https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lVspB1tPlmg
All right, well, hey, I’m going to get started. I kind of said to everybody I wanted to start on time. I mean, obviously if somebody struggles in, we’ll let them in. So I’m here with John Viveki. I know that pretty much everybody on the call and those who couldn’t make it that we’ll send it to know who John is. So thanks, John. I appreciate you being here. Finally. As we said, as we jumped on finally, right? I mean, we’d be trying to set up this call for like three months, but you know, one thing after the next, it storms in Thailand. And then I think your computer decided to die on you and a whole bunch of other things. So I mean, our topic for today, which I’m really excited about, to be honest, I mean, I’m being like, just so excited to have this conversation with you, especially when we talked about it last time as maybe something of interest to people is this idea of martial arts as a process that can lead to meaning in life. Right. So I think maybe the way to kind of situate this and get started, which kind of will set the tone, I hope, is maybe just everybody pretty much knows who I am on this call for sure. And I can give a Cliff Notes version, of course, but I’d like you to discuss your martial arts practice, you know, how you came into the martial arts. What have you actually been practicing? And that might be a very good start, because I think two things are important. Of course, one is we want to draw from your expertise. But at the same time, you are an accomplished martial artist. It is something that you’ve been doing for a very long time. Right. So that’s I think that’s imperative as part of the discussion. So when I entered university a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I I was in sort of my own existential crisis. I’d left the fundamentalist Christianity and I was very much looking for something to give to provide me with a paradigm. And I encountered the figure of Socrates, which had just had a lasting and profound impact on me and the project of the cultivation of wisdom in a deep way. And I became very powerfully enamored by this. But there was there were two things. Plato gives this amazing presentation of Socrates and the practice of dialectic and to be a logist, which is a very powerful practice. I just did a workshop on that. Just finished it last weekend with Guy Sandstock and Christopher Mastro. And that’s powerful, but it isn’t really laid out in the book. But it isn’t really laid out that clearly. And the Academy was right beside the gymnasium. And Plato actually means broad shoulders because he wrestled and all this other stuff was missing. So that was one thing that was missing. And then very quickly with an academic philosophy, although this is now changing, but when I was doing it, the topic of wisdom fell off, falls off the table, even though it’s in the title of the discipline, the love of wisdom, that’s it. It fell off the table and I went on an academic philosophy and then and then into psychology and cognitive science because I found that the scientific pursuit intrinsically valuable and interesting. But that longing for the cultivation of wisdom stayed very prominent in me. And down the street from where I was living at the time, there was a dojo that taught what I now would call an ecology of practices. They taught Tai Chi Chuan, Vipassana, meditation and metacontemplation. And then there was sort of a little bit of, you know, Qigong and Jiangjiang and a few other things like that. And that immediately gave me a sense of a home in which I could cultivate wisdom in a deep way. And so that has been ongoing for, well, I guess, like three decades or so. And I’ve been doing that. So I currently practice a slow form of Tai Chi Chuan, a derivation of what’s called the Beijing form, fast form Fijian, a sword form. And then I do some I throw in some Pranayama, some Qigong, some Jiangjiang and a few asanas from yoga. And then I integrate Buddhist meditations with neoplatonic contemplation. So that’s, you know, and that’s sort of my morning set of practices. I’ve always been, you know, I taught Tai Chi at what’s called the Multifaith Center at the University of Toronto, and I taught that for like a decade or so. And of course, I’m interested in martial arts as a form of self-defense. But if that was the only use I had for martial arts, that would be a very poor investment of my time. So for me, I’m very interested in the cultivation of wisdom through the martial arts. Now, I want to be really clear that I am not opposed to the swing that’s happened in the martial arts, away from a lot of the Wu. I am a cognitive scientist, and I think a lot of the Wu was frankly bullshit, and it needed to be cleared away. But I’m afraid we’ve swung too far that we’ve lost the fact that the gymnasium and the academy used to be together and that this is a place in which we can help people cultivate character, virtue and wisdom. And this makes sense, given a lot of the work and my colleagues we do in cognitive science about the embodied, embedded, enacted nature of cognition and intelligence. So the lived, skilled body plays a huge role in our cognition. Just one quick example, and then I’ll shut up. Part of your brain that you use in order to navigate through physical space gets exacted, gets taken up and used in order to move through conceptual space. So the facility through which you can navigate through physical space actually helps to translate into the facility by which you move through physical, through conceptual space. When I was doing Tai Chi Chuan, I was about three or four years in and I was doing it very religiously, like three or four hours a day, going to the dojo like four or five times a week kind of thing, really intense. And people were noticing a difference in me before I noticed and they were noticing it in my cognition, the flexibility of my thinking, the way I could interact with interlocutors. And so for me, that became the pressing, the pressing question. I’m not saying it has to be everybody’s question, but for me, it’s how can the martial arts help that adaptation process so that I can as powerfully and as elegantly as possible transfer in that way and cultivate wisdom? So that’s sort of how I’m coming at this. No, I think that’s beautiful. And I mean, in a lot of ways, we share a lot of similarities there in our philosophy and in our approach to martial arts. There’s a lot to unpack there. When you talked about the ecologies of practice and what we both practice as martial arts, but it doesn’t only have to be there. But I see as one of the guiding principles, because you just hinted to that was this idea of embodiment. Yes. And you kind of, you kind of touched on that. And I think that’s crucial, right? Because a lot of times we are in this kind of world where we talk about rationality as something that only resides in our thinking brain. It’s not something that is quote unquote embodied. It’s separated, you know, it’s up here and it’s all about basically trusting the way that you think, but it’s negating or relegating the body to something that’s just more of a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. Right. And in our experience as martial artists is that there is no way to do the martial arts without the body, but at the same way, there’s no way to experience it all of it without that thinking mind. So we quickly start to realize that there’s this importance of integration. That mind and body are deeply connected, that they are a feedback loop, that the body is talking to the, I refer to as the thinking, thinking mind or the thinking brain. And the reason I make that, that kind of distinction is because just as an example, like just literally a week ago, I had a conversation and we were in a, in a motor vehicle driving somewhere in Denmark and the guy was talking about mind. And I said, I was just interested to like, what do you see as mind? Like, what are you defining as the mind? And most people, when they think about mind, they think about brain. When I think about mind, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, I think about all of myself and then the extended mind, right? It’s going out from myself into the world in collaboration and communication with my environment. And that includes other people. And I think intuitively, I knew that before I went down my academic path, but I didn’t necessarily know how to explain it. But it was definitely something that I experienced through my martial arts practice. Would you say that that sounds about right? Does that kind of, kind of where you’re moving from? Does it make sense? Yeah, it very much does. I mean, I was doing so for a while I was doing two things that seemed orthogonal to each other. I was doing this academic work and going into cognitive science and I was doing all this cultivation of wisdom, broadly construed the way we’re talking about it here. And they weren’t connecting. And then all of a sudden, cognitive science did this turn, really fundamental turn towards embodiment and embeddedness and enacted and, and, and, and, and psychology started talking about wisdom and a deep, all of a sudden everything came together in a very powerful way. So for me, it was similar to you in the sense that I was intuitively understanding this before I was able to bring a scientific understanding to bear on it. Now, for me, they reciprocally reconstruct each other. The cognitive science understanding helps me reformulate, better understand, reconstruct the practice and vice versa. And so I would say it’s not only that the old models, not only that the brain’s up here, the mind is in here and the new model is no, no, this is a dynamic integrated bioeconomy and, and, and cognition is between this and the world. The way the adaptivity of an organism isn’t in the organism or the environment, but the proper fittedness and the co-shaping of the environment and the organism together in something like niche construction. And so for me, the martial arts are very good for bringing that out. Also within an ecology of practice, they tend to, they tend to counterbalance, compensate, even do opponent processing with a lot of spiritual practices that tend to be stillness practices, which they have their place. I practice seated meditation contemplation. The problem with that, going back to the acceptation, here’s a bizarre thing. When you, when people are meditating and they’re absolutely still, their cerebellum is actually firing like crazy. But in a lot of the studies, that’s just ignored because of course, the brain, the mind is here, frontal, right? And they say, we don’t include that. But here’s a really good question. When you’re sitting, like, why is the cerebellum going crazy? Well, a lot of people, and when I used to teach this, it was sort of controversial, not so much anymore. What’s called the, you know, the cognitive revolution about the cerebellum. The idea is that there’s a cerebellar cortex loop and the cerebellum is, you know, originally evolved probably for sensory motor coordination, but it has also been accepted to any sophisticated coordination problem that the brain is facing. So it looks for all kinds of contingencies and maps them out. So it can be, it can be doing really, it can be balancing, notice what I’m doing here. It can be balancing between, you know, the frontal, the visual and the parietal cortex when you’re engaged in meditation and trying to get some coherence there, just as much as when it’s balancing in sensory motor. But one of the things you should be doing then is actually helping to train that cerebellar cortex loop by doing a lot of mindful movement in which physiological and kinesthetic balance are actually making a challenge on the brain, making a demand on the brain. So when you were saying that, I was just thinking too, you know, from my own experience is that, you know, we’re talking about this idea of rationality and this kind of disconnection from the body as natural intelligence. One of the things that I’ve realized in my martial arts practice, which has been very powerful, is that in that same respect, it also balances that out so that I don’t become heavily laden upon rationality as my only way of knowing the world, that my body becomes part of that experience too. So it’s like a balance, right? My experience of martial arts balances it out. And what I mean by that is, is that anybody who’s trained martial arts knows this, is that anytime you’re in a situation, let’s say we use an example of sparring, right? You’re sparring somebody, you don’t know what they’re going to do. You don’t know what you’re going to do next. It’s this kind of chaotic, you know, environment that you’re facing. The second you start trying to figure it out, the second you start trying to think your way through the problem that you’re facing in that moment is the second you get hit, is the second you basically move away from your ultimate goal. And in actual fact, what you really have to do is you have to quiet your mind as best as you can, you have to be present and you have to rely on your body to make the right decisions for you. And I think that’s beautiful, right? Because I think that’s where a lot of people falter is that that’s not how they are viewing the world, that what I think is what I believe, right? My thinking is real. And what martial arts teaches you is that, no, it’s not. You can be thinking one thing and even planning a certain thing. But the experience that’s happening at that moment, what the opponent is doing to you is completely opposite. And the more you get stuck into that thinking, the further you move away from your goal. So I am in deep agreement with you, although I think I. I would propose taking it in the other direction. I propose recovering the notion of rationality that includes what we’re talking about. We have moved to the idea of rationality as computation, as logical deliberation, and that is not the ancient model of rationality. Think the word ratio ratio to properly proportion. And the original meaning of rationality is a capacity for self-correction so that you are more properly proportioned in your relationship to the world. And that can be the proper proportioning of your attention. It can be the proper proportioning of your salience landscaping. It can be the proper proportioning of your skills and how they’re constraining your sensory motor loop and the degree to which that is affording the self-correction that brings you into more proper proportioning. I think we should extend the notion of rationality like the ancients did to mean all of the ways in which we know the world, not just our belief, but our skills, our perspectives, our characters, all the ways in which we know the world, how our contributors to a more comprehensive and integrated notion of rationality. And I think when you get to that degree and that notion of rationality, that kind of comprehensive, dynamical self-correction that is properly proportioning attention and intelligence in the sensory motor loop and memory, right. Heightening what I would call relevance realization. I think we’re now talking about wisdom and the fact that we have a notion of rationality current as computation, which is separate to wisdom. I think that’s a telling criticism of our current truncated notion of rationality. Yeah, I love that. I think the way that you said that is right on. I guess we aren’t always coming from, and the reason I set it up the way that I set it up is because I know that that’s kind of the standard understanding of how people perceive rationality. Right. I agree. I agree. And I think and I’m not telling you what to do, Rodney. You have your pedagogical reasons for doing what you do. Sure. I’m engaged in a project of trying to recover that ancient notion precisely because I want to be able to reintegrate our science, which is taken as the epitome of our theoretical rationality and our sapiential projects, our projects for the cultivation of wisdom. We now see them as opposites or independent from each other. But if you go back, for example, into Platonism, they are deeply interwoven and interpenetrating and mutually affording. And I believe in order to, I would argue, and I don’t just believe you don’t care about my beliefs, my beliefs are meaningless. I would argue that, right, that unless we can bring back sciencia, the original meaning, knowing and sapientia, wisdom, understanding, we will not be able to significantly address the meaning crisis that is besetting Western civilization. Yeah, that’s a really good point. So as you were saying that I was just thinking, and I’ve mentioned to you this before, and this kind of comes back to something you said right in the beginning. I feel this is just my perspective and what I’ve seen as I’ve been talking to people, especially in the martial arts world, because that is the world that I mostly inhabit. There is a resistance to this idea of martial arts as being something more than just purely about learning how to fight, at least in the modern kind of era. Right. As you said, there was a lot of woo woo in the kind of traditional forms of martial arts and over the last, especially over the last two decades, if not the last decade for sure, we’ve started shifting where we’ve now basically looked at that and called it. Said, OK, if you say that that’s the way that it’s going to be in combat, in hand-tang combat, let’s see if it works. And the place that we tend to see that mostly these days or the most obviously most prolific is mixed martial arts. But there are other combat sports as well that do that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve always kind of like sat there and wondered, like, why did we call it martial arts to begin with? Why not just call it martial combat or athletic combat or something in that way? Right. Because that’s kind of where we are right now. And so the kind of the sense that I got was is that, as you noted, is that. The traditional martial arts always talked about martial arts as being more than just about learning how to fight. But because what they taught didn’t match up to the philosophy, it was in a way kind of neutralized the opportunity for that philosophy to come to be right. It didn’t come to fruition as it should, because you could say all these good things and you could say about meaning and how you want to show up in the world in a good way. But at the end of the day, when you’re faced with somebody that wants to do harm to you and you have to use those skills, suddenly you realize that all of that no longer works. Right. And then the entire kind of facade falls apart. On the other side, you’ve got now the combat sports, which we can call them. Right. And there is no doubt in my mind that we’ve now figured out really beyond a shadow of a doubt what basically works. Right. And those guys know how to fight, but what they’ve done is they’ve kept the martial and they’ve thrown the art out. Right. There really is no discussion of what we’re talking about as it being something more than just the ability to dispense with the opponent that you are facing, be it that in competition or otherwise. And I guess that’s the reason why I really wanted to talk to you and why I think this is an important conversation, because what you’ve been saying is exactly what I’ve been saying. And really it’s about finding that balance between the martial and the art and the consequences of that. It leads to, as we’ve been saying, finding meaning and ultimately expressing wisdom as it was meant to be. Yes, yes. And I think we can properly redress the imbalance if we make good use of the best cognitive science in order to make the connection to meaning, to consciousness, cognition, character, culture, the thing that cognitive science is disposed to talk about in a rigorous fashion. I mean, there’s two dark events in which you can lose your life. One is the combat situation in which somebody is threatening your life. But there’s the waking up at 3 a.m. And realizing my life has no meaning. People can die of despair. And if you don’t think we’re suffering a epidemic of deaths of despair, look around and look at what’s happening. So there are two ways you can lose your life. And I think a good martial art should be concerned with both of those extremities in a rigorous manner. And I think that is both possible and also happening. There are increasing good cognitive scientific studies of it. And so like you like, you know, all the one inch punch, it’s all woot. Well, no, you know, there’s some good there’s been some good experimental work that there are people that can get about 70 percent of a full piston punch in a one inch punch. And you look at it and it’s because of small martial coordination, brain integration, a lot of stuff, sort of hyper efficiency. So is there magic? Can they push somebody through a wall or bullshit like that? No. But can they do something sort of extraordinary that’s in, you know, says something about the capacity for cognitive embodied integration? Yes. Yes. And is it testable and something we can come back to and learn about? Yes, we need to do that more and more and more. Yeah. I know why we had to throw out the bathwater. I totally agree with that. But we’ve thrown out the baby to a significant degree. I do not. Here for me. I don’t recommend any of these mixed martial arts champions as as as models or exemplars for my students to follow as as the kind of person they should be. That’s a failure. That’s a failure. And let’s see, that’s just as much a failure as the oh, I could knock you over from six feet away by for owing my brow. That’s those are both failures. They’re both significant failures. And it’s time we took a very right, you know, comprehensive, rigorous responsibility for what we are trying to propose to people with martial arts as a way of life again, if people want to just do it for combat or they’re just worried about self-defense, I’m not. But I think what we need right now is we need something, like I said, that can address both the threats to one’s life, both the kinds of friends. So speak to speak a little bit more, because I think that’s an important point to kind of address and just, you know, etch out a little bit more. You said, you know, we talk about combat sports. You wouldn’t necessarily use those as models to your students as something to follow. And you said not the art, the people, the people. What do you mean in the sense of what is the failure there? I mean, I think we know what it is, but maybe we need to kind of just talk about it because it’s kind of like the elephant in the room, really. Well, I see individuals who do not seem to have any of the properties that I would associate with wisdom, or they seem to be lacking many of the virtues. They seem to be often aggressive, impulsive, short sighted, egocentric, at times selfish. I mean, you know, and their personal relationships seem to be fragile and fraught. And one wonders why, what’s going on? And there’s. I don’t I don’t want to get too harsh, but we are not in a situation where we can afford to. We need here. I’ll try and put it more positively. We need. Young people need. I mean, deeply need like the way people need food and medicine. They need real role models right now. And for me, if if this isn’t helping me to become a better role model and point out me to point to better role models, then I ultimately can’t justify it within the context of the meeting crisis. I can’t justify to myself doing the practice. I’m just talking about how I see it for me. Yeah. And if I talk about for myself, I mean, I’ve had so much restless nights with this kind of tussle inside of me, this battle going on between, you know, where where I came from, to where I am now, how I see the world now, how I see my practice now versus my practice from two decades ago, because there was a time when I was all about the fight, but that was more about survival. And it was the environment I was in. And I felt that that’s what was needed in order to survive. And for sure, you know, it allowed me to survive really rough upbringing and childhood and into my young adulthood. But the more I deepen my practice, the more I look around and I realize that there is this. And I’m part of that, too. So there’s a hypocrisy where on the one side we say to a child, for example, you know, violence is bad, you know, it’s not good to do any kind of violent act. But yet then all the things that we immerse ourselves in, especially the most popular things in society, and at least in the Western world, are all violence oriented, you know, so with their violence is OK, but to a young child, it’s not OK. Or, for example, OK, if I send young men and women off to off to war, violence is OK there. But if I’m doing it on the street and I’m getting into street fights, that’s not OK. There’s this kind of dictum me all the time. This constant jostle between this hypocrisy. And I find that for myself. And it’s like, how do I balance that for myself within my own practice? Because I have people coming to me, students, trainers, you know, some of them are very in opposition to to to kind of the way I want to go. Right. Because I want to go where you’re saying, but they haven’t got there yet. They haven’t seen what I’ve seen, if that makes sense. It’s a really difficult situation to find myself in. I agree. I mean. Spectacle violence, which is what we could be contributing to within the meaning crisis is a good explanation for the increase the increased number of mass shootings in the United States. I mean, I’m not saying those are the only factors. They’re all obviously mental health issues or socioeconomic issues. But they have been more constant and we’re seeing something going on here. And, you know, COVID, you know, COVID enhanced the meaning crisis. Would you say would you say that there’s something to be said when we look at society and the trajectory that it’s on, that more and more what becomes acceptable, especially, for example, in spectacle violence, sport, however you want to describe it, becomes more and more violent. Is there something there to take note of? Why are we moving? It seems to me, instead of moving away from violence or violent ways of expressing ourselves, we seem to be driving more into it. At least we then they justify it, right? Well, it’s only sport, so that makes it OK. That’s kind of what I was saying, right? But if I do it in this context, then it’s perfectly fine. Well, we’ve lost we’ve lost a lot of things that preserve the ritual boundaries between the sports arena and the public sphere. And that has been increasingly problematic. And. I guess what I’m thinking, what I’m thinking about, not to interrupt, but I was thinking, like, say, for example, the fall of the Roman Empire, right, and we think about in the later later stages before the fall of the Roman Empire, the Colosseum and more like. Oh, but it’s the opposite way. The Colosseum, it goes away towards the end of the Roman Empire. Yeah, but before it goes away, it got to a point of the Colosseum kind of like crazy. You know, it went from just two gladiators to huge battle scenes with water. OK, I get your intent. So let’s respond in there. So you get this escalation because what’s happening in the Roman Empire is for all of its imperial power, the Roman Empire has has sort of a meaning hole in it. And if and you see things rising to try and fill that. You see stoicism. And then you see Christianity and Christianity wins, not by producing the most extreme martial art. It actually creates a new subculture in which a new way of connecting to people and making meaning and being wise and self correcting. Take shape. And I don’t mean this in an airy fashion. I mean, you get welfare. First of all, you get welfare. Welfare. First real welfare. First will, you know, medicine, hospitalization. That’s why. Have you ever wondered why there was this longstanding association between the church and medicine? Because that’s where it got started. Right. The Christians think about how you and I, all of us regard infanticide as with horror. Killing an innocent child is the epitome of evil. But for Christianity, it was an acceptable daily practice in the Greco-Roman world. Now, think about all of that horrific violence removed. And it wasn’t removed by coming up with an ever badder way of engaging in combat. It was removed by a fundamental cognitive cultural change. So that’s my next question then, John. I think that you made an important point there. So this is something I’ve been saying to my guys, my team, the people that teach my programs that I’m very lucky to coach, of course. One of them is on here, Chris People. So Chris could probably agree with me. He’s been with me for a long time. And I was saying things that we’re talking about almost a decade ago. And it was like I was the only person saying it, right, at least in my world, because I’m a modern martial artist, right. So I’ve kind of I mean, I’ve gone through some of the traditional stuff, but I would be considered on the combat athletic side. Nobody was talking like me. And I kept saying to them, I said, I understand that. And it might seem like we were an anomaly, but I think it’s going to swing back. I can’t tell you exactly when that’s going to happen, but I think it’s going to swing back. So that’s kind of what I was saying is that, yeah, we see this extreme version right now. But if we take your example of the Roman Empire and Christianity coming in, do you have the sense that it’s going to swing back? It’s going to because it has to, right? I mean, typically, just I think like just like us and our innate natural systems where it’s always trying to balance, we’ve got this body budget, right, between, say, for example, the sympathetic and the Parisian, they always trying to balance itself out. Right. Why is that? I don’t see that as innately only to us as human beings. But why could that not be part and parcel of the universe per se? Right. The natural intelligence of the universe. And maybe we need to go to that extreme to figure out what we’ve actually done, what we’ve lost and ultimately to come back, like you mentioned in the in the example of the Roman Empire, would you say that there’s a point where it’s probably going to swing back or more people are going to understand what we’re saying now, where we’re not maybe not just because obviously our discussions about martial arts and it doesn’t have to only be martial arts. But I would like to see a time. Yeah, I’m not. I come back to the balance. Right. I agree with coming. I want that to. I’m not so sure about whether or not there’s a teleology in the universe. But maybe I’m being just a bit romantic. Well, I’m also not in a place to deny it to you. What I wanted to say is I think that the increasing advance is that the right word of four E cognitive science makes a intellectually, scientifically responsible redress and rebalancing possible for us. And if the martial arts and I’m going to sound a little harsh right now, the martial arts aren’t helping solve the meaning crisis. Then I kind of want to tell them to fuck off. Because if we don’t get this, if we don’t help people ameliorate this and address it, it’s already getting worse. And I predicted that COVID would make it worse. And we would have a mental health tsunami after COVID. And look around. We’re having it. And so if like, you know, that’s sort of my attitude towards it. It’s a little bit harsh. But there is a lot and a growing amount of deep suffering that I feel that many of us have the capacity to help address and ameliorate and turning away from that because we’re afraid of the Wu, I think is no longer justifiable. So two things there, John, one was that I didn’t get. No, no, no, I’ll I’ll I’ll throw a vulgar word in for you so that we balance it out. No, I’m just so, yeah, no, just two things there that I wanted to say. First off is that’s interesting because I kind of got to a point and this was part of my time of being really depressed where I was like, if I can’t find a way to take this practice, this thing that I’m known for and use it in a positive way that I do aid in helping the people that I teach, my students find meaning, then I don’t want to do it anymore because that became the reason for me, you know, doing the practice. If it meant that I had to practice on my own, then I’d practice on my own. But I would just basically just give it up because I didn’t see any point in doing it. I’m still at that point where I feel it still has potential. Like, I still feel we can do something with it, even though we don’t like things. Like if we did a call today on the realities of interpersonal violence, five ways to dispense with any opponent, we would have 10,000 people on this call right now. Right. The fact that we’re talking about what we’re talking about, it’s just that’s what I’m saying is like the numbers are few. But I’m on the believer that it’s going to change because it has to change as more people come out like yourself talking about the meaning crisis and why this is so important. So that’s the second part is this maybe address for those listening who haven’t necessarily followed your work. And I would suggest if they had the chance, they should watch your. It’s a 50 part series, right, where you address this in huge detail, but maybe give us the Cliff Notes version of what do you mean by the meaning process? So 50 videos and put it into five minutes. So let’s go back to what we said a while ago, that cognition is the adaptive fit between the embodied brain and the environment, this dynamic coupling. It’s a self-organizing dynamics. It’s the way in which you are shaping your your information processing capacities to the world and shaping the world to fit your information processing capacity. So you can solve problems. That’s intelligence. Right. And and here’s what I would a place I would be willing to sort of argue as long as I possibly could for the very processes that make you adaptively intelligent, make you perennially susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. The very processes that are fitting you are doing it because they are making some information relevant and having you ignore most information that’s irrelevant. And the price you pay for that is that there is always the chance that the ignored information is actually the needed information. And you know, and this happens when you, for example, have an insight or when you realize, oh, my gosh, I was thinking she was aggressive, but it turns out she was just scared. I just I just miss even think of the word. I just mistook that I miss framed it. Right. And we are doing this comprehensively all the time. And so across history and across cultures, communities have understood that we need to give people practices for helping them ameliorate this foolishness, this self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. There’s no panacea practice. Practices are like the autonomic nervous system, like the parasympathetic and sympathetic is what why is your biology organized in all these layered appointed processing? Because there’s no panacea process. They all have to interact and mutually constrain and afford each other. We need an ecology of practices for ameliorating self-deception and enhancing that sense of being connected, like that adaptive, fitted connectedness. That’s wisdom. That’s what wisdom is. And when you when you don’t have it, you are beset often, often unconsciously, almost trapped in self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And also that connectedness is undermined. Now, here’s the key point about the connectedness, that sense of connectedness. That’s what is what the research is showing. That’s fundamentally what meaning in life is your sense of how connected you are to yourself, to other people and then in the world and the world. And so what we need is we need ecologies of practices that ameliorate foolishness and afford connectedness. Religio, the heart of the word religion is religio, which means to bind, to connect. Now, because of a lot of historical reasons, we have lost the ecologies of practice by which we’ve lost the places and the traditions and the role models in which we can point people in this way. Look, I do this in my classroom. I say to my students, where do you go for information? They hold up their phone. Right. Where do you go for knowledge? They’re a little bit more well, the university science. Where do you go for wisdom? Dead silence. Dead silence. And the look on their eyes of like a deer caught in headlights. That’s the meaning crisis. That’s the meaning crisis. And you see it showing up in a wide set of symptoms, increasing suicide, suicide independent of clinical depression. Kat Yannia Schneil’s work, young males who just my life is meaningless. They’re not in. They don’t fall into clinical depression. They just directly go from meaninglessness to suicide. They just opt out and they either opt out literally or they opt out. You have like the great resignation. People aren’t going back to work. The staying in bed movement in China. You get the mental health crisis. Depression is now called the common cold of mental health. Think about that. You got the opioid crisis. Addiction is not primarily a disease in the body. There is chemical aspects to it. But Mark Lewis is right. Addiction is ultimately an existential issue. You’ve got the virtual exodus. People now explicitly state that they prefer the virtual world over the real world, and they try to live there as much as possible. You have the rise of all kinds of pseudo religious behavior. What do you mean, John? So the MC universe is you’ve got a bunch of bronze age deities flying around speaking Axial age morality. And people go to the church. We all watch it together. And then they go to Comic Con and they dress up and they talk about they’re living. Right. It’s a religious framework, but it’s not ultimately transferable to the cultivation of wisdom in real life. But you get positive responses to you get the mindfulness movement. I’ve criticisms of it, but you get the mindfulness movement, the resurrection of stoicism. You get all these emerging communities of practice where people are trying to create a colleges of practice. Colleges of practices for addressing the need. I mean, I mean, conversation with many of these communities and we’re trying to network them together. You get the academic increasing academic interest in study of wisdom, meaning in life, self-deception. So why all of this? Why all of this? Because of the meeting crisis. That’s there. That was my best attempt to do five minutes. That was good. That was awesome. Yeah. Just to, you know, to be respectful of your time as well. I just want to kind of put it out there. I mean, even though there’s only a few people on the call right now. But I mean, I see Chris people and Frank Forincich, for example. Frank, I don’t know if you know about Frank’s work, but myself and Frank have done things together. He’s the founder of Exuberant Animal. And he’s very much into what we’ve been talking about. Actually, we just did a podcast recently that I’ll hopefully have out soon. We were talking exactly about very much the same things. You know, we were talking about now. I’m not too sure if you guys have any questions, Frank, Chris. Anything you want to say? Can unmute yourself. Let me see. Hold on. Let me I think I might have to unmute you. Let me see. Is it? Asked to unmute. Let me see. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They’re perfect. Hey, Frank. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m really enjoying this. And I’m fascinated by the question of meaning. And. The direction I like to go with this is to try and couple the martial arts with activism, because for me, activism is the place where people can find a sense of meaning. And whether it’s climate change or habitat destruction or any of the modern, you know, afflictions that that threaten to take us all down. You could find a sense of meaning by participating in those things. And the martial arts and the activism make perfect allies. So that’s the direction I’m headed. And it’s I’m playing around with words like martial artistry and martial education to to make that link. And I’m finding it really fruitful. So in what way? You don’t mind me asking you a question like so. Could you be a little bit more specific that how is it helping people? Like, what are you seeing in people? What are they reporting back to you? Well, I’m writing a book, so I don’t really know what the downstream effect is going to be here, but I write about strategy and tactics and life skills, life lessons that come from either the martial art or the world of activism, and they talk to each other. So that’s what I’m looking for. Do you find that they like mutually inform each other, like lessons learned in activism translate back into the martial arts and vice versa? That’s what I’m looking for. And that’s what I’m hoping for. Yeah. And of course, activism is in a way kind of a new thing. At least the modern form. And people are learning when they go out and they protest or they write letters or whatever they do. And you learn some martial artistry along the way. So I’m trying to make that explicit for people. And I’m interested because I’m interested in perhaps a third poll. I mean, what do they take into their personal lives from these two public participations? Right. Well, anytime you engage in real activism, you are undertaking risk and you’re making yourself vulnerable and you’re exposed to the world. So that’s it’s inevitable that there’s going to be some learning going on there. And it’s just the metaphor that that combines the martial art and activism. You’re going into combat and maybe it’s out on the street in a protest. Symbolic comp. I see. I think, I think, yeah, I think for me, just like as Frank was saying, that where my mind went was like, I was thinking, well, one thing for sure. And I’ve seen this through my own practice, at least the way that I’ve been practicing in the direction I’m going. I grew up a very anxious kid, then super angry and aggressive. And that kind of, you know, was form the formula for my beginning life. Friday, my twenties. And I was like, I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to go to the gym. The formula for my beginning life, Friday, my twenties. And the more I’ve practiced and the more I understand what martial arts really is about, the less aggressive I’ve become. Or at least at the very least, I get to be more astute of how I choose to use that skill set. And so one of the things I always say to my students is that if you get into a situation and you’re able to use verbal jujitsu, that takes far more skill than your ability to throw a punch. Right. And that’s only something that comes about through training. But at the same time, I guess, you know, practicing martial arts also gives you that confidence, that inner confidence to be able to take on, you know, situations where you know you need to do the right thing, but you know people are going to stand against you. And so you can build that confidence as well. I think that’s very well said. I want to acknowledge that. I was just curious about, frankly, if you’ve done any work on, do these people feel more resiliency and wisdom or flexibility or virtuosity in other domains of their life, transferring from this integration of artists, of activism and martial arts? For example, how are their personal relationships going better? Or their life projects, like if they’re engaged in any kind of education, do they find that that helps them with their educational projects or their professional life? That’s what I’m interested in the question of transfer. And you know, maybe Frank hasn’t been looking for that. I’m not demanding it. I was just asking an open question. Well, I’m assuming that there’s going to be effects across those demands, but I haven’t been doing research. I don’t really know for sure. So it’s kind of a new thing for you, Frank. I mean, that’s kind of where you’re moving into, right? So, you know, in the coming, I guess in the coming months and in a few years, you might have that answer. You’ll be able to make that connection, right? Right. Yeah, right. I didn’t want to put you on the spot. I was just wondering. I was just wondering. Yeah, I mean, I can speak for myself, you know, John, just like I was, you know, just all the time. And one of the things that I noticed, for example, is that, you know, somebody comes in, they’re super aggressive. They, if they’re open, they talk about their aggression, right? And they say, I’m having a real problem in life. I’m getting aggressive for all the wrong reasons. And then through the practice of martial arts, they learn how to deal with that in a more constructive way, right? And if anything, as you know, right, it’s a humbling experience. And so you learn really quickly where, you know, what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. And you realize that just by getting hotheaded doesn’t actually lead to the outcome. That in actual fact, again, as it’s a slow process, but down the road, you realize, well, the more calm and relaxed I am, the more focused I’m going to be. And actually buying into my anger, buying into that aggressive kind of attitude just gets me further and further into trouble. You know, if I, and then plus when aggression doesn’t work, where do you go from there? Right. Especially if you’re on the receiving end. So there’s like, that’s kind of where I see like myself and I just, there’s that, there’s a connection for me and kind of what I’ve been noticing coming out from the martial arts practice. That’s great. That goes towards answering the question. Yeah. And thank you, Frank, for sharing that you sort of suspect in the good sense of the word that those kinds of transfers are happening. Because that’s what I would be interested in as a cognitive scientist. I want to be seeing, is it transferring out into multiple domains in a powerful way? And I think that’s an important point, you know, just coming back to the whole point of our discussion, right? Is that’s really it, right? Is that if you’re going down and you’re going to train in martial arts, but the very things that are tripping you up in life are not getting better, they’re getting worse, right? So if you go in and you’re already an angry person and the training makes you even more angry and more aggressive, right? Then that should be a kind of, at least if you’re self-aware, there should be a kind of an indicator that this isn’t a good practice for you, or at least not the environment that you’re in. And you may need to change the environment and go somewhere else. I think the whole point is that exactly as you’ve been saying, is that if I look at my life and I say, what are the things that trip me up all the time? What are the obstacles that I face in my everyday life? And does the practice of martial arts enable me to handle those in a more productive way? Then that is a practice of needing and then it makes sense to keep it. Yes. And this is one of the things. I like for me, I’m interested in this question. Why did my Tai Chi Chuan permeate into my life and percolate through my psyche? And the flow state that people get into in video games doesn’t transfer that way. What’s the difference and what’s going on? That’s that. Yes. And you can take that and do what you’ve done with it, Rodney. You can turn it into a practical, in the good sense of the word, existential question. Is this practice permeating my life and percolating through my psyche in a way that is regularly and reliably moving me towards a good life for human beings? And if the answer is no, stop the practice. Right? Yes, exactly. I think there was a time, you know, there was a time it wasn’t. And that was my realization is that, you know, I tell the story often. I’ll give the short version of it. I remember when I was a young child, my first kind of, Sorry, some stuff just fell down in my kitchen. No problem. My first experience of martial arts was watching those old Chinese martial art kung fu movies. And they used to be real. Right. And I used to do that at my uncle’s house because that was used to love martial art movies. And it probably wasn’t a good thing for a five-year-old to be watching. But nonetheless, I was there. Right. I was watching it. And the thing that attracted me, of course, the physical side of it, you know, they’ve got this unassuming person that in the movie ultimately becomes the hero. Right. But in the beginning, he’s not. And whatever, you know, there’s a bunch of hooligans that come into his village. Throwing things around. He doesn’t know how to deal with it. So he goes off to find a way to deal with it. There’s a master in a cave or in a monastery. He goes there and he thinks he’s going to be taught how to fight. But first, they don’t want to teach him. Eventually, he sticks around for like how long, however long it takes. Right. Sometimes standing out there in the rain and the cold and everything else. Eventually, they let him in, but they’re still not teaching him. They give him like really shitty jobs to do. Like go wash the steps or go wash the floor or go sweep the garden or whatever that may be. And there’s always one guy that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. There’s this one guy in the background and he takes pity on him. We realize that there’s potential and starts teaching him. But in the process of teaching him, he makes a point of bringing across this idea of that it’s not about fighting other people, but it’s about overcoming your inner opponent. That’s what the practice is about. Right. It’s about showing up in life better than you came in. And as always in these movies, right, the hero eventually leaves. He does the test. He leaves. It’s kind of like Joseph Campbell’s kind of hero’s journey. And he goes back to the village. The bad guys are still there, but now he doesn’t want to fight. Now he wants to find a way to kind of work this out. Right. He wants to use verbal jujitsu. And it’s the classic kind of thing in these movies. You know, he doesn’t want to fight, but the bad guy wants to fight with him. And he does end up fighting. He uses his skills. He beats the bad guy, but he doesn’t kill him. He just does what he needs to do to show him. Listen, you’ve lost. Turns around and walks off and the bad guy will pull out some kind of weapon. Then he has no choice but to end it. Right. It was that that attracted me to martial arts. It had nothing to do with the fighting. It was what fighting could do to transform you into a better human being. And I forgot that for the longest time. And for the longest time, I got so stuck in the martial and forgot the art that that became part of my meaning crisis. And I had to find a way back. And it took me a long time to find a way back because, you know, there are lots of reasons. You know, the environment I’m in says I need to be like this. And I got to do this in order to be successful. But inside, I’m saying I don’t want to do that because that doesn’t make me feel good. Right. And, you know, I’ve got people who want like, like I said, you know, if we made this into a webinar on self-preservation, the five best techniques to beat any person, regardless of size and strength, 10,000 people are going to rock up for it. That’s just how it is. Right. And I had to fight that all the time. No, that’s not what I mean. And I’m now at that point where I’m like, OK, you know what? If only five people are listening, then five people are listening. But I need to be true to myself. I need to I need to I have to embody the meaning for myself. Right. First and foremost. And if I can’t do that, then I’m no use to anybody else because I don’t want to go back to where I was. But I came through that cycle. And so I know what it’s like to come through the marshal and what the consequences is of just throwing all the art away. And all I can say for myself is every single thing that were obstacles in my everyday life did not get better. They got worse when I was focusing purely on the fight. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I did something analogous when I confronted Socrates. I mean, I was there. And I know this in retrospect, you know, because I was hungering for wisdom. But I part of me was at least a significant part because Socrates wins every argument. And I and initially I want to I want you know, this the battling and I can go in. And I became a real sort of jerk and I wasn’t making my life better because, you know, but I could win every argument kind of thing. And then I realized that and Plato makes a clear distinction. The love of victory is not the love of wisdom. And he makes a clear distinction. And Socrates is not trying to win. He’s trying to be a spiritual midwife. He’s trying to help people give birth to themselves. And that was a big, a big awakening for me. And I think hopefully I aspire to philosophically moving away from debate. And our culture is drenched in debate towards what I call the logos, like what we’re doing now, which is drawing each other out, right? Sometimes provocatively, sometimes evocatively, but nevertheless, trying to get to a place together that we couldn’t get to individually. And so I’ve had a similar change. Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, Chris, did you want to say anything? Sorry, I was just about to log off. But thanks. I know you’ve got three minutes now. You’ve got three minutes. Fascinating stuff. I suppose just following on from what Frank started really, and then John’s comments back. I was wondering if any and to everybody in the room really, if anybody had a thought about why martial arts practice is so important in meaning making or in just generating a sense of well-being? And is it the focus of the attention? Is it the integration of the breath? Is martial arts practice a unique gift to the world in that it’s one of those things that gives us all of those wonderful things together? And does anybody have a thought about that? I do. And so I think your intuition is leading you down the right sort of theoretical trail. I think the stuff you’re talking about, about exaptation of the cerebellar cortex loop, and the training of attention, the training of psychosomatic coordination, the ability to induce the flow state in a way that seems to be sort of higher up in sort of the brain process that it transfers to other areas. It’s not locked down like the flow state within the video game. I think the very sophisticated patterns of coordination often put against, as Rodney was saying, surprise, right? So coordination confronting surprise in an ongoing manner. I think so there’s a very real capacity to get into what Bogotsky called the zone of proximal development, which is optimal for human learning. I think there’s a lot of good reasons why the martial arts can be places where we could. I agree with Rodney right now. We can’t right now, although it’s encouraging to talk to both of you. But generally, I don’t point when my students ask me where to go to the cultivation of wisdom. I don’t point them to a local dojo because I don’t find that that’s a place in which this really powerful potential is being actualized. Yeah, I mean, I’ve got my own views on that, but I’m going to keep it to the time we said. So maybe there’s a part two yet, hopefully, right? And get it out. And once people realize just the depth of the conversation and just how worthwhile it is, I think next time around, it’ll be even more fascinating.