I'm Tom Bilyeu, and this is Impact Theory. Let's dive right back in, part two, with John Fervicki. 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, certainly from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you're always trying to figure out what's true. I think we're terrible at it, but anyway, that'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.
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. And so he ended up going off of his medication again.
And as the medicine was still in the 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. Okay. Now, Tom, that goes exactly to what I was arguing for earlier. You have the predictive processing machine, but what's going on?
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 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 square 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 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 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 of the salience landscape in coupled. 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, care about it and be invested in it.
That's not what we're doing with our current treatment. 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? Yeah, well, they make you epistemically vulnerable, right? What does that mean?
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... When you say epistemically vulnerable, do you mean that you're not sure what is true? No, what happens is you're in a state...
Okay, so think about it this way. Remember when 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'm 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 a 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 there's a lot of things that are open for you.
Remember when I was talking about the bias-variance problem and you get overfitting through the data? So your brain is, in a lot of ways, overfitted. This is plausibly why you dream. Dreams are...
You're throwing noise into the system and break all that framing up and open up the possibilities so you're a little less overfitted. You can explore more possibility space. Psychedelics do that, but they do it... 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... We're increasingly talking about set and setting.
You have to have the proper mental set, proper framing. You have to have the right 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 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 it. But if you just break frame and you don't have those four S's, you will gravitate to anything like the schizophrenic that will make sense of that aberrant salient 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 age of conspiracy. So I think we're living in the age of conspiracy right now.
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? The meaning crisis. That's a way of understanding what they're not connected to what's real.
So what the meaning crisis means is, do you have an ecology of practices? What do I mean by that? Because of the bias-variance trade-off that I talked about earlier, there's no one practice. This is called a no-free lunch theorem.
This is formally proven. There's no one thing you can do to alleviate all your self-deception. That's part of what I was talking about earlier about no one algorithm kind of thing. So what you need and what you see in wisdom traditions like Buddhism, the eight-spoke path, 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 learn to step back and look at your framing. Hey, wait, look at that. That's crap.
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 like embedded in a story and a tradition that gives you an overarching worldview telling you how basically we all agree we're going to fundamentally make sense of things. And 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 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. And without that you're just going to grab on.
You're going to grab on and you're going to be radically epistemically vulnerable. The frames are all broken and you're going to grab on. 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 So not only does the meaning crisis cause that massive epistemic vulnerability, these things now emerge.
All of these symptoms, the loneliness, the depression, the anxiety, the increased rates of addiction, the over-identification with mythological worlds, the weird thing that everybody is deeply disenfranchised by politics but everything is politicized with a religious fervor. All of this then feeds back and exacerbates the meaning crisis and that's what we're in the midst of. 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 the psychology of 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?
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 of the world and he does something very powerful. He brings the Hellenic, he Hellenizes, the Hellenic culture goes everywhere. That was part of the project. 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, a person who tried 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 at one time. Everybody around you is also the same.
You all speak the same language. You all worship the same gods. You have a terrific sense of identity with this. Polis, right?
That's where we get the word political from. It didn't mean what we mean by political. It means this tremendous, the greatest penalty is just, we think, why is the Nostradar Sabaab? I'll leave Toronto and move to Sabaab.
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 might, 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. You can 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, yeah, addressing this anxiety, right, gets sort of layered on to 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. That doesn't mean what we mean by skeptic. And eventually, the Neoplatonists get 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, 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. We'll take a quick break here.
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Quince.com slash impact pod. 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?
That question sort of puts us on personal aspects of my own life. There's two senses. I use two different terms. I use the two different terms not because I'm trying to be pedantic.
I use philosophy to mean what it now currently means for most people. It means academic philosophy. Philosophy that you could go to a university for and get a degree and I have a PhD in philosophy for example. I value all of that.
I'm not here to like criticize them 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 meeting 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 philo sophia the love the and philipalia 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-destructive self-destructive behavior you're trying to enhance your meaning in life and you're doing this semi-consciously autodidactically 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 talking about here that's happening all around the globe all over the place 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 that's very interesting uh we will see if it plays out as well as i hope it will in the face of ai i know there's so many things converging right now um talk to me about socrates so through your eyes for the first time i found him incredibly interesting uh why did they kill him i think that's a really good in for people that don't know what he was essentially willing to die for well um 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 minutia of going over your autobiography he means are you cultivating rationality and wisdom are you learning are you developing the 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 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 out the truth of things which means were they really practicing a way of thinking and seeing that was dealing with self-deception you know in an ongoing systematic and systemic way now 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 many people that's a state of epistemic vulnerability some people like plato his greatest disciple or xenophon another another important follower said i see and socrates famously said wisdom begins in wonder he doesn't mean idle curiosity he means calling yourself in your world into question in this probative provocative manner some people get oh 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 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 yes uh is a wildly problematic thing in the human psyche do you think that the way that we self-deceive has evolutionary advantages uh or is this just a byproduct of another need say to stay flexible or to learn from culture maybe a better way to say it 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 every doubt 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 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 details a waste and selection task right um by all sort of you know objective measures a relatively easy reasoning task it's kind of like the thing i did with a lily pad with you uh a while ago and you give people this problem we've been doing this since 1966 and this is not something from the replication crisis it robustly and these are the cream of the crop i'm at you know 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 reliable right 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 uh mercer and spurber's book you make my reason read uh the the dialogical roots of deduction by dilleth nevez 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 miscontrols 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 see it you feel so wise right but when it's you how good are you 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 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 then 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 okay so then what's going on politics why do people hate it so much when you challenge their beliefs 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 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 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 um you have a default mode network that's making you want to mind wander and introduce variation and you have a task focus 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 right evolving like a reproductive cycle your 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 uh 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 biological 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 say more 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 i will defend that defend well what i mean by that is that you you are you 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 are 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've talked about rationality and 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 okay so in this moment you're saying we no longer want our ideas challenged because we don't want our ideas challenged we're not getting smarter as a group and we now have a failed state for democracy itself yes 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 verbeke and we're back how do you think this is going to play out the way it's playing out i mean the way it's playing out is we're seeing we're seeing we're seeing increasing polarization this is not just the united states it's 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 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 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 if the self-correcting mechanism is broken is just a runaway flywheel it 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 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 yeah i don't see a way to break the flywheel that that is uh 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 um i know thucidity's 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 yeah that's what this feels like right now like the um 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 trust yourself you have to want like here's my thing here here i just want to reinforce that okay 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 uh to me it comes down to don't trust thyself like you want to know thyself for sure so you want to be highly skeptical that you will lead everyone to the right place 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 australian uh you know 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 we 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 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-exceed we have to do a tremendous amount of work not just individually but collectively and not just now but in a sense traditionally like you've been doing with me asking about relevant historical precedents we have to do this more deeply 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 uh we for instance so this the idea of the um 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 economies in this place uh this is how people think of our product this is how people think of our um the area of the market that we're in all 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 that 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 you know your goal now what are the dots we're going to connect them in a narrative and 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 follow 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's wrong in my narrative i just don't know what it is yet yeah and so it is this super weird thing like all right everybody we're marching on that hill we're gonna go get those guys and this is gonna be the outcome and then you gotta step aside 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 you And it's like, okay, they 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. 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 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. 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 handle the time 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 to the demagogic figure who gives you just a very clear answer. You slide them behind them, they promise everything's going to feel good again and now you're where we are. 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 civilization to give up momentum to build cathedrals where one generation would start and three generations later would see it to give an example, right?
Or to go to other places like the Buddhists who left India and went to China or something like that. So you're trying to get that balance and they're trying to get a balance between there's a bias attached to that. But 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, we have to always use this word bias. 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, that's very well said. 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 common explosive search.
And what heuristics do is 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. But they had people behind the scenes. They had people like Thomas Aquinas who have Siddhartha. They have the mystics.
So they have the priests. I'm speaking very broadly. I'm asking for some charity here. You have the priests who are basically pushing the narrative.
And I mean this in a sense of giving up momentum. But behind it, you have the mystics who are constantly stepping back and wondering about the whole picture. And you're constantly toggling between the priest and the mystics within the religious tradition. And what you can do is they were able to manage that for extended periods of time and create a home entire colleges and 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 meeting 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, right? We don't just need somebody who's a leader. We need somebody who can do that, can give us a 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. Politypical. 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 little loss of cities. Much greater.
But what happened was there was an 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've got all these little these little mammalian kingdoms doing all these experimentation. 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 that went with 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 calculation and write your thoughts down and share your thoughts with your future self and share it with other people.
You get a massive empowerment of cognition and critical reflection and you get this whole new world view. Titanically different world view arises. The actual revolution. The whole two worlds mythology that has become the legacy grammar for us even though that is not collapsing.
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 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. We're tonos like the tonos of a bow the tonos of a liar. It has the tonos between that narrative momentum and that mystical reflection and that rational criticism gets that right tonos. We've done it before.
We can do it again. And it's absolutely fascinating. John, this has been incredible. Where can people follow along with you?
Well, I would like it if people bought my book Awakening from the Mean 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 that.
I felt great to the very mistake that I just critiqued a few minutes ago. I presented the series Awakening from the Mean Crisis. It's very popular. I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't.
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 more, there's much more rigor in the citations, the references, more examples, more diagram. Madeline Abramian 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.
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.
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