https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Lzug-jtx1PA
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Revaki. I’m very happy to be here with Terry Dentry and Nate Kinch. And I’m going to turn things over to Terry. She’s going to tell us what we’re going to be doing. And this is going to be an extension of the ongoing work that Terry and I have been doing. Some of you have seen two of the videos that Terry and I have been in together. And so welcome, Terry and Nate. So yeah, great, John, to be talking with you again. And this is going to be a really interesting discussion for us because with us today we’ve got Nate, who is going to be talking to us about his experience, personal experience of going through a chronic pain journey and also his background in working with the types of things we’ve been talking about, the dialogical reasoning. This, of course, all belongs to the work we’re doing together in seeing more and how we can actually help people understand the journey they’re on through their chronic pain journeys with understanding the way that they’re actually seeing the world themselves through their own relevance of the way they’re seeing the world. So part of that journey is very personal to people to actually look at how they are seeing it themselves. And what we want to help them see is that how others are going through it and actually learning through the way that others have also been through this journey, too. So I’m going to quickly now introduce Nate, who’s become a very good friend of mine. We met together through Voicecraft, which, yes, we know Tim Adolin is one of our joined friends, and Nate and Tim are also good friends. And Nate and I joined Voicecraft maybe 12 months ago, 18 months ago we met for the first time. And Nate was telling me, apart from his other work, which we’re also going to talk about today, Nate was also telling me about his journey with chronic pain. And I thought it was a really great opportunity for us to talk about it together today. But also, as he tells us his journey, his story, that we can start to think about it and talk to him about it in a way that it makes sense through developments realisation. So, Nate, I’d like to introduce yourself. Yeah, very happy to. Thanks, Terry. And what a privilege it is to be here. Probably having some fanboy moments right now, but I’ll try and contain those as best I can. Yeah, so my work is sort of defined as socio-technology ethics. I’m looking at the relationship between our values, different aspects of the civilisation or stack, the ways in which we approach designing different types of technologies, lots of different applied areas from machine learning and sort of broadly what we’re calling AI through to synthetic biology, through to different medical and clinical content, etc. So, worked across a wide array of injuries. Injuries, ha, Freudian slip, there we go. That’s a nice one to start the day, isn’t it? Industries, excuse me. And yeah, the core focus of my work over the last probably 12 or 13 years has been about what can we do to better design organisations, technologies and systems that are worthy of trust, that consistently exhibit benevolence, integrity and competence? And how can we engage very deliberately in that process in something like the hope that those trustworthy institutions, organisations, technologies and systems will make our lives and our relation to the world more broadly fundamentally better? So, yeah, that’s kind of like the TLDR summary of that. And as Terry alluded to, I’ve had some personal challenges throughout life that perhaps we can touch on today. Well, I’d like to zero in on the first thing you said first, if we may, because of course, you probably know I’m very interested in everything you just said. I’m very interested about institutions, collective intelligence, distributed cognition, and that overlaps with the work I do with Terry around logical reasoning and interprofessional practice. What… I mean, I don’t want you to give the elevator pitch, voices will for vacuums when you give something longer, maybe the foyer pitch, I don’t know what to call it, but it’d be something like, what are there some… Like, you know, you’ve got 12 to 13 years in on this. What are some of the lessons or things that you would… you think are central to understanding the criteria by which we can place our trust in an organisation and an institution? Yeah, look, it’s a brilliant question, John. I think one of the big challenges we have here is that a lot of organisational design work gets done kind of like outside of what I think is its necessary systems context. So let’s say we look at something like the story of separation that seemed to really solidify in terms of its technical, operational, political, economic, scientific instantiation throughout, you know, what we refer to as the Western Enlightenment. This idea that we are separate from one another, we are separate from nature, you know, nature is effectively a resource to be exploited for human benefit. And something like the purpose of life itself, human life, excuse me, is to be wealthy and powerful. And the modern corporation, the Dutch and British trading companies that sort of coincided with this were like an incredible instantiation of something like those metaphysics or that value system. And it’s quite a narrow value system. And so when we look at, say, a corporation today, and I don’t just work with corporations, I’ve done quite a lot of work with public institutions, but I think they’re harder to separate than many folks might realise, particularly if you look through the lens of something like a neoliberal paradigm or however you want to frame it. So a corporation’s fundamental purpose, its teleology, is to maximise shareholder value. And the people who have a sort of like fiduciary responsibility, the board of directors, they have to operate in alignment with that very narrow value or goal orientation. And what that means is almost everything that they’re doing, the way in which they construct their organisation, the way in which they incentivise and disincentivise, the way that they think about relating to one another, describing roles, responsibilities, workflows, practices, etc. They wouldn’t use the word are like the are word rituals, but that’s a different sort of thing. It’s very much about that. And so they attempt to internalise all of the benefits and externalise all of the costs, ecological, societal, etc. And that works beautifully. We’ve gotten so good at that. But what it comes with is like really significant downsides for pretty much everyone else that isn’t a primary beneficiary for that internalisation of benefits. And so when we think of benevolence, something like a public interest and planetary interest goal orientation, it’s near impossible for a corporation, the way that a corporation is presently legally instantiated, to have that type of benevolent goal orientation. And so in the sort of trust literature, we refer to these things as trust antecedents, formally, but they’re sort of like qualities of trustworthiness. So what are the indicators that we’re looking for that give us good reason to believe in another party’s trustworthiness? And so we are kind of looking for that positive goal orientation that is aligned to what we think is kind of normative or good. And that’s almost like a non-starter for most corporations. When we look at integrity, it’s another really tricky one, John, because we don’t have like massive bodies of empirical literature on this, but we have some pretty interesting stuff. And there was a study published by Donald Sull and colleagues at MIT in 2020 that tried to look at the relationship between a corporation’s stated values and the way that that translates into corporate culture and behaviour. And their conclusion was effectively that there isn’t even a statistical correlation. So the corporation gets in some fancy consulting firm, the fancy consulting firm works with the board, they linguistically describe some sort of explicit values. They don’t do a lot of work on surfacing the implicit, but they describe these explicit values. There’s often five to seven of them. They get published on the website. The CEO does a great job of orating, talking about them at conferences, etc. But they’re not operationalised. They don’t become part of the organisation’s DNA. So we actually see a lack of integrity within most organisational and institutional contexts. And then when it comes to competence, I actually think that organisations, in many cases, are reasonably competent. So of the three primary qualities of trustworthiness, they’re quite good at doing what they say they’re going to do. But what they say they’re going to do is maximise shareholder value. And so many of them are quite good at that. When you think about some of the other claims that they make, Apple’s campaign, we work for Mother Earth, and it’s kind of like, well, open up your life cycle assessments, folks. Let’s actually see how significant of an impact you’re having on planetary boundaries. They’re not quite willing to open the kimono. So if we looked at other contributions that they’re describing, wanting to make, I think that any assessment of competence would go way down. And then just really briefly, when we are, trust is this really weird thing. It’s something like a biopsychosocial phenomena. We can’t really get at it. We’re sort of approximating it. There seems to be stuff that’s sort of like going on almost like pre-rationally. I’m not quite sure how to describe it, but there’s very interesting neuroscience research that demonstrates, for instance, that when our brain assesses the trustworthiness of someone’s face prior to us having the capacity to consciously perceive it, and really interesting experimental like sort of like design, fMRI stuff that shows that. So there’s stuff that goes on there. There’s kind of like an embodied intelligence, but then there’s the process that we actually execute where we’re like, hey, who are these folks? What are they trying to do? So there’s a bunch of stuff going on. I don’t think we have a really firm grasp on what trust is yet. We often oversimplify it. I think we reduce it in many cases unhelpfully, which is a broader pattern. So anyway, those are some of the big things. And then when I go and work with an organization, the first thing I ask is, hey, let’s take a look in the mirror, like that hard confronting look that’s like, do we like what we see? Are we actually living like an embodied expression of our explicit and implicit values? And if not, are we willing to courageously face into that and attempt to transform our organization so we can live in alignment to those values? And that process is rarely as successful as I would like. Well, that was quite articulate and at times eloquent. So thank you for that. There’s a couple of things I want to say that were sort of landed for me, were triggered in the good sense of the word triggered by what you said. Let’s say sparked in me. Let’s change the metaphor. All right. Nice. Yeah. So one of the things was this notion of separation. And I’ve of course, I’ve been arguing about a reflection on that. I did a big chunk of that and the work I do on a work I did on Awakening for the Meaning Crisis and this profound sense of separation that’s written very, very deeply into and I think you use the word are metaphysics. And it strikes me that it’s interesting how that is showing up in a way of if I understand your argument correctly, it’s sort of hamstringing corporations from really being entities that are acting towards civilizational or even world level values or something like that. If I get that argument correct, which I think that’s a very powerful argument. This is the line with an argument I’ve made about that disconnectedness, you know, grounding in normalism and Cartesianism sets up adversarial processing and all kinds of other things. And like you said, that point, the Heidegger’s point, it sets up the world as a reserve, right, as resources, standing reserve. So that argument, I think, is very, very, very powerful. The one about integrity, I’ve done a lot of work with a good friend of mine, Tim Bishop, and he actually wrestles with this on a regular basis, that corporations have their vision statements or their mission statements. And this is, I didn’t realize you had it that down and that accurately, but I find it totally convincing that there’s zero correlation between their statements and what you might call the culture, the shared system of meaning among the people who are actually working in that corporation or that business. And he goes in and he tries to get people to really explicate that often implicit culture, find out how it’s not healthy, and see if what needs to be done so that people are actually willing to go through a process of enculturation. And people won’t buy into a culture unless they feel that it’s going to give them some meaning in life in return. So he does a lot of work around that. I thought what you’re talking about and what he does is very convergent. And then I get the third thing you say that, of course, they’re going to be sort of competent at what they claim to be doing because they wouldn’t stay in business if they weren’t. Given the difficulties of the first problem, that it’s sort of woven into the fundamental grammar of Western civilization that we can’t get these corporations out of that way of thinking. And what a lot of people carry that around. And given also this pervasive disjunct between what people are stating in their propositions and then what they’re actually enacting and inculturating with each other. I guess I want to ask a question around that, which is, is there… Sorry, I don’t want to… We just met, so please take this charitably. It sounds to me like you’ve got an almost impossible job, is what I want to say. Like you want to go in and you want to make some difference. And it sounds like by your own arguments, you’re kind… I’ll speak somewhat ironically, you’re kind of doomed to fail, is what it sounds like. And I’m wondering about that. And then the other thing is, I think there is a burgeoning and important literature around trust in philosophy, especially around the new revival in the study of Hegel, Brandeum’s huge book, The Spirit of Trust, and Hegel’s deep work on trust as the reciprocal recognition by which we establish a shared normativity that we generate together, what we bind ourselves together in, and that’s what generates trust. And I think thinking of trust primarily as a psychological trait is to fundamentally misunderstand it. And I want to put it to you that that’s also perhaps part of the problematic you’re facing, is that people think of trust and love as sort of psychological states. And I think that is to misunderstand them in a profound way. So two questions. Why is your work not impossible? And it’s that other problem I just brought up, also an additional problem that people are in some sense over-psychologic, like, psychologizing some of these important concepts in a way that might be misleading. Yeah, look, they’re brilliant. I think they’re great observations and brilliant questions, John. I might try and pick up on the second one first, although the second one is certainly a rabbit hole. And so we’ll keep it as light as I can just in respect of our time and everyone that ends up tuning in. So, like, I absolutely agree with you. And I think we almost pathologize to some extent trust is kind of like a problem to be solved rather than something to sort of exist in relation to. But, yeah, I think we do overly psychologize it, but also a lot of the trust literature, say in the 70s, 80s, etc., was about game theory and stuff like that. And so we were looking at kind of like prisoner’s dilemma, iterated exchanges, these different types of things. And so we developed a particular sort of construction of trust that in that context sort of does make sense. Because you’re trying to go, OK, in some sort of hypothetical dynamic in which an agent is attempting to maximize utility, how does said agent relate to other agents and how does that get done reasonably intelligently, you know, good judgment, etc., etc., such that the agent maximizes its benefit and often in order to do that in some type of cooperative-ish dynamic, it means that they have to play nice-ish. And look, there’s so many challenges with that. It’s crazy. I’m not sure we can adjust to such a process here today. But, yeah, look, I’m really with you. And I think there are different lenses through which we might look at this. One is, and I’ll describe very briefly, and maybe this is where actually the two questions interdepend in some way, because the work that I do within an organization, John, I sort of have this organizational design approach. And an organization will come to me with, say, this, oh, we have a problem with trust or reputation, say. And actually what they are talking about is social license to operate. And it’s important because I know when I listen to the way that you engage in discourse, dialogue, dialogos, etc., with friends, colleagues, contemporaries, there is a specificity to your use of language that I very much appreciate. And I think you and many others are very conscious of equivocation. We’re not particularly conscious of equivocation when it comes to trust. Like, we use the word in so many ways, and it’s so confusing. And so the definition that you described before, I think, is very much aligned to a working definition I have, which is basically that trust is the willingness to be relationally vulnerable based on positive expectations. And that maps very nicely to what you’re describing. So the organization, the problem that they think they have is people don’t trust them or their reputation is not good enough. And really what they’re talking about is social license to operate. They care about social license to operate because they want the market broadly to accept what they’re doing so they can continue doing it. Now, what they then do as a kind of systematic error is go straight to that. So they go outside the organization and go, we’ve got to change that. But that’s sort of like a variable outcome. It’s something that they can influence at best. But they sort of they apply the command control paradigm to like, yeah, we can change that. And I go, but what if we actually step back and we start with something like ethics, which I would describe as sort of like the process of deliberating on our first order moral beliefs in an attempt to align our actions to that which we believe to be good and right, which might be framed through something like our purpose, values and principles within an organizational setting. And I sort of describe ethics as a cognitive process. And I think this is how this sort of came to be because I shared some of that work with Terry and I was like, well, some of the things that John is describing, I think is a close. I won’t say perfect, but the best articulation I found for what doing ethics actually is and sort of like a 4A6D type thing. And I have this discussion, I’ll frame it politely as a discussion with professional philosophers all the time where they say there’s no place for emotion in ethics. And it’s really interesting. What do you mean by that? Ethics is a rational process. What’s rationality? What’s our capacity for reason and logic? What gives rise to our capacity for reason and logic or our cognitive abilities? Oh, what’s cognition? Oh, it’s you know, we can potentially describe cognition in these ways. And I go, haha, gotcha. You know, so cognition is this kind of like embodied process. And you know, and then I sort of really like the additional two E’s, emotion and accepted. And I sort of describe that to them and that’s really interesting. So I think ethics is this cognitive process that really that that’s in some, I don’t know, end dimensional hyperspace touches these six E’s really in lots of beautiful ways. So I take the organization back to let’s start there. And then by getting better at the process of doing ethics, we can we can more concretely animate those qualities of trustworthiness, benevolence, integrity and competence. We can then give evidence of those qualities of trustworthiness, benevolence, integrity and competence to the market, which enhances the belief in the organization’s trustworthiness, which positively affects reputation. And both trust and reputation together are effectively the glue for social license to operate, which affords the organization the privilege of doing the things that it wants to do. And then I try and do that in a reasonably sort of systems literate way, but but also in a way that seems to respect the sociological, sociopolitical, sociocultural changes that are occurring. Because when we assess what it means to be a trustworthy organization today in 2024, it’s it’s quite different to an assessment that we would have made in the late 90s in terms of the expectations we have for how the organization treats people, its supply chain, its ecological contributions, et cetera. And so like so the stuff that you’re describing about trust, I think it fits really nicely into the specific organizational design approach that I have. And then let’s just talk very quickly about that. I’m pushing the boulder up the hill and it’s sort of never-ending. I think there are different ways that we can look at this. One is through kind of like a lens of incremental progress and the compound effect that that can have over time. And I think that is a worthy pursuit. But in sort of like futures thinking or the futures profession, we have something called the Three Horizons Framework. And what that describes, John, is an approach to thinking about how we increase the probability of preferable futures. And it works in conjunction with other tools that professional futures practitioners use. And what it sort of describes, and it’s hard because I don’t have the visual here, but there’s sort of like some some curves that it describes. So it describes a current state and then the trajectory that we have to go through to biodegrade the harmful components of the current state. And for instance, we have to biodegrade the story of separation as one example. And the body of work that we have to do, which is sort of like so that’s H1, what we need to biodegrade, like the BAU that’s unhelpful, the business as usual that’s unhelpful. That exists in relation to some vision that we have for the future, which we call H3, which is this preferable future. Like what might the world look like where everyone’s fundamental needs are met? So we have all eight billion of us or more have what we need to live a healthy and dignified life within the constraints of a finite biosphere. So what might that world look like? And then we have H2, which describes what are the things that we can do in service of that preferable future? And every single step we undertake, every action that we engage in, we’re trying to increase the likelihood that we’re moving in that direction. And so what I see is I use that tooling or that framework quite a lot. And so I look at it as, all right, well, these organizations are not like ultimate entities that are unchanging. Like we have designed these things and the enabling constraints are based on this. If we change the initial conditions, change the enabling constraints, we can design different types of organizing structures at the macro, the meso and the micro sort of level. In terms of, I don’t know, civilizational architecture in service of this preferable future state where everyone has what they need to live a healthy and dignified life within the constraints of the biosphere. And part of that process means actively biodegrading the harmful stuff. So now I have to be honestly, I have to be very cautious about the way that I approach that, because if I go into an organization and say, hey, we’re going to biodegrade you, it probably isn’t particularly well received. But what I’m really saying is very caringly, very lovingly, like if we want to have a future together, if we want to live this beautiful paradox that we call life, that we’re still trying to understand and live in relation to and be an expression of, there’s some stuff that has to change. And, you know, let’s engage in that process together. Let’s literally take the work hat off and let’s interact with each other as human beings that have hopes and fears and desires and pains and potentials for gain. And so I don’t think it’s a hopeless task. I think it’s a very challenging task. But because we have designed these structures that have had said consequences, we can redesign them or re-architect them or even think reason from first principles and build new stuff from the ground up. I hope that I hope I’ve done justice to the quality of the questions that you asked there. They were great. A couple things that were sparked to me was the way you were describing the transformation of the organization sounds very similar to what Aristotle proposed for the cultivation of character in an individual. And that seems that what you’re doing is trying to get these organizations to cultivate a character for their collective agency and their collective intelligence. And I think that’s a very powerful argument. I think that’s, I haven’t heard that made before, but I think that lands very, very well. And then the other one, I mean, you’re talking about, yeah, that this is sort of a position I take too about what we’re ultimately talking about is, yeah, there’s an orientation change. There’s a metanoia, and it’s not the same as changing the world, but it makes it, it changes the probability of the world being changed. And, and I think that is also a powerful argument to be made. And I like the way you were talking about the biodegrade. I talk about similar things with like breaking frame and making frame. And you see that like in the insight process for individuals. And so I say, I sometimes think that what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to cultivate characters for these institutions and organize cultivate character for these institutions and organizations, and then get get them oriented. So something analogous to an insight will occur for them. There’ll be a frame breaking that makes a new frame making possible so that they can reconnect to the world in a way that doesn’t seem possible to them right now. And so does that land when I give that back to you? Those two things I just said. So like, yeah, I’m, I’m very alive right now on the inside because I’m like, yeah, like bring back virtue ethics, which it’s really interesting because when that stack that organizational design approach that I was describing, John, there is a heavy link. So I have a very pluralistic approach to moral theory, drawing on even Confucian ethics and Bantu ethics, ethical or moral frameworks from different First Nations peoples. But yeah, this number of my colleagues, we often go back like this cultivation of character. And it’s interesting because we’ve described something like, you know, think of Nagarjuna’s like the fundamental wisdom of the Middle Way and Aristotle almost describing something like the wise operating space between extremes as something like virtue. There are wisdom traditions, beautiful wisdom traditions that certainly don’t have all the answers because I’m not sure that it’s the pursuit, but the the integrist pursuit that they have engaged in has led to something that has real complementarity. So, yeah, like it does. I, I, I’m very excited about the way that that’s coming back to me. Yeah. And I think that plugs into sort of fundamental features of cognition around predictive processing, relevance realization, opponent processing and optimal gripping. I think there’s deep relationship between optimal gripping and the golden mean and, and these kinds of things. And so I think there’s a possibility to ground that virtue ethics for collective intelligence in a cognitive science of collective intelligence as well. And I think that’s a very exciting possibility. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Your work is deeply impressive and you articulate it in an extremely eloquent manner. And I could see why my work could potentially be helpful or relevant to yours. And I appreciate that. How big of you refer to your colleagues. How big of a network of people is that that we’re talking about? Well, I used to run pre COVID I used to run a services firm that did this. And we, we, we had to shut down during the pandemic. The way that corporations work is no thank you, but it’s no it’s totally okay. Because there isn’t really a line item in a procurement function, the way that corporations procure services and technologies and it’s very At least plenty to the imagination. Let’s put it that way. But because there isn’t a line item for something like ethics, like you could fit it into compliance and stuff, but we not a fan of doing that for many different reasons. I think it’s the wrong sort of stuff that the wrong seed the wrong and initial condition. So we had to tap into innovation budgets or discretionary spend that goes up and down. And then when the pandemic started, it was like those budgets and their magic because money is magic and they disappear. So I’m I’m I’m a solo act at the moment, but always doing my work in relation to sort of like an ecology of practitioners around the world. Sometimes that’s through formal collaborations. And other times, it’s just engaging in the spirit of something like a deal logos and just just, you know, Trying to come into a deeper relation with something truthful together. So, yeah, it really depends. But I feel very privileged to have amazing like Terry or Tim or Adrian or some of our other friends from the voice craft network or, you know, so it’s hard to I wish I could give a more concrete answer, but it’s really it’s almost like a That’s fine. Yeah, I think I think that the question actually requires that kind of answer. You gave me like 17 or 25. I’d be really worried about that kind of answer. Yeah. Oh, wow. We’re getting we’re getting some green flags. Now they’re all let’s let’s shut this call down. So, I mean, I, I want to pivot a little bit because I want to bring Terry more into the conversation. So one half of the reason why we’re here is I wanted to talk about that I want to thank Terry for making that available because there is the resonance between your work and my work, and I hope I hope we could talk a little bit more about it again in the future because I think that’s really important. And it would be if great if you and I and Tim Bishop talked at one point too because I think the stuff is also really, really, really convergent. So this is really, really cool. Now, of course, you know that the dialogical stuff and the distributed cognition and all of this also leads us into the work I’m doing with with Terry and and Terry said you’d also be, you know, a really good guest to talk about this because of a more personal journey you’ve been on with with dealing with chronic pain. And, and first of all, I want to thank you for doing this. I mean, you’re exposing yourself and giving your definition of trust. I appreciate the trust you’re placing in both Terry and I and in my audience and I do believe they will respond appropriately to you. But I think I should shut up for a bit and let Terry take the mic for a bit and maybe draw you out on that question and in that direction a little bit will pivot and this is the connection and and then I’ll keep it in here and there. All right, thanks, John. And, and of course I’ve just been enjoying listening to the pair of you because I knew that you would have great connection. So I’ve really been looking forward to introducing the pair of you. What I wanted to adjust before we pivot over to tonight’s personal journey. What I want to really bring us back to the work that we’re doing in seeing more is that just reminds us that health care is an industry. What we are doing here is actually talking about the way that the industry needs to change and empowering the consumer. We are the consumer of the health care industry. And we are the ones that are blindly really being led into what is our current model of health care. And this is what needs to change. We need to become more empowered. So the person on the street needs to have more control and understanding of the language being used in the industry of health care so that we can actually be more involved in that industry when it comes to our own personal health. And that’s really where I’ve been really interested in talking with Nate about this because in order for us to have more power in our own health, we need to understand how to have that power in the industry. How to actually work with the practitioners who are, we still need practitioners. There’s no way that we’re ever going to have a personal health journey where we don’t need to reach out for professionals to actually help us on that journey. That’s part of what we need to do. And that’s a wonderful way that we have organised our knowledge into professional practices. But we need to be able to go back to having dialogical reasoning about why we are interacting with those practitioners. And in order to do that, we need to empower the person on the street to be able to do it. And that changes the nature of the corporation, as Nate was saying. The trustworthiness of that organisation is put on show. How do we, if we are the ones who are empowered and we actually learn more of the language, you know, actually learn more about the understanding of how we are interacting with that health care organisation, we are then interrogating their trust. The way that we trust them and the way that they trust each other. And that sort of, you know, that whole cycle has to be exposed before it can change. And I wonder, Nate, how you feel about that? Before Nate speaks, I just want to say that was beautiful, Terry. Wow, that was just a great, great connection there you made. Seeing more, by the way, is the name of the book that Terry and I are working on. Terry’s first author. I’m co-authoring it with her. But the whole project. But what you just did there, Terry, that was really, really wonderful. Thank you for that. That was an excellent, excellent bridging framing. Yeah, echoing what John said, Terry. Look, I couldn’t agree more. Maybe let’s try and make this quite real for people. So you walk into your general practitioner, what we call a GP here in Australia, your family medical class, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your family doctor, your Aer Warsaw Senate, most times I’ve been interested in it. And a lot of people, probably are enough to think, and like in fact, they’re completely Coke rather than might be just wanting to have the recovery of their disease and that’s totally up to anyone, like I fell over, I broke my leg. There’s a simple-ish causality to that, but something that feels more deeply rooted, more systemic, that is more enduring, and that is scary because we don’t understand it. We have some courage, we go into this environment, we open ourselves we are willing to be vulnerable to the actions of the doctor based on positive expectations about their capacity to help support us and to treat us as a human being that’s sort of irreducibly valuable. These are hopes, not necessarily realities. And we express something, and maybe we even express something like a hypothesis. Here’s what I think might be happening, and we get shut down. That is an overwhelmingly common occurrence. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about this has experienced that. There’s so many different reasons for this. You go into a general practice, your family clinic, depending on where you are in the world, for many of us that means you’ve got a 15-minute slot if that. They’re always running late. Many of these folks have very little time to upskill. The seven plus years that they’ve spent in medical school is grounded in the biomedical model. There’s not a lot of biopsychosocial development that occurs throughout that process. And actually we look at medical training itself and the psychosocial issues that arise from that, even physical dependencies. There’s many different issues. But I think that’s something that many of us can feel into because we’ve been there. And it’s often more extreme if you’re with a specialist. I have to get a full shoulder replacement at some point. And although through the process of trying to understand what the consequences were of a number of different injuries and stuff like that with this particular one, there are many. How long do we have? But I felt lesser than the surgeon all the time. And I feel like I have a capacity for an everyday person. I’m not medically trained. So all those really important caveats. I feel like I have a reasonable capacity to make sense of things, to sit with challenging information, to interpret scientific studies. But every interaction we had, there was a very clear power and balance. And I didn’t feel like I was treated as a participant in the process of my healing. And I think that plays out in many different ways for many different people. I think as far as we can tell, empirically, much worse for women in many parts of the world. I think it can be worse for children. I think it can be worse for ethnic minorities. I think it can be incredibly challenging. Let’s say if you’re in a predominantly English speaking country and you don’t speak English. So there are many different disenfranchised groups. And therefore, the work that the two of you are doing together and the work that I know Terry has been doing for many years and continues to do and the vision that you have, Terry, it’s so important because it’s almost like coming back into something like right relation with our embodiment and all of the challenges that that comes with and finding ways to maybe reconnect with something deeper and integrate that into the incredible advancements that we’ve seen that have come out of the biomedical paradigm. Because some people get very woo with this and they move away from all of something like that, the way that the biomedical model has been instantiated. And it’s like, no, no, no, don’t do that. Remember that the wise operating space between extremes, we need to integrate. And so I think that yes, this is about consumers, patients or citizens. I struggle with the framing of consumers for many different reasons. And I prefer the framing of citizens and citizening. And we both know John Alexander, Terry and all of the great work that he does in that area, so many others. But just as importantly, I think we have to see that on the other side of the table. And perhaps where we get to over the coming minutes is how the work that the two of you are doing together maps to the personal experience I had with with certain chronic issues and the healing experience, which has sort of acute spikes, but is an ongoing process, hopefully until my last breath. Yeah, so I think everything you said, obviously, definitely resonates with me as well. One of the additional problems I’ve seen with people, obviously interacting with our current health structure is the unknown components of different types of practitioners. So we have certain practitioners like a general practitioner and GP, we used to be the family doctor who would come to your home and you kind of have that faith that that person probably knows a little bit about everything and can probably be your first open daughter, everything. But when we start talking about working with specialists, which we really need to in the current frame of the problems that we have in the world right now with the health of our patients, with chronic pain, but with emotional pain. And I think that you’re going to talk to us a little bit about the current problem that we’ve got with long COVID, which is a combination of these things coming together. And the numbers that we have of people who are going through this particular journey at the moment, we don’t really have the right set up for people to actually know who to talk to and have the trust in those people to actually talk to the people they need to talk to. So I know a lot of people who won’t talk to a counselor, because they’re not really sure how that counselor is going to talk to them. Like you first said, they’re going to dismiss your current understanding of what you think is wrong with you and start to sort of unpack a whole bunch of other stuff instead, which they kind of don’t understand the journey that that person might be taking them on to get to maybe what was going to be a similar outcome, but they need their own framework of journey they need to go on. We don’t really have that doorway to actually talk to people who are going to give us some help. They’re there to help. I have never met anybody in the health industry who’s not there to help people. That’s what they’re there to do. They are wonderful people and they’re there and they’ve studied really hard and they have wonderful knowledge about how to help people, but we don’t know how to talk to them. So this kind of breakdown in conversation happens. We might know how to talk to the one that we are used to, but we don’t know how to talk to the specialist we need to talk to about something that we’ve now got that’s different. And that’s really where, for me, that will say the trust component, but we also need to change the way we’re doing it. We can’t just say to people, trust us and just have that discussion. That’s not, we can’t just say blindly just believe we know what we’re talking about and you just come and talk to us and we will listen to you in our way and therefore give you recommendations in our way and you’ll be fine with that. We need to obviously go back to empowering people to be able to have these conversations, but we need to start to open that door. And I wondered, Nate, if you had some observations in how you actually start to talk to people about doing things that they’re not currently comfortable with and how that about their own self. And maybe we talk about it through your journey. Maybe if you start us on that journey, because I know I really want to hear about it too. Maybe you start us down the journey where you started. Maybe if we walk down that journey and we can talk about the doors you went through and where those kind of stumbled. And you, knowing everything that you know, still stumbled through those doors. So maybe if you can start us on that component. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely brilliant. One thing I’ll just say really, really quickly. I think there are sort of like ontological and epistemological and then to some extent axiological considerations, implications here. So as an example, the shoulder stuff, when I was going through a process to assess whether or not the rehabilitation that we were trying to do was helpful. The clinician said to me at the time, I don’t quote verbatim, but I think this is the sentiment of it. Yeah, we can’t rely on that because that’s subjective. Talking about how I felt the shoulder was feeling, performing, et cetera, et cetera. What we need is this objective data. When we think about things like objectivity, subjectivity, et cetera, I think in medical science, we have quite a simplified view of that. Philosophers talk about this much more richly and philosophers of science. But what I think that does is there’s a value judgment there, like objective better than subjective. Objective can be relied upon, subjective can’t be relied upon. I don’t think it’s binary. I’m not saying there’s not a weighting criteria here, and there’s plenty that you could get into there. But often when we deal with clinicians, I think they operate from a belief that objective good, subjective bad. So from the get-go, what comes out of our mouth is close to meaningless. Now, I know that’s a blanket generalization and it might be unfair to many different clinicians. I want to be careful about that. But I think as a pattern, there is something to that. Okay, so let’s get into it. I became acutely ill with SARS-CoV-2 for the first time in very early 2022. Not to divide rooms or anything like that, but I’d had multiple vaccinations up to that point and wasn’t particularly acutely sick. It was like a very light cold. But actually, no, no. I’ll go through this and then I’ll describe some of the causes and conditions, if you will. I continue working during the week just from home. I was advising our Commonwealth government at the time on a bunch of things and get better, start doing a little bit of domestic travel for work again, Canberra and things like that. And then I do my first proper exercise three weeks later. Not super hard, like I’m a former elite athlete and so spent time in high performance institutes. So I had a sense of how to progressively get back. And about 15 to 20 minutes afterwards, I was just like dead. And we call that post-exertional malaise. That’s the sort of medical description of what was going on. And immediately I start getting worried. Oh my God, I’ve given myself long COVID. And I was just, for context, I was really concerned about getting long COVID the whole time. I was not married anymore, but married at the time, small child, the only one working, all this different type of stuff. The business had shut down. We’d had to sell our house, we’d had some financial difficulties, things like this. And I’m a bit worried. And I’m paying a huge amount of attention throughout the pandemic. What is this thing? What’s going on? What are its origins? Oh, what is this post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 thing that we call long COVID? What is this? Holy crap, that sounds terrible. God, I hope I don’t get that. I was really like my salience landscape was very COVID oriented, unhealthily so. Anyway, so I keep getting worse. And after about three months, I’m seeing a GP, oh no, it’s normal to be tired after COVID, blah, blah, blah. I ended up having heart palpitations and brain fog and a number of different symptoms. I couldn’t walk up. I went from being an incredibly fit individual to not being able to walk upstairs. And then I started atrophying. Over that period of time, I lost nine or 10 kilos of muscle. I couldn’t really be an active parent. Everything became about this. And this is a common thing for people that have chronic issues. You almost become obsessed with the chronic issue. And in terms of like the neural patterning and stuff like that, like you’re reinforcing the thing. Anyways, I get into the Royal Melbourne long COVID program. And Royal Melbourne Hospital is a wonderful medical institution, lots of great applied research for many different issues or ailments that one might have. There aren’t that many better places in the world to go. So like all praise to the institution itself in so many ways and many of the clinicians. And I’m working with a series of clinicians. They have this clinic. Now the clinicians aren’t integrated, but there are many of them. And I’m working with a series of clinicians. There are many of them. And exercise physiology, neuropsychology, yada yada yada. I’m working with a bunch of very smart, very capable, very credentialed clinicians. And they’re not really doing anything other than attempting to manage my symptoms. So I start having discussions with them about, at the time I believe there were seven mechanistic causal hypotheses for what post acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 was. And again, I was paying very close attention to all of this and trying to understand it. And I was going to them with this data saying, hey, this, this, this, this, this, and this. And they’re like, they were quite honest. Like we don’t, we don’t know. We actually don’t have the time to try and understand this stuff. And I’m like, oh, that’s a bit concerning. And anyways, I keep taking them stuff every session I would spend with them. And I just wasn’t getting better. After maybe seven months or so, I read an article that Paul Garner had published as a blog in the BMJ. And Paul is a very credentialed medical scientist, professor of infectious disease at the University of Liverpool. And he published a blog for the BMJ about his sort of speculative hypothesis that for many people, like particularly those where there wasn’t any identifiable underlying pathology of which I was one, we did every test under the sun again and again and again, and every test said I was healthy. I’m fine. And I’m like, but I’m not. I can’t do anything. I can barely work. I can barely get up out of bed. I can’t walk up a flight of stairs without feeling like I’m going to die. Like, I’m not okay. And he suggested that it was something like a mind-body syndrome or a psychophysiological disorder or the result of neuroplasticity, like a learned thing. And it results from fear, you know, there’s increased propensity when there’s early childhood trauma, all this different type of stuff. And so it was a very biopsychosocial view. And at the time, my metaphysics was more narrow. I was very much into a mechanistic view of things. And I was like, I started speaking to Paul. I’m like, is this just some, excuse my French, but some quack shit, some woo woo shit? He’s like, no. And he started explaining it to me. And he sent me to all these different reference points. And I’m like, all right, I like, I’m willing to try anything. And I then connect with a group of biomedical researchers from Harvard Medical School, led by Mike De Nino. And Mike is also an ER doctor. So in addition to being an ER doctor, which is one of the most high pressure jobs, and you can like, the dude’s literally saving people’s lives on a daily basis. He’s also doing incredible biomedical research, and had actually been doing sort of like research into chronic pain for about a decade through a biopsychosocial view, looking at the John Sarno’s work, Howard Schubiner’s, these folks. Anyways, they conducted importantly, a non-randomized interventional study, looking at psychophysiological approaches. And they call it symptom relief, but I think they’re doing that to be quite careful, humble, etc. Read the study, I’m like, holy crap, these people are basically better. And they’d all had long COVID for like a year. And then I reach out to Mike and Patricia, one of the main clinicians that was leading this body of work. And they’re incredibly generous with their time. We do like, what an awesome opportunity. Oh, I’m struggling with this thing. I’m just going to reach out to some biomedical researchers from Harvard Medical School, and they’re going to help me. Like, how incredible is that? It’s just, I feel so grateful to this day for that opportunity. And anyway, so the study was done, but they had the protocol. And they’re like, Nate, all of these mechanistic hypotheses that you’re describing, we actually don’t see good evidence for this stuff. We think it’s a psychophysiological disorder. We think that there is effectively a neural pattern that emerges. And that that gives rise to these symptoms, you know, in a really simple, as a really sort of simple descriptor. And we believe that you can, you can create a new neural pattern, if you will, or a stronger neural pathway. And as a result of that, we believe that you can become symptom free. And I’m like, oh my god, what have I got to lose? I do it anyways. Maybe a week later, I’m like, almost better. Three weeks later, I have no symptoms whatsoever. And I’m like, oh, what is this? This is incredible. And John, during that time, and Terry knows this, I went through a divorce during the same period of time. I also fell over and broke my shoulder, tore the labrum. I’ve got no labor. That’s the reason why I have to pull. So it’s not just a posterior labor repair, they actually have to give me a new shoulder. You know, so like it was, it wasn’t an easy period of life. Now, I’m not saying I was living in war or abject poverty, like, you know, right. So, and I know you can’t compare suffering, and I’m not trying to, but I just want to be conscious of that. There is still a position of privilege from which I’m speaking. And I just want everyone to know that I do not take that for granted. But it was for me, it was a real, like it was an incredibly challenging year, and I’ve ended a 15 year relationship, all this different types of stuff. And anyways, that shattered my worldview. And even philosophically, that opened me up so much. Like I was, I’m not going to say I was sort of like fully in the Vienna Circle or anything like that, but I was more constrained than I am now. And it really opened me up. And part of that process was, you know, a particular sort of type of psychotherapy that took me back to my early childhood. And I was like, Oh, my God, I actually have a lot of trauma and like a lot of suppressed emotion. And this hyper rationality that I developed was actually a coping, like the organisms coping mechanism. It wasn’t a deliberate thing I did as a young child, but this intense difficulty that I was dealing with in my family and stuff like that. And oh my God, and so I ended up releasing a lot of this and learning not to fear the emotion, to actually fear it. It’s like there are many, like I would be, I don’t know, I don’t think I was ever toxically masculine or anything like that, the way that we might now think of that. But I would be more, I’d be like, yeah, I can take the physical pain, but really deep down, I was scared of emotional pain. Like I was so scared of emotional pain. And I hid away from it. And anyways, I learned to feel, I learned to feel and learning to feel and not be scared of that emotional pain was part of the healing. And overall, I just became less fearful. Like I was in a state for 30 years of chronic fear and I just didn’t know it. And eventually it got to me. And it was just the complex nature of the pandemic and my relation to it was what triggered a very extreme psychophysiological dis- and I do believe, and I want to be very conscious. I’m not saying that some of these mechanistic hypotheses are invalid, like in relation to post acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2. So I’m not making any of those claims. But for me, it seemingly was this psychophysiological disorder that Paul had described, that Mike and Patricia had described, that many others have described in say the chronic pain literature. And yeah, it was just profound. And then I ended up having this experience in May last year, John, a guided mescaline, three-day mescaline retreat, and with a guide who I’d known for a number of years and who I hold very near and dear. And it was just like, so if the psychotherapy got me to something like level three of my emotional capacity, like that took me straight to level 10. Like I was active for 20 hours, which is a pretty long trip. And it was just this energetic release that was like biblical in nature. I can’t do linguistic justice to what I experienced. And there was this whole healing journey. And look, I took all of this back to my clinicians. I took all of the studies. And when it comes to the chronic pain stuff, there are some wonderful clinicians doing work on neuroplastic pain and demonstrating people with a spine that has scoliosis at a 73 degree angle. And they engage in this what’s called pain reprocessing therapy. And they are pain-free within eight weeks. Like, oh, so it’s just been so incredible. And so I try and engage with clinicians with epistemic humility, of course, but also with care and with passion and with consideration for all those other than me that are suffering. In many cases, I think unnecessarily, we think there’s more than 200 million people around the world that have been clinically diagnosed with long COVID. I’m not going to get into my take necessarily on that diagnosis, because I think there are many issues with it. And there’s much that we have to learn. And I’m not sure if pathologizing it the way we have is helpful or harmful. But I think almost certainly, given my experience, given many others’ experiences, given the emerging empirical literature that we have on these psychophysiological approaches to post acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, I think there’s something to that, at least for many people. For people who are incredibly ill acutely, who have been in the ICU, and they’ve had genuine systemic inflammation, potentially even close to organ failure, OK, it totally makes sense that they might take months and months to recover. That makes sense. And the symptoms that they have might be very similar to the symptoms that I have. But we tested everything again and again and again and again. And I was never acutely particularly sick. So it’s a different clinical starting point. You know what I mean? So I just want to be careful about who’s this guy is, not a medical scientist. I’m not making any grand claims about it. So just get that out there. But anyway, so that’s the kind of journey. And it changed my connection to self. I realized I was in this recursive pattern of self-negativity my whole life, my whole athletic career, always talking myself down. That was my default. And now I’m in this space where it just doesn’t happen. I can’t remember the last time I defaulted to a negative response about myself or reflection about myself. And so it’s been psychedelic. It’s been transformative. It’s almost been transcendental. Do you know when you feel like you’ve got so much energy running through you, you’re a little bit dizzy? It’s almost like you’re over oxygenated. I feel a little bit like that now. I need a breather. I need a break. I don’t know. I hope that was expressively helpful. It’s beautiful. Very, very. Thank you. So I know Terry probably has some questions. I have some questions. We need another adjective than the one I’m going to use, but it’s the only one we have right now. There seems to be a spiritual dimension to this in which it’s not just a transformation of your health, even mental health. There seems to be a, you said there were things happening, at a philosophical level, a deeper level. I think you even said ontological at one point. What do you have to say to that? Because part of the way in which Terry and I are talking about this is the meaning crisis and the spiritual famine and the cultivation of wisdom and meaning famine, in addition with what we were talking about earlier about this separation of the subjective and objective and all that sort of stuff. The meaning crisis itself could be exacerbating these kinds of illnesses, if that’s even the right word. But just let me use it for now. It seems to me that that’s a very plausible proposal given the way you’ve described what happened to you. It seems that you’ve got this, and like I said, I don’t like the adjective, but I don’t have a better one. There seems to be a spiritual dimension to this that seems to be very absent from a lot of the discussion. And of course, it’s not something that the medical industry is particularly, that has the medical industry doesn’t have it on its radar, as far as I can see, in any significant way. What do you say about that? How does that land with you when I make that proposal to you? Take me back 18 months, and I would have been deeply uncomfortable with you framing it that way, John. But feels right now. Like, yeah, absolutely. It changed my metaphysics. Now, I’ve studied philosophy of mine for many years. And like, this first person experience opened me up to, again, I don’t want to make any ontological claims here, because I do deeply value epistemic humility. But the patterning that I was in prior to this didn’t afford, like really afford the landscape of possibilities that I’m now open to. Yeah, and I think that’s what I’m saying. Yeah, and I was very up here and incredibly disembodied. And I think that the being too up here and not really being living for E6E, something like that, I don’t quite know how to describe it, but I wasn’t living for E6E. I feel like I am now. And yes, there is a spiritual dimension to that that has truly enriched life. And again, it’s hard because I don’t want to get into sort of like a reification or reducing approximating to the extent that we lose some of the value of what really seems to be here. But yeah, what you say, like it resonates on a frequency that I’m now just like vibing with daily. And it’s very, very cool. And I wish for so many others to have whatever their version of that experience might be. Yeah, Terry has, thank you for that. And Terry has convinced me that one of the dimensions of the ways in which the meaning crisis is maybe showing up at large are these kinds of, you called those sort of psycho-physical, I would say they’re psycho-cultural, spiritual, physical, disease. And I’m going to put the hyphen in there to try and open things up. And I hadn’t considered that. I mean, I’d looked at mental health that had been part of my argument. And some self-criticism here, even though I’m supposed to be this critic of the Cartesian divide, I was still being influenced by it. And I was sort of partitioning off this whole area in which the meaning crisis could be showing up. But I’m not trying to reduce people’s suffering to just the meaning crisis. I’m just trying to make a connection here. And so self-criticism, like, wow, John, you’re saying this thing, and yet you’re not paying attention. And then Terry, bless her, she comes all the way to Canada and she lays out this argument and it’s like, oh, oh, right, I get it. I get it. And so, I mean, I think that this is very, very powerful stuff. So I’ll turn things over to you, Terry. Yeah, I do remember that moment, John, when I just gave John example after example after example of this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening for people. And he was like, oh, I just didn’t, I just didn’t know. And I think this is what’s driven me to write this book with you, John, is because people don’t know. They just don’t, they’re living with it every day. We see it around us every day. We hear of people who actually have chronic pain and go on a journey with chronic pain. And we believe things about what that person’s going through. That person believes things about what they’re going through. We don’t really make this connection that emotional pain and physical pain are connected to the meaning crisis. It’s really something that is fundamental and it is transforming. It is absolutely a transformational event. Every single person I’ve spoken to in my research and since my formal research and starting to really explore this has said to me, it gives them a change in their sense of self. It does change the way that they interact with the world when this opens up for them. Really fundamentally, people have said to me, I can make decisions for myself. I see the world differently. I interact with it differently. You’re saying you’re alive with the world. People change the way they’re interacting with the world when they make these connections. And it’s really, it really is a, just a, it seems like a very simple message and it feels like, yeah, of course that happens. But actually, people are still trapped in their narrative bias of believing that it’s something different, that pain is different, is external. It’s nothing to do with me and my own being and my own psyche and how I’m interacting with the world and the world is interacting with me. They actually think it has something to do with something else. And that’s how we’re starting, that’s how we have been treating it in the Western industry of health care. But what we need to start doing is starting to integrate it back into the whole self and helping people to see it and understand it. But just going back to this earlier track that we were talking about, about health care being an industry, if that happens, if we start to see and start to understand that we need to have a different type of conversation, is our healthcare industry ready for that different type of conversation? Because they too, as John, you and I have had this discussion before, they too are stuck in the same narrative bias. And so it’s almost, it’s an unlocking on both sides. And there is a journey that has to be gone through to actually try to open this up. We can do it on a one by one basis and that’s great. And I think that that is really fundamental for those individuals that go through it. Really excited to see how those individuals go through it. And we need to start there. We always need to start with the individual and have that lived experience and have that shared lived experience. And I think there’s definitely some collective intelligence that needs to be altered a little bit. We need to get this into the position where spiritually it’s starting to allow us to share this with others because it has been some kind of block there that we have our narrative biases caused us to put walls up and we need to open those doors. And all the words we normally use, seeing the light, opening the door, going through something, jumping over the wall, knocking things down, all those things apply to this same problem. And it’s a journey on both sides. Our health practitioners need to go on this journey. They need to understand it. When I do talk to practitioners one-on-one, they go, yeah, of course, I believe that too. But then when they are in their practice and they’re talking with a patient who’s in, you know, interceding them in service, that’s not, they operate in the way that they need to because that’s the way they need to work in that particular paradigm of their job. Their job is to provide health care in a certain way. Their job is not to bring their individual beliefs into that sector of health service. And this is where we need to start to really do a lot of work in this area on both sides. The person needs to understand things from a different way. And Nate, I heard you say biopsychosocial quite a few times today and we’re going, I think what needs to happen is that that model doesn’t really offer us a lot of ways of seeing this problem. The model itself, biopsychosocial is a model that doesn’t really allow the visualization of what’s really happening. And I think the 4E model is something that allows us to talk about it in a way that is, gives us the same frame. We can talk with practitioners and people, can actually talk in the same way about the same things, start talking about things being embodied and embedded and the way that we feel, the way we enact, allows us to have a discussion in the way that makes sense to both sides. We can have a conversation where we are equal partners in the conversation, which is the starting of having a dialogical conversation. We need to be equal partners in that conversation. And so we need to have this start chipping away at changing the language and changing the model and seeing things through a way that we can talk about it together going forward. That was beautiful. Wow, really, really nicely done, Terry. So I’m sure we’ll all talk again, but we’re coming close to our sort of allotted time. It is my habit to allow the guests to have the last word, and it can be whatever last word you want, summative, provocative, cumulative, review, inspirational. But before I pass it, I want to thank Nate for coming and the two parts of the discussion, which were woven together so beautifully by Terry. I appreciated both parts of them, and I see why they belong together. And of course, I want to thank Terry, our ongoing partnership around this project is important. And I think I’m glad my viewers are getting more and more exposure to the way your mind works, Terry, and the way that your heart works. So I’m very, very appreciative of that. So I’m now going to turn it over. You two can decide the order you want to do for the last words, and then we’ll wrap it up. Maybe I can say something very briefly. Yeah, thanks, Terry. And thank you, John. Just expressing gratitude again for this opportunity. I think there’s many of us around the world, John, that have deeply valued and greatly benefited from the thousands of hours of content that you’ve put out into the world. So I just wanted to say thank you to Terry for having a belief or confidence in me to participate in a discussion like this. For people that are listening, one of the things about pain, so there are a number of regions in the brain that are effectively responsible for pain and the signaling that sort of goes on between the brain and the central nervous system and stuff like that. But there’s an important difference between acute pain and chronic pain when we look basically at blood flow through fMRI. So when we’ve got an acute injury, the experience of pain that we have is reflected in the areas of the brain that we would expect to be involved in that pain signaling due to tissue damage or whatever it may be. When we look at chronic pain, the areas of the brain that light up are those that are responsible for learning and memory. This is one of the reasons that the framing of neuroplastic pain and pain reprocessing therapy has come out of, I think it was Alan Gordon and colleagues who’ve done some wonderful work on this. And so there might be things that we were saying today that maybe sounded a little bit waffly to folks or disconcerting given your current worldview. But even if we look through the lens of say the biomedical model and we give credence to the fact that we’re through the lens of say the biomedical model and we give credence to say the hypotheses that are generated from an fMRI study like that, we see really, really distinct differences. And we also, I think now understand how neuroplastic and adaptable and resilient we can be as super organisms and we can rewire our brains and bodies. And so if you’re out there feeling hopeless, feeling like your pain might never end, that might not be the case. There may well be good reason to have belief in the possibility that you can be better. Yeah, really lovely. So I have thought of something as a challenge for you, Sean. Because I think that this work, well, as you know, for me, it’s a really important piece of work. I think we are living through it. And I think when we talk to people like Nate, you can really understand the difference it can make to individuals and the difference that can make to the individuals around them and the difference that makes to those around them. And we have communities that we can actually change with this transformational thing that can happen once we start to have these conversations. So I like to challenge people to come forward and tell their stories. I think lived experience really is what we can learn from. There’s so much that is going on in this area. We are just, you know, tip of the iceberg, we are just talking about it in the tiniest way. There is so much going on from practitioners who are going through this. There are a lot of practitioners who have gone through the same joining as Nate’s gone through and actually been transformed on the other side and got, I’ll never be the same again. There’s a lot of obviously people who have gone through their own personal journeys. And I think it would be amazing to start collecting these lived experience stories and actually being in a way that we can share them with others. As much as people want to share, but learning from each other is obviously a really, really valuable way for us to learn how to make a difference. I think that’s a noble proposal. And I think we should be able to make that happen. Yeah. I think if there’s a way that people can just start to provide us their stories in a way that we can collect them together, and I’m more than happy to start doing the work of seeing what we can do to help to collect those together and learn from them. But I think the sharing of the story can also be really therapeutic in its own way. Yeah. Well, Terry, let’s talk about this off camera, even by email, and we’ll work out the logistics of how we could get that collection and collation going. So, and curation. So thank you both very much for this. Very wonderful voices with Reveke. Very much appreciated. Thanks, John. Thanks, Terry.