E462 John Vervaeke

28:17And 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. So ask yourself, what do you want to exist even if you don't? 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. Probably families. Yeah, so these are people, you want them to exist even if you don't? Yeah. Yeah. Like happy children, happy families maybe would be something I would say. And do you think you make much of a difference to them right now?

28:53Not a ton. Right. So you need a good answer for both of those to have a strong sense of meaning in life. 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 ask themselves those questions? Well, I want to point to something that you put your finger on. There's a decline in the bigger picture, worldview. worldview. And the worldviews that 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.

29:33Like you have their heroes and things are sacred like the flag and you pledge allegiance, which is a kind of prayer, right? And both of those religious frameworks, and even though they're tearing each other apart about it right now. They're falling. 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. And so they're making a real difference to this overarching worldview, American democracy, Americanism, they had so much meaning in life.

30:23Like Socrates, they're willing to die for it. I mean, 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 for my country. 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 pole now. Remember, we talked about the individual pole. Then there's the worldview, right? The pole that we, no one, you didn't invent English, did I? Right. These are the things we invent together and we evolve together and we participate in together.

31:03And one is like, there was a great metaphor by an academic called Peter Berger. He called it the sacred canopy, where you had this worldview 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 worldview 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 need another sacred, I suppose, civil and sacred religions, they were both doing for people.

31:55And these have been breaking down. 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. Okay. 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, you can't do them on your own, right? You'll fall prey to sort of—if you're just an autodidact, 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.

32:36Yeah, we transcend each other through each other. Right. This is Socrates. You know how I can most transcend myself and overcome my bias and my narrow frame? Is you challenging you. Yeah, we are 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, 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.

33:15They're now 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. You know? But look at how those, like a symptom of the meaning crisis is 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. I mean, myths aren't ancient stories about the past. They're stories about perennial problems and patterns. And so think about the whole MCU universe. 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.

34:01And it's falling apart. We can't even keep that running. Yeah. Right? Like this is how bad things are. And so the perennial problems They start to get worse They tear out what's left of the worldview The worldview can't home the ecology People get more foolish, more selfish And the whole thing just spirals And so Was that a good answer, by the way, to the two polls? Yeah, I think it was really good, man I think it was really good I'm doing a decent job, I think, of keeping up 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.

34:35Yeah, I appreciate it. So what happens historically in a time where we get to a place like this? Has 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. We've been through it before. Now, 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 the meanings and problems, and it's a dismissive thing. And then 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, like this, you know, complex and growing.

35:23Like we face an interconnection of the advent of, you know, AGI. We're 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 I think when we're in a meaning crisis, it sort of hamstrings us. It really weakens our ability to turn our best wisdom towards these problems. Because when we're in a meaning crisis, right? Oh, especially now if we're all isolated.

36:11We're isolated. It's not our best. It's very self-motivated. It's not our like group conscience. We're acting out of fear a lot of people. Yeah. And we're acting out of like, and our ability to cut through the bullshit and to realize when we're in self-deception is, you know, 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, not globally, but like in the ancient West, the Hellenistic period, there was a meaning crisis at that time too. What was that about? So it's basically – so there's Alexander the Great.

36:54So Socrates – Was he great or not? Well, it depends. So – Because that's a straight – I mean that's like you're not even leaving any – 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 – so my partner, she's Persian and Alexander Great is the bad guy in the Persian world, right? Oh, so he's the one you ask, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like – right. But what he does is like he conquers most of the Silk Road and some of the major civilizations in Asia, Europe, and Africa.

37:48And 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, by the way, right? This is their life. They live in like a polis, 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 in Athens, you participate.

38:25well, if you're a male, so it's, right. You participate directly in the government, right? You know, you, you know, but in person, the leaders. So, right. This is like, after Alexander, you're now in a world in which the people, you've might've been uprooted. People have been uprooted, moved around. It was a little more global than at that point. Kind of. Exactly. But that's exactly the parallel. Right. Right. So people around you speak a different language. They haven't been there for years. You might not have, your ancestors might not have been there. They have different religions. Right, you've conquered, there's an area that's been conquered, so now there's more of you to consider whenever you're making laws and rules.

39:04And these kingdoms are constantly shifting, so you may go to sleep in the Ptolemaic Empire and wake up in the Seleucid Empire and you don't know. And that's the thing, the government is thousands of kilometers away from you. So people felt, there's a term for this, it's called domicile, which is the killing of home. They didn't feel at home in the world anymore. So this has been called an age of anxiety. 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 with Socrates and Plato, you already have these questions about meaning and wisdom.

39:44But 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, how to increase people's sense of meaning and connectedness. And we got Epicureanism and Stoicism, and then eventually we got Neoplatonism that drew them all together. And we got—and you also had the emergence of new religions that were trying to— There was syncretic religions in which people were merging gods or mother goddesses.

40:30Because when you don't have a home, a mother goddess becomes a really big thing. Isis becomes a big deal. And, 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, 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, Jordan Peterson's an easy one because he's been very popular. guys like you who are able to converse uh or just you're able to put into words what a lot of people can't that's one of the problems that a lot of us have we can't put certain things into words 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 no it does and it lands uh it lands very well but it lands with that sort of a very strong sense of responsibility um 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 like the people in the in the polis in the city or whatever who were like what do we do now and and you know and like um like as other things start to fall as the fabric of our society, the traditions and stuff start to like get more opaque or whatever.

42:06There's opaque. Does that mean opaque? Like you can't see them as well. 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 risk there, right? 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 then there's also risk for the person. They might be sincere, but 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, like Icarus.

42:49You try to fly to the sun, or Phaeton, you try to steer the chariot of the sun, and Zeus has to kill you. Right, humility, basically. Right, and Socratic humility, right? Yeah, I mean, one way of understanding the human task is to 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. And we have to hold the finitude and the transcendence together. If we just do the transcendence, we can fall prey to thinking we're gods, and then the hubris falls. And that's what a lot of these thought leaders do.

43:29And 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 to tyranny and servitude and despair. And Plato is all about trying – he uses Socrates to represent somebody who – Socrates described himself as metaxu, between. He was always holding those two together. And so I try to take on the responsibility you put your finger on 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. 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 talk to other people about it.

44:23But 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 wiener. I'm talking about the other thing. Which one? like a confusion fallacy I'm talking about? Yeah, yes. Okay. Yeah, that's one of the fallacies of just being human. It's like you can, when things start to go well, this happened to me before in my life, I started to get some popularity and things seemed like they were going good. And there was a moment where I was like, well, I started asking myself, does God have some special plan for me?

45:05You know, which is a dangerous thing to start asking yourself. It's okay to ask, to be curious and see 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 it's just being human. That's what that fulcrum is right there, is just trying to keep that even. And Theo, 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 Verveke Foundation, that keeps the money and the power at an arm's length for me.

45:44I'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. Hey, you don't strike me as that person at all. I wasn't trying to say that. No, 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, hey, 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? Yeah. But then I have to be careful that I don't let that leave the room with me.

46:17Yeah. It's like beautiful music, right? Yeah. You joy in it while it's happening because somebody is sharing with you. Right. Right. And you don't want to rain on somebody when they're sharing with you because they need that. But it's like music. When the song's done, the song's done. Don't keep hymning yourself as you leave, right? Yeah, exactly. Don't put your AirPods in. La, la, la. John is great. John is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Today's episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Indeed, BetterHelp. They can help. They'll do it. They helped me. I tried them out. I needed help. I called them.

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49:29This is a paid advertisement and we are grateful to Morgan and Morgan. It's the calm right now before the holiday storm. And I hate to say it that the holidays are coming, but you can hear them. You can hear them. Holidays are coming. they're humming around the bend you know that but you can prepare your e-commerce business for the holiday rush now just by using ship station oh god it sounds good whether you're shipping from your house or a warehouse ship station can help increase your profitability save time automating your shipping and returns in the ShipStation dashboard and keep costs down with industry leading carrier discounts while your holiday orders roll in.

50:18So set your business up for success this holiday season with ShipStation. 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 um 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 freaking i don't know if they had butterscotch or whatever back then but a couple little candies for the road you know they would put that in their bear in their casket right yeah so imagine what life was like when you thought that yes death like there was a whole not like you this was just a preparation yes that must have added so much i feel like that would have added so much meaning it can to being alive whereas now that doesn't seem yeah it's not as prevalent i mean nobody you know i was at a place one time somebody maybe put a couple quaaludes or something in a dude's pocket in a casket but i've never been there where they're you know armoring him up and putting him in like, you know, under armor or anything, you know?

51:36So that's a really important thing. There's a really great book. I'm teaching an online course for the Halkian Academy on Beyond Nautism, and we started it with Tillich's book, The Courage to Be, which is a really great book. The Courage to Be by Tillich, you said? Paul Tillich, yeah. Okay. And he talks about these things that can really take people into despair. and he talks about them analytically but he's very aware that they can interpenetrate and you can have multiple ones at the same time. And one is the one you just mentioned. It's mortality. But you have to broaden it. You have to understand mortality.

52:17We talk about a fatality but the base of that is not death. The base word in there is fate. This is the idea, your death is just an example of how the universe is perpetually, profoundly beyond your control. You could have met the woman of your life and you both know it and you step into traffic and the truck hits you. And it's not the case like in a romantic comedy that the great narrative that is unfolding. Like Meet Joe Black, that's what happened, I think, in that. Yes. So we confront fatality, which ultimately in our mortality, that's one. One is the one we've been talking about, meaninglessness.

53:03The 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 the more profound sense of, I think I'm just a bad person, right? I like, and not necessarily evil. I just, the weight of your flaws and your failings and your faults can be magnified, especially if you're very honest. I mean, Theo, I don't want to live forever because I don't want to try and carry that boulder that will get larger and larger of my flaws and my fates and my finitude.

53:51right? And that can weigh you down. And so I think one of the things that, I think you're right, 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. Wow. That's scary feeling. Well, that's domicile, so welcome to it. Sorry. That's domicile? The loss of home. Loss of home. Oh, the loss of feeling at home.

54:29Loss 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. There's no depth to it. So all three of those intersect. Now, one of the things, and I want to go back to, remember I mentioned the Hellenistic philosophers like Epicurus, even Socrates. They tried to address the problem of mortality. Socrates said all the philosophy is a preparation for death, right? And they tried to address it in a different way. Can I try, just to give people, first of all, one thing. Other cultures, so I have a lot, I've been practicing within Taoism and Buddhist practices also for three decades.

55:14So if you look even in Vedanta, if you look within Hinduism, at least important, I mean, I don't want to talk about them as they're homogeneous, but at least large swaths of Hinduism, Buddhism, right? Immortality is a curse. Immortality, living forever is a curse. Right. 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. The faults and the flaws and the failings pile up, right? And it becomes just horrible. And what you seek for is moksha. You seek for liberation from rebirth or reincarnation, or you seek nirvana.

55:58You're seeking, 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 Vedanta. You want to realize moksha by realizing that the ground of your being, your soul, and the ground of reality are one, and 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.

56:41So it's a different response. Now, the Hellenistic 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's he doing there? Is he playing games? What he's saying is you can't actually experience being dead because if you're dead, you're not there. There's no experience. And as long as you're experiencing, you're not dead. You can never have the experience of being dead.

57:20And so what do you, no, people say, that's not good enough. That's not the point. 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. You're not afraid of all the time before your birth when you didn't exist, right? So what is it you're afraid of dying? You're afraid of 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.

58:04Cultivate wise friendships and friendships that support wisdom. And he was suffering horrible illness as he was dying, and he took that right through. And he also taught people how to not fear the gods. And so that was one response The Stoics, Marcus Aurelius People all know Marcus Aurelius from the movies And Marcus Aurelius, what the Stoics said is Look, the problem is what we set our hearts on What we identify with We're always assuming and assigning identities For example, right now I'm assuming the identity of this academic person I'm assigning an identity to you But this isn't the identity I would have with my partner when I go home at night.

58:49That would be weird, right? And I wouldn't assign the identity. Whoa, sorry, are you going to interview me now? 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 way. But here's the thing. Most of the time we do this unconsciously. We do it mindlessly, automatically, reactively. And so we identify with the wrong things. And so what the Stoic said is, I'm going to use, I know your viewers can't see, I'm drawing a horizontal line. We identify with horizontal things. We identify with trying to extend our life, have more fame, have more power.

59:21And they said, that's ultimately doomed. You're pitting yourself against the universe. The universe is gonna crush you. Instead, go vertical. Seneca said, even when you're painted into a corner, you can jump into the sky. 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. That's really, really cool. Yeah, and so you live that, and you try and realize that now. They did this in - 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.

59:58That creates probably some - And they can get more in touch. And this is helping other people. Service is definitely a way to do this. They can get - Think about this as - I mentioned earlier, people don't want a flat world. They want a world with depth and height to it. And 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'm just thinking, I get a lot of questions, people asking like, hey, man, I'm in a tough spot right now. I feel like there's no way out. What do I do right now?

1:00:32So that's why, and a lot of times I'll say to those 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. So that's what I'm thinking. 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. And 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.

1:01:10It'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, 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.

1:01:45And you have less and less cognitive flexibility. You have less and less ability to 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 reciprocally narrowed yourself all the way down. Now, I was having lunch with Mark Lewis. And I said to him, and Plato's in the back of my mind because I got this from Plato. I said to Mark, I said, well, if you can reciprocally narrow, can't you reciprocally open? Can't you bring some flexibility to 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.

1:02:24And 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. And we turned that into the movie, The Matrix. So, right, you can wake up. You can reciprocally open up. And what's important about that is that's jumping into the sky. The word for that in Greek is anagoga. It means ascent, 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 when you do that, this was Plato's great insight, three things are happening that are really, really important.

1:03:04Two, well, I'm going to use meta again Two meta desires So in addition to whatever you desire You desire that what is satisfying your desires You have peace of mind You're not at war with yourself You're not in conflict with yourself The other is You desire that what is satisfying your desires is real You may say, well, that doesn't seem right Well, 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.

1:03:43This is the weird, messed up. Oh, yeah. We make someone our higher power. That's right. That's right. And we'd say to one person, you're going to 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? Your relationship should be nourished by what is ultimate. That'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? A certain 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.

1:04:25And almost all of them keep their hands up. And then you ask them, 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, 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.

1:04:54And 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. And I'm not talking about romantic love. It can be friendship love. Right? Just buddies, yeah. Reciprocal opening gives you peace of mind, 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.

1:05:33And 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? 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 was got closed up if they were really, you know, like narrowing in and isolating.

1:06:08It's like, so this thing starts to grow and it's just like, 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. And it really is. It's expansive though. It is very expansive is what it feels like. And it expands out and in. Is that, is that fair to say? 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 and it's a, 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 were always living.

1:06:45And you—so the answer to the problem of 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, right, you get that vertical dimension. Well, let me tell you a story, right? So this is, Julian Barnes wrote a book, The History of the World in 10 and a half chapters. There's this one story about this guy, he dies and there's an afterlife and he goes to heaven. St. Peter's is there. Oh, yeah, do whatever you want. And The Good Place made use of this, but I won't do any spoilers about it. But anyways, great ending, they made use of this.

1:07:23And he, you know, he wants to play, and he gets, and he plays golf and he gets to the place where he can play golf absolutely the best every single day, all the time. Then tennis, and then 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. He goes, 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? The point of heaven is for you to be ready to die, ready to cease to be, because you're immortal.

1:07:58You 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? Wow, 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 very hard and that's okay it's interesting it's that's what that's what's being brought on by the world and by society i think men are realizing that they have to be the uh 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?

1:09:00I think it's really, I mean, for me, somebody that's been of help for me is Marcus Rillus. I mean, 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 perhaps the greatest of the five good emperors. And he said something that you have to really let it reverberate inside of you because it really, he said many things. If you read his, the meditation. He was chatty kind of. Yeah. Thank God. Yes. Well, the meditations aren't written to anybody else. They're actually, they're written to him? Yeah, they're written to himself. Wow. He's doing a spiritual practice.

1:09:39And this is a practice you can do, by the way. And 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'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. And it's like there's a way in which all those things that are catchy but don't have depth, we can learn and we can help each other. Thich Nhat Hanh said the next Buddha is actually the Sangha, the community.

1:10:17we can learn to discern through all of that and get to where we can find that vertical such that we can leap into the sky I love that man I love that feeling when you're stuck you're painted into a corner that you can still leap into the sky there's a way to find it's fascinating reciprocal opening there's a way and let's be clear you have Marcus Aurelius on one, I'm not saying, I have criticisms of Stoicism, but Marcus Aurelius is an emperor, Epictetus is a slave, the two poles, and they're both saying you can do this. They're both saying at the extremes, you can find this. And they're not saying, they're not doing it like at a Hallmark card.

1:11:08Yeah. Right? They're like, you have to practice a lot of, 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 practice, right? And that was bigger in the past centuries, I feel like, than it 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.

1:11:49And there were, you know, religious get togethers and people thinking about their God and thinking with their God. And singing together. 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 specifically at a church sometimes, people start singing. 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 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.

1:12:29And in some of the practices that we do, there's the horizontal, like you and I reciprocally open to each other. But there's also the vertical. You and I, 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 into dialogos, 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 that collective flow state and that sense of reciprocally opening to each other. And then they all start talking about like the third, the we space, like the collective intelligence that's not coming just from you or from me, but it's being co-created and emerging and taking on a life of its own.

1:13:15Yeah. Right? And then they start to talk about this in religious language. 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. People start saying things like that it might be God for them. And I want to be really careful here. I'm very respectful of people's religious adherence. I'm not anti-religious by any means. No, neither. But people, well, what happens is, right? And this is a platonic point, a neoplatonic point. So what happens is initially when they're doing these, they get an intimacy with each other, that reciprocal opening.

1:13:54They fall in love. It's philia love. 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 the Geist, the spirit. We call it the logos, right? 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 to the depths of reality. 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.

1:14:41Some 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, 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?

1:15:17And they'll sort of like, oh, well, science, the university, but they're - 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. Now, if you'd ask people that 200 years ago, they'd say, oh, my church, my temple, my mosque, my, right, right, right, my sangha. Those answers don't come out. Occasionally, very rarely, somebody will say, like my church, but sometimes they'll say it kind of like, but not really. And what's happened is, so the largest growing demographic are the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S's. They have no official religious identity.

1:16:06Now, 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 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 much more – it's a little bit of a truth issue, Theo, but it's much more a relevance issue. Most people feel that these institutions are no longer relevant to them. They're not vibrant.

1:16:46They're not vital. They don't speak to them. They don't call them to their better selves. They don't call them into 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 of practices. So yeah, as we lost, 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, right, right. No, we're just looking at it. Right, we're looking at it. But when we lost that sacred canopy, we lost a lot.

1:17:29You know, Nietzsche said it really well. He said, he runs into the marketplace, the madman, and 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, so he's not there to argue against them as atheists. He said, you don't realize what you've done. You've taken a sponge and you've wiped out the sky, right? You've unchained us, like 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 grieved to the depths we need to and in a healthy way in order to be worthy of that.

1:18:12That's what he's basically saying. Well, 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 have evolved. You see a lot of single-parent families. Both parents have to work. You know, the kids are being raised. by their smartphones and by whatever, the first thing you can get to them. And then you take away also, there was a time like in the 90s where 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.

1:18:50There used to be like - Shared. We would - Yeah, shared experiences. They were called networks for a reason, right? We were a network together. That's a good point. 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 was over, especially in the summer because it was still light outside. We'd go outside and like impersonate our favorite acts from it. We'd all laugh and have like a shared experience. Whereas now everybody - It's fragmented. Yeah, everybody's just like watching whatever when they want.

1:19:19It'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 function, religio, to bind together. It used to do that, and now we've even lost that dimension. 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? 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?

1:20:09I do think there's a way out. And 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 Ray Kelly's Return to the Source last July. Is that a series? 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.

1:20:56And 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. Go on, sorry. So, you know, and what you have is you have. um so let's say there's a father or mother out there right and they're in charge of their home right and they want to have a different future they want their yeah you know what can what do they do what do they start to do like all like as a person or as a leader of a home that can help yeah so good good here's the answer uh uh sorry uh i'm enthusiastic don't misread my my energy for like, I know, like, I hope I have.

1:21:42No, look, we're waiting, John. Okay, so like, and this comes from work I've done with Nathan Vanderpool and other people. Like I said, I've done, I've been in the room virtually or in person with all of the scientists and we're all sat in a room and we, what is wisdom? And we really, we produced a consensus paper and then I've done, I go, you know, lots of participant observation and we got all the, a lot of the leaders of the community together in one room and we did a bunch of discussion and practice. And we're going to, I'm going to go to another one next week in France or same thing. And, and, and so what's coming out of it is like, there's sort of three dimensions you want to pay attention to.

1:22:26You want to pay attention to view, care, and action. You want to pay, remember that framing? You want to do, 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 letting all of that go on mindlessly, automatically, reactively. You've got to bring it more into your awareness. That's view. Care. Reciprocal opening. You've got to learn how to reciprocally open. How to communicate, share information, accept information. Is that what you mean by that? But also reciprocally open. 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.

1:23:13I don't understand. So you and I, right? You can know as a set of facts, John's different. He thinks differently than me. 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 mind sight, 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 why they lead to the third thing action 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 call it dime.

1:24:22You want dialogical practices, this dialectic into dialogus. And we run workshops on that. And there's a whole bunch. There's circling practices. This is all over the place where people are trying to get back. This kind of what's happening between you and I where it takes on a life of its own. And we both get to a place we couldn't get to on our own and it's emergent and it's transformative. Yeah. Then you want the imaginal. 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 huh it's an extinct animal the imagination and we also relegated it to something that where we're looking I want to compare two different senses of imagination one is the imaginary this is Henri Corbin he was a philosopher and that's like when I you picture something in your mind like picture a sailboat yeah okay are the sails up or down in a shop okay so there you go Now, that's one thing.

1:25:19Now, I want you to consider that in comparison to this. So a kid picks up a stick, ties a blanket around them, and says, I'm Zorro. They're not picturing anything in their mind. What they're doing is they're trying to take the perspective and the identity, the 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. That's serious play. That's what you do in ritual. You do that imaginatively augmented awareness. So when I'm teaching people Tai Chi, right? And they're novices, you have to teach them how to inhabit their body differently.

1:25:58You 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. 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 insubstantial as possible. And when people are doing that, they're imaginally augmenting so they can become aware of very subtle patterns, sensory motor patterns that they would otherwise be unaware of, and they can re-inhabit themselves in a new way.

1:26:29And 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 dialogical. You need the imaginal. You need mindfulness practices. You need meditative practices and contemplative practices. They're not the same thing. You need sitted versions. You need moving versions. You got to create that ecology, right? And then you need embodiment in practices. You need practices that involve you, right, knowing through your body, being embedded in your environment, negotiating with the world. So Rafe, Kelly, you evolve, move, play.

1:27:04You do parkour in the wilderness. So you get nature connection and you're also moving your body and having it be challenged. So it's not a postcard that you sit back like a Monet painting. Oh, isn't that lovely? I just really like. No, it's challenging you. It's forcing you to transcend. When I was there, I'm like 60, and I'm there with all these 20-somethings, right?

1:27:28And I talked about every day you went to the horizon of horror. And they're so good at taking you to this place where it's 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 meniers. And I said, other than those things, anything that's presented to me, I'm going to do it. And the more afraid I am, the more I'm going to do it. Oh, yeah. I did that. Today, 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.

1:28:00I 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 system because if it seems like these things that you're speaking of are things that seem like necessities to our soul you know they are like nothing seems more thirsty these days than like our soul like whatever there's like some i almost can feel this part of underneath me all a lot of times just almost like my soul is trying to order per like oxycons or something it'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?

1:28:41It's like you can start to feel it feels bored, you know, or it feels like thirsty. That's a better word. It doesn't feel bored. It feels thirsty. Well, yeah, thirsty, but it can vacillate between profound boredom and extreme anxiety. Like, so you get the, 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 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.

1:29:26I'm playing around with it 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 three dimensions, view, care, action, and do DIME, you know, dialogical, imaginal, mindfulness, embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, all that stuff, emotional too, all the ease, right? 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, right? And sometimes people make a distinction between your soul is sort of how you're profoundly connected to your body and you're grounded.

1:30:17And then your spirit is how you're profoundly connected to that capacity for leaping into the sky, right? And then yourself, yourself is paradoxically how you're profoundly connected to other. We only become 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 Zorro, the imaginal. The kid imaginally, not imaginatively, but imaginally, right? The kid will try and take on the perspective of the teacher or the parent.

1:30:56And they'll imitate them, right? And eventually they can imitate them to the point they indwell that parent's perspective and then they imitate it more and more and more. And what that means is they start to be able to do that for themselves. They start to internalize that. And what does the parent's perspective have that the kid's perspective doesn't? The parent's perspective can see the biases that the kid's perspective has. The kid can't see it because they're in the perspective. And the parent's perspective can also see broader, deeper goals that the kid's perspective can't see. And so this is by Bogotsky and other people's notions.

1:31:31By 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. They can't introspect. Oh, yeah. And I kept track of this with my younger son. It must be bad if your father is a cognitive scientist. Oh, yeah, the kid's not going to be. But I kept track of the first two times he introspected. He was four and a bit, and we were driving in the car, and he said, Daddy, it's snowing outside, but only in my head.

1:32:12and he oh 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 is he came up to me and he said I have a backwards camera in my head and I went what 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 I this is great I said to him does anybody else have that and he said no only me Right? So we become capable of introspecting, reflecting on ourselves, correcting ourselves, contending ourselves through other people.

1:32:51We become selves through each other. And so the soul is perhaps, I mean, I'm trying to rehabilitate these terms so we can re-inhabit them. And there's a connection between those two words, rehabilitate, re-inhabit, right? I'm trying to rehabilitate the notion of soul. This is how we, right? This is our deep connectedness to our embodiment, 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 if we could bring those back so that they can be simultaneously scientifically understood, remember Socrates, and spiritually transformatively real for us again, then we can do that nourishment you were talking about.

1:33:33and I think it's going to become it's 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 um these just like this understanding or this comfort or this peace not even like the comfort of a blanket or of uh but the comfort of just some connection to this greater energy that we're supposed to be like working with, you know? So we're just talking about like how that, that we need each other, right? Yeah. 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 we almost, I started to notice this with reality television right like so people would watch a show that was on reality television do they have it in canada reality tv yes so people would watch we we pretty much have everything you have okay um well you don't want everything we have no no and we also get some of the stuff that we we don't want to have but we still get it anyway sorry and i want to apologize about that yeah um but like people were originally where they would watch a reality show because the shows were trying to capture people in their real lives behaving a certain way.

1:34:59But then, after a generation had gone on for some of those shows that were still on... It all became bullshit. 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. They went on script, yeah. Right. And they don't even do it by... 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... And I notice it even with trends like they'll have on social media.

1:35:41People 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 if generation over generation we just start to impersonate what we've already seen. Yeah, I mean, and that's a problem. And Plato actually starts worrying about that problem way back just with the invention of writing and alphabetic writing. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that happens is, like Baudrillard and Simicra, hyper-reality, we start to get, our capacity for abstract, imaginary, symbolic thought, which is one of our great gifts, is also, it's adaptive, so it is also something that can be a vehicle of tremendous self-deception.

1:36:37It can cut us off 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 Fromm that he got from the Stoics. We were talking about the Stoics earlier. And so remember when I was talking about, you know, we're always assuming identities and assigning identities. And I have an agent arena relationship. That's my existential mode. That's the language we use. We're talking about that. Okay, that's true. When you say agent arena, what does that mean? That means I'm assuming a certain identity so I can act as an agent. I can pursue goals, solve problems.

1:37:21And the arena is the world makes sense and is shaped. So 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, I go in there and I'm a patron, so I don't act like a police officer when I'm in there. Exactly, exactly. 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.

1:37:58Oh, I see. Right? And so that's what I mean of when we're doing it unconsciously, right? Okay, so that's your existential mode when you're doing all of that. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay, and so Fromm 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 he called the having mode. This is the mode in which you need to have something. 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.

1:38:34It doesn't have to be like this particular water. It just has to be healthy water, right? 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 Buber 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 if you don't have that mode, you're dead. 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.

1:39:12You need to be in love. notice how we say we have sex but you want to be in love 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 if I treated Sara like a member of a category, well Sara the reason I'm with you is you remind me of all the other women I've been with and 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.

1:39:50You'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 Plato's sense, 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? 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, Fromm says, especially if we're not paying attention to our existential mode is we will pursue the needs in the wrong frame.

1:40:36So for example, being need, maturity. Instead of I'm going to become mature, I'm going to have a car. Instead of being in love, I'm going to have lots of sex. I see. Right? And this is modal confusion. Your existential modes are confused. And when that happens, we confuse. So we put quantity on equality, kind of yes yes kind of a blanket statement but yes so let's back to your point social media what you want is you have a being need 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 and from's point is our culture right is is largely he called it like Like, Fram's a Marxist.

1:41:30I'm not a Marxist. But he called it the market character, right? He said what happens is we are increasingly led to trying to pursue not only our having modes but all of our being needs from within 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 bullshitting you, right? Constantly keeping you with salience, but you don't ever pursue the truth of what your needs really are, right? But constantly giving you the salience and drawing you in.

1:42:11But we benefit that in a way because if I continue to bite at the fool's gold bait, right, of those types of things, If I continue to, it keeps me away from really having to look at myself. Yes. Because it can be very painful to really sit and look at myself and my history and my 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 what you just said. So there's an outer 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.

1:42:52And ecology is a practice that can give meaning to the pain. People can undergo tremendous pain if it is made meaningful to them. I'm working with somebody right now. She's done interventions around pain management. And like people, like people, think about, here, let me give you a reason. So what are the things people, oh, 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 will destroy all of those? Have a kid. Have a child. Your health goes down. Your finances go down.

1:43:27You'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 is convinced the other one's not doing enough work. And you ask people, why do you do that? Why do you give up on 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 want it 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. If you love a child, you turn this being. I mean, they're morally people right from the beginning, but cognitively, they're not people.

1:44:05And it's like magic. You love them and they turn into persons. And so when people can go, they will sacrifice a lot if they have a reasonable hope that there'll be meaning in it. But if we're in a meaning crisis and meaning scarcity, they won't make any of those 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.

1:44:47And 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 gold. It's not actually satisfying it. 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 or small things, whatever little things that they let fester while they were trying to achieve grander.

1:45:28It'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 led us so astray, though, sometimes. But I think we are as a group are realizing that we are astray, it feels like. I think so, too. And Fromm predicted, he predicted that eventually, he made the argument that when we're in 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, is we will seek the last connection we have with reality, which is violent destructiveness.

1:46:10If I can't connect to it, the last connection I can have is at least I will be the one that destroys it. Wow. Really? Yes. think of movie joker right 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 people that's a symptom of the meaning crisis look at suicide look at yeah um you know we had a corner on and he was saying the number one cause of death and uh black communities is gun violence number one cause of death and white communities is uh overdosing yeah it's like people are just finding a mean you know there's, we're at, it feels like we're in a cul-de-sac of hope in a way.

1:46:53Yeah, I think so. We're in a place where, like, 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? And like, if you look, I'm just using an analogy, If you look at a disease, you look not at only the negative systems. 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.

1:47:27And 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. And I had to sort of introduce it within the middle of another lecture. I'm 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 McMindfulness. 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.

1:48:06There's meditative practices, contemplative practices, right? There's siddharp practices. There's all this, right? And then what we did is we took one practice, meditation, sit 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 with being a corporate drone. 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.

1:48:41right? 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 Pajot and Bishop Maximus, both good friends of mine, 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 a Neoplatonist. And so there's all these dialogical communities emerging.

1:49:21There's things like Rafe's Evolve, Move, Play. There's Guy Sendstocks Circling. There's the work that Taylor Barrett does, all the stuff we're doing. And we're just one amongst many. Yeah. Well, it's interesting to hear people, you know, 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. Well, you know, that's the thing. 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. And people have sort of struggled with this.

1:49:53But here's something that people say when we're doing 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. That's what they say. 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. Dirkbrook, you know, Meister Eckert, they break through it, right? He's a Christian Neoplatonist. They break through and they break through the modal confusion. And so they were hungry for it, but their framing hadn't been well.

1:50:32That's one of the things I love about going to a lot of different recovery meetings. Sometimes you sit in there, you're 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 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 hear someone's hear other people in the room. It's almost like - That's the embodiment. Collective sigh. Yes. That's amazing. Yes, that's the embodiment, right?

1:51:07And that's the soul, right? And there's also the spirit. You're both getting to a place you couldn't get to on your own. And I'm gonna use this word and I don't, I mean it positively and I'm not trying to slot you, But, you know, those are the recovery meetings. I've done, you know, I've attended AA and some other things. But, and many of them are explicitly, at least, were born in a religious framework. But they're religious practices in the way we've been talking about. You're cultivating wisdom and transformation, how to face yourself, how to cultivate connection, right? And you're doing it individually and collectively, right?

1:51:42And yes, and I notice, and this is an observation, it's not a criticism, you keep returning to this as a lived example, in your body lived example of what we're talking about. Right? And so, but what I'm asking you to now consider is there's lots of possibilities, 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. Hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's, it's the, it's the thing, like when things get bad, they're always throughout time. It seems like there's always been like, uh, in every story, there's the moment where you think things are where things get bad and they get good.

1:52:34It's like, it's that feeling inside of you that this has to end well. I think That little pilot light of that, it feels like it perseveres no matter what. 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 not just as a pilot light, but like what a pilot used to be, a pilot of an airplane or a pilot of a ship. 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.

1:53:21And their internal light has in some sense been blown 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. There's a Greek word for this, and it's from the Christian tradition. It's kairos, and it means the right timing, the time where the course of things turns. And the kairos is always a place in which multiple opportunities. So, like, you know, the Bronze Age collapse. Civilizations can collapse, too, right? And so, yeah, we're at this very crucial time.

1:54:04Now, it's a dangerous time, but the advantage of a Kairos 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. But when things are breaking up, this is called self-organizing criticality, then individuals can make a difference that they can't normally make when things... So don't look at, like, well, things have always been this way, because if we're actually in a crisis, a Kairos, then your capacity as an individual to make a difference has been increased. Wow, man, that's awesome. You know, that's really awesome, man.

1:54:36And 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 can this is never has the road been set more when you can have an impact. 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 um self-worth more than the the just uh feeling good in the moment you know um that's that's inspiring man what when you think What about love?

1:55:17People look at love a lot. Have you been in love before? I'm in love right now. Okay. So you have a partner now and y 'all 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 two children are adults. My two children are now adults. Okay. But you've had children now. Yeah. And there's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. but I am in love now and I also love my kids I love my friends but I've also been learning to love the world and reality and being and in that sense like agape the love that makes us like we were talking about earlier the love that turns us into human beings the Bible I'm not a Christian but the Bible said you know, God is agape, 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.

1:56:31The 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, do you think that, Theo, I think 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. Like, it's really hard. Most of my failings have become that I did not love wisely. I loved foolishly. I think you could understand sin as a failure to love wisely. Sorry, I interrupted you, but I 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 there's things that are easier to love, and it's not even love.

1:57:22It's like a lust even of your imagination. Yeah. Or even if you can lust, anything can lust. It doesn't have to be just like of your groin or whatever, you know? Yeah. It can be of any. You can fame. Fame. Yeah, fame, food, sugar. Yeah, I went through that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, God, dude, I eat a whole bag of damn Dove dark chocolates. And I'll do it again sometimes. I miss 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? Love? Well, I mean, again, lust is when we're pursuing love from the having mode.

1:58:09right okay so you you you need to have sex like i mean we got into the mistake of thinking no no we don't need that that and that mess that messes people up yeah right and then we do the other thing no no no no you need like you'll get love by just having lots of sex and that that now we're in that the other we just went 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.

1:58:41I'm in love with Sarah right now, and until I mentioned those words, I wasn't feeling anything. Right. Love isn't an emotion. I'm in love with Sarah, and sometimes that makes me sad. I miss her right now a lot. Sometimes it makes me angry. You're threatening Sarah. No, you're not going to do that. And sometimes it makes me really happy. Sometimes it makes me very thoughtful. Wow, I just realized I really don't know her, and that's wonderful. So love isn't even an emotion. Love is an existential stance. It's you and I, we're going to religio, 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, you transcend yourself through me, and I transcend myself through you, and we keep realizing that that is such amazing mystery that it keeps happening.

1:59:31we'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 - But it's not a prison. No, and the Greeks have two words, right? There's encratia, like democracy, encratia, power. So encratia is when you commit by like, I'm not going to eat the chocolate. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. That's encratia. Sofferson is different. Sofferson is like this. St. Paul talks about when he does the hymn to Agape. When I was a child, I thought like a child, I acted like a child. But then when I became an adult, I put childish things behind me.

2:00:08As the 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? And he looked at me like, finally, dad is asking me something intelligent. And he even did like, give me a moment, I want to 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. There's a philosopher in there somewhere, right? And so, right, but notice what, and I used to play with him all the time.

2:00:46And it's a weird thing when you're an adult because like, 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, when you're a kid, toys are super salient to you, right? My son, when he was young, he used to have like a toy tower where all the MC figurines are there and everything. Like to get him to, he would forego urinating and eating to play, right? With his toys, right? Now I would play with him, but I don't have that, you know, because 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.

2:01:20No, I won't. I've matured what I find salient. We call that a salience landscape. I've matured what I find salient, how I connect to things. And salient means just to make it clear. How things grab your attention, how they stand out for you, how they catch you. Got it. And so I know logically I could pick up the toys and play, but it doesn't draw me. See, Safrasen, that's Safrasen. You want to commit not encratically, I'm not going to cheat on my partner, you want to commit Sofreson, 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.

2:02:02Like Frankfurt called love a voluntary necessity, which is a brilliant way of putting it. Do 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. I think commitment's the right word. The problem is we often, when we hear commitment, we think of duty and then we fall into a cradia and I'm going to force myself to stay with this person. Now, you have to tough it out at times, but in the end, you want to mature in a relationship so that the commitment is sofrosan. It's reciprocal. Yeah, and it's opening and you're being drawn into it rather than forcing yourself.

2:02:45It's like when you're meditating. Initially, you're sort of 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? 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 in your, love it, 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.

2:03:19You have to, what infatuation does is it says, okay, see how you could get into this reciprocal opening with somebody? Now this is candy. 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, 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 then the other thing it tells you is, right, the best part of love is the falling in love part.

2:03:56No, 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, you're constantly tempted to fall in love with the person again and again and again. And that's what I thought was interesting that you said in the beginning was that 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, it just makes it, it's going to make every day or every week, whatever, like a new episode.

2:04:37It's not going to, you're not going to just be playing the same episode over and over. giving you. 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 that I can relate to them. That's pretty fascinating. So confronting a mystery here, 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, you know?

2:05:14Well, I think— It's cool, though. I think it's neat. I think that's the—again, try to rehabilitate the notion of faith. Instead of faith being asserting propositions, pretending you have certainty, even though you don't have evidence, what about we reconsider faith as faithfulness to the mystery of being 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.

2:05:48And that's one of the things, again, we lost. We've lost faith as a profound faithfulness. 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 be bad at volleyball. I don't know. But some things are certain people are certain things. You appear smart, right? Okay. To a pretty regular person like myself. Is it harder to be in love when you're smart? Because smart makes it so you kind of look at things a lot. So intelligent people generally have a harder time. And the problem, and this is the work of Stanovich 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.

2:06:36And 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 your intelligence to become aware of the self-deception and the bias so that you can overcome it. So mindfulness is a way of being rational, even though you're not running any arguments in your head. And Plato was deep about reason in that sense. We still carry it around when we talk about somebody being reasonable. 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.

2:07:20And I think if you're intelligent and you haven't cultivated rationality and its accompanying 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— So you start making hurdles because your brain, that's what it's—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, remember we talked about anticipating the future? So your brain is constantly also trying to solve problems you didn't solve in the past.

2:08:05And so in a bit of a slogan, your brain actually prefers familiar unhappiness 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. You see this in your friends and they see it 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're always doing your relationships. You're doing it again, right? And you seem so wise from the outside except two years later, Bill comes to you and says, Theo.

2:08:41You're doing that thing. You're doing that thing again, right? Now you're doing that thing. Right, yeah, yeah. I know, it's so interesting. So you have to, your intelligence not only is problematizing things by looking for problems, it's also trying to solve previous relationships, but 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 and that actually makes, gives you a greater capacity to enter deeply into a loving relationship.

2:09:20I, I like, I want everybody to understand I'm like 61, almost 62 and I've like screwed up. You look young, man. Well, thank you. I've screwed up a lot. Um, and I continue, I continue to make sense. So, so, um, uh, 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. 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... I think so. Okay, good.

2:09:58But I also feel your questions deserve the best, most responsible answer I can give them. No, and I appreciate that. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. um 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 things become more important like you know we let like uh 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.

2:10:41See, Han talks about this in Saving Beauty. He talks about how pornography makes... He talks about how we're trying to make everything smooth. We've, instead of... See, if you read The Ancients or even Rilke, beauty is almost terrifying because it shocks you. It wakes you up. It makes you, oh, I didn't realize the world could be like this. Oh, I remember I saw a hot chick. I couldn't even handle it, dude. Right, right. I freaking had to go... Yeah. I tried to almost bury myself in the dirt one time because I couldn't handle it the first time I saw a beautiful girl. It's overwhelmingly powerful.

2:11:10And you're like 11 inches of dirt out and fucking sat in there. Isn't that crazy though? But it, well, it's, it's, it's, it's something that we've done everything else to. We've tried to, like, what did, what did Rilke say? Beauty is the angel that almost threatens to kill you but doesn't. Right? And then what pornography does, according to Han, is it just makes everything, there's no challenge. 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. So everything is now smooth for us.

2:11:52And 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 it's that hyperbolic discounting. We get the momentary thing, and we lose the long-term project. Yeah, the long-term project of relationship, of cultivating sexuality between yourself and a partner. Yes. 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?

2:12:38And a lot of times you'll just choose that easier one. You'll just buy a new vape or something and choose that easier one instead of go that longer road where there's going to be more value. And it's almost become so prevalent that some people don't even know that there is the longer road anymore the fact that that's the scary part yeah yeah we brought we're growing up in a generation who has never been without screens and and where pornography is available all the time everywhere and everything is if you want to laugh now 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 Like we had to make each other like you had to be the videos you're watching in a way.

2:13:23You had to use your imagination to iterate what had happened before. Like you felt like a cog in the wheel of entertainment just by being a human being. And some of that has disappeared, you know. I mean, conversation is – people are listening to people have conversations. that's how archaic they're becoming. That people are listening to podcasts to hear people talk freely. So by the way, I loved seeing you that animated. That was really powerful. So thank you for sharing that with me. Oh, thanks, man. That was really. Yeah, I didn't know it was going to be so powerful to me, but I think it does.

2:14:05I think I've fallen victim so much to pornography, especially in my 20s that like, dude, it just makes me mad, you know? The time wasted. Yeah, time wasted. and the ability to love wasted and the ability to learn about love. I didn't have any other choice. I mean, I maybe had a choice, but I wasn't aware. Yeah, for sure. But anyway, go on. Well, I was just going to 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 those kind of conversation.

2:14:44that kind of dialogos, I use the Greek word, right? And then we say, well, you can, and here's a place you can come where you can start to practice it. Either you can do it through a Zoom room, and that still works, by the way, which is really fascinating, because as a scientist, I wonder, would it work? But it still does. But we can also do it in person. And trying to build that bridge so people can, once they see, I want to be part of that, I want to participate in that, like you were just talking about with 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 it.

2:15:21Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's also, there's, I mean, there's 12 step programs for everything, which is great. And, you know, 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 and sometimes pornography, all different types of stuff. I met a buddy that was a flasher in there. So you get all types. Some of it's kind of cool, kind of. I mean, not cool, but it is kind of neat. You know a flasher, you never thought you'd know one.

2:15:56You know them. That's great. So yeah, I think some of that's just the rooms that are out there that people are sharing what their life is like 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 were 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 and see how special I am I can disclose more than you can.

2:16:32And that's why I think, that's why I really strongly challenge, 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. Yeah, because I do worry that we're getting kind of like therapy porn starting to emerge in our culture where, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to just open up and share my feelings. Right. And it's like, toward what end?

2:17:08Are you cultivating virtue? Are you overcoming self-deception? Are you helping the other person to grow? No, it's just, I'm going to expose myself. And that's, you know, right? And it's like the flasher, right? Yeah, 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, oh, it was so smooth. It was so easy. It's 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.

2:17:41Yeah, 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 pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can see they start to get, like they don't even remember what they're doing anymore. They're performing constantly for an audience, and they start doing strange things and almost become trapped in this manic episode. Yeah, it's that reciprocal narrowing, right? And they're trying to have something instead of become someone. Like, yeah, and the fact that, I mean, that's another symptom of the meaning crisis.

2:18:19The fact, as you noted, but this kind of stuff is spreading like a disease. 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 things like the Bronze Age collapse, you know, 1177 BCE, right? We've had Bronze Age civilizations, ancient Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, the Hittite Empire, the Mycenaean civilization. They all collapse. All collapse, except for Egypt. Assyria almost collapses, it shrinks. Egypt survives because one of my favorite people of history, I just got a book on him, Ramsey's the third.

2:18:59He's a military genius and he defeats the invading people, the Sea Peoples in two great battles. And he's trying to hold up the whole Bronze Age world on his shoulders. But even Egypt, he gets assassinated. And once he's gone, even Egypt goes into decline. So most of the civil—more cities went out of existence. More trade is lost. More literacy is lost than any other time in the Western world. Even the fall of the Western Roman Empire was not as great as the Bronze Age collapse. Wow. So things can really collapse now. And then there's several centuries. And you don't want to be alive in the centuries after the Bronze Age collapse.

2:19:39They're really, really bad time to be alive. Oh, it gets pretty sketchy. It gets really bad. But it opens up possibilities. And people start to experiment. They create new psychotechnologies, alphabetic literacy, numeracy. And that gives birth to the actual age, to people like Socrates and Buddha and Lao Tse. Yeah, it's almost like you just needed it over time. It's like that's the cycle. Yeah. There's some people who think that complex organizations go through what's called self-organizing criticality. They organize and they build and they get very complex and then they get too top-heavy like a pile of sand.

2:20:17And then it avalanches and it 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. Yeah. And so, um, you know, you, you, you, you, you can't solve this problem and you, you, 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. Um, and, and what often has to happen is you have to break that frame. You have to like, and sometimes breaking is really, really, really hard. Sometimes it's easy.

2:20:50Like you'll do things like you'll say to people, you know, uh, what's the gray stuff that comes from fire and they say smoke. And what's, 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 you call the white of an egg? And they'll say, oh, a yoke. Of course, it's not. It's the white of the egg, right? You fall into a frame and you get locked, right? And sometimes the frames are fairly easy. Sometimes the frames are really, really hard, like you're deep in modal confusion, right?

2:21:20And so breaking that frame is like that avalanche. You have to break that frame. But if you don't break it to the point of trauma, if you break it in the right way, what it does is it allows the brain's capacity to self-organize, to reorganize from like a broader or different base. Got it. And then you get a new frame and then you get that aha moment. And typically what happens, at least that's a significant theory, is activity is predominantly in the left hemisphere, which is your logical sort of step-by-step, fine-grained, well-defined problem side. And you realize, oh, I can't solve this problem.

2:21:54And it goes into the right hemisphere, which was for like predation. 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 bring it back in. Oh, that's cool. Do you think sometimes like, you know, say if you put like you took a bunch of sand, right? And you just poured it into 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 come can understand so much 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 i i would say i know that's the case because of what we rely on um we so most of our problem solving is not done as individuals.

2:22:58You didn't invent English. I didn't invent English. You're not managing the electric grid. I'm not a manager managing. You didn't invent these microphones. I didn't invent them. You didn't make these chairs. You didn't build this building. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We forget that most of our problems, no one person can run an airline or a railroad. And so what you can show, actually what we seem to do, I've done work on this with to Anciapi. We've investigated the scientists moving the rovers around on Mars. But our primary adaptivity is we plug into that collective intelligence. And that collective intelligence can often grasp objects that we can't individually grasp.

2:23:42So it could be bigger than this. Right. So 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 with a whole bunch of equipment all around the world. Yeah, totally. You can't just be some dude guessing. Right. And no one person, this is Ed Hutchins, no one person navigates a ship. It's a bunch of people and a bunch of equipment and they navigate the ship, right? And so we plug into the intelligence of civilization, basically. But the problem is there are things that can even exceed that because civilizations probably face what's called general systems collapse.

2:24:26What 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. And it grows and it grows and it grows. And initially, it's good at growing and it's solving more and more problems. 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.

2:25:06And then you get general systems collapse. And it's making its own problems then, too. And it's making its own problems. And you can tell when an institution is cusping on that, and I think the universities are suffering this problem, is when the bureaucracy starts to become for its own sake 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 a threshold.

2:25:44Man, freaking 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. Complex is we have real 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 and between us to drill 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 comes out in my conversations with Jordan Hall and others, and this is something we're now discovering in biology.

2:26:32So you can evolve a trait, like this creature's going to be faster, or taller or something like that. But what we're now realizing, and this is Owen Gilbert. I always get the names the wrong way around. You can also evolve your evolvability, 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, right? Human beings reproduce sexually. Sexuality reshuffles the genetic deck so we get more variation.

2:27:17And with more variation, evolution speeds up. So one of the reasons sex becomes pervasive is because it makes you more evolvable as a species. And now using that analogy, we have to learn to become, we have to stop just, I'm going to, no, sorry, we don't have, 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, we have to evolve our evolvability right now because the, the, the way things are complexifying is accelerating dramatically. Well, especially in the U S I mean, it's like we've become, you know, it's a very, I mean, America has always been kind of a, uh, 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.

2:28:11Yes. Yeah. 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, all of that. Yeah. And those things, a lot of those things now people look at them and the news will scoff at those things. Or sneer. Yes. Yes. Even sneer, not even take into account that some of these people died or that their loved ones had to witness them die. And a lot of those people start to lose their hope. Yeah, they lose orientation. I mean, completely lose orientation, which is crazy. That's how much a comfortable landscape or commonalities mean to people.

2:28:54See, the landscape doesn't have to be comfortable. They were willing to go to war. That's a good point. 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, but you have to be oriented and other people have to cooperate 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 meeting crisis, not being at home, domicile, is people are feeling increasingly disoriented.

2:29:25They don't know which way to go. 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. It's a safety mechanism. I just keep on keeping on and I just do what I've been doing. That's where I think a lot of people are right now. Yeah. You know, 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 so 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 it's it's nice in a way where you're like oh i'm gonna have some self-confidence yeah yeah of course i'm gonna achieve you have to have self-care yeah man it feels very lonely you know and i think a lot of people are are kind of wondering that so i wonder if that will lead people back to religion, looking for purpose.

2:30:23And 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 like 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, I mean, we lived under a superpower, Great Britain, and we slowly negotiated our way out. We didn't have a revolution. We slowly negotiated. We don't have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have peace, order, and good government.

2:30:59That's our constitute. We slowly negotiated our way out, right? And you can't point to a point in history and say that's when Canada was completely not a colony anymore. It's there. Maybe the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but it's a gradual thing, right? And as we slowly did that, this superpower emerged to the south of us that went on to conquer the world. I mean, America is a titanic entity. I mean, like Second World War, they take on the Japanese empire almost single-handedly while manning most of the Western Front. And like it's titanic. It's huge. And they're just overwhelming. And they continue to be so.

2:31:44Like 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. Like America is like – and Canada is like – imagine this. There was a superpower and we slowly managed to get out of a shadow. We very carefully negotiate 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. We're much more about perspective and negotiating.

2:32:23We 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 willing to negotiate with us and to ally with us. Yeah, and you get to be right there. Canada's always been a very peaceful place, I feel like. A lot of my friends there are good listeners. Yes. I think people are like, I'm surprised there's not a mass exodus to Canada. But great posture, too. I don't know if you've ever 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.

2:33:08That's a good point, huh? You've got to bear yourself well. Yeah. Oh, and they do it. 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 guys like you, Jordan Peterson. and you guys worked together? We were colleagues. Jordan was just down the hallway from me. We continue to keep in communication. Because he doesn't teach anymore now, does he? No, I mean, he had a very fraught relationship with the University of Toronto. Oh, he did? Yeah. And I think there was fault on both sides in that issue.

2:33:48I mean, but I want to be very clear. I have a really good relationship with the University of Toronto. They've treated me, well, the psychology department at least has treated me extremely, extremely well. Yeah. Right? But Jordan and I were colleagues. We were very friendly colleagues. We shared students. We would frequently find ourselves at the same conference talking about stuff. That's fun. Was it fun to discuss things with him and be able to communicate? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. and

2:34:23I want to say this very carefully because whatever you say about Jordan Peterson it'll bite you in the ass no matter what you say because Jordan's a very divisive person but

2:34:36Jordan and it's reciprocated Jordan respects me and 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. There were three life-changing professors at the University of Toronto. One, I won't mention his name, and the other two are myself and Jordan Peterson. So we often shared students. Like I said, I've always had and I've appreciated very good relationships with Jordan.

2:35:21I don't agree with Jordan on certain things, especially political things. But you see, like when some of the stuff dropped initially, 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 and you should be treated with – like the way – he shouldn't have just been sneered at or yelled at. They should have like – they should have. He deserved to be given a good hearing, a good counterargument. Yeah. I think once you get to a certain level kind of a popularity and once 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 probably the grounds you guys are used to where people communicate regularly.

2:36:07And so the thing is, when I would write him that email, he would say thank you. He was appreciative. Or I'll be on his channel with him and he'll criticize postmodernism. And I'll say, well, I think there's value to postmodernism. And here's the value. And here's – Foucault was saying this and Derrida was saying – and he'll be responsive and respectful. Yeah. Right? And so, but the thing about that is, is like, it's, I want to maintain a good relationship with, like when he, somehow he found out I had diabetes and he sent me like a supportive email and I appreciate that. Like I believe, and this will get me in hot water with some people, but I believe that Jordan is fundamentally a good person.

2:36:56And I think he has very good intent. And I think he's terrifically talented. But, well, 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. But, but, right. I think if people, if we could get out of the polarization around him, and to be fair, I think he contributes to it. I don't, he's, I think by his own admission, he's not very good on Twitter. Yeah. Right. No, I think he would admit that. I'm trying to think of what we talked about when I was with him, when I chatted with him. If we could, if we could get out of polarizing and if he could get out of being caught up in that.

2:37:39like what's really impressive is like like when i've talked to him or jonathan and jonathan and pajot and i talked to him he'll get a lot of comments like do more of those jordan do more of those yeah right 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 i can't i 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, I don't think it can be solved there.

2:38:19We've been talking about a much different level, 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-out. I'm metapolitical. 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 profound mistake. 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.

2:38:57And when they worked where they were correcting each other and helping each other emerge and we're 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.

2:39:38Those 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 addictive, probably. 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, you can do it all day there, you know? Yeah, but it's argument for—Platon made a distinction between philosophia, the love of wisdom, and philonychia, the love of victory. And when it's the love of victory, then you've lost the Socratic spirit, right? I will disagree with people.

2:40:18Bishop Maximus and I, we disagree. He is a committed and I think profound and virtuous Christian. I'm not. We know this. 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. You can disagree. You can argue. You can challenge. But 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 bias is? narrative is, this is a real bot. I can tell a story about that, so it must mean I know what's going on, right? And so we get simplistic narratives, we get confirmation porn, we get this sort of self-righteous adversarial, I'm going to destroy the other and see, it shows how good and it's ultimately narcissistic.

2:41:08I don't want to participate in any of that crap, right? And And you can see I'm getting very animated. Oh, it'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 if he was here and could defend his position. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that we are. I think I have a decent enough relationship with him, and I'm sure you have a great relationship with him. So it's like I would understand if – he wouldn't be upset, I don't think. I don't think so. I think he understands that we're – he's invited me to do things.

2:41:44like to, he's putting together a new course, Peterson Academy. And I've taught, I've already done one course for him on intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and spirituality. But when he, 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 yours. 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 toe 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.

2:42:19Because why wouldn't I? That's a completely virtuous context. And I hate guilt by association. Well, you're associating with it. Really? Yeah, that's become a huge problem in America. In politics overall. In society. You can't do that. It's so funny. People don't even realize. Like they'll guilt by association and then they'll espouse sort of Foucault and postmodernism who are deeply influenced, profoundly influenced by Heidegger who was literally a Nazi, right? And it's like where is your guilt by – how does your guilt by association metric work, right? It doesn't work consistently. It doesn't work coherently.

2:42:55And, you know, I think that it's important that we give people a chance to enter into genuine dialogos with us, that we don't, you know, part of understanding forgiveness, which is an important part of agape, that's Jesus of Nazareth. Forgiveness isn't like mercy, I let you off the hook. Forgiveness is I'm giving you the chance to enter into a relationship with me and even giving myself to enter a chance into a 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 a relationship, I can't do the things that will allow me to re-earn your trust.

2:43:48Right. And so you need to give me that. You need to forgive. I'm playing with the word a little bit. You need to forgive so that we're not bound in reciprocal narrowing so there's a chance for reciprocal opening. I think we've lost the 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.

2:44:30Yeah. 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 hesitate. That's a great point. Well, you're an 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. And 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 that we could not possibly get to on our own? That was the proposal of democracy.

2:45:03The 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 genuine diologos with you, you can help me correct mine and I can help you correct yours. 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 Well, at least to my mind Yeah, and did he do the Dewey Decimal System? Yes, that's that John Dewey I knew it, dude I knew he freaking did it God, I can't believe some weirdo would do that But I'm grateful he did it Yeah, me too Because I needed to get those books I don't know if you saw this, John It says the moon is open for business.

2:45:51Entrepreneurs are racing to make billions. Basically, they're planning on opening the moon where people can go there and have a little colony. That's... Like as if the moon's going to become the new, like, you know, we're heading with the Mayflower, you know? Yeah, well, I mean, that's part of what's happened to the American mythos, right? is the frontier, the new world, the frontier. And it's gone now. I mean, there's nowhere left to go. Right, 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, right?

2:46:34And 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 U.S. Space Agency aims to lay the foundations for the first human settlements beyond Earth and pave the way for extraplanetary colonization. And that business is at the core of its strategy. So I've wondered about this, that maybe there's a hunger in America for another frontier. I could 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 sort of the Pacific Ocean.

2:47:21And then there was a problem because, this is oversimplistic, 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 thing. Yeah, Australia. Yeah, or Australia, right? And then the problem is, right, we lost that, or the United States, Canada didn't grow up that way. But the United States lost that ability. It lost that vision. Yeah, maybe there's even like a bit of a spiritual dimension to this.

2:48:00There's a trying to attempt to get a sense of, well, there's a frontier we can open up, we can orient towards. 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 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 phalluses into the sky like we've been doing recently. Yeah, that's just having that's just modal confusion.

2:48:39it's just trying to have sex with the universe yeah that's what it feels like to me like a little bit of a weird kind of let's inflict ourselves onto the world because we can afford it one of the rockets even looked like a penis it was really embarrassing somebody with psychological training I'm looking at this and going that's a penis and you're thrusting it into the sky it's really weird so yeah you're right it could become that but if it becomes if it becomes Plymouth if it becomes a stepping stone to maybe opening up colonization of other planets then that could become something other I don't know there it is right there blue origin there you go see what I mean yeah that thing somebody's just slanging a wiener out into space homie well it's you know my dick's bigger than yours kind of thing yes yeah 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 very ambivalent relationships to their sexuality and to their genitals.

2:50:08Has that happened over time, you think? A lot of folks? I think it's a perennial thing about human beings. I think human beings... 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. But sex can also call us... You talked about this. There's a possibility of ecstasy. There's a possibility, like you have like Tantra, which is 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-transcendence.

2:50:48You can touch aspects of your psyche that are otherwise inaccessible. And so we've always understood, 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 do the one or we'll just do the other. And again, it's Plato to my mind. Like the toughest thing for me to be, to do loving wisely insofar 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 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.

2:51:47Yeah, I think I just gotten so disappointed. like I think because in my 20s I was looking at pornography a lot you know choose that oh I could see that yeah over going on a date or something like because it was less committal it was way less scary than like possibly disappointing a woman or possibly getting into a relationship even like like even if I had appeased a woman and then things got closer that was very scary and I remember yeah at one point I was just so sick of myself I was like I will just just mail my penis and I guess I thought Africa because it was like a starving country something they could use it as like a soup meat or whatever but just to put you in some august company you know you know St.

2:52:34Paul talked about cutting off your left hand and Jesus did too if it offends you right we can we can misidentify with our body or parts of our body in a way like you just described and thank you for sharing that that can really narrow us down, reciprocally bind us, get us locked in, and we can feel trapped. And we feel like the only way out, remember Eric Fromm, is to destroy. Wow. Is to destroy, right? Yeah. I'm glad you're not there, and I'm really glad you got out of that without having to damage yourself. Yeah, me too. I think there were just times where I was like, I'm going to fucking hum this thing over the fence.

2:53:12Yeah. You know, just because you just wanted to get rid of it. It felt like the cause of your pain. Oh, I remember saying something. not quite as self-mutilating as that but i remember saying for the longest time if there was a button 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 by my my my this wonderful woman that i'm with um and so yeah i i can understand that i can understand how you can get to that place.

2:53:49But I think, you know, the rocket is also just a projected version of that. Oh, it's like us 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. Well, yeah. And then we're losing, we're losing the we, we're losing, you know, what can we do together and get to a place that we couldn't get on our own. And, you know, flinging the phallus 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.

2:54:23And 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 the Olympics and stuff, everybody takes different sides and points of views. It used to just be you cheered for your team. 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.

2:55:03I mean, it's even back, you know, 36 Olympics and they're in Berlin and Hitler's, the Nazis are running the Olympics. right and then you and then you got the the olympics got corrupted by the cold war um right and they've always been pretty fallible to uh somebody taking them out like yeah i mean whenever 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. And that's a perennial problem. And so, again, the answer to that is not let's win that game, to my mind.

2:55:48The answer is let's stop playing that game together. Yeah, it seems 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 felt like. Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt like it happened. Well, the cable knew, like you said a long time ago, the cable fragmented the networks, right? 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 figure. When you're Walter Cronkite and so many people are listening to you, they, right, and they're all sharing that together, a lot of trust gets placed in you by a lot of people.

2:56:31when you're on some little cable thing, right? Then that's 24 hours a day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it, so, you know, CNN changed things. I remember when I was watching CNN when it first came on and I got like a shiver went through me. I was watching it and I realized the journalists are interviewing each other. I grew up in journalism when 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, they're talking to each other. And I go, oh no, this, this is, really bad. This is going to isolate itself more and more and more and become more and more about itself very, very rapidly.

2:57:10And it has. I used to watch CNN. I thought it was the place I would go for news. And then I think five years ago or something, I was like, this just isn't news anymore. I don't know. But the news lost itself, and so then 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 but what the conspiracy shows 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 connection like Socrates they don't want just empty truths they want transformative truths and that's what like if you watch like a QAnon meeting you know yeah, they'll be the conspiracy language, but it looks like a church service.

2:58:01They have, like, there's songs, and then there's somebody gives, like, a sermon, and then they're supporting each other, and they're offering 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 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.

2:59:00in a lot of cultures of these places is it yeah not is it right or is it wrong because it's it is what it is you know um but it 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 calm community common unity um the the problem we're facing is we've I think for good reason 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

2:59:42somebody I'm recording some episodes with Greg Thomas, he's a black man and he's been teaching me how much jazz and the blues contributed to American culture, to American democracy that series is going to come out eventually. Yeah, we just went to Graceland the other day. Yeah. And so, right, and he talks about being an omni-American and being a radical moderate 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, we have to do this thing.

3:00:24We 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, remember the ecology of practices, we haven't been counterbalancing 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 give you a biological example of this. You and I started out as a zygote, a fertilized egg. Initially, the egg just, the cells just reproduce. But then they start to do something. They start to differentiate. They start to become skin cells and lung cells and hearts.

3:01:01Oh, wow. Right? Differentiation. Do they 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 And when I am – look at my hand. My hand is very differentiated, but it's also integrated. 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.

3:01:43You 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. 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 the civic religions. We've lost the sacred religions. We've even lost a shared popular culture.

3:02:27And just being taught, 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 hear what I'm saying. Pursue the diversification. I hear it totally. That's right. But it also needs to be counterbalanced with also pursue the integration so that we 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. I'm mostly viewed as just a white guy, you know. But it's been like it definitely feels like they've made just why a lot of times the media feels like I'm not saying this is real.

3:03:12But it feels like, and I have friends that feel like that white Christian men are just made to be like the enemy, you know, and that they've never done anything good. Demonizing people will always end up bad. 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. 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. Does 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.

3:03:55And at one point he said, well, you know what? And this is the effect this had on him. I'm going to join the right because at least they'll work on my behalf and they'll stop demonizing it. And I had to sit him down. I said, 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 like I had empathy. Like if you're demonizing somebody, do we really like, do we really think that, oh, you've made me feel really horrible and guilty about myself for like all a long time. I I'm just going to join your cause. No, some people will do that because they'll give in.

3:04:32But a lot of people are going to give that the finger and they're going to fight back. Yeah. 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? And this is a really tricky problem. Yeah, 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 I'm not the right person. So I'm trying to really, really listen 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.

3:05:28Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that's always a good idea. I mean, it's just nice to think about and talk about. We should. It's nice to be able to share that thought and just have it be discussed or heard or whatever. And I think we should. I think making things topics that we can't discuss, that we need to discuss, is really problematizing things for a lot of people. 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 into fear. So I know an increasing number of people who are, I can see that the fires of resentment are building in them.

3:06:14Yeah. And it's dangerous. It's like, this is like the Weimar Republic, right? The Versailles Treaty will crush the enemy into the dust because they're demons. And you just, you end up breeding a demon that's 10 times worse. so I like 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 where we can do this like you know this dialogos 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 mistakes.

3:06:56Like people have to be able to make mistakes and say, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize like, oh yeah, maybe that was a racist thing that 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? 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 eggshells 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 has kind of pigeonholed itself with some of its creations these days.

3:07:33And they're paying the price. So they're claiming that this is what everybody believes. 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're trying to create Stockholm syndrome with their audiences. Not that they need to be one way or the other, but just that can we have some reality? Because what gets to be scary is 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. We should go back to making great stories that are a great myth that afford people being imaginal, 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 so that people watch this and they say, this is boring or I'm tired of getting preached at.

3:08:43Like, again, like, here's a, 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 there's a goal. Should we reduce racism and racial tension? Should we make things more fair between, like, the sexes and the genders? Yes. 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 believe in the goal, if we actually believe in helping the people, we should be able to criticize the methods like science does.

3:09:34Instead of like, no, actually, I just want to 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 without being lambasted so much in society or online that it gets debilitating to to any real conversation. Yeah. And again, I would say that I think I can 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.

3:10:12I agree with the left your goals of making the world more compassionate not making people the victims of fate the fate of race or the fate of the economic class. Yeah, they keep doing that Right, keep doing that but also they keep doing that over and it's like come on we've heard this story a million times when are people going to start to live a new truth unless you start to tell 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.

3:10:50Are 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. Exemplify it. Be like Socrates. Be like Siddhartha. Be like Jesus. Right? Yeah. 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 your back's against the wall or you feel like your back is against the wall, whoever that may be, you're going to retaliate more than you are.

3:11:35like entertain, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. 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 and cognitive scientist, that is, 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 they're yelling right now at me but it's like you you you you're saying opposite i hear you saying and shouting opposite things but you seem to be acting in this almost the exact same way uh and um and so that for me that's that's that's a sign that like well that's a sign that we're in trouble that's in a sign that that like we we don't even have debate we've lost diologos we've even lost debate we've just got like sort of verbal rugby or something going on yeah it is I think it really is you know I saw in some of your work you talk about psychedelics and psychedelic yes you know and the value of that yes 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?

3:12:59I've done psychedelics in my past. Like to party or to learn? 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 in both senses of the word. I was doing it like hours every day. I was going to the dojo three or four times. I was getting all the, you know, where you're hot like lava and cold like ice and all those experiences and everything.

3:13:26and then something happened that sort of twigged me so some people came to me, I 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 like how I'm showing up, how I'm comporting myself. That was being changed. Other people were noticing that. And 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?

3:14:10Does it percolate between different layers of their psyche? And so it's like, oh, oh, oh. And I had a very good friend, and I won't out that person, of course, because of course these things are still technically illegal. But that's gonna change soon too. And they offered to do magic mushrooms, and I said to myself, and this is explicitly how I framed it, and I said, I wanna go on magic mushrooms and I wanna do Tai Chi Chuan on when I'm high, because I wanna know what it's like, what it feels like, what the phenomenology is like. Because the psychedelics reduce your egocentrism, right? Yeah. And they open up that connectedness, you're falling in love with reality.

3:14:59I 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, right? And I can use that like a touchstone. And so what I can do is, right, I can practice and I'll have this deep felt memory of what it was like 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. Now, that brings me to something. So remember the processes that make you adaptive, make yourself deceptive? Real quick. So it worked as a strategy in the sense it helped you get deeper, and then in subsequent experiences, you was able to still get deeper?

3:15:46Yeah. Because of that first experience? I can get to that state now in Tai Chi Chuan without having to be on mushrooms. Dang, boy, he's saving money. You know? Well, and other things. Yeah. And other things. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't do it now if I wanted to because I have Meniere's in my left ear. Meniere's? Yeah. They don't know what causes it, but my inner ear can, and I can't talk about it too long because it can trigger an attack. Wow. What a freaking crazy disease. Yeah, it's a bad disease. Oh, yeah. My inner ear will suddenly fill with liquid, and I'll get the worst vertigo you can possibly imagine.

3:16:28Oh, a buddy gets out if you say his ex-wife's name around him. Yeah, yeah, that I can. You'll fucking start running in a circle. But psychedelics, right? Psychedelics, what they do is, 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 talked to people who do psychedelic work. And I read people like Robin Carhart-Harris and others. The idea is 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 trying to predict.

3:17:09We'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 locked into the patterns that are in the sample, but don't actually aren't in the world. Okay. 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 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.

3:17:44And so you're constantly caught between them. And so what you do, machine learning, like deep learning, these machines that are AI and stuff. Oh, yes. 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 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 it looks like that's what you're doing in dreaming. That's what psychedelics do.

3:18:20So 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 or whatever. Something like that, yeah. And so the thing is they have to be put in the right context because when you are 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 S's.

3:19:00One of the words is multi-selectual. It's sapiential. That means having to do with wisdom. You need to set, if you're going to do psychedelics, you need to make sure you're doing lots of other practices that challenge your proclivity, your proneness to self-deception. That's what I mean by a sapiential context. And then, like how indigenous people, which they do that, they have the shamans usually, right? And you also have to have it in a sacred context, right? where there's a context in which your altered states of consciousness are not just running around free. They have a worldview that can properly home them and integrate them in.

3:19:38Yeah, I did an ayahuasca ceremony. Right, right. Man, I didn't. It helped me so much. It was unbelievable. Yes, it can. And I'd been sober 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 thing through. And when it helped me to the immense, I feel like it literally did 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, and they had all these little light candles and all these.

3:20:24Yeah, there's a ritual contact. There was a lot of music that really put you in a special space. Yeah. Everybody was wearing white gowns and robes were in there. There's a lot of symbolism, yes. Yes, there was a ton of symbolism. So there was a lot of traditional moments that we went through before and throughout the experience. It was like a nine-hour experience. And also there was this time where we would get up with these maracas or shakas or whatever. chakras and we'd have to shake like these little things with the sand in them and you'd have to shake them and do this dance ritual. There was a lot of rituals that made the whole experience more powerful.

3:21:04And more transferable. So you can integrate it, you can transfer it, bleeds to different levels of your psyche, bleeds into different domains 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 And, you know, an ayahuasca tourism is. Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. Like, come on down here. Have your experience that you can go back and tell your friends about. Yeah. That kind of thing. And there are some of the flowers, even there's like a sexy woman on the flower. Like, what does this have to do with it?

3:21:34Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it 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 now and be like, what a poor left turn that society took? You think we'll be back in like villages and looking back. Like, what do you think the long game looks like, if you have any 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.

3:22:08And then that gives us all the noxious side effects. But the forced multiplication of civilization was worth it, right? but now what we can do is we can do all the civilization stuff virtually and then we could live in small-scale communities. He calls this the Scybium Project. So we could live in groups of 150 people growing our own food. We 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 that civilization affords. And now we don't have to physically live with millions.

3:22:53And so we now have the possibility where we could turn to, we could live psychologically, physiologically, physically as we evolved to while participating in a hyper-technological civilization with all of the force multiplication that that gives you. and this is a real possibility and he's done stuff to try and make it happen but it's like the lone voice crying in the wilderness kind of thing until he isn't and I hope he keeps coming back to it that's a real possibility we could take that turn for me if we could take that turn while building up these kinds of colleges of practices both individually and collectively are talking about and he and I have talked about how those would integrate and support each other.

3:23:45That could be a turn away from some of the darkness 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's a lot to think. Yeah, yeah. Whenever you get burned out from thinking, what do you like to do? When I get burned out from thinking, sometimes I like to do embodied stuff like Tai Chi Chuan or meditate. Sometimes I like to read some very good literature where I'm putting myself sort of into somebody else's thinking. Do you read fiction ever?

3:24:29Yeah, 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 awful sexual at that time. Oh, yeah. But they're encountering, like they meet, Socrates is there. Oh, wow. So for me, it's like I get to meet Socrates and hang around with him. 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, they go to the gymnasium and Aristocles is there and he's a wrestler.

3:25:12And that's actually Plato's real name. He's Aristocles. Plato means broad shoulders because he was a wrestler. That was his nickname. And I said to myself, I just met Plato. That's cool. Dude, the Delphi, that was like your WWF, huh? Yeah. 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 really good historical fiction to be. A friend of mine, one of my most important friends, Christopher Massipietro, my co-author on so much work, he works for the Ravicki Foundation. He's also recommended Hadrian's Memoirs, I believe it's called.

3:26:00I've got that book. It's about Hadrian writing to the young Marcus Aurelius, trying to educate him in how to 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 because it's inspiring and it's beautiful, I find it very healing and restorative I was just reading this book I think it's called The Library you look it up by this guy Matt Haig H-A-I-G 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 like wakes up in a library and every book on the shelf is the Midnight Library that's what it's called and every book on the shelf is a different possibility of her life if she had made different choices 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 that's right You didn't realize, oh, when I get to this life, my father had passed away early, or my partner had left me, or I was cheating on something.

3:27:32It's just pretty fascinating to see all the different, like the broader view, instead of just being very specific, like, oh, if this one thing changes, 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 book. It's really cool. It's easy to read. It blew my mind just what a creative idea it was. It's a really good idea. That's what good literature can do, right? Yeah. It can persuade you without making an argument, but nevertheless, it rationally persuades you to really consider and reflect on things. Yeah. It kind of made me excited.

3:28:04It was like I hadn't read something that had like kind of a new idea or something that I'd never thought 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, right? They feed your mind in a way that information doesn't. We're at a place now where everyone has access to the same information. So 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.

3:28:43I 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 evangelist maybe, but that's but non-Christian, non-religious evangelist. Because they need, you know, I don't know what I'm saying. I think what you're saying is people have a sense of something that will open them up in that way you were talking about. 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.

3:29:32So yeah, TSLA 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 can take you from the information into the knowledge and if it's really great literature from the knowledge back into the wisdom John Verveke thanks so much man thank you Theo I really enjoyed this I mean you 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 dialogos is we both got to a place we couldn't have got to on our own it wasn't just a dialogue we like there was something a life took shape between us and and grew for a while and we sort of followed it i really the aesthetics and and the 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 have a lot of education, you know, and are good at sharing information.

3:30:34So I feel, 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 listeners. So, yeah, man, thanks so much, dude. And, yeah, I've got to come check you out. I don't want to come see a class or something when I get up there to Toronto. You're welcome. Let me know.

3:31:08Yeah. Can people come sit in there like they ride along with a cop? You can audit. Because the universities are publicly funded in Canada, you can audit any course you want as long as you get permission of the instructor and it doesn't violate the fire code. Sometimes I'm in a room and it's seating for 35 and there's 35 people. Oh, yeah. And I won't wear nothing flammable either. I won't wear, if you think I'm going to wear wool or something, I probably won't. But thank you for letting me know. John Verveke, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.

3:31:47I must be cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones But it's gonna take