I'm manipulating and I'm using my intelligence and I'm manipulating and controlling the world and I have what Boober would call an I-it relationship. I'm only relating to this as an it as a member of a category, right? And that's important because like if you don't have that mode, you're dead. Okay, now there's another mode. He called it the being mode. I'm not totally thrilled with that. This is the mode These are the needs that are met not by having something but by becoming something so you need to be mature You need to be in love. Notice how we say we have sex, but you want to be in love, right?

Starting point is 01:40:18 And and and that's a different mode So in that mode, I'm not trying to control and manipulate the world. I'm trying to reciprocally open it. So I strive to have that relationship with my friends and most importantly with my best friend and partner, Sara, right? If I treated Sara like a member of a category, well, Sara, the reason I'm with you

Starting point is 01:40:39 is you remind me of all the other women I've been with, I know how to manipulate and control you and use you to satisfy my needs. That just ended the relationship. What she wants is, no, no, you're not a problem that I'm going to solve. You're a mystery that I'm going to constantly be faithful to. And that's where I'm using not my intelligence. I'm using, from means reason, but in play docents, not in the modern logical sense, he means that capacity to challenge self-deception and to try and reciprocally open with something. So those are your being needs, right?

Starting point is 01:41:15 And those are important too. And you need both, right? Because you want to have water and you want to be mature. You want food and you want to be honest, right? The problem we get from says, especially if we're not paying attention to our existential mode, is we will pursue the needs in the wrong frame. So, for example, a being need, maturity. Instead of, I'm going to become mature, I'm going to have a car. Instead of being Instead of, I'm gonna become mature, I'm gonna have a car. Instead of being in love, I'm gonna have lots of sex.

Starting point is 01:41:49 Mm, I see, right? And this is modal confusion. Your existential modes are confused. And when that happens, we confuse. So, we're wanting you on a quality kind of. That's just, yes, kind of a blanket statement, but I see, yes. So, let's back to your point. Social media, what you want is you have a being need.

Starting point is 01:42:10 You need to be in relationship with people, but now you have connections. You need to be real, but now you have a script. Do you see what keeps happening? What happens, and froms point is our culture, right? Is is largely he called it the like, froms a Marxist, I'm not a Marxist, but he he called it the market character, right? He he said, what what what happens is we we are increasingly led to trying to pursue not only our having modes, but all of our being needs from within

Starting point is 01:42:47 the having mode, because if I can get you to pursue your being needs within the having mode, I can sell you stuff. I can sell you stuff. I can sell you ideas. I can manipulate you with political ideas. So there's a lot to be gained by both shitting you, right, constantly keeping you with salience, but you don't ever pursue the truth of what your needs really are, but constantly giving you the salience and drawing you in. But there's, we benefit that in a way, because if I continue to bite at the fool's gold bait of those types of things, if I continue to, it keeps me away from really having to look at myself. Yes. So because it can be very painful to really sit and look at myself in my history and my

Starting point is 01:43:34 past. If I'm not doing it in a loving way, in an accepting way. And think about how that's made even worse. That's astute to you to set. So there's a there's a outer dimension of how we're being misled. And then there's the inner dimension of how we're being misled, and then there's the inner dimension of how we're avoidant. And think about how hard it is for you to confront pain. If you don't have a sacred canopy, an ecology is a practice that can give meaning to the pain. People can undergo tremendous pain if it is made meaningful to them.

Starting point is 01:44:00 I'm working with somebody right now. She's done interventions around pain. And like people, like people think about here. Let me give you a reason. So what are the things people? I want money and I want to feel comfortable. I want to feel sort of good. You know, I want good sleep, good health. You know, I want my partner and I to get along really well. You know what? We'll destroy all of those. Have a kid. Have a child. Your health goes down, your finances go down, right? You're sick all the time, you're wet for some reason all the time. There's alarms going off, you don't sleep. Each partner's convinced the other one's not doing enough work. And then you ask people, why do you do that? Why do you give up on

Starting point is 01:44:40 all of those things? And they'll say, because having a kid is so meaningful. Remember, I'm connected to something that has a reality and a value beyond my egocentric concerns. I wanted to exist even if I don't and I want to care for it. I want to make a difference to it. And it's magical. You're like, if you love a child, right, you turn this being. I mean, they're morally perced people right from the beginning, but you cognitively, they're not people, right?

Starting point is 01:45:06 And it's like magic. You love them and they turn into persons, right? And it's just, right? And so when people can go, they will sacrifice a lot if they have a reasonable hope that they'll be meaning in it. But if we're in a meaning crisis and meaning scarcity, they won't make any of those

Starting point is 01:45:25 sacrifices. They won't face pain. Don't tell somebody face your pain, feel your emotions. If they can't bring meaning to it, if they can't have practices to confront it and bring wise discernment. So you're right. It makes it even worse. So not only are they being bullshitted from without, they're being starved, your nourishment metaphor. They're being starved within of the meaning that would allow them to make that confrontation. And you're right, those two things feed on each other and we get really, reciprocally narrow, we get really bound into this profound modal confusion. And like you said, it's fool's goals. It's not actually satisfying it.

Starting point is 01:45:59 So we pursue, I need more cars, I need more sex, I need more drugs, whatever it is. And then we get lost in a profound way. Well, we're at the end of the line with it, it feels like, I mean, we're watching, there's television shows called American Greed. It's like, we're sitting here watching the, you know, we're watching like every hero becomes a villain because they fall to their own devices of addictions

Starting point is 01:46:23 or small things, whatever little things that they let faster while they were trying to achieve grander. It's like, we're just realizing that there's no, I think the avenue of this capitalistic, I don't know what it is, I can't figure out what it is that's let us so astray though sometimes. But I think we are as a group are realizing that it's that we are astray. I think so too. And you know, and from predicted, he predicted that eventually are in him. He made the argument that when we're a profound modal confusion, what we would eventually do, and he was part of the person that inspired me when I made that prediction. I talked about earlier,

Starting point is 01:47:06 is we will seek the last connection we have with reality, which is violent destructiveness. If I can't connect to it, the last connection I can have is at least I will be the one that destroys it. Wow. Mm, he really? Yes. Think of movie Joker, right?

Starting point is 01:47:23 And just that movie's just, it's almost like a hymn to that. Yeah, I mean, think of, look at schools, people walking into schools and shooting piece. That's a symptom of the meaning crisis. Look at suicide, look at, yeah. You know, we had a corner on and he was saying

Starting point is 01:47:36 the number one cause of death and black communities is gun violence and I'm willing to cause a death and white communities is overdosing. It's like people are just finding a mean, there's, it feels like we're in a cul-de-sac. You see, of hope in a way. Yeah, I think so.

Starting point is 01:47:55 We're in a place where, we're really, we're narrowed down, we're locked in. But like I said, there's also, those are all the negative symptoms. Right, right, and I know, and I hate to be, I don't want to try to be too negative either. No, there's positive symptoms too, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:12 And like, if you look, and we're just using an analogy, if you look at a disease, you look not at only the negative symptoms, you look at how the body's trying to heal itself, how it's trying to repair, because that might give you hope, rational hope, for how you could actually cure the disease. But you see other things happening.

Starting point is 01:48:27 And even in those things, you'll see the mixture. So the mindfulness revolution is, I think I was the first person to teach about mindfulness academically at the University of Toronto. I had to sort of introduce it like within the middle of another lecture and I was just talking about mindfulness. There's actually a lot of experimental work. Right? Now everybody talks about it. There's journals. But the mindfulness revolution is an attempt to start bringing back the cultivation. Now it's also getting commodified. We have what's now called

Starting point is 01:48:54 mic mindfulness. Mindfulness, if you look in the cultures, like if you look in Buddhist cultures, or you even look back into Christian neoplatonism, the monastic traditions. Mindfulness is this rich ecology of practices. There's meditative practices, contemplative practices, right? There's citted practices. There's all this, right? And then what we did is we took one practice meditation, citted meditation. And we said, that's all mindfulness is. And then we took it out of that rich thing. We took it out of the broader framework of ethical practices and philosophical practices. So it's not about transforming you in the world. It's about making you contented

Starting point is 01:49:31 with being a corporate throne, right? And so, but still, you see what I mean? There's a positive and negative in there. The stoicism is going through a huge revival right now, right? There's a revival of interest in Eastern Orthodox Christianity because I think one of the reasons, I've had great conversations with both Jonathan Pazzo and Bishop Max, both good friends of mine.

Starting point is 01:49:55 Because Eastern Orthodox Christianity has the imaginal in it and has neoplatonism in it. So imagine if you took Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics and you integrated them together. So not only was it a great philosophical system, it was a profound ecology of practices. That's Neoplatonism and that's what's coming back. I consider myself in Neoplatonism. Right. And so there's lots of there's all these dialogical communities emerging. There's things like rafes evolve, move play, there's guys, send stocks, circling, there's the work that Taylor Barrett does,

Starting point is 01:50:28 all the stuff we're doing, and we're just one amongst many, yeah. Well, it's interesting to hear people, yeah, people are thirsty for something. They're thirsty for something new, I think. Or they're just a new being, and they're thirsty for something. But that's a thing. And Plato had this weird thing where he said, you don't really learn, you're just a new being and they're thirsty for something. Well, you know, that's a thing.

Starting point is 01:50:45 And Plato had this weird thing where he said, you don't really learn, you're just always remembering something, you didn't know, but you did know. It's just, and people have sort of struggled with this. But here's something that people say, when we're doing like the dialectic into the logos or the philosophical fellowship, they'll say things like, that's a form of intimacy I never knew about, but I realized I've always been looking for.

Starting point is 01:51:08 Hmm. That's what they say. And it's so, and that's so paradoxical to hear, but when you're in it, you understand perfectly what they're talking about. They broke that modal confusion. They break through it, dark-bruck, they break, you know, my striacker, they break through it, right? He's a Christian neoplatan, as they break through and they break through the modal confusion. And so they were hungry for it, but they're framing hadn't been well. That's one of the things I love about going to a lot of different recovery meetings. Sometimes you sit in there, you just waiting for somebody to say something the way that you have always wanted to say it, but you couldn't put like the seven

Starting point is 01:51:46 or eight words together. Isn't that a gift when that happens? It's unbelievable. And I'll go three or four times a week just hoping to hear one guy says something and I will literally feel like my body will do that. And you can kiss on us here, other people in the room. It's almost like that's the amazing. of size. Yes, that's amazing. Yes, that's the embodiment, right?

Starting point is 01:52:08 And that's the soul, right? And there's also the spirit. You're both getting to a place you couldn't get to on you. And I'm gonna use this word and I don't, I mean, it positively and I'm not trying to slide you. But, you know, those are the recovery meanings. I've done, you know, I've attended AA and some other things. But and many of them are explicitly at least, we're born in a religious, but they're religious

Starting point is 01:52:32 practices in the way we've been talking about. You're cultivating wisdom and transformation, how to face yourself, how to cultivate connection, right? This is, and you're doing it individually and collectively, right? And yes, and and and and and I notice, and this is not, this is an observation, it's not a criticism. Like you keep returning to this as a lived example in your body lived example of what we're talking about.

Starting point is 01:52:58 Right? And so, but what I'm asking you to now consider is there's lots of variations on this theme that are arising everywhere and they're getting scientific understanding. They're networking into a subculture and that gives me rational hope. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's the thing like when things get bad. They're always throughout time. It seems like there's always been like, in every story, there's the moment where you think things get bad and they get good. It's like, it's that feeling inside you

Starting point is 01:53:38 that this has to end well. I think that little pilot light of that, it feels like it perseveres no matter what. You know? Well, it can get blown out. We do some work with, I agree with you about that pilot light. By the way, think of it, it's not just as a pilot light, but like what a pilot used to be, or a pilot of airplane or pilot of a ship.

Starting point is 01:54:00 It's a guiding light. Well, I think it's not even my own pilot light, but I think it's the collective pilot light. That's the one that I feel like wins in the end. I don't know if us as individuals if we win. That's an excellent distinction because we're doing some work myself and some of my colleagues, graduate students, of vets who have post-traumatic stress disorder. And their internal light, in some sense, been blown

Starting point is 01:54:26 out. But I like what you said. One of the things we're trying to do is see if they can catch it from each other. Again, and bring about interventions that can bring that about. So remember I mentioned Paul Tillich, the courage to be here. There's a Greek word for this, and it's from the Christian tradition. It's chirous, and it means the right timing, the time where the course of things turns. And the Kairos is always a place in which multiple

Starting point is 01:54:55 opportunities, so like, you know, the, you know, Bronze Age collapse, civilizations can collapse too, right? And so, right, yeah, we're at this very crucial time. Now, it's a dangerous time, but the advantage of a chirost is, okay, when everything is going really well, a system is really stable, and it has a lot of inertia, and it's hard to make a difference.

Starting point is 01:55:16 But when things are breaking up, this is called self-organizing criticality, then individuals can make a difference that they can't you normally make when thing. So don't look at, like, well, things have always been this way because if we're actually in a crisis, a chirous, then your capacity is an individual to make a difference has been increased.

Starting point is 01:55:34 Wow, man, that's awesome. You know, that's really awesome. And that's something that I think, yeah, I'm grateful to hear that today, you know, and I think, and not to give us the insight that we are gods or that we, but just that you kid, this is, and I think, and not to give us the insight that we are gods or that we, but just that you kid, this is never has the road been set more when you can have an impact.

Starting point is 01:55:51 That's right. You know, because that's just the way that the chips are stacked. So what a blessing for you to be able to have an impact right now. If you do something good, if you do something positive, if you choose to take the road that builds up your self-worth more than the the just Feeling good in the moment, you know That's that's inspiring man. What when you think of like What about like love like people look at love a lot, you know? Have you been in love before I'm in love right now. Okay. So you have a partner now and

Starting point is 01:56:25 you'll have children? No, I have children from a previous marriage. She has children from a previous marriage. And we're done. We've raised children, her children, her two children are adults, my two children are now adults. Okay, but y'all, you've had children now. Yeah, and there's yeah, yeah, yeah and but I am in love now and I also love like

Starting point is 01:56:55 my kids and I love my friends But I've also been learning to love the world and reality and being and in in that sense, like a gope, you know, the love that makes us, like we talked about earlier, the love that turns us into human being, you know, the Bible, I'm not a Christian, but the Bible said, you know, God is a gope, like finding that reciprocal opening, that sacredness, finding the deep connections between logos, that spirit of making sense of things that emerges between people the agape by which we make each other into people, but it also connects us deeper to reality.

Starting point is 01:57:32 Deep within is calling to the deep without and they call to each other. I'm in love with all of that. Yeah. Did you think that, uh, if you ask me in the elevator, John, you have 20 seconds. This is what I would say. Learn to love wisely. That's it. It's really hard. Most of my failings have become, that I did not love wisely. I love foolishly. I think you could understand sin as a failure to love wisely. Hmm

Starting point is 01:58:10 Sorry, I interrupted you, but I just wanted to just wanted to express that no, I appreciate you expressing that. Yeah, I think I've done that a lot of times I think sometimes it's there's things that are easier to love and it's not even love It's not even love. It's like a lust, even of your imagination. Yeah. Or even if you can love anything can lust. It doesn't have to be just like of your groin or whatever you know. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:32 It can be of any, you can. Fame. Fame. Yeah, fame, food, food, sugar. Yeah, I went through that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God, dude, I eat a whole bag of damn, dove, dark chocolate.

Starting point is 01:58:44 Yeah. And I'll do it again sometimes. I missed the chocolate. It's one of the things I had to give up when I was diagnosed with diabetes. Oh God, dude, they get you. Yeah, how crucial is that to people to the success of their survival, do you think?

Starting point is 01:59:00 Love? Well, I mean, again, lest is when we're pursuing love from the having mode. Right. So you need to have sex. I mean, we got into the mistake of thinking, no, no, we don't need that. And that messes people up. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:22 And then we do the other thing. No, no, no, no, you'll get love by just having lots of sex and now we're in that the other way. Right. And so, I mean, love is, love is, like love, the thing is we're really confused. First of all, love isn't a feeling. I'm in love with sorrow right now. I mentioned those words that wasn't feeling anything. Love isn't an emotion. I'm in love with Sara and sometimes that makes me sad. I miss her right now a lot.

Starting point is 01:59:55 Sometimes it makes me angry. You're threatening Sara. No, you're not going to do that. And sometimes it makes me really happy. Sometimes it makes me very thoughtful. I just realized I really don't know her and that's wonderful. So love isn't even an emotion. Love isn't existential stance. It's, I am you and I, we're going to religion. We're going to bind ourselves so we reciprocally open. So you draw the best out in me. I draw the best out in you.

Starting point is 02:00:23 You transcend yourself through me and I transcend myself through you and we keep realizing that that is such amazing mystery that keeps happening. We're going to be faithful to it. It's a commitment. Yeah, it's a commitment, but it's not a commitment. Like the Greeks had the Greek. Not a prison. No, but and the Greeks had the Greeks have two words, right? There's in Kratia, like democracy, Kratia power. So in Kratia is when you commit by like, I'm not gonna eat the chocolate. I'm not gonna do it.

Starting point is 02:00:52 I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. That's in Kratia. Sofferson is different. Sofferson's like this. Same Paul talks about what he does, they him do a gophe. When I was a child, I felt like a child.

Starting point is 02:01:04 I acted like a child, but then when I became an adult, I put childish things behind me as a child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. So when you're a kid, you have two gods, candy and toys. In fact, one of the greatest things I did philosophically with my younger son is I came to him one day and I said, which is more important toys or candy?

Starting point is 02:01:26 And he looked at me like finally dad is asking me something intelligent. And even said, like even did like give me a moment, I wanna think, right? I was like, okay. And then he came back to me and he said, toys, because you can get sick of candy. And I thought, oh, that's my son.

Starting point is 02:01:41 Right, there's a philosopher in there somewhere. And so, right, but notice what, I used to play with him all the time, and it's a weird thing when you're in that alley, because I remember one of my friends told me, he remembered the day when the toys died, when the, like, because what happens is, when you're a kid, toys are super salient to you, right?

Starting point is 02:02:00 My son, when he was young, he used to have like a toy tower or all the MC figurines are there and everything. Like Like to get him to, he would forego urinating and eating to play with his toys, right? Now I would play with him, but I don't have that, you know, because I'm, I hope I'm an adult, I'm a man, and I don't have to sort of resist. I don't have to go, no, I won't play with the toys. No, I won't, I've matured what I find salient. We call that a salient slansk. I've matured what I find salient, how I connect to things, and salient means just to make it clear.

Starting point is 02:02:30 How things grab your attention, how they stand out for you, how they catch you, right? And so, like, I know logically I could pick up the toys and play the, this is Mark, but it doesn't, it doesn't draw me. See, sofferson, that's sofferson. You want to commit, not incredibly, I'm not gonna cheat on my partner.

Starting point is 02:02:51 You want to commit, sofferson, it's like I'm constantly tempted by the good. I'm constantly flowing. It comes like second nature to me to have this commitment. Like, Frankfurt called love a voluntary necessity, which is a brilliant way of putting it. You see what I mean? Because the problem we have is we can, and this messes people up. This is why I wanted to speak to this. People, I think commitment is the right word. The problem is we often, when we

Starting point is 02:03:25 hear commitment, we think of duty, and then we fall into it, and we, I'm going to force myself to stay with this person, right? Now, you have to tough it out at times, but, right? In the end, you want to mature in a relationship so that the commitment is sofferson, right? Right? So it's reciprocal. Yeah, and it's opening and you're being drawn into it, rather than forcing yourself. It's like, it's like when you're reciprocal. Yeah, and it's opening and you're being drawn into it rather than forcing yourself. It's like when you're meditating. Initially, you're constantly trying to keep your attention on the breath and it's like concentrate, like the word you're forcing things into the center, right?

Starting point is 02:03:54 But what you get is you get to where it flips and instead of doing that, you're constantly instead being re-interested and being drawn into what you're focusing your attention on, entering the stream, as they talk about. You want to enter the stream and your... What love, like infatuation, is the momentary madness that gives us a foretaste that we can properly play with of how that can happen, but the problem is we can't stay in infatuation. You have to... What infatuation does is it says, okay, see how you could get into this reciprocal opening with somebody now This is candy

Starting point is 02:04:28 Find out how to make it food Basically, that's the other problem. We have in our culture The romantic comedies have told us that the most important not only do they tell us that this weird Bullshit story that the universe will conspire to bring you the person you should be with no won't No, yeah, the universe is not like one to bring you the person you should be with. No, it won't. No, it won't. Yeah, the universe is not like one of the, it's not like a lazy Susan. No, exactly. And the other thing it tells you is, right, the best part of love is the falling in love

Starting point is 02:04:56 part. No, it's not. Infatuation, right? Infatuation is to shake your world up enough, right? So that you could cultivate that commitment so that it becomes your constantly tempted to fall in love with the person again and again. And that's what I thought was interesting

Starting point is 02:05:15 as you said in the beginning was, when you were talking about your partner, about your wife, that you said, if there's something new I see about her, that she's a mystery. Yes. Continuing to perceive that person as a mystery, really, or to look at them as a mystery,

Starting point is 02:05:33 it just makes it, it's gonna make every day, or every week, whatever, like a new episode. It's not gonna, you're not gonna just be playing the same episode over and over giving, you're giving your framework, you're framing as a perspective to, oh, let me see what else new I could learn or see about this person or a new way

Starting point is 02:05:50 that I can relate to them. That's pretty fascinating. So confronting a mystery rather than here, here. This is how you know your relationship is doomed. If you turn your partner into a problem to be solved, rather than a mystery to constantly face and be faithful to. Wow, to be faithful to a mystery too. That's a pretty brave thing.

Starting point is 02:06:15 Well, I think it's cool though. I think it's neat. I think that's what I, again, try to rehabilitate the notion of faith. Instead of faith being a certain propositions, pretending that you have certainty, even though you don't have evidence, what about we reconsider faith as faithfulness to the mystery of being,

Starting point is 02:06:33 so that we continually fall in love with reality in increasing depths within and without? Why don't we make faithfulness as opposed to, I'm gonna say things that have no evidence, and I'm gonna pretend that I'm certain about them. I think that's a really modern, and it's not the ancient notion of faith. That's one of the things again, we lost. We've lost faith as a profound faithfulness.

Starting point is 02:06:53 Do you think, because you're a smart guy, do you think it is, which is okay? Maybe, maybe. Some people are smart and that's okay. I'm not saying you're good at volleyball, you might not be bad at volleyball. I don't know, but some things are, certain people are certain things. You appear smart, right? To a pretty regular person like myself. Is it harder to be in love when you're smart?

Starting point is 02:07:16 Like, as smart makes it so you kind of look at things a lot, you know? So intelligent people generally have a harder time and the problem, and this is the work of Stand-of-Itch and others, the problem we've also gotten into is we've confused being intelligent with being rational and we've confused being rational with being logical. And so we get all messed up about this. Intelligence is your capacity to solve problems. Rationality is ultimately, I would argue, and this is the ancient notion, this is Plato's notion. It's not about being logical. Rationality is about using

Starting point is 02:07:49 your intelligence to become aware of the self-deception and the bias so that you can overcome it. That's what, so mindfulness is a way of being rational, even though you're not running any arguments in your head. Okay. So if, and Plato was deep about reason in that sense, reason, we still cared around when we talk about somebody being reasonable, right? Reason in that sense and love, they're interwoven because reason in that sense is the profound love and faithfulness to what is true, what is good and beautiful. And I think if you're intelligent and you're not and you haven't cultivated rationality and it's a company in virtues, then you are more and more tempted to problematize your relationship just because you have the intelligence machinery to use. But if you could,

Starting point is 02:08:43 so, but if you start making hurdles because your brain, that's what it's, it just, it likes to solve problems, so it'll just make problems. Right. And what your brain will also do, right, is your brain. So your brain is a powerful prediction machine. It's a relevance real, remember, we talked about anticipating the future. So your, your brain is constantly also trying to solve problems you didn't solve in the past. And so in a bit of a slogan, your brain actually prefers familiar on happiness to unexpected happiness. Because it likes organization, right? It likes familiarity, because familiarity at least initially seems that you're predicting things. Now the problem with familiarity is, and you know this,

Starting point is 02:09:24 you see this in your friends, and they stayed in you, and the great gift is if you could come to see it in yourself. You're doing that thing, Bill. You're doing that thing. You always doing your relationships. You're doing it again, right? You seem so wise from the outside, except two years later, Bill comes to you and says, you know, you're doing that thing again.

Starting point is 02:09:44 Right. Now you're doing that thing again. Right. Now you're doing that. Right. I know. So, you have to, your intelligence not only is problematizing things by looking for problems, it's also trying to solve previous relationships, but in often in a maladaptive way. But if you can bring rationality in the platonic sense, rationality, love, virtue into faithfulness, and they're all interdependent, if you can bring that in, then I think then it shifts,

Starting point is 02:10:15 and that actually makes, gives you a greater capacity to enter deeply into a loving relationship. I want everybody to understand, I'm like 61, almost and I've like screwed up all young man. Well, thank you. I've screwed up a lot and I continue to make sense. So so I want to give credit to a lot of the people that helped me along the way and I want to give credit to my friends and also to my beloved partner for like for anything I'm saying here I owe it profoundly to them. Yeah, and we're just trying our best, you know, it doesn't mean that you know everything. No, and I don't want to come across that way, but I do want to do it. But okay, good, but I also, but I also feel your questions deserve, you know, the best, most responsible answer I can give them.

Starting point is 02:11:06 No, and I appreciate that. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. Yeah, because I think that's a challenging thing these days, I mean, especially, you know, we've let so much, like we've let so much, and I don't know if it's capitalism or what we let win in our country. We let those

Starting point is 02:11:26 things become more important. Like, you know, we let like, I mean, I use pornography as an example, just how it killed. It's killed a lot of the libido in the world. Yes. I feel like. And so there's no. It makes salient as opposed to offering depth. See that, that Han talks about this in saving beauty. He talks about how pornography makes... He talks about how we've tried to make everything smooth. We've, instead of... See, if you read the ancient, or even real cut beauty, it's almost terrifying. Because it shocks you. It wakes you up. It makes you... Oh, I didn't realize the world could be like this. I remember I saw a hot chick. I couldn't even handle it, dude. Right, right. Yeah, I tried to almost bury myself in the dirt one time because I couldn't handle it.

Starting point is 02:12:08 First time I saw a bugger. It's overwhelmingly powerful. And you know, like 11 inches of dirt out and fucking sad and that's crazy, though. But it, well, it's, it's, it's something that we've done everything else to. We've tried to, like, what did, what did, real could say, beauty is the angel that almost threatens to kill you but doesn't.

Starting point is 02:12:33 Right? And then what, what pornography does according to Hawn is it just makes everything, there's no challenge. And what that, and we think that's great because now it's easily accessible. I can have it. But there's no confrontation with mystery. There's no calling to go beyond oneself. There's no calling to challenge one.

Starting point is 02:12:51 So everything is now smooth for us. And we've adopted an aesthetic of the smooth and the easy and the comfortable. I think you're right. Pornography is a clear symptom of just how, and then we, and it's a hyperbolic discounting, we get the momentary thing and we lose the long-term project

Starting point is 02:13:12 yeah, the long-term project of relationship of cultivating sexuality between yourself and a partner. It's like, okay, do I want to go out and meet someone and try to fall in love and try to covet them and respect them and create sensuality and make this long diatribe of a relationship that has value to both me and them or do I just want to go squeeze one out over here, you know. And a lot of times you'll just choose that easier when you're you'll just buy a new vape or something and choose that easier when you'll just buy a new vape or something

Starting point is 02:13:45 and choose that easier when instead of go that longer road where there's gonna be more value, you know? And it's almost become so prevalent that some people don't even know that there is the longer road anymore. You the fact that that's the scary part to me. Yeah, we're growing up in a generation who has never been without screens and where pornography is available all the time everywhere and everything is if you want to laugh now

Starting point is 02:14:09 This is kind of an interesting one, but if you want to laugh you can go find you a laugh You know you can find a laugh pretty quick But if you wanted to be out like we had to make each other like you had to you had to be the videos You're watching in a way you had to, you had to be the videos you're watching in a way, you had to use your imagination to iterate what had happened before. You felt like a cog in the wheel of entertainment just by being a human being. And some of that has disappeared, you know.

Starting point is 02:14:43 I mean, conversation is, people are listening to people have conversations. That's how archaic they're becoming. So that people are listening to podcasts to hear people talk freely. So one, by the way, I'd love to see you that animated. That was really powerful. So thank you for sharing that with me. That was, oh, thanks, man.

Starting point is 02:15:02 That was really, yeah, I didn't know it was gonna be so powerful to me, but I think it does. I think I've felt fallen victim so much to pornography, So thank you for sharing that with me. That was great. Oh, thanks, man. That was really... Yeah, I didn't know it was gonna be so powerful to me, but I think it does. I think I've felt fallen victim so much to pornography, especially in my 20s, that like, dude, it just makes me mad, you know. I didn't wasted.

Starting point is 02:15:14 Yeah, time wasted. And the ability to love wasted and the ability to learn about love, you know. I didn't have any other choice, you know, but, I mean, I maybe had a choice, but I wasn't aware, you know. Yeah, for sure. But I mean, I maybe had a choice, but I wasn't aware, you know. Yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 02:15:25 But anyway, go on. Well, I was just gonna say that one of the things that I'm trying to do with the podcast and the videos, but I'm also building in person things is build a bridge between those, so that when people see these, because I get comments all the time, it's like, I wish I could be part of that conversation,

Starting point is 02:15:45 that kind of de-allogo, so I use the Greek word. Yeah. And then, you say, well, you can, and here's a place you can come where you can start to practice it. And you know, either we can do it through Zoom room, and that still works, by the way, which is really fascinating, because it's a scientist, I wonder what it would work, but it still does, but we can also do it in person,

Starting point is 02:16:04 and trying to build that bridge so people can, once they see, I wanna be part of that, I wanna participate in that, like you were just talking about so much life, there's a place they can go, where they can, there's a bridge between witnessing and wanting to be in such a conversation and actually practicing and participating in. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:24 Yeah, well, there's also, I mean, there's 12 step programs for everything, which is great. And I go to some of the meetings for, they have like, intimacy and love addiction. And some of the names of the groups are a little bit off sometimes, but you can go in there and listen to people talk about their struggles with relationships

Starting point is 02:16:43 and sometimes pornography, all different types of stuff. I met a buddy that was a flasher in there, so you get all the type, you know, some of it's kind of cool, kind of. I mean, not cool, you know, but it is kind of neat. You know, a flasher, you know, you know, you know, you know one, you know, you know him, you know,

Starting point is 02:16:59 that's great. And so, yeah, I think some of that's just the rooms that are out there that people are sharing like what their life is like and and getting better and Recovering from those things are pretty fascinating It's also at a time where it's like yeah if you're willing to share what's going on with you There's a ton of value to that. Yeah, I mean as long as it doesn't turn into that thing We're talking about earlier like the reality shows where it just becomes something that we can modify in order to put another trophy of narcissism on our wall, right?

Starting point is 02:17:29 And see how special I am, I can disclose more than you can. And that's why I think, that's why I really strongly challenge don't find, don't think that there's one thing you can do that will be a panacea, You need a whole bunch of practices. All doing this checks and balance. You need to do it with a bunch of different people coming from different perspectives. Right? And only then do you have the chance that it might not degenerate in that fashion.

Starting point is 02:17:55 Yeah, because I do worry that we're getting kind of like therapy porn starting to emerge in our culture. Where? What? You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to just open up and share my feelings. Right. And it's like toward what end? Are you cultivating virtue? Are you overcoming self-disception? Are you helping the other person to grow? No, it's just I'm going to expose myself. So that's, you know, right? And it's like the flasher, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's like, I'm going to expose myself. And then what we'll do is I got to see deeply into somebody and it was so smooth.

Starting point is 02:18:28 It was so easy. It's a pornography. It doesn't take any commitment or challenge. I don't have to make myself responsible to that person. They'll just gush and I'll just drink it in. And I'm worried that that's growing right now. Wow, that's fascinating, man. Yeah, because I worry about that sometimes, like not only in my own life, but yeah, you see stuff like that. I have some friends that are vloggers, and they vlog every minute of their lives.

Starting point is 02:18:52 Yeah, yeah. And you can see they start to get, like they don't even remember what they're doing anymore. They're performing for constantly for an audience, and they start doing strange things and almost become trapped in this manic episode. You know, is that reciprocal narrowing? And that's right, and they're trying to have something

Starting point is 02:19:15 instead of become someone. Like, yeah, the fact that, I mean, that's another symptom of the meningitis. It's the fact that you know that this kind of stuff is spreading like a disease. Like, yeah, right? Yeah. But there's always been diseases, right? There's always been things that have come along. We've always gotten through them. Well, yeah, I mean, sometimes we got through it like things like the Bronze Age collapse, you know, 1177 BCE. Right. We had Bronze Age civilizations ancient Egypt, Assyria Babylon, the Hittite Empire,

Starting point is 02:19:48 the Mycenaean civilization. The Al-Khalap. Al-Khalap. Except for Egypt. Assyria almost collapses at shrinks. Egypt survives because one of my favorite people in history just got a book on him. Ramsey is the third.

Starting point is 02:20:01 He's a military genius and he defeats the invading people to see people in two great battles and he's like He's trying to hold up the whole Bronze Age world on his shoulders But even Egypt at once he he gets assassinated and once he's gone even Egypt goes into clients So most of the civil more so more cities went out of existence More trade is lost, more literacy is lost at any other time in the Western world. Even the fall of the Roman, the Western Roman Empire was not as great as the Bronze Age collapse. Wow. So things can really collapse now. And then there's, like, there's several centuries. And you don't want to be

Starting point is 02:20:38 alive in the centuries after the Bronze Age collapse. They're really, really bad time to be a lot. Oh, it gets pretty scanty now. It gets really bad. But it opens up possibilities and people start to experiment. They create new cycle technologies, alphabetical literacy, numeracy. And that gives birth to the actual age to people like Socrates and Buddha and Lao-Zi. Yeah, it's almost like you just needed it over time. It's like that's the cycle. Yeah, it's almost like you just need it over time. It's like that's the cycle. Yeah, there's some people who think that that that that that complex organizations go through what's called self organizing criticality.

Starting point is 02:21:12 They organize and they build and they get very complex and then they get they can't they get to top heavy like a like a pile of sand. And then it avalanches it at all collapses, but that provides a broader base and then it can build again even higher than before and it oscillates in that way. Some people have argued that. Human cognition seems to work in that way too. Yeah. Yeah. So you know what? You can't solve this problem.

Starting point is 02:21:38 You got a sense, but you can't. You're just framing it the wrong way, but you can't break out of the wrong frame. And what often happens to happen is you have to break that frame. You have to, and sometimes breaking it's really, really hard. Sometimes it's easy. Like you'll do things like you'll say to people, you know, what's the great stuff that comes from fire?

Starting point is 02:21:56 And they say smoke. And what am I doing with my hand right now? My arm, oh, that's a stroke. And what am I doing right now? Oh, that's a choke. And what kind of tree grows from an acorn that's an oak? And what do I doing right now? Oh, that's a choke. And what kind of tree grows from an acorn that's an oak. And what do you call the white of an egg? And they'll say, Oh, yoke. Of course, it's not. It's the white of the egg. You fall into a frame

Starting point is 02:22:13 and you get locked, right? And sometimes the frames are fairly easy. Sometimes the frames are really, really hard, like your deep and modal confusion, right? And so breaking that frame is like that, that avalanche, you have to break that frame. But if you, if you don't break it to the point of trauma, if you break it in the right way, what it does is it, it allows the brain's capacity to self-organize, to reorganize from like a broader or different base. God. And then you get a new frame and then you get that aha moment.

Starting point is 02:22:42 And typically what happens, at least that's a significant theory, is the activity is predominantly in the left hemisphere, which is your logical sort of step-by-step fine grain, well-defined problem, and you realize, oh, I can't solve this problem. And it goes into the right hemisphere, which was for predation. The heart is that.

Starting point is 02:22:59 Well, well, it's predation. It's wide open attention. You're trying to get a wide picture of the big perspective. And what you do is you go over there, get a new bigger perspective, and then bring it back to that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's cool. Do you think sometimes like, say if you put like you took a bunch of sand right and just poured it into this, this glass right here. Right. This, it would fill it up, right? Yeah. Do you ever think that there's a lot more going on in the world, but that us as a vet, like a vessel only can, can, can understand so much. Sure.

Starting point is 02:23:41 So that there could be so much more happening out here, but our ability to understand is only It's this glass. Right. So I would say I know that's the case because of what we rely on We so most of our problem solving is not done as individuals You didn't invent English. I didn't invent English. You're not managing the electric grid. I'm not a managing managing You didn't invent these microphones. I didn't invent them. You're not managing the electric grid. I'm not a managing, managing. You didn't invent these microphones. I didn't invent them, right? You didn't make these chairs.

Starting point is 02:24:08 You didn't build this building. Love, love, love, love, love. We forget that most of our, no one person can run an airline or a railroad, right? And so what you can show, what you, actually what we seem to do. I've done work on this with Dan Shiappi. We've investigated the the scientists moving the rovers around on Mars, but what our primary adeptivity is we plug into that collective intelligence and that collective intelligence can often grasp objects that we can't individually access to. It could be bigger than this.

Starting point is 02:24:44 Right. So like to give you a clear example, no one, and I'm not trying to get into political controversies right now, but no one person can perceive or even measure or track global warming. It takes a whole bunch of scientists, it's a whole bunch of equipment all around the world. Yeah, totally.

Starting point is 02:24:59 You can't just be a gistom dude, guess it. Right, and no one person, this is a Hutchins, roughly, no one person steer navigates a Hutchins strawberry no one person steer navigate to ship It's a bunch of people and a bunch of equipment and they navigate the ship, right? Yeah, and so so we plug into Right the intelligence of civilization basically, but the problem is there are things that can even exceed that because civilizations probably faced what's called general systems collapse. What that means is, so here's a civilization and it's growing and what it's doing is it's solving problems and every time a new problem emerges, it adds a new piece on itself.

Starting point is 02:25:42 And it grows and it grows and it grows and initially it good at growing, and it's solving more and more problem. The problem is, as it grows more and more and more, think about a bureaucracy, or a government bureaucracy, as it grows more and more and more, it starts to become as complicated as anything it's trying to solve in the world. Does that make sense? Yeah. And eventually, it gets so big that it can't manage itself well enough to solve any unexpected new problems And then you get general systems collapse and it's making its own problems and it's making its own problems

Starting point is 02:26:12 And it starts to be and you can you can tell when an institution is Cutsping on that And I think the universities are suffering this problem is when the when when the like the bureaucracy Starts to become for its own sick rather than for solving problems because it's much more about managing and maintaining its own existence right and the civil services of some countries go down that route too. So I think we have an individual limit and then we deal with that by plugging into the civilization but the civilizations also have threshold.

Starting point is 02:26:44 Man, frickin' existing, bro, it's complicated. Yeah, the thing is, it's complicated, but reality is actually complex. Complicated is we can manage all the variables, but there's just a lot of them. Complexes, we have real uncertainty uncertainty and there are new emergent variables and they're dynamically shifting their relationship to each other. Reality is actually complex. And we create complicated systems within and without

Starting point is 02:27:12 and between us to deal with that complexity. But at some point, we get challenged. And part of what I think we need to face, that was a distinction from Snowden, part of what we need to face, and this is, comes out in my conversations with Jordan Hall and others. And this is something we're now discovering in biology. So you can evolve a trait, like this creature is going to be faster, or a writer taller, or something like that. But what we're now realizing, and this is,

Starting point is 02:27:42 is Owen Gilbert, I always get the names the wrong way around. Right. You can also evolve your availability, which is you can evolve so you can evolve faster or better than other species. Really, so you can mate with someone who evolves well and make a hyper. Well, you just brought something up there. Okay, For billions of years, organisms are single-celled and they reproduce asexually, they just divide. Human beings reproduce sexually. Sexuality reshuffles the genetic deck so we get more variation and with more variation, evolution speeds up. So, one of the reasons sex becomes pervasive is it because it makes you more

Starting point is 02:28:27 available as a species. And now using that analogy, we have to learn to become, we have to stop just, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, no, no, sorry, we shouldn't stop. I'm going to become stronger or braver, traits. We have to keep doing that. But we have to do this higher order thing. We have to, we have to evolve our availability right now because the way things are complexifying is accelerating.

Starting point is 02:28:52 Yeah. Well, especially in the US, I mean, it's like we've become, you know, it's a fair, I mean, America's always been kind of a, it's always been like a diversifying landscape, you know, I think a lot of people, I know it's been tough for my mother and for people of her generation because they had like this idea of America. And like of what it stood for and the things we fought for and the things that our brothers and sisters died for, you know, those, you know, all of that. And those things, a lot of those things. Now people look at them and the news will scoff at those Yeah, yes, even sneer not even take into account that some of these people died died or that they're loved ones had to witness them die like yeah, you know

Starting point is 02:29:34 um and a lot of those people start to lose their Hope, you know, yeah, they because they lose orientation Right, I mean, completely lose orientation, which is crazy. Like, that's how much a comfortable landscape or common, the commonalities mean to people. See, the landscape doesn't have to be comfortable. They were willing to go to war, they were,

Starting point is 02:29:58 they were willing to go to war. The landscape has to be navigatable. And navigation is not something you can do primarily on your own, right? You have to do, you have to obviously move yourself around. has to be navigatable. And navigation is not something you can do primarily on your own, right? You have to do, you have to obviously move yourself around. But you have to be oriented. And other people have to cooperate

Starting point is 02:30:12 in the orientation with you. And you help each other. And that's how you navigate a landscape. And because of what you just said, we're losing another way of talking about the meaning crisis, not being at home, domicide, is people are feeling increasingly disoriented. They don't know which way to go.

Starting point is 02:30:27 Yeah. They don't know what they should be doing. And so what they do is they fall into things by default. And I'm not criticizing anybody. No, no, this is normal. They fall into the mechanism. I just keep on keeping on. And I just do what I've been doing.

Starting point is 02:30:40 That's where I think a lot of people are right now. Yeah. Not only older folks, but younger folks as well. They're just wondering what I used to think I was part of something. Now, I don't feel like that anymore. Looking out for just myself feels doesn't feel good. It's very small. Yeah. It's very, very small. Yeah. Feels really small. I mean, I think there's moments of it where it's nice in a way where you're like, oh, I'm going to have some self-confidence. Yeah, yeah, of course. I'm going to achieve.

Starting point is 02:31:12 You have to self-care. Yeah, man, it feels very lonely, you know, and I think a lot of people are kind of wondering that. So I wonder if that will lead people back to religion looking for purpose. And I wonder why in America we've gone to like Canadians. I mean, you're Canadian. Yeah. You know, and thank you for being Canadian. I like them. Well, John Oliver is right about Canada, right? I don't like John Oliver, a lot, but when he said that, you know, it's as if the United States and Great Britain had a child that they abandoned in the snow. Right, right. So, yeah, we, I mean, we lived under a superpower, Great Britain, and we slowly negotiated

Starting point is 02:31:54 away out. We didn't have a revolution. We slowly negotiated. We don't have life liberty in the pursuit of happiness. We have peace order, a good government. That's our, that's our constant. We slowly negotiated our way out, right? And you can't point to point in history and say, that's when Canada was completely not

Starting point is 02:32:11 a colony anymore. It's there. Maybe the statue to Westminster in 1931, but like it's a gradual thing, right? And as we slowly did that, the superpower emerged to the south of us that went on to conquer the war. I mean, America is a Titanic entity. I mean, like, the Second World War, they take on the Japanese Empire almost single-handedly while manning most of the Western Front, and it's Titanic, it's huge. And they're just overwhelming. And they continue to be so. Like even militarily, you take all of the other NATO countries and pit them against the American military. The American military will destroy them in three days.

Starting point is 02:32:53 Like America is like, and Canada is like, like imagine this, there was a superpower and we slowly managed to get out of a shadow who were very carefully negotiated only to have this other one emerge, right, that overshadows us, powerfully and completely. So we're always in between. We've always been in between, and we're always much more about, because we don't, we can't enforce our way on the world.

Starting point is 02:33:21 We're much more about perspective and negotiating. We negotiate with, we negotiate with great Britain and we negotiate with the United States. And thankfully, both great Britain and the United States are willing and have been, have been willing to negotiate with us and to ally with us. Yeah, and you're willing, and you get, you get to be right there net,

Starting point is 02:33:42 you kind of have to have a, Ken has always been a very peaceful place. I feel like a lot of my friends are good listeners. Yes. You know, I think people are like, I'm supposed to not have max a mass exodus to Canada. But great posture too.

Starting point is 02:34:00 I'm afraid we've seen the posture in Toronto. You seen it? Well yeah, I mean, part of it is because you can slouch in winter when you're wearing 10,000 layers of clothing. I think the point on whatever. You got to bury yourself well. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:34:12 Oh, and they do it. You can bury people just, you can barely see them. They're so straight sometimes. Yeah. Just like watching something go by. But yeah, I find that it's interesting that we're finding like guys like you Jordan Peterson and you guys work together. We were colleagues Jordan was just down the hallway from me.

Starting point is 02:34:33 We continue to keep in communication. Because he doesn't teach anymore now does he? No, I mean he had a very he had a very fraught relationship with the university. Oh he did. Yeah, and yeah, and I think there was fault on both sides in that issue. We brought relationship with the university. Oh, we did. Yeah. And, yeah. And I think there was fault on both sides in that issue. I mean, but I want to be very clear, I have a really good relationship with the University of Toronto.

Starting point is 02:34:55 They've treated me, well, the psychology department at least has treated me extremely, extremely well this year. Yeah. Right. But, Jordan and I were colleagues. We were very friendly colleagues. We shared students. We would frequently find herself at the same conference,

Starting point is 02:35:13 at same conference talking about stuff. That's fun, was it fun to discuss things with him and be able to communicate? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wanna say this very carefully, because whenever you say about Jordan Peterson, it'll bite you in the ass no matter what you say. Is Jordan's a very divisive person. But Jordan, and it's reciprocated, Jordan respects me.

Starting point is 02:35:41 When Jordan respects you, he interacts with you differently that if he doesn't respect you or he doesn't know if he should respect you, then he interacts. This is at least to my mind. It could be a safety mechanism too. It could be a safety mechanism. It could also be that that's the kind of teacher he was. Very care. There were three life-changing professors at the University of Toronto. One, I won't mention his name, and the other two were myself and Jordan Peterson. And so we often shared students. Like I said, I've always had and I've appreciated very good relationships with Jordan.

Starting point is 02:36:22 I don't agree with Jordan on certain things, especially political things. But you see Like when when some of this stuff dropped initially, I would send I would send him an email and I'd say here's my arguments against your position But I think they should treat you with respect. You're making a point. You should be treated with like the way he should have just been sneered at or yelled at They should have like they should have they way he shouldn't have just been sneered out or yelled out, they should have, they should have, they should, he deserved to be given a good hearing, a good counter argument.

Starting point is 02:36:51 Yeah, I think what you get, what you get to a certain level, kind of a popularity, and what you're in the social media sphere, in some sense, you don't, it becomes more of like a mad max beyond ThunderDome out there, and not as much of

Starting point is 02:37:05 probably the grounds you guys are used to where people communicate. Yeah, and so the thing is like when I would write him that email, he would say thank you. Like he was appreciative or like, you know, I'll be on his channel with him and he'll, you know, he'll criticize postmodernism. And I'll say, well, I think there's value to postmodernism. And here's the value. And here's like, you know, Foucault was saying this, and you know, and Derek I was saying, and he'll be responsive and respectful.

Starting point is 02:37:33 Yeah, right? And so, but the thing about that is, is like, I want to maintain a good relationship with, like, somehow he found out I had diabetes, Like, I want to maintain a good relationship like when he somehow he found out I had diabetes and he sent me a supportive email and I appreciate that. Like, I believe, and this will get me in hot water with some people, but I believe

Starting point is 02:37:56 that Jordan is fundamentally a good person and I think he has very good intent and I think he's terrifically talented. But, while the things that make you adaptive make you prone to self-deception, and there's things that he also, we fundamentally don't agree on. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:38:14 But, but, right. I think if people, if we could get out of a polarization around him, and to be fair, I think he contributes to it. I think he's, I think by his own admission, he's not very good on Twitter. Yeah, right. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 02:38:30 No, I think he would admit that. But I'm trying to think of what we talked about when I was with it, when I chatted with him. If we could get out of polarizing and if he could get out of being caught up in that, like what's really impressive is that like, like when I've talked to him or John, and Jonathan and Pazzo, and I talked to him, he'll get a lot of comments like do more of those Jordan do more of those. Yeah, right?

Starting point is 02:38:49 Because for me, I feel like that's the Jordan that I really respect and I have affection for coming to the fore and then there's this other aspect of him that I can't I can't connect to him. Yeah, maybe he likes to get into the fracas of it, you know? Well, see, that's a philosophical difference between us. I think trying to solve the meaning crisis at the adversarial level of propositional just ideas and ideologies and that kind of, I don't think it can be solved there. We've been talking about a much different level,

Starting point is 02:39:22 a much different ways in which the meaning crisis has to be solved. I think, and this isn't a scapegoat, this costs me, so this doesn't come for free, this isn't a cop, I met a political. I think that trying to get engaged with this problem in a political framing is fundamentally a modal confusion. It is to make that kind of performance.

Starting point is 02:39:45 I think the left at its best reminds us that we're finite animals, subject to fate, and we have to show compassion to each other. And the right at its best reminds us that we're also called to transcendence and the cultivation of virtue. And when they worked, where they were correcting each other and helping each other emerge

Starting point is 02:40:04 and were committed to democracy, then we have something wonderful. When they break that up into winner take all the other side is evil and I have to destroy them, then that society that democracy is doomed and over. And I think that's where our political situation is. So I refuse like Socrates. I refuse and Plato. I refuse to participate in the political domain because for me, I do not, and see, Jordan wants to go in there, guns blazing, and that's a fundamental difference between us. And so we've come to understand that we won't talk about those things.

Starting point is 02:40:39 Right, those are just ways you guys are. And I'm glad we probably need people to be both ways. I think some of the online stuff gets like, it gets addictive probably, you know? It is. Yeah, I think once you get into that world, there's people that their whole lives are that world, you know? And he loves to argue points. So I think if you want to argue stuff, yeah, yeah, you can do it all day there. But it's argument for, play the main distinction between phylo-sophia, the love of wisdom, and phylo-naikia, the love of victory. And when it's the love of victory, then you've lost the

Starting point is 02:41:15 Socratic spirit. Right. I will disagree with people. Bishop Maxopus and I, we disagree. He is a committed and I think profound and virtuous Christian. I'm not. We know this. And yet, but so we disagree and profound. And yet he's one of my dearest friends. And we draw each other out and we contribute to each other. Right. You can disagree. You can argue. You can challenge, but you don't have to pursue demonization destruction.

Starting point is 02:41:43 You don't have to pursue confirmation porn. You don't have to pursue demonization destruction. You don't have to pursue confirmation porn. You don't have to pursue narrative porn. You know what the narrative is? If narrative is, this is a real butt. I can tell a story about that. So it might mean I know what's going on. Right? And so we get simplistic narratives.

Starting point is 02:41:57 We get confirmation porn. We get this self-righteous, adversarial, and then destroy the other end of it and see it shows how good I am. And it's ultimately narcissistic. I don't want to participate in any of that crap. Right. Right. And you can see I'm getting very animated. That's okay. It's interesting. I feel very strongly that, sorry, I want to make it clear that I'm not arguing against Jordan in his absence. I would welcome him if he was here and could defend his position.

Starting point is 02:42:31 Yeah, yeah, I don't think that we are. I think I have a decent enough relationship with him. I'm sure you have a great relationship with him. That's good. I would understand if he wouldn't be upset. I don't think so. I think he understands that we're, like, he's invited me to do things like to, he's putting together new course-paters in academy and I've already done one course form on intelligence, rationality, wisdom and spirituality.

Starting point is 02:42:55 But when he came to, when he made the offer to me, he said, well, I said, Jordan, I'm not a conservative. I'm not a Christian. And I have ideas other than you're saying, he said, first of all, you can criticize me if you want. You have complete academic freedom and you don't have to be a Christian and you don't have to tow the conservative line. I just want you to come in and give the best possible course you could give. And I said, okay, under those conditions, I'll do it because why wouldn't I?

Starting point is 02:43:21 That's a completely virtuous context. Yeah. And I hate guilt by associating. Well, you're associating with it. You really, that's become a huge problem. Well, the politics overall and you're in society. You can't do that. You, like, it's so funny. Like, people don't even realize, like, they'll guilt by association.

Starting point is 02:43:41 And then they'll spout sort of Foucault and postmodernism, who are deeply influenced, profoundly influenced by Heidegger who was literally a Nazi right and psych What what what where is your guilt by how does your guilt by association metric work right it doesn't work consistently It doesn't work coherently and you know, I think that It's important that we give people a chance to enter into genuine theologos with us, that we don't, you know, part of understanding forgiveness, which is an important part of agape, that's Jesus of Nazareth. If forgiveness isn't like mercy, I let you off the hook. Forgiveness is, I'm

Starting point is 02:44:26 giving you the chance to enter into relationship with me and even give it myself to enter in a chance into relationship with you before it has been earned. Because something has happened that I can't earn it until like I'm in a catch 22 unless you give me the chance to enter into the relationship. I can't do the things unless you give me the chance to enter the relationship. I can't do the things that will allow me to re-earn your trust. So you need to give me that. You need to forgive. I'm playing with the word a little bit. Right? You need to forgive and make the so that we're not bound in reciprocal narrowing. So there's a chance for reciprocal opening. I think we've lost the

Starting point is 02:45:08 commitment to that. America used to, I mean, I'm a Canadian, I only get it through the media, popular media, but America used to be a place, at least it seemed to me, where people were initially given the benefit of the doubt, because you were all Americans, and you all believed in democracy. As far as I can tell now, I mean, there's research to show this. You know, Republicans are more afraid of Democrats than they are of China and vice versa. Right? And nobody believes in democracy anymore. Everybody's convinced on both sides this, like, I'm in this to win, not to make America better. Right? And so, I mean, I had a point.

Starting point is 02:45:43 Well, you're American and I'm glad you're nodding to that because I feel a little bit weird here, commenting. No, I think that's a great point. I hadn't really thought about that. Everybody's in it to win. They're not in it for how do we get out of this? How do we get to a better place? How can we all get to a place together

Starting point is 02:45:59 that we could not possibly get to on our own? That was the proposal of democracy. Yeah. The proposal of democracy. Yeah. The proposal of democracy is we will all engage in self-deception, but if you have a different point of view and I'm willing to enter into a genuine deal logos with you, you can help me correct mine and I can help you correct yours.

Starting point is 02:46:18 And we can get to a place together that we couldn't get to on our own. That is the great promise of democracy. It's also the great promise of science. John Dewey, one of your great philosophers said those two, when they're both working, they work together profoundly. That's what America was.

Starting point is 02:46:34 Well, at least to my mind. Yeah. And did he do the Dewey decimal, says? Yes, that's that John Dewey. I knew it, dude. I knew he freakin' did it. God, I can't believe some weirdo would do that, but I've been gratefully did it. Yeah, me too. Because I needed to freakin did it. God, I can't believe some weirdo would do that, but I've been gratefully did it.

Starting point is 02:46:45 You have me too. Cause I needed to get those books. I don't know if you saw this, John, it says the moon is open for business entrepreneurs are racing to make billions. That they're gonna, basically they're planning on opening the moon where people can go there and have like a little colony.

Starting point is 02:47:01 That's, that's. Like as if the moon's gonna become the new like you know, we're heading with the Mayflower, you know, yeah, well, I mean The that's I mean, that's part of what's happened to the American mythos, right? Is the the the frontier the new world the frontier when it's gone now I mean, there's nowhere left to go. Right. And we try, and Star Trek tried to propose that space would be the final frontier. And we're still playing with that. But the problem is space isn't the same way as another continent,

Starting point is 02:47:34 right? And yeah, I think America is, I hadn't thought about this. Sorry, this is just coming to me. No, it's okay. It's just the news. It says with its Artemis missions, the US-based agency aims to lay the foundations for the first human settlements beyond and pave the way for extra planetary colonization and that business is at the core of its strategy. So I've wondered about this, maybe there's a hunger and America for another frontier. I can see that. Yeah. And maybe trying to make that happen. Yeah. There's been some historians who talked about that and how the frontier kept moving until they hit the Pacific Ocean. And then there was a problem because, this is over simplistic.

Starting point is 02:48:25 But generally what happened is, people who were relatively more stable and were more sociable stayed, and people that were a little bit fringe, would move to the frontier. And then they kept moving, and they kept moving, and then they end up in California, kind of.

Starting point is 02:48:41 Australia. Yeah, Australia. And then the problem is, we lost that, or the United States, the Canada didn't grow up that way. The United States lost that ability, lost that vision. Yeah, maybe there's even a bit of a spiritual dimension to this. There's a trying to attempt to get a sense of, well, there's a frontier we can open up,

Starting point is 02:49:09 we can orient towards. I hadn't, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, well, it just makes me wonder like, you know, what, if it's just a money thing so that rich people could look cool and take pictures on the moon, like what big vow, I mean, I guess you could open up maybe

Starting point is 02:49:25 a nice restaurant there that only really rich people could go to. Yeah, I mean, if it's just a business thing and all we're doing is sort of flinging fallacies into this guy, like we've been doing recently. Yeah, that's just having, that's just modal confusion. It's just trying like, like, like, so to have sex with the universe. Yeah, that's what it feels like to me. Like, a little bit of like a weird kind of like, let's inflict ourselves onto the world. I forget what you can afford it. One of the rockets even looked like a penis.

Starting point is 02:49:54 It was really embarrassing. Really? Somebody was psychological training. I'm looking at this and going, like, that's a penis. Yeah. And you're thrusting it into this guy. Right?

Starting point is 02:50:02 And it's like, it's really weird. So, yeah, you're right, it could become that. But, you know, if it becomes, if it becomes Plymouth, right, if it becomes a stepping stone to maybe opening up colonization of other planets, then that could become something other. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:50:21 There it is right there. Blue Origin. There you go. See what I mean? Yeah, that thing. Somebody just slaying in a wiener out in the space, homie. Well, it's, you know, my dick's bigger than yours, kind of. Oh, yes, yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:34 Who doesn't want to just rip their wiener off and just hum it into the damn ether? You know, I remember at one point I hated my penis for some reason. And I remember I wanted to cut it off and mail it to Africa to like a starving country and they could use it for a food. Isn't that crazy to think that? Well, maybe, but I mean, a lot of people get into a very ambivalent relationships to their sexuality and to, you know, the genitals.

Starting point is 02:51:09 Is that happened over time, you think? A lot of folks. I think it's all, I think it's a perennial thing about human beings. I think human beings, right? Sex pulls us in the two directions. Sex pulls us towards the animal, the finite. We're having sex because we're finite. We're limited. We're trying to make more kids, right? But sex can also call us and you talked about this. There's a possibility of ecstasy. There's a possibility like and you have like tantra, which is right people understanding that sex is a powerful way to reciprocally open with another human being. And if you frame it the right way, you can go into ecstasy, you can go into self

Starting point is 02:51:49 transcendence, you can touch aspects of your psyche that are otherwise inaccessible. And so we've always understood it. I think that sex is a powerful thing and it's got this tension in it and one of the ways we try to just alleviate that tension is just, well, I'm just going to collapse to one side or the other, we'll just just do the one or we'll just do the other. And again, it's play-d Plato to my mind. Like the toughest thing for me to be, to do loving wisely, in so far as I have, is to hold those two together about my sexuality, right? Is to acknowledge the animal part, but don't identify with it, and to acknowledge the

Starting point is 02:52:40 ecstatic part, but don't think I'm a God and identify with it, but try and keep the two talking to each other all the time. Yeah, I think I just gotten so disappointed. Like I think, because in my 20, I was looking at pornography a lot, you know, yeah, yeah, choose that. Oh, I could see that. Yeah. Overgoing on a date or something like, because it was less committal. It was way less scary than possibly disappointing a woman or possibly getting into a relationship even. Like even if I had appeased a woman and then things got closer, that was very scary.

Starting point is 02:53:16 And I remember, yeah, at one point I was just so sick of myself, I was like, I will just mail my penis. And I guess I thought Africa was like a starving country or something, they could use it as like a soup will just mail my penis. And I guess I thought Africa was like a starving country something that could use it as like a soup, meat, or whatever. But just to put you in some August company, St. Paul talked about cutting off your left hand and Jesus did too if it offends you, right? We can misidentify with our body or parts of our body in a way like you just described

Starting point is 02:53:47 And thank you for sharing that that can really narrow us down Reciprocly by us get us locked in and we can feel trapped and we feel like the only way out member Eric from is to destroy Wow is to destroy right? No, yeah, I'm glad I'm glad you're not there. I'm really glad you're you got out of that without having to damage yourself Yeah, me too. I think there were just time girls like I'm in a fucking home this thing over the fence Yeah, you know just cuz you just wanted to get rid of it It felt like the cause of hearing oh I remember saying something Not quite as self mutilating is that but I remember saying for the longest time, if there was a button

Starting point is 02:54:25 I could push and it would turn off my sexuality and leave everything else in place, I'd push that button. Oh, yeah. I won't push that button now. Yeah, I won't push that button now. It's different. And that's again, the gift that has been given to me by other people, especially my just wonderful woman that I'm with. And so, yeah, I can understand that.

Starting point is 02:54:48 I can understand how you can get to that place. But I think the rocket is also just a projected version of that. Oh, it's like, oh, it's just trying to show off. Yeah, and it seems like rich people are doing a lot of their own space. It's like everything has become very privatized. That's one thing that kind of scares me, you know? Well, yeah, and then we're losing the we. We're losing, what can we do together and get to a place that we could get? It's like everything has become very privatized. That's one thing that kind of scared me. You know? And then we're losing, we're losing the we.

Starting point is 02:55:06 We're losing what can we do together and get to a place that we couldn't get on our own. And flinging the fallow's into the sky is a way of saying, I can get there on my own. And the problem is, I bet you can, but so what? Right? The price you pay for that is you haven't brought everyone else along. And then once you get there, you've lost that capacity that only civilization has. Yeah, you're there by yourself. You're there by yourself and you lose all of what, all the often frustrating but also the wonderful ways in which human beings challenge us beyond ourselves, other human beings. Yeah. Yeah, it's like even,

Starting point is 02:55:47 yeah, it's like even like the Olympics and stuff, everybody's like, it takes different sides and points of view, is it used to just be you cheer for your team? You know, I wonder if it's like that in other countries or if it's just America doing all this bullshit? Well, I mean, the problem was the Olympics also, I mean, they got corrupted by politics, politics. I mean, it's even back,

Starting point is 02:56:06 you know, 36 Olympics and they're in Berlin and Hitler's, the Nazis are running the Olympics. So, right? And then you, and then you got the, the Olympics got corrupted by the Cold War. Right. And they've always been pretty fallible. Somebody taken them. Yeah, whenever there's an arena in which human excellence could come to the fore, there are also people who want to grab the shiny thing and bullshit you with it, and manipulate you around it. That's always going to be the case. That's a perennial problem. So, again, the answer to that is not, let's win that game to my mind.

Starting point is 02:56:49 The answer is, let's stop playing that game together. Yeah, it seemed like that's a thing that's really been, that's gotten rough in America is, I mean, for one, our news, the faith in our news dissolved. Yeah, the legacy media has no legitimacy. And I mean, it happened like that, I mean, for one, our news, the faith in our news dissolved. Yeah, the legacy media has no legitimacy. And I mean, it happened like that. I felt like maybe I'm wrong, but it felt like it happened. Well, the cable, like you said a long time ago, the cable fragmented the networks. Right.

Starting point is 02:57:16 And so when you don't have a consensus out there, when you don't have a listening consensus, that doesn't get reflected back as a consensus authority for you. When you're Walter Cronkite and so many people are listening to you, they write and they're all sharing that together. A lot of trust gets placed in you by a lot of people. When you're on some little cable thing, then that's 24 hours a day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it, so, you know, CNN changed thing.

Starting point is 02:57:41 I remember what I was watching CNN when it first came on and I got like a shiver went through me, was watching it and I realized the journalists are interviewing each other. I grew up with journalism with the journalists went to where the story was and interviewed the people that the story was happening to. And I'm watching CNN and it's their talking to each other and I go, oh no, this is really bad.

Starting point is 02:58:04 This is gonna isolate itself more and more and more and become more and more about itself very, very rapidly. Yeah. And it has, I used to watch scene and I thought it was like the place how I go for news. And then like I think five years ago

Starting point is 02:58:16 or something, I was like, I don't, this just isn't news anymore, I don't know. But the news lost itself and so the conspiracy theories grew. They filled the vacuum. Because of course, people are trying to figure out the reality of news. They're trying to figure out real information. So I guess people are searching for real information. You know, they're trying to figure it out.

Starting point is 02:58:35 But what the conspirator should have to show you though, at least I would argue this, is they're not just searching for information for facts. They're searching for meaning. They're searching for belonging. They're searching for belonging. They're searching for connection. Like, Socrates, they don't want just empty truths. They want transformative truths. And that's what, like if you watch a Q and on meeting, yeah, they'll be the conspiracy language,

Starting point is 02:59:01 but it looks like a church service. They have like, there's songs and then there's somebody gives like a sermon and then they're supporting each other and they're offing childcare. And it's like, and you like it's like, like I'm not condoning anything here, but it's like, as a scientist, I look at that and I go, you know, they're, they're creating a new religion. Yeah. Because what people want is they don't just want the facts, right? They want the facts that connect them to themselves, to each other, to the world, and to what's ultimate. In a lot of cultures, or in a lot of like, you know, America's become extremely diverse,

Starting point is 02:59:38 you know, you have a lot of diversity issues like in France right now, like where? Canada too. Yeah. Is it, is that just a phase that we go through as places diversify, like schools of thought changing? Like are we eroding sometimes, or are we evolving, do you feel like? That's where I sometimes wonder, like, you know, is diversification, is it too soon in some of these places? Is it, not as it writers, it? Is it not as it writers at Rome because

Starting point is 03:00:06 it is what it is, you know? But what is the byproducts of that? And because some of it seems to be kind of scary in some spots, you know? Yeah, I mean, the, and it may be too big of a fish to fry, you know? Well, I mean, common community, common unity. The problem we're facing is we've, I think for good reasons, we've decided, we've realized that we've marginalized groups of people unfairly, we've disenfranchised them, they haven't been included, they have valuable things to say. Somebody, I'm recording some episodes with Greg Thomas. He's been he's a black man

Starting point is 03:00:49 and he's been teaching me how much jazz and the blues contributed to American culture, to American democracy. It's been really, that series is going to come out eventually. He's been. Yeah, we just went to Graceland the other day. Yeah. And so, right. And he talks about being an omnie American and being a radical moderate or like and talking about a cultural worldview rather than a racialized worldview. And you know, I applaud his courage because you know, it's difficult to make these things and make these kinds of statements. But I think what he's putting his finger on is yet we have to do this thing.

Starting point is 03:01:25 We have to stop hurting people just because of who they are. And I firmly agree with that. But we haven't been, we haven't been, the ecology of practices. We haven't been counter balancing that with, okay, good, let's do that. But what we need to do is we need to balance that with what are we doing to strengthen community? This is called complexification. So let me let me give you a biological example of this We you and I started out as I go to fertilized egg Initially the egg just the cells just reproduce, but you know, then then they start to do something

Starting point is 03:01:57 They start to differentiate they start to become skin cells and lung scales cells and hearts. Oh wow Right differentiation fight a little or not. Well, here's the thing I'm skin cells and lung scales, cells and heart. Oh wow. Right? Differentiation. Fight a little or not. Well, here's the thing, but that's the thing. While they are differentiating, they are simultaneously, literally self-organizing. They're also organizing into organs. And so a living thing is simultaneously differentiating and integrating. And when I am, look at my hand, my hand is very differentiated, but it's also integrated.

Starting point is 03:02:28 And when it does both of those, it complexifies. It gets emergent abilities, emergent powers. And if you only integrate, you get stultifying stillness. And if you only diversify, you get frustrating fragmentation. You need to have them properly integrated, right? So that you get complexification. I think we should be, I'm not saying we should stop pursuing the diversification that we're doing.

Starting point is 03:02:57 There are good moral arguments for doing this. And there's even good cultural arguments, right? But what we actually should be pursuing is complexification of our culture, which means we should also be countering balancing that with yes, but what binds us together and simple liberal tolerance doesn't do it. It's not enough. It's thin soup. And we've lost, we've lost the civic religions, we've lost the sacred religions, we've even lost a shared popular culture. And just being taught, you know,

Starting point is 03:03:30 well, let's just all be nice. That's not realistic. It's not enough. It's not enough. You need a shared vision. Again, I want everybody to know what I'm saying. Pursue the diversification. This is what I hear it tells us.

Starting point is 03:03:43 That's right. But it also needs to be counterbalanced with also pursue the integration so that we complexify so that we literally grow and have emergent abilities to deal with the problems that we're all collectively sharing. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, I'm a, my father's from Nicaragua and I'm mostly viewed as just a white guy, you know?

Starting point is 03:04:05 But it's been like it definitely feels like they've made just a lot of times the media it feels like I'm not saying this is real But it feels like and I have friends that feel like that the that like a white Christian man Or just made to be like the enemy, you know, and that they've never done anything good enemy, you know, and that they've never done anything good. Devenizing people will always end up. It's been horrible because there's so many good people that now start to say, okay, you want to make me the enemy, then that's what I'll be. You it's almost like not that's what I'll be, but then I'm going to separate myself from this society because I'm not even respected in it.

Starting point is 03:04:42 Yeah, my is that make any sense? Yeah, it makes direct sense to me as a father. My son was in a program in which he would come home and he would feel dejected because he was demonized that way. And at one point he said, well, you know what? And this is the effect this had on him. I'm gonna join the right because at least they'll work on my behalf and they'll stop demonizing you. And I had to sit them down and I said,

Starting point is 03:05:08 son, don't do that. Like you're giving in to like the shadow side of what's happening to you is coming out. But I had empathy. Like if you're demonizing somebody, do we really think that, oh, you've made me feel really horrible and guilty about myself

Starting point is 03:05:25 for a long time. I'm just going to join your cause. No, some people will do that because they'll give in. But a lot of people are going to give that the finger and they're going to fight back. Because you can't do that with people. So again, we've got to get the balance. How can we take responsibility for what has happened without just transferring the group that we're going to hate, right?

Starting point is 03:05:53 And this is a really tricky problem. And it's very complex. It's very hard and I applaud people like Greg. I'm mostly on this issue. I feel that I don't have the requisite education or expertise. And I also feel that, you know, I'm not the right person to, so I'm trying to really, really listen

Starting point is 03:06:21 to people who I think do have the proper place and role to try and wrestle with this and learn from them as best I can. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that's always a good idea, you know? I mean, it's just, it's nice to think about and talk about, you know? It's nice to be able to share that thought and just have it be discussed or heard or whatever, you know. And I think we should.

Starting point is 03:06:46 I don't think, I think making things topics that we can't discuss, that we need to discuss is really problematizing things for a lot of people. There are problems don't go away by talking about them as if they don't exist, right? Yeah, and you create people that are, then you get people in a fear. So I know an increasing number of people who are I can see that the fires of resentment

Starting point is 03:07:13 are building in them. Yeah, and it's dangerous. It's like this is like the like the Vimar Republic right the Versailles Treaty will crush the enemy into the dusk as their demons and you just you end up breeding a demon that's 10 times worse. So I hope that we can get to a place where we can do that, we can do the kind of thing that you and I are trying to do here, what we can do this, like, you know, this theologos conversation where we wrestle with things and we do it honestly and people are allowed to make mistakes without immediately being condemned. Like people are so afraid to make a mistake. You can't learn if you can't make mistakes. Like people have to be able to make mistakes and say, oh I'm

Starting point is 03:08:00 sorry I didn't realize like, oh yeah maybe that was a racist thing. I didn't know, right? I really honestly didn't know. Can you accept that I didn't realize, oh yeah, maybe that was a racist thing, I didn't know, right? I really honestly didn't know, can you accept that? I didn't know, and then can you help me? Right. But if we get to a place where you can't make mistakes, then you can't learn, and like it feels in a lot of places people are walking on egg shells,

Starting point is 03:08:17 and everybody's terrified about making a mistake, and then everything gets this chilly, superficial kind of conversation. And then we can't solve any of these problems. Well, I think it's kind of where Hollywood is kind of pigeonholed itself with some of its creations these days. And they're paying the price. I mean, so they're claiming that this is what everybody believes.

Starting point is 03:08:39 And then the box office is repeatedly telling them, no, they don't. And they resent it. And they're not listening. Well, it's almost like they have like, like they're trying to create Stockholm syndrome with their audiences, you know? Not that they need to be one way or the other, but just that, can we have some reality?

Starting point is 03:08:57 Because what gets to be scary as a regular person, you start to question your own fucking reality. You're like, am I, there's no way that I'm insane suddenly, you start to question your own fucking reality. You're like, am I, there's no way that I'm insane, suddenly, you know, what we should go back to making, making great stories that are great myth that afford people being immaginal, yeah, that call them to wisdom and virtue. And then within that, ask them to consider issues of race and gender and economic status, rather than hitting people over the head with condemning messages or very superficial representation

Starting point is 03:09:39 so that people watch this and they say, this is boring or I'm tired of getting preached at. Like again, like, and here's it, like right here, there's a point I want to make. We should be able to criticize the method without automatically being told that we are criticizing the goal. I think this ago, like, should we reduce racism and racial tension? Should we make things more fair between like the sexes and the genders? Yes.

Starting point is 03:10:11 And because I really believe that, I think there are good and bad ways of doing that. And we should be able to work together and I could be wrong and you could be wrong. And we should be able to criticize the methods if we actually believed in the goal, if we actually believed in the goal, we actually believed in helping the people, we should be able to criticize the methods like science does.

Starting point is 03:10:33 Or instead of, no, actually I'm just gonna plant my flag. Right, right. And so, it's, no, it's a great point. We should be able to criticize the methods without saying we're criticizing the goal. Yes. And it's gotten to the point now where you can't even raise your hand and ask a question

Starting point is 03:10:52 without being lambasted so much in society or online that it gets debilitating to any real conversation. Yeah, and again, I would say that, I think I honestly say that, I would say that equally to the left and the right, let me criticize the methods, and it doesn't mean I'm necessarily criticizing the goal. I agree with the left. Your goals of making the world more compassionate,

Starting point is 03:11:18 not making people the victims of fate, the fate of race or the fate of the economic class. Yeah, they're right doing that. Right, keep doing that. But also, I get the way they the fate of the economic class. Yeah, they're like, right. Doing that. Right, keep doing that. But also, I get the way they keep doing that over and it's like, come on, I've heard this story a million times. Well, but when are people going to start to live a new truth unless you start to tell

Starting point is 03:11:33 them a new story? But that's it. It's like, that should never stop because that's a perennial thing. Human beings are all, but you have to have the method that doesn't dull people to it. And I also want to say this to the right, you're supposed to be calling people to personal responsibility and virtue. Are your leaders, exemplars of virtue and personal responsibility? They don't seem to be, right? Yeah. I agree with your goals. Are your methods like, you know how you convince people to pursue virtue? be as virtuous as you can

Starting point is 03:12:07 exemplify it be like Socrates be like Sardar to be like Jesus Right, yeah, so so I'm sorry. I'm probably pissing everybody off because I'm criticizing both the left and the right No, I don't think look. I think those are challenges that everybody faces you know and when you're backs against the wall Or you feel like your back is against the wall or you feel like you're back is against the wall, whoever that may be, you're going to retaliate more than you are like entertained. Yes, that makes sense. Yes, it does.

Starting point is 03:12:39 You know, so I think and a lot of people are feeling that way. It's interesting how so many groups at the same time can feel that way. That's what's kind of interesting to me. They can have opposite beliefs and be almost exactly in their behavior. And that is, like as a psychologist, a cognitive scientist,

Starting point is 03:12:55 I'm sorry, this sounds arrogant, I don't mean it to me, but it's so apparent to me. It's like you're both acting the exact same way, and both sides will like, oh no, we're all right. They're yelling right now at me. But it's like you're saying opposite. I sure you saying and shouting opposite things, but you seem to be acting in this almost exact same way. And so that for me, that's a sign that, like, well, that's a sign that, well, that's a sign that we're in trouble. That's an a sign that we don't even have debate. We've lost theologos. We've even lost debate.

Starting point is 03:13:32 We've just got sort of verbal rug beat or something going on. Yeah, right. Right, right. Yeah, it is. I think it really is, you know. I saw in some of your work, you talk about psychedelics and psychedelic, you know? Yes, in some of your work you talk about psychedelics and psychedelic issues, you know, and the value of that,

Starting point is 03:13:48 and like getting people to be able to access and help solve issues that are inside of them trauma. Yes, yes, right? Yes, yes. Have you had experience with it? I've done psychedelics in my past. I can't. I can't part of your to learn.

Starting point is 03:14:05 To learn. So this was a long time ago. I was about three or four years into doing Tai Chi Chuan. I was doing it religiously. At both senses of where I was doing it. Like hours every day I was going to the New Jo, three or four times. I was getting all the, you know,

Starting point is 03:14:19 where you're hot like lava and cold like ice and all those, who experiences and everything. And then something happened that sort of tweaked me. So some people came to me, it was in graduate school and they said, you've changed. What's different about you? You're much more balanced and flexible. And I realized, oh, the Tai Chi is changing me. I'm so concentrated on all the wonderful bizarre experience and I'm not paying attention to how my character my cognition

Starting point is 03:14:52 I can't like how I'm showing up how I'm you know, composing myself to that was being changed other people were noticing that I and I and I and I that's been something I've been looking for, I keep looking for, when somebody recommends a practice, does it transfer broadly, deeply and effectively into their many domains of their life? Does it percolate between different layers of their psyche? And so it's like, oh, oh, oh, and so, and I had a very good friend, and I won't out that person, of course,

Starting point is 03:15:22 because of course these things are still technically illegal, but that's gonna change soon too. And they offer to Doom Magic Mushrooms, and I said to myself, and this is explicitly how I framed it. I said, I want to go on Magic Mushrooms, and I want to do Tai Chi Chuan. Hmm, on Go on Magic Mushrooms and I want to do Tai Chi Chuan. Hmm. On when I'm high, because I want to know what it's like, what it feels like, what the phenomenologies like,

Starting point is 03:15:53 because the psychedelics reduce your egocentrism, right? Yeah, and they open up that connectedness, you're falling in love with reality. I want to know what it's like to do Tai Chi like that, because if I do, what I can do is I can remember it, and I can use that like a touchstone. And so what I can do is I can practice and I'll have this deep felt memory of what it was like

Starting point is 03:16:18 and I can keep calibrating the practice so that I can get into that state without having to use the drug. And so that's how I did it. And was it helpful? Yes. Yes, it worked. That worked as a strategy.

Starting point is 03:16:32 Now that brings me to something like. So remember the processes that make you adaptive, make you self-disceptive. Real quick. So it works as a strategy in a sense, it helps you get deeper. And then in subsequent experiences, you was ableceptive real quick. So it works as a strategy in the sense that it helped you get deeper and then in Subsequent experiences you was able to still get deeper because of that I can't I can get to that state now in Tai Chi Chuan without having to be on mushroom. I ain't boy. You save in money And other things yeah, and other things Yeah, well, and other things. Yeah, and other things.

Starting point is 03:17:03 Yeah, I mean, I couldn't do it now if I wanted to because of my meneers in my left ear. So meneers? Yeah, it's a, they don't know what causes it, but my inner ear can, and I can't talk about it too long because I can trigger an attack. My, my, my, what a freaking crazy disease. Yeah, it's a bad disease. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 03:17:23 My, my, my inner ear will suddenly fill with liquid and I'll get the worst vertigo you can possibly imagine. Oh, buddy gets out if you say his ex-wife's name around it. Yeah, yeah, I can start running in a circle. But psychedelics, right? Psychedelics, what they do is we end and we're not we're not, know and I work with I talked to I was Alex Benier he's got his new book out the bigger picture I was on when he released it I I talked to people who do psychedelic work and you know and I've read people like Robin Carr, Harrison others here the idea is you when you're dreaming you're basically doing what psychedelics do. So the idea is your brain is always taking a sample of information from the world and it's

Starting point is 03:18:08 trying to predict what we've talked about this. Now you face two problems in that. One is you can do what's called overfitting to the data. You can get all the patterns that are in the, but don't actually aren't in the world. Right? Right? Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. It's called overfitting to the data. You can also underfit to the data, which is you don't pick up on patterns that are in the sample,

Starting point is 03:18:35 that are actually in the world. So there's two kinds of errors you can make. The problem you face is that they're in a trade-off relationship. As you try to solve one, you make the other worse. And so you're constantly caught between them. And so what you do, machine learning, like deep learning, these machines that are AI and stuff like that. Yeah, oh yes.

Starting point is 03:18:54 Like yeah, yeah. So they face this problem. And what they periodically do is they will throw noise into the system. They will shut off half the nodes, or they'll put in static information. And what that does is it into the system. They will shut off half the nodes, although putting static information. And that what that does is it prevents the system from overfitting to the data. It breaks up the frame enough so that the machine will go to a wider framing, like we were talking about earlier. And that looks like that's what you're doing in dreaming.

Starting point is 03:19:19 That's what psychedelics do. So psychedelics basically get parts of the brain that normally don't talk to each other, to talk to each other. Oh, yeah, right? Like the in-laws, dinner, whatever. Something like that. Yeah, and so the thing is, they have to be put in the right context

Starting point is 03:19:37 because when you are, when you're sort of unmooring your salience landscape, right, that could possibly lead to insight or you could also rabbit hole and get into your own personal bullshit really, really powerfully. So, you know, back in the 60s, people talked about set and setting, that's still true. You got to have set and setting, but you also have to have, you know, two more Ss, one of the words is a multisala, it's sappy-entral, that means having to do with wisdom. You need to set, if you're gonna do psychedelics,

Starting point is 03:20:08 you need to make sure you're doing lots of other practices that challenge your proclivity, your pronus to self-disception. That's what I mean by a sappy-ancho context. And then, like how indigenous people, it's neat, which they do that, they have the shamans, usually. Right? And you also have to have the shamans, usually, right? And you also have to have it in a sacred context, right?

Starting point is 03:20:28 Where there's a context in which your altered states of consciousness are not just running around free. They have a world view that can properly home them and integrate them in. Yeah, I went to, I did an ayahuasca ceremony. Right, right. Man, I didn't, it helped me so much, it was unbelievable. Yes, it can.

Starting point is 03:20:49 And I'd been silver for a few years and I'd done a ton of therapy, but I'd never been able to put, I couldn't adjust my perspective. Right, I couldn't adjust the framework that I was looking at this. Exactly. And when it helped me to the immensely, I feel like it literally did

Starting point is 03:21:09 a thousand sessions of therapy in two days. That's what the research shows. The research shows. Unbelievable. If put in the right context, and that's what we were in, I mean, we were in a place, they had a shaman there at all these little light candles

Starting point is 03:21:24 and all that, and there little light candles and all that. There was a lot of music that really put you in a special space. Everybody was wearing white gowns and robes were in there. There's a lot of symbolism. Yes, there was a ton of symbolism. There was a lot of traditional moments that we went through before and throughout the experience. It was a throughout the experience. It was like a nine-hour experience.

Starting point is 03:21:49 And also like a day, there was this time where we would get up with these maracas or chakras or whatever, chakras. And we'd have to shake like these little thing with a sand in them. And you'd have to shake them and do this like dance ritual. Like there was a lot of rituals that made it very, made the whole experience more powerful and more transferable. So you can integrate it, you can transfer it to different levels of your psyche, leads into different demands of your life, like I was talking about. That's exactly it. The problem with that now too though is that's becoming a business. Well, it's becoming a business, it's becoming commodified and, you know,

Starting point is 03:22:21 an ayahuasca tourism is moving. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, like come on down here. Have your experience that you can go back and tell your friends about. Yeah. And there's some of the flowers, even there's like a sexy woman in the flower.

Starting point is 03:22:34 Like what does this have to do with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's just, but yeah, it's scary that that's how everything becomes. Do you think down the road we will look back at society like thousands of years, you know, I'm like what a whore left turn that society took. You think we'll be back in like villages and looking back. Like what do you think it the long game looks like if you have any

Starting point is 03:22:55 predictions? I don't know about predictions. I know about a possibility. My good friend Jordan Hall talks about a possibility that we haven't had before. So until recently, in order to get the benefits of civilization, we had to live close to each other. And then that gives us all the noxious side effects. But the forced multiplication of civilization was worth it. But now what we can do is we can do all the civilization stuff virtually, and then we could live in small scale communities because it's a Sivium project. So we could live in groups of 150 people growing our own food. We

Starting point is 03:23:33 could live in this way that is psychologically, physiologically, healthy, and yet we could still benefit from that massive collective agency, that collective wisdom, the collective intelligence, the civilization affords. And we don't have to physically live with... Right. Right. And so we now have the possibility where we could turn to, we could live psychologically, physiologically, physically,

Starting point is 03:24:03 as we evolved to, well, participating in a hyper-technological civilization with all of the force multiplication, then that gives you. And this is a real possibility. And, you know, he's done stuff to try and make it happen, but, you know, it's like a, you know, the lone voice crying in the wilderness kind of thing. Until he isn't. Until he isn't. Until he is it. And I hope he keeps coming back to it.

Starting point is 03:24:28 That's a real possibility. We could take that turn. It for me, if we could take that turn while building up, you know, these kinds of colleges and practices, both individually and collectively are talking about. And he and I've talked about how those would integrate and support each other. That could be a turn away from some of the darkness

Starting point is 03:24:53 that many of us feel we're entering into. Yeah. Cool, man. I don't think I have anything else to think about. I mean, I could probably think about more, but I don't know if I could do it, you know? Yeah. It's something that's a lot to think, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever you get burned out from thinking, what do you like to do? When I get burned out from thinking, sometimes I'd like to do

Starting point is 03:25:16 embodied stuff like Tai Chi Chuan or meditate. Sometimes I'd like to read some very good literature Sometimes I'd like to read some very good literature where I'm putting myself sort of into somebody else's thinking. Do you read fiction ever? Yeah, I'm reading I'm reading The Last of the Wine, which is a really wonderful historical fiction about Athens and the Peloponnesian War and we're following these two characters as they form a profound platonic relationship, but platonic actually means all the whole sexual at that time. So, yeah. But, but, but they're encountering, like you, they're, like they meet,

Starting point is 03:25:55 they meet Socrates is there. Oh, wow. And so for me, it's like I get to meet Socrates and like, and hang around with them, play to, I just, I was read to a chapter and I sort of stopped and I savored the moment and I read it again. And you know, they're in there, they go to the gymnasium and aristocratly is there and

Starting point is 03:26:12 he's a wrestler and that's actually Playdough's real name. He's a aristocratly, Playdough means broad shoulders because he was a wrestler that was his nickname. And I said to myself, I just met Playdough. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, the Delphi, that was like your W-W-F, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:28 Yeah, it was, I used to be a big fan of, like, science fiction, and occasionally there's some good science fiction. But now, maybe, it's just because I'm older, I'm finding a really good historical fiction to be a friend of my, one of my most important friends, Christopher Master Piatro, my co-author and so much work. He's works for the Reveki Foundation. He's also a recommended, what is it, Hadrian's memoirs, I believe it's called, I got that book. It's about Hadrian writing to the young Marcus Aurelius trying to educate him and how to

Starting point is 03:27:08 be a great stoic emperor. And so I find that kind of literature when it's not hackneyed, when it's really well researched and well written. I find that very inspiring. It helps me to aspire to be the kind of person I want to be and I find that It I find because it's inspiring and it's beautiful. I find it very Healing and restorative. Hmm I was just reading

Starting point is 03:27:39 This book I think it's called the library you look at up like this guy Matt Hague HAIG and It's called the library. You look at it, this guy Matt Hague, HAIG. And it's about this lady. She thinks her life is like horrible, right? So she wants to take her own life. But the second she does, she wakes up in a library, and every book on the shelf is the Midnight library. That's what it's called.

Starting point is 03:28:00 And every book on the shelf is a different possibility of her life as she had made different choice? And there's a billion books. It's an endless library. Of course. So she can take one and open it and she'll be in that life. And it's really interesting because it's like it, the author just kind of takes you on the journey where no, every life you think, oh, if I just stayed and done this thing, but there's a million other things that are different about that life.

Starting point is 03:28:23 That's right. And you didn't realize, oh, when I get to this life, like my father had passed away early or my partner had left me or I was cheating on him. There's just, it's just pretty fascinating to see all the different, like the broader view, instead of just being like very specific, like, oh, if this one thing changes, I would be awesome,

Starting point is 03:28:43 but if that one thing changed, so many things would change. That's excellent. I think I would be awesome, but if that one thing changed, so many things would change. That's excellent. I think I would like to read that for that. It's really cool. It's easy to read a blue my mind how just what a creative idea it was, but. It's a really good idea.

Starting point is 03:28:53 That's what good literature can do, right? Yeah. It can persuade you, like without making an argument, but nevertheless, it rationally persuade you to really consider and reflect on things. Yeah. It kind of made me excited. It was like I hadn't read something that had kind of a new idea and something that I'd never thought

Starting point is 03:29:08 I've ever heard seen before, you know? And I was like, oh, this is exciting. It felt promising, you know? New ideas that have both truth and relevance. See, like you said, they're so nourishing. Yeah. They feed your mind in a way that information, you know, doesn't.

Starting point is 03:29:24 Yeah. We're at a place now where everyone has access to the same information. The value of information itself has kind of diminished unless you can iterate that information or share that information to people concisely and effectively and in ways that they can digest it. I think that's one of the reasons why people are going to a lot of like orders and speakers and stoics and different, like just different, I don't know what they'd be called, but evangelists maybe, but not in Christian,

Starting point is 03:30:01 not non-religious evangelists, because they they They need you know, I don't know what I'm saying. Oh, no, I think what you're saying is like people have a sense of That you know of something that will open them up in that way you were talking about yeah And they see that possibility and they're hungry for it. Yeah, they're hungry for it. And some of the old mediums of it have proven to be non-valuable recently. And so I think they're looking for new mediums of it.

Starting point is 03:30:33 So yeah, T.S.L.A. said, where's all the wisdom we've lost in knowledge? Where's all the knowledge we've lost in the information? And so yeah, it's like that very much. And good literature can take you back. Like it take you from the information into the knowledge, and if it's like that very much. And good literature can take you back. It can take you from the information into the knowledge. And if it's really great literature, from the knowledge back into the wisdom. John Verveki, thanks so much, man.

Starting point is 03:30:54 Thank you, CEO. I really enjoyed this. I mean, you drew a lot out for me, and it was really wonderful. You shared a lot, which was really wonderful. And I feel like one of my criteria of genuine deal logos is we both got to a place we couldn't have got to on our own. It wasn't just a dialogue. There was something, a life took shape between us and grew for a while.

Starting point is 03:31:19 And we sort of followed it. And I'm really, the aesthetics and the meaning of that, I find that very, very powerful. Thanks, man. Yeah, I think I was afraid. Sometimes I get afraid to talk to people that are, are a lot of education, you know, and are good at sharing information. So I felt, you know, I feel I guess pretty happy about myself that, you know, I planned ahead. And so I had somewhat of a plan. So that was nice. But I didn't feel like I had to like stick to it too much and I felt like I was able to like You know communicate and learn and ask questions that I think myself and my listeners are curious about you know and be Just like a voice for our little group of of listeners. So yeah, man. Thanks so much, dude, and

Starting point is 03:32:03 Yeah, I got to come check. Yeah. I don't want to come see a class or something when I get up there to Toronto You're welcome. Let me know yeah, can people come sit in there like they ride along with a cop You there's you can you can audit it because the universities are publicly funded in Canada You can audit any course you want as long as it does as long as you get permission of the instructor and it doesn't Violate the fire code sometimes I'm in a room and we had that there's it's seating for thirty five and there's thirty five people oh yeah oh oh I don't I don't wear nothing flammable either I won't wear he'd think I'm gonna wear wool or something probably won't so but thank you for

Starting point is 03:32:38 letting me know john verveki thank you so much for your time thank you so much now I'm just going on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I Thank you so much. And I'm about to say that it's gonna take

This Past Weekend - E462 John Vervaeke

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