Can We Still Trust Reality? How AI Is Changing Truth Forever | John Vervaeke - PT 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: Impact Theory

Episode: Can We Still Trust Reality? How AI Is Changing Truth Forever | John Vervaeke – PT 2
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Dr. John Vervaeke
Date: November 27, 2024

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Overview

This episode explores the evolving nature of "truth" in a reality where artificial intelligence, social upheaval, and philosophical crises intersect. Dr. John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and wisdom researcher, returns for Part 2 to unpack the psychological and societal roots of our current "meaning crisis," why conspiracy theories proliferate, and the critical role of collective rationality and dialog. Tom Bilyeu guides the discussion, challenging conventional notions of self-knowledge, democracy, and the possibility of restoring meaning in a fractured world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Nature of Truth and Predictive Processing

• Tom frames the pursuit of truth as essential for entrepreneurs and people alike, but notes our collective struggle with reliably perceiving it (00:45).
  • Example: Tom recounts a conversation about a man with schizophrenia preferring a "meaningful" (even if delusional) reality over a medicated, boring existence (01:25).
• Vervaeke explains this in terms of salience dysregulation and predictive processing:
  • "The predictive processing machine is trying to make sense of what’s called salience dysregulation... They have this aberrant salience landscape." (02:00)
  • Medications flatten both affect and salience but don’t restructure the underlying predictive framework—hence treatment fails to re-engage the patient with a viable, meaningful reality (02:55).

2. Psychedelics, Frame Breaking, and Epistemic Vulnerability

• Why do psychedelics transform people?
  • Vervaeke: "They make you epistemically vulnerable... you come out wildly transformed." (04:10)
  • Psychedelics cause 'massive frame breaking,' leaving people in a state where new meanings can be created—or new delusions formed, depending on the user's context ("set and setting") and their ability to integrate the experience (04:26–06:30).
• The importance of what he calls the "Four S's": right Set (mental framing), Setting, Sapiential (wisdom skills), and Story (narrative worldview) for positive integration (05:40).

3. The Age of Conspiracy and the Meaning Crisis

• Tom: "I think we're living in the age of conspiracy right now." (07:07)
  • Vervaeke: The proliferation of conspiracy theories and alternative realities stems from a collective meaning crisis—loss of shared narratives, practices, and role models (07:31–10:32).
• He argues for an "ecology of practices," modeled after wisdom traditions (e.g. Buddhism's eightfold path), to counterbalance individual self-deception and foster adaptive sense-making.

Quote:
"You need an ecology of practices. You also need those credible individuals that can act as exemplars to them." – John Vervaeke (09:20)

4. Historical Parallels: The Hellenistic Era's Meaning Crisis

• Tom asks if our current crisis is unique. Vervaeke draws a historical analogy:
  • Post-Alexander Hellenistic world saw fragmentation, loss of identity, and anxiety after the collapse of stable social orders.
  • "The philosopher becomes the physician of the psyche. Epicurus: 'Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others.'" (15:21)
• Only ~10% need to practice these philosophical ecologies to create tipping points for cultural reorientation (16:10).

5. The Future of Philosophy and Collective Wisdom

• Tom wonders: Will the next shift be rooted in philosophy, or somewhere else?
  • Vervaeke: Today’s academic philosophy isn't enough. What's needed is a revival of "philosophia"—the love of wisdom, shared in dialogue, not monologue (17:38–19:50).
  • Grassroots communities globally are spontaneously reconstructing these dialogical wisdom ecologies.

6. Socrates and the Dangers of Self-Deception

• Tom: "Why did they kill Socrates?" (20:12)
  • Vervaeke: Socrates threatened people's cherished identities by exposing self-deception, urging them to examine their framing, which many could not bear (20:38–23:41).

Quote:
"He would burst the bubble of bullshit pretense where people think they know themselves just because they identify with certain ideological positions..." – John Vervaeke (35:11)

7. Dialogical Rationality vs. Monological and the Death Spiral of Democracy

• Experimental Evidence: In reasoning tasks, groups (dialog) succeed far more often than individuals (monologues): 10% vs. 82% success (24:15–25:10).
• Problem: Modern culture recast democracy as adversarial "game-theory," not dialogical self-correction (28:05–31:34).
  • Vervaeke: "If you remove the dialogical rationality and the opponent processing, you remove the rationality. That is the guts and the spirit of democracy." (30:41)
• The self-correcting machinery of democracy is breaking, risking a political "flywheel" of mutual destruction (33:22–34:53).

8. The Psychological Need for Certainty, Leadership, and Narrative

• Tom explores the intoxicating power of certainty in business and politics (36:23–39:17).
  • Leaders must wield narrative bias to rally people but also be wise enough to recognize and revise their own narratives ("priests and mystics" model).
  • "You have to intoxicate them with certainty, and they will fall in behind you...but you've got to step back and go, I know something is wrong in my narrative." – Tom Bilyeu (38:20)
• Vervaeke: Historical examples ("priests" generating narratives, "mystics" maintaining reflective tension) show the need for both, warning against super-CEO or demagogue solutions (40:44–41:41).

9. Historical Hope: Renewal After Collapse

• Vervaeke describes the Bronze Age Collapse, when civilizational catastrophe gave rise to new forms of literacy, critical thinking, and worldviews—the Axial Revolution—suggesting hope for bottom-up cultural reinvention even after systemic collapse (44:00–46:26).

Quote:
"We have done this before...We were able to bottom up, recreate entire new philosophical religious narratives that had this proper tension... As we've done it before, we can do it again." – John Vervaeke (46:02)

10. Resources and Final Thoughts

• Vervaeke suggests his book Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, co-authored with Christopher Mastropietro and video series as accessible guides for those interested in practical wisdom, not mere theory (46:32–47:43).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Flattened Salience:

  "The medication flattens the salience landscape...but you don't want that either. You want a salience landscape that is rich and evolving..."
  – John Vervaeke (02:54)

• On Collective Blindness:

  "Individually we are pathetic animals. But you get a bunch of us together and...we can kill everything on the planet. We evolved for a dialogical, multiperspectival rationality, not a monological one."
  – John Vervaeke (26:07)

• On Democracy’s Loss:

  "Democracy is no longer culturally situated in the United States...If you think the primary way we undertake democracy is through adversarial processing rather than joint commitment...you have doomed democracy."
  – John Vervaeke (30:17–31:17)

• On Wisdom's Necessity:

  "Wisdom is not optional. You either have an implicit pursuit of wisdom...or you're doing it explicitly with other people, reflectively, self-correctively, self-transcending."
  – John Vervaeke (18:49)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:45 – Opening discussion of truth, prediction, schizophrenia and meaning-making
• 04:10 – Psychedelics, salience, epistemic vulnerability
• 07:11 – The age of conspiracy, role of meaning crisis
• 09:20 – Ecology of practices, need for exemplars and worldview
• 12:16 – Historical analogy: Hellenistic period’s crisis and philosophical response
• 17:38 – Is philosophy as practiced today fit for our crisis?
• 20:38 – Socrates, the unexamined life, and the cost of challenging others’ frames
• 24:15 – Group reasoning, dialogical vs. monological minds
• 28:05 – Politics, adversarial processing, and the erosion of democracy
• 33:22 – Flywheel of polarization and pain
• 36:23 – The seductive need for certainty, CEO analogy
• 40:44 – Narrative bias, role of “priests vs. mystics,” historical cycles
• 44:00 – Bronze Age collapse: hope in bottom-up reinvention
• 46:32 – Vervaeke’s book as a resource for transformative wisdom

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Conclusion

John Vervaeke and Tom Bilyeu deliver a rich, urgent discussion on the architecture of self-deception, the breakdown of collective meaning, the mechanistic dangers of adversarial democracy, and the hope embedded in history for renewal—even after collapse. Vervaeke insists both individuals and communities must consciously cultivate ecologies of wisdom—through shared practices, stories, and honest dialogue—to stave off the fracturing pressures of technology, polarizing politics, and epistemic vulnerability. The episode masterfully connects philosophy, psychology, and current events, urging listeners to embrace dialogical rationality and the humility of “knowing you do not know.”

Listeners are encouraged to delve deeper into these ideas via Vervaeke’s book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. Let's dive right back in to part two with John Vervaeke. What do you think about the following truth so you've laid out the idea that we want to be connected to what's real. I talk a lot about this is about building a better prediction engine. When I think about any, certainly from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you're always trying to figure out what's true. I think we're terrible at it. But anyway, it's a useful aim because it increases your ability to predict the outcome of your actions. Then I met somebody who had a brother who was schizophrenic and he believed that he was being pursued by the French government.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And every day for him was like a spy novel and he was just running from place to place, trying to stay away from them and make sure they couldn't intercept his thoughts. And they finally got him on treatment and he became depressed because his life was boring.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

And so he ended up going off of his medication again and as the, you know, medicine was still in his system, but he had decided not to take it anymore. He said, I would rather be schizophrenic and living an exciting life than be bored.

[C]

Okay, now Tom, that it goes exactly to what I was arguing for earlier. You have the predictive processing machine, but what's going on? But remember I said you always have to integrate it with the relevance realization. There's a growing consensus that what's going on are these two things within the schizophrenic you have the predictive processing machine trying to make sense of a what's called salience dysregulation, the salience network. What is being marked for attention and perception as relevant is not functioning Properly for these people. So they have this very aberrant salience landscape. And what they have, it's actually called schizophrenic insight. They get an insight in scare quotes that makes sense, that gives the predictive processing the anticipation for that skewed salience landscape. And that's why they have this bizarre thing they're living in now. What the medication does, right, is it. It flattens the affect, it flattens the salience landscape. But you don't want that either. You want a salience landscape that is rich and evolving. And so what you do is you debilitate these people. And the problem also is, even though you've now flattened the salience landscape, the belief network from the predictive processing machinery is still all in place. You, you haven't disrupted that. It's still looking around for the world that it works in. You haven't done what you need to do. So it actually means that what you have to do is you have to simultaneously, you have to much more carefully calibrate the disruption in the salience landscape. And you have to couple that with restructuring the predictive processing machinery so they better fit together and the person will find that viable, such that they will, and I'm using this word deliberately, deliberately care about it and be invested in it. That's not what we're doing with our current treatment.

[B]

Why do psychedelics not tied to schizophrenics, but why do psychedelics have a profound impact on the salience network such that people come out of it oftentimes wildly transformed?

[C]

Yeah, well, they make you epistemically vulnerable, right?

[B]

What does that mean?

[C]

What that means is you come out wildly transformed, but it can go towards growth and it can also go towards self destructive. So although psychedelics aren't sort of biochemically addictive.

[B]

You say epistemically vulnerable. Do you mean that you're not sure what is true?

[C]

So what? No, no. What happens is you're in a state. Okay? So think about it this way. Remember when you like I have, I've misconstrued a situation, I've misframed it. What I have to do is I have to first break that frame, right? And so when I've broken a frame, I'm now in a position of vulnerability because now I need, I have to now make an alternative frame. There's actually, I talk about this in the book about insight, problem solving. There's this cycle. You have to break an inappropriate frame and then you have to also craft, make a new frame that replaces it. Now what psychedelics do basically is they do massive frame breaking and then they put you in a state where, where there's a lot of things are open for you. Remember when I was talking about the bias variance problem and you get overfitting to the data, so your brain is in a lot of ways overfitted. This is why you also, this is plausibly why you dream. Dreams are, you're throwing noise into the system to break all that framing up and open up the possibilities. So you're a little less overfitted. You can explore more possibility space. So psychedelics do that, but they do it right. And so now you're in this state where you've done a lot of massive frame breaking and you can explore a lot of the possibility space. And so things seem very, very pregnant with possibility for you. Now it really depends. And this is why we're increasingly. You hear people increasingly talking about set and setting. You have to have the proper mental set the question, proper framing. You have to write context, setting. I would add two more S's. You need a good sapiential that has to do with wisdom. You need a lot of skills for dealing with self deception and you need some sort of, you need some sort of story. You need an overarching worldview that can accommodate these anomalous experiences. If you have all of those, then you'll make frame in a way that actually plugs you. It's like the fantasy novel where you go in and you come back and recover this world and see more deeply into to it. But if you just break frame and you don't have those four S's, you will gravitate to anything that, like the schizophrenic, that will make sense of that aberrant salience landscape. And so like a schizophrenic, you can go into a paranoid narrative, you can tunnel into weird rabbit hole metaphysics, you can get involved in conspirituality, literally typing or writing.

[B]

Age of conspiracy So I think we're living in the age of conspiracy right now.

[C]

Yes,

[B]

sure, some people are doing psychedelics, but I don't think that's the big cause. So what is it? If that's one way to break the frame and give you nothing back. What is it about modern life that's broken our collective frame of reference and left so many people to chase so many conspiracies?

[C]

The meaning crisis, that's a way of

[B]

understanding what they're not connected to what's real.

[C]

They're not what they. So what the meaning Crisis means is right. Do you have a, like, do you have an ecology of practices? What do I mean by that? There's because of the bias, variance trade off that I talked about earlier, there's no one practice. This is called the no free lunch theorem. This is formally proven. There's no one thing you can do to alleviate all your self deception. That was part of what I was talking about earlier about no one algorithm kind of thing. Right? So what you need and what you see in wisdom traditions like Buddhism with the eight spoke path, right, the eight spoke wheel, you need a bunch of different practices that are complementary. They have complementary strengths and weaknesses. So they play off against each other and they play with those trade offs between bias and variance. Explore and exploit. So for example, just quickly, I want a meditative practice. I'll use this for my framing, my glasses and normally I'm not aware of my framing, I'm aware through it. But in meditation what you do is you look, learn to step back and look at your framing and notice, hey wait, look at that, that's cracked. That's distorting my vision. I'll fix that. But that's not. I need something else. I need to know if I can now see better. So I need to do the opposite, the opponent processing. I need to now put on my glasses and see if I can see more deeply into reality. That's contemplative practices. And I need to move back and forth constantly going between them in a self correcting fashion. And also you need seated mindfulness practices like meditation and contemplation that are in opponent processing with moving practices like Tai Chi chuan that are getting you to practice mindfulness within movement between flowing in and flowing out with your environment. So people need an ecology of practices. They also need those credible individuals that can act as exemplars to them. Remember we talked about you internalize people. They become part of your reflective capacity, your ability to reflect on yourself. You get through indwelling other people and then internalizing them. You need role models and you need them to be embedded in a story and a tradition that gives you an overarching worldview, telling you how basically we all agreed we're going to fundamentally make sense of things. Now what used to do that wisdom cultivation were religious frameworks. I'm not here advocating for religion. That's not what I'm here. I'm talking about a historical phenomena. And when I mean religion, I don't mean Abrahamic religion exclusively. That's an ethnocentric bias. I mean Things like that other people might call philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism. I mean things that give you ecologies of practices, moral and wisdom exemplars, powerful narratives in which and through which you can identify.

[B]

And without that, you're just going to grab on.

[C]

You're going to grab on and you're going to be radically epistemically vulnerable. The frames are all broken and you are going to grab, oh, it's the world of a video game or it's this world that the LLM is creating with me, or it's some weird messed up conspirituality. And it's called conspirituality for a reason. When Julian Evans sort of magnified that term, it's a mixture of conspiracy theory and this spirituality, this fundamental identification and this big picture alignment and adherence. You're going to, that's. That's what's driving the meaning crisis, right? So not only does the meaning crisis cause, right, that massive epistemic vulnerability, these things now emerge, all of these symptoms, the loneliness, the depression, the anxiety, the increased rates of add, the over identification with mythological worlds. The weird thing that everybody is deeply disenfranchised by politics, but everything is politicized with a religious fervor. Right? All of this then feeds back and exacerbates the meaning crisis. And that's what we're in the midst of.

[B]

Okay, one, is this a unique moment in time or do we move through these meaning crises throughout history? And two, how do we get out of this moment? You've already been clear about you need this OCC practices, but I'll just tell you, the vast majority of humans are never going to do it. I know enough about your cycle and all the different things you do. Just the average person just isn't going to do it. So if this is a pattern that's repeated in history, how have we pulled ourselves out in the past and how are we going to do it now?

[C]

Right, And I'll answer both of those concerns at once. We have done this before in the West. It was called the Hellenistic period. So you've got Alexander's empire basically unites most of civilization. I'm not talking about India and China, but a lot, you know, a lot of the world. And, and he does something very powerful. He, he brings the, he creates a Hellenic, he Hellenizes the Hellenic culture, goes everywhere. Right, that was part of the project. Okay. And then that world breaks up because he dies before he appoints an heir. And what it Breaks up is it breaks up into smaller kingdoms that are constantly fighting each other. So I want to compare a person who's living just before Alexander, Aristotle, the time of Aristotle, person who taught Alexander, and somebody who's living in the time 100 years after Alexander when all these kingdoms are fighting. Okay? You're in Aristotle's time. You live in one place and your ancestors have lived there a long time. Everybody around you has also the same. You all speak the same language, you all worship the same gods. Right. You have a terrific sense of identity with this polis. Right? This is where we get the word political from. But it didn't mean what we mean now by political. It means this tremendous. The greatest penalty in the ancient Greek world was ostracizing people. Not killing them, forcing them to live outside of the polis was just. We think, why is being ostracized so bad? I'll leave Toronto, I'll move to Savannah. Who cares? No, this is horrible. This is a horrifying prospect. Okay, so that's the world of Aristotle. Now you're in the world after Alexander. You have probably moved to this place. There's people around you that also their ancestors don't come from this place. They speak different language, they worship different deities than you do, different history, different tradition, different customs. When you're in Aristotle's time, you know the people in power, you literally live in the same city as them. You could even be invested and involved in the government. The time after Alexander, the rulers live thousands of kilometers away from you. Everything that gave you a sense of belonging and being at home is totally lost. And so this is known as an age of anxiety. And you see the art and everything changing. And you can see the rise of a tremendous sense of ill ease in this period. Now what happens is a change in philosophy. The philosopher becomes the physician of the psyche. And Epicurus. Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. And addressing.

[B]

That's a good quote.

[C]

Yeah, Addressing this anxiety, right. Gets sort of layered onto all the previous projects of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And so you get the emergence of the Epicureans and the Stoics and the Cynics and the skeptics doesn't mean what we mean by skeptic. And eventually the Neoplatonists who draw it all together. You get these philosophies that are attempts to deal with everything we have been talking about here. They are attempts to ameliorate that self deceptive, self destructive behavior and enhance that sense of meaning in life, that hands of enhance that connectedness to reality, to yourself, to other people in the world. And they create entire ecologies of practices, communities and role models around that. They don't have to convert everybody. They don't. You're right. They get about 10% of the population involved and that actually tips the balance and moves them forward.

[B]

We'll take a quick break here, but stick around. John Vervaeke is just getting started

[C]

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[A]

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[B]

All right, let's pick up where we left off. What will today's version of philosophy be? Will it be philosophy literally or something else

[C]

that that, that that question sort of person sort of pushes on personal aspects of my own life. There's two senses. I, I, I, I use two different terms and I use the two different terms not because I'm trying to be pedantic. I use philosophy to mean what it now currently means by for most people it means academic philosophy, philosophy that you could go to a university to for and get a degree in. I have a PhD in Philosophy, for example. I value all of that. I'm not here to like criticize that. But that did not meet the need I met. I was trying to meet when I first went into philosophy and I met the figure of Socrates. When I read Plato's Republic, I was in a meaning crisis and I was looking for a way to ameliorate foolishness, enhance flourishing. I was looking for a role model that I could internalize. I found it in Socrates and I thought philosophy was going to be that. The original Greek is philosophia, the love and philia the brotherly love, the shared. We share this love together, you and I together in dialogue. Dialogos we share together a love of wisdom. That's what it means. That's what I was looking for. And I think people don't need academic philosophy to deal with what I'm talking about. But we all need to be, we all need to be lovers of wisdom because wisdom is not optional. You either have an implicit pursuit of wisdom. You're trying to deal with your self deceptive, self destructive behavior. You're trying to enhance your meaning in life. And you're doing this semi consciously, autodidactively, unreflectively. That's an implicit philosophy in the ancient sense. Or you're doing it explicitly with other people, reflectively, self correctively, self transcending. You're making use of the best that history can offer and you're creating current and being involved in current ecologies of practices. That's another thing that's a positive symptom of the meaning crisis. Tom, I talk to all of these communities that are springing up around the globe. Yes, I know there's a lot of stupid, cultish, weird things. But there's also bonafide healthy communities where people are creating ecologies of practices for doing exactly what we're talk, talking about here. That's happening all around the globe, all over the place. And then. And they reach out to me and I get so. And I get to go and participate and spend time with them and talk to them and see what they're doing. I think that's what's happening right now.

[B]

That's very interesting. We will see if it plays out as well as I hope it will in the face of AI Yes, I know there's so many things converging right now. Talk to me about Socrates. So through your eyes, for the first time, I found him incredibly interesting. Why did they kill him? I think that's a really good end for people that don't know what he was essentially willing to die for.

[C]

Well, Socrates developed a practice of question and answer that was designed to get people aware of their narrative framing and how it is causing them to deceive themselves. This is what he meant. This is what he said when he was on trial for his life. The unexamined life is not worth living. He doesn't mean the minutiae of going over your autobiography. He means are you cultivating rationality and wisdom? Are you learning? Are you developing colleges of practices, internalizing, developing skills, internalizing role models so that you can constantly and appropriately call into question how you are construing things, how you're framing things and Trying to liberate yourself as much as possible from how you are deceiving yourself and potentially bullshitting other people. That's what he did. And so he would go into situations and he would ask people probative questions that was designed to get them to disidentify with their framing so they could, like I did with my glasses, so they could step back and look at it. Because that's what you have to do. You have to take your glasses off, you have to look at it and see. Oh, you have to be in that bigger thing that allows you to see the smaller frame is actually misleading. And he would do this with people that were making claims to being wise. And he was doing it because, well, he was interested in whether or not they were telling the truth. Not in just a propositional way, but like, were they actually enacting the right commitment to get at the truth of things? Which means, were they really practicing a way of thinking and seeing that was dealing with self deception in an ongoing, systematic and systemic way? Now can, and as you can imagine, think about it today, think about the. I'm a Canadian, so I get to say this. Think about the fraught political arena, right, that you have right now. People don't like to disidentify with their framing. That identification goes a lot towards their central ego narrative of who and what they are. So when he tried to probe people to take off their glasses and look at them, that's a state of epistemic vulnerability. Some people, like Plato, his greatest disciple, or Xenophon, another important follower, said, I see. And Socrates famously said, wisdom begins in wonder. He doesn't mean idle curiosity. He means calling yourself and your world into question in this probative, provocative manner. Some people get, I see, I see. Other people, oh, I don't like that weakness. I don't like that disidentification. I don't like losing that cherished identity. You're a threat. That's why they killed him.

[B]

That's a mic drop there. We're seeing this in politics right now. So this sense of any attack on my politics is an attack on me.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Is a wildly problematic thing in the human psyche. Do you think that the way that we self deceive has evolutionary advantages or is this just a byproduct of another need, Say, to stay flexible or to learn from culture may be a better way to say it.

[C]

That's interesting. So I do a lot of work. I'm trying to get a paper published now. I think it's going to get published because it's in revision, so that's usually a good sign. It's going to get published. On the connection with Anna Riedel, the deep connections between all this formal work on relevance realization, predictive processing and rationality. So I do a lot of work really looking at, you know, all the best theoretical debate, the best experimental competition around this. And one thing is becoming really clear. We believe for cultural reasons, that we reason that reason is something we do monologically. That means we do it as a monologue. We do it individually on our own. And also I'm playing on the word monologue. We use sort of one formal logic and we talk to her and it's a monologue and we're using one sort of system. So take a standard reasoning task. I won't go into the details. The waste and selection task, right. By all sort of, you know, objective measures, a relatively easy reasoning task. It's kind of like the thing I did with the lily pad with you a while ago. And you give people this problem. We've been doing this since 1966. And this is not suffering from the replication crisis. It robustly. And these are the cream of the crop. I'm at a top tier university in the world. These are high iq, highly educated, socioeconomically stable status, all those sort of variables that are supposed to predict success. You put them in the waste and selection task, and only 10% of them get it right reliably. They only look for confirmation. To put it in sort of a nutshell, right? Take the same task, replace it with four people and tell them to work together. The success rate goes reliably from 10% to 82%. Whoa, this is just. Read Mercer and Sperber's book the Enigma of Reason. Read the Dialogical Roots of Deduction by Duluth Neves. Right, like so what's going on here? Well, let's make it hopefully intuitively accessible to your audience. Okay? Have you ever noticed that you're actually really good at spotting other people's biases and misconstruals? Like, you know, you're really good at pointing to your friend, hey, you're doing that stupid thing you always do in your romantic relationships. You're doing it again and they don't do it. And you feel so wise, Right? But when it's you, how good are you at finding your own biases? It's really hard. It's even metabolically difficult for you, right? We seem to have evolved for this. You are my best vehicle of self correction and I am yours. And that works Only if we're in dialogue. Let's go back to the experiment I talked about. It's not the case. This is what's so intriguing because you can look at the data really carefully. It's not the case that one person comes up with the answer individually and convinces the others. The group as a whole comes up with the answers. And this plugs into the fact that that is our evolutionary superpower. We have a collective intelligence in distributed cognition. Individually we are pathetic animals. But you get a bunch of us together and we can coordinate our behavior with some pointy sticks and some dogs and we can kill everything on the planet. Right. We evolved for a dialogical, multi perspectival rationality, not a monological one.

[B]

Okay, so then what's going on in politics? Why do people hate it so much when you challenge their beliefs?

[C]

Because we have linked that monological model we got from the European Enlightenment, 17th and 18th century with a individualism and a kind of small L liberalism idea and the autonomy of the individual. And romanticism reinforced that with self expression and authenticity. I'm not saying there aren't positive aspects to this. I'm just trying to answer your question. Okay, and so what that means is we progressively have forgotten that the principle of democracy is dialogical rationality. Remember I talked about how we do within our minds? We do opponent processing, we do this trade off relationship. Your attention is doing it right now you've got two attentional systems. You have a default mode network that's making you want to mind wander and introduce variation. And you have a task focused network that's killing off most of the variation. And what you're doing is you're doing this. And it's exactly the same principles as biological evolution. Variation and selection, Variation and selection, variation and selection. And you're constantly evolving like a reproductive cycle, attentional fit, that's opponent processing, that's within your attention, but with dialogical rationality. There's supposed to be opponent processing between you and I. We're supposed to disagree and challenge each other, but we're supposed to have common unity, community of both agreeing that we fundamentally need each other for self correction. And we commit to the process above and beyond our position because we have full acknowledgement and identification with the fact that rationality is primarily dialogical. But what has happened is we have forgotten that because of this cultural history. And we have replaced evolving dialogical opponent processing between people with adversarial game theoretic zero sum processing in which I can only win by destroying you. I think democracy is no longer culturally situated in the United States. Obviously it's still here politically.

[B]

Say more.

[C]

What I mean by that is if you think the primary way in which we undertake democracy is through adversarial processing rather than joint commitment to a community of opponent processing and the power of distributed cognition, you have doomed democracy. I will defend that.

[B]

Defend?

[C]

Well, what I mean by that is that if you do not have that, you are losing the capacity for rationality. The point of democracy, like science. This is John Dewey, one of your great philosophers. The point about science and democracy is that they're. Democracy is. Winston Churchill said it's like it's the worst system next to all the rest because in many ways it can be outperformed by other systems. What it has is the best capacity for self correction, like science has the best capacity for self correction. It is designed to be rational in the way we have talked about rationality as systemic self correction. If you remove the dialogical rationality and the opponent processing, you remove the rationality. That is the guts and the spirit of democracy.

[B]

Okay, so in this moment you're saying we no longer want our ideas challenged. And because we don't want our ideas challenged, we're not getting smarter as a group and we now have a fail state for democracy itself.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Woof. How do you think this is going to play out? Quick break here, but when we're back, we'll continue this incredible conversation with John Vervaeke.

[C]

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[B]

And we're back. How do you think this is going to play out?

[C]

The way it's playing out. I mean the way it's playing out is we're seeing increasing polari. And this is not just the United States. This is happening in Canada, it's happening in Europe. We're seeing. We're seeing what I talked about earlier. We're seeing this weird paradox of people profoundly cynical and feeling disenfranchised with the political but also deeply politicizing. Everything, everything is polarizing. Everything is a culture war. Everything is invested with a religious fervor. And yet we don't think that the system that is supposed to solve these political conflicts is actually functioning. And so we think we have to somehow capture the system, capture the institutions and destroy the opposite side in order to somehow achieve our goals. This is how it's playing out.

[B]

If this self correcting mechanism is broken, is this just a runaway flywheel that doesn't stop until there's enough pain and suffering in the system that people will change? Or is there a lesson in history here about how we back out of this?

[C]

The Athenian democracy killed Socrates and lost what I was talking about and got overtaken by the demagogues, the bullshit artists of the political arena and drove it into extreme extremity. And you have people like Alcibiades and Cleon and others and they drive Athens to self destruction. If we don't step out and address the meaning crisis and properly re home and re situate democracy, yes, I think it is doomed.

[B]

Yeah, I don't see a way to break the flywheel. That that is the. And I'm a. I'm an optimistic guy, but I like to be able to see what the path forward is. And if I can't articulate that, and history tells me that. I know Thucydides Trap is specifically about a rising power versus an established power, but I'll use it in the sense of that collision that you can see coming a mile away and you just can't stop it. That's what this feels like right now. Like the. I am trying to get people to believe in this idea that the center is a destination, that you have to want to end up there. You have to want the friction between the two sides. You have to distrust yourself. You have to want, like here's my thing.

[C]

Here, here, Tom. I just want to reinforce that.

[B]

Well, thank you sir, I appreciate that very much. If we could get a lot more people to reinforce that, I think we'd be in a way better situation. To me it comes down to don't trust thyself. Like you want to know thyself for sure, but you want to be highly skeptical that you will lead everyone to the right place.

[C]

This is what Socrates said. He said, my wisdom consists in that I know that I do not know. He doesn't mean the trivial sense that we know. I don't know anything about Australia. He doesn't mean that trivial sense of ignorance. He means that existential lack of rationality. The self knowledge he's talking about is not your autobiography. He's talking about your owner's manual. Like the thing that tells you how you work that's what he's talking about. And what he did was he would burst the bubble of bullshit pretense where people think they know themselves just because they identify with certain ideological positions and propositions, when in fact they. And I'm willing to point my finger at myself, by the way. We are ignorant profoundly of what is how we are fundamentally driven and how we are fundamentally self deceived. We have to do a tremendous amount of work, not just individually, but collectively and not just now, but in a sense traditionally by like you've been doing with me, asking about relevant historical precedents, we have to do this more deeply.

[B]

Yeah. I have a deep fear that there's something in the architecture of the human mind which has made us the most dominant species the world has ever seen. So this is not me saying I could have done a better job if only evolution had left it to me. But we, for instance. So this, the idea of the vulnerability when your frame of reference gets cracked and how unnerving that is for a lot of people and how when you attack somebody's belief system, it is like assaulting them directly. Humans want to be intoxicated with certainty. One of the first things you learn as a CEO is you have to do this really weird thing of, okay, the world is presenting us with all these dots, right? The economy's in this place. This is how people think of our product. This is how people think of the area of the market that we're in, all of that stuff. And now I'm going to tell a story about how those dots connect. And I need that story in order to move forward because I need the. You were talking about bias as a positive thing. I need that bias to know what to focus on so I know what not to pay attention to, so I can put things literally in priority order. Now, one thing, when you train entrepreneurs, you realize very quickly people don't. They're terrified to put things in priority order. And what I find is they won't put things in priority order because they don't have a strong narrative about where they're trying to end up and how they're going to get there. And so you have to work with them. Hey, decide where you want to get what I call Kyg. Know your goal? Yeah, you know your goal. Now what are the dots? We're going to connect them in a narrative now you have to go to your team and say, hey, everybody, I guarantee these are the dots and I guarantee this is how they connect and why we're going to end up where we want to go. You have to intoxicate them with certainty, and they will fall in behind you, and then you can really get momentum, which is a lot of people moving in the same direction. Now, the catch is, as the CEO, while they are running intoxicated with your certainty, you've got to step back and go, I know something is wrong in my narrative. I just don't know what it is yet.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And so it is this super weird thing of like, all right, everybody, we're marching on that hill. We're going to go get those guys, and this is going to be the outcome. And then you've got to step aside and be like, okay, I know there's a flaw here somewhere, and I need to find it as fast as I can. And when you then step back in and challenge other people and ask them to challenge your ideas, you start to break some of that certainty. And so it's this really weird thing that I see exacerbated a thousandfold in the political arena, where people need the certainty of their own side in a moment like this, where we're very much following demagogic figures. And it's like, okay, they've told me this is a narrative. I know how to repeat it. So I'm going to repeat that narrative. I'm just going to get behind it. I'm going to move as fast as I can in that direction. And when the other side challenges, like, there are actual videos where you can just look. How to counteract XYZ argument.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And so it's like, just give me the talking points, bro. That's all I need. I don't need to actually understand it. I don't even necessarily need to believe it's true. I just need to know how to rebut it. And it's like, whoa. Yeah. So that worries me because that feels architectural in the human mind. I don't know that there's a way. I don't think humans en masse will transcend that. And to your earlier point about philosophy and that it only took, like, this small group, but you needed that small group to be. To build an alternative vision that people could be excited by that's in alignment with the times. Because now here's my secret secret. See, I feel like I should whisper this, but I've talked to my audience about it so much. This is all a debt question. And you can just go back and where are we at in the debt cycle? Because when people are making more money over time from their youth until their old age, and when they hand the baton to their kids and their kids make more than they did. So they're ahead of where they were in their 20s. And you have every reason to believe they'll be ahead of you in their 60s. And you are in your 60s. Everyone feels great at the macro level when that breaks. And for us, it's breaking right now, for sure. Everything feels off, but people don't understand exactly why it feels off. In steps, demagogic figure who gives you just a very clear answer. You slot them behind them, they promise everything's going to feel good again. And now you're where we are.

[C]

I would say you're in a position. The way you describe the CEO is sort of the balancing act that the religious institutions did in the past. They tried to create the narrative for a civilization to give up momentum, to build cathedrals that. Where one generation would start and three generations later would see it, to give an example. Right. Or to go to other places, like with the Buddhists who left India and went to China or something like that. So they're trying to get that balance, and they're trying to get a balance between a nar. It's. There's a bias attached to that. It's called narrative bias. If you give people a narrative, they think they know about the situation more than they do, and they have confidence in it more than they do. It's an actual bias phenomenon, but it's empowering. Like you said, it's. We have to always use this word bi. In fact, in the literature, we talk about heuristics and bias. A heuristic is when it's working, and a bias is when you don't like it. Yeah, okay.

[B]

That's very well said.

[C]

Okay. And so. And you always have to use heuristics because, as I was saying earlier, you can't use algorithms because it would get you into a combinatorial, explosive search. And what I'll. What bias. What heuristics do is they. They say, only look here. That's what a narrative does. It focuses you. Like you said, you get everybody focused, and then you get a momentum. So they were doing that, and then they had to. But they had people behind the scenes. They had people like Thomas Aquinas, or they have Siddhartha, they have the mystics, so they have the priests. If I can. I'm speaking very broadly here. So I'm asking for some charity here. Right. You have the priests who are basically like, pushing the narrative. And I mean this in the sense of giving up momentum, but behind it you have the mystics who are constantly stepping back and yes, but wondering about the whole picture. And you're constantly toggling between the priests and the mystics within the religious tradition. And what you can do is they, they were able to manage that for like extended periods of time and you know, create and home entire ecology practices. And part of what I'm saying is we lost that at the civilizational level. What you had as a CEO with your particular company. That's another way of talking about the meaning crisis. That's where we're at. And the problem we're making is we think what we need is the super CEO. But no, we don't just need somebody who's a leader. We need somebody who can do that, can give us the compelling narrative, but is also willing to step back from it and call it into question and evolve it in a way that constantly draws us out of our comfort zone. So we're willing to commit beyond ourselves to what we want to exist, even if we don't like the cathedral. Now is that possible even in the face of tremendous economic collapse? Yes. Historical example, Bronze Age collapse. Mega civilizations exist. Empires, Egyptian empire, prototypical. Lasting for literally millennia, 3,000 years, 4,000 years. This is the Bronze Age. It's Titanic. And it utterly collapses. General system collapse, change in warfare. We don't quite know what happens. It is the biggest collapse in the history of civilization. It's bigger than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire trade, the loss of trade, the loss of literacy, the loss of little, loss of cities, much greater. But what happened was there was a invention of. It's like the asteroid hitting and the dinosaurs going extinct and all the mammals now can move out and evolve. And you got all these little, these little mammalian kingdoms doing all these experimentation and you get all these new inventions. You get the invention of alphabetic literacy with a standardized reading, you have coinage that teach people abstract symbolic calculation. And when you write things with alphabetic literacy, not like hieroglyphics, way more people can learn it. You go from 2 or 3% up to maybe 20% of your population. And now think about how empowered your cognition is by the ability to do symbolic calculations and write your thoughts down and share your, your thoughts with your future self, share it with other people. You get a massive empowerment of cognition, critical reflection. And you get this whole new worldview, titanically different worldview arises the actual revolution, the whole two worlds mythology that that has become the legacy grammar for us, even though that is now collapsed. So is a titanic Economic collapse possible, you know, more than I do. I worry about it, but I don't have the expertise to properly comment on that. What I can say as a cognitive scientist and a historian is, yes, but. Right. We have done this before Axial Revolution, after Alexander's empire collapsed, and we did this. We were able to bottom up, recreate entire new philosophical religious narratives that had this proper tension. I like to use the Greek word tonos because tension is negative in English, where tonos, like the tonos of a bow, the tonos of a lyre. Right. It has the tonos between that narrative momentum and that mystical reflection. And that rational criticism gets that right tone. As we've done it before, we can do it again.

[B]

And it's absolutely fascinating. John, this has been incredible. Where can people follow along with you?

[C]

Well, I would like it if people bought my book Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, because a lot of this, you know, Chris and I have done a lot to really make a lot of this as accessible as possible. There is the video series. I think the book is better because of Chris's involvement. I did the. I fell prey to the very mistake I just critiqued a few minutes ago. I presented the series Awakening for the Meaning Crisis. It's very popular. And I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I don't. I don't want.

[B]

That's fantastic. I've watched it.

[C]

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. But I did it monologically. This book was written dialogically. If I aspire to being Socrates, Christopher is Plato. He takes my arguments and he does what you've been doing here, dialogically, opening them up, making them more accessible, grounding them back for people, showing them how they can be more personally transformative, giving them more examples. There's much more rigor in the citations, the references, more examples, more diagram. Madeleine Ebramian really helped with editing and correcting and removing a lot of the little glitches that are in the video series. I would really. I would really like people to buy the book, actually.

[B]

I love it, man. Well, I cannot recommend it highly enough. And everybody, speaking of things that I recommend highly, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.