https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=cc5YZ867Ikk
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. I’m very excited about this one. With me today is Kyle Koch. He was one of the instructors and facilitators when I went to the deeply transformative return to the source retreat. We shouldn’t really call it a retreat. Rafe Kelly prefers to call it an intensive. It had a huge impact on me. Many of you who follow me know I’ve been tweeting about it and talking about it. Even mentioned it when I was on Lex Friedman’s podcast and talking to him. It had a huge impact. And Kyle played a very significant role in that. And so I’ve invited him here to talk to me about that, to talk about his work in general, and to talk about some forthcoming projects that he is working on. So welcome, Kyle. It’s great to have you here again. Yeah, John. Have you here and to see you again. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve been catching up on your work and watching Voices with Verveki. And I’m super excited to chat and, yeah, bring my perspective into the ethos. So maybe we could start with a bit of background biography. You could tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into the work you’re doing, how you got involved with Rafe’s Evolve Move Play. And then after you’ve done that pass to turn a little bit, give us a glimpse of what the future is for Kyle. And so just please begin. Awesome. Yeah, my name is Kyle. I grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I lived a very mainstream lifestyle. And I eventually got interested in computers and software, and I became an IT tech in my early 20s. And I was, again, living the modern lifestyle, centered around like going out to the bars and drinking and like that kind of culture. And I had noticed that I was dissatisfied and not really fulfilled in my life. Like I didn’t really have any skills. Like if you take away a computer and the internet, what am I capable of, right? Like I’m pretty funny and charismatic and good looking, but I didn’t have a lot of skills. And I got really interested in survival skills, and I took a three-day class. And in that class, I made my first primitive fire where I took some sticks, rubbed them together, and I blew this Tinder bundle into flames. And in that moment, I was like forever changed. I was like, wow, I am a deep infinite well of untapped potential that is just by being in relationship with the world, I can tap into. And I cashed out some investments in Google ads, and I went to a nine-month school called the Wilderness Awareness School. They have a program that’s a deep dive into wildlife tracking, bird language, medicinal edible plants, mentoring, and just general survival skills. And that was extremely transformative. And then years later, John gave me language for what happened to me during that experience because it was like transformative, but I didn’t know really how or what to do with it. And I was seeing that effect in other people. So after that, I was a wilderness therapy guide, and I would implement the teachings with these at-risk youth in wilderness setting, and it had a profound impact on them. Almost all of the kids that came into that program affected positive change in their life. And so I got to thinking, what is it about this nature thing? And so I ended up going back to Wilderness Awareness School with that question in mind, what is it about nature that helps us become these amazing creatures that we are? And I had a really unique job. I got to interview all of the students before they entered into the nine-month program that I graduated from. So I got to get their life story, interview them, then I got to watch them go through that process and then see how they came out the other side. Right, right, right. And I did that for six years. And through that process and through podcasts and my own teachings and learnings, along the way I met Rafe, who really helped me integrate the importance of movement into that perspective. And I was just like, and then I came upon your podcast, which really gave me the language and cognitive science about what is happening and how we can repeat this process in reliable ways and how we can extract these tools and implement them in different environments. And so that’s where I’m at right now. I did it, I got it, and now I’m trying to figure out how to carry it forward and make it more accessible for people in a shorter amount of time. Right, right, right, right, right. Because I mean, return to the source, for example, is quite physically and mentally demanding. And it requires a nine-day commitment. And that may not… Both of those factors might prevent certain people from having access to that transformative power. So what you’re trying to do is, if I understand you correctly, you’re trying to figure out, well, can we relax those constraints somewhat? Not too much, obviously, but somewhat. So groups of people, perhaps, for example, more older people, people that are more elderly, could we relax these constraints so that their health is not put at risk, et cetera, but nevertheless, they could gain benefit from it? Am I understanding you correctly? That’s what you’re trying to figure out right now? Yeah, like how can we boil it down to the minimal effective dose so that we can make it the most accessible for the most amount of people, and then give them a path forward to infinitely expand on that perspective? That’s excellent. And so, what concretely are you doing right now? In what ways, if people were interested in helping you, what are the projects you’re considering to engage in? Yeah, so where I’m at currently is, I spent the whole summer building a completely off-grid retreat center that people can come and have a little like two and a half day weekend. So we take care of all their stay, all their food, and we can practice what is called the core routines of nature connection in a way that’s less physically and emotionally demanding, but allows people to get a participatory experience and practice the skills so that they can take them home. This sounds really intriguing to me, Kyle. So what would, like, can you give us, I mean, I don’t want you to give away your secret sauce if you don’t want to or anything like that, but what are you thinking about when you talk about like core routines? Yeah, so the core routines of nature connection is an idea that comes from John Young, who’s the founder of Wilderness Awareness School. So he actually has a pretty cool modern day mythological story, right? As I listened to work, like, who are our modern day myths? Right. Right? That we can learn from and create our own myths to move forward. So whether his story is true or not, it doesn’t matter because it’s had impact as if it is true, right? Right, right, right, right, right. And so the very short version of his story is his elder, Tom Brown. Tom Brown, when Tom was 12, Tom was taught these skills of nature awareness by an Apache elder named Stocking Wolf, or grandfather, who has his own mythological story, who essentially traveled all over North and South America, learning skills and then taking them into wilderness to see if they were actually applicable, right? Like that’s cool, that’s a cool concept when we take it into deep nature, does it still hold its truth? And so he did that for like 40 to 60 years, and then he taught those skills to Tom Brown from Tom was like 11 or 12 until Tom was about 18 or 20. Tom was an amazing tracker, he was hired by the police to do investigations, he was hired by the military to train people in these skills of tracking and awareness. Well, then Tom taught John when John was a young boy and John grew up learning these skills, John met in a combo elder named Ingwe or yeah, Ingwe Norman Powell, who grew up in Kenya and Africa. And they basically had like similar experiences despite being on separate parts of the world, the core routines of nature were the same, and John carried that question forward, like how do people learn without school? And what are the important things that we see if we look at place-based cultures all over the world, what is their kind of like Venn diagram? Right, right, right, this is fascinating. And so the core routines, I just wanna make sure I get them all, are essentially sit spot, so spending time sitting in nature, right? And which is cool, I’ve been learning a lot about non-sleep deep rest. Right, right. And sit spot like checks all the boxes, right? Yeah. Story of the day, so sharing your story with your community around the fire. And then also the art of questioning, so having people and elders in your community to ask you questions about your story so that you can actually expand on your experience Yes, yes. and dial in. Yeah, yeah. And then I’ll just go through them all really quickly, but we have gratitude and thanksgiving, bird language, listening and being aware of the birds, mind’s eye imaging, can you actually imagine where you are in a landscape? Right, right. From like a bird’s eye view, mapping, animal forms, wildlife tracking, wandering, which I think is a really amazing lost skill, like just going out on a landscape with no destination and no time constraints and just letting your curiosity move you. Right, right. Yeah, and there are more, but those are kind of the like, those are the minimal effective dose, which I could think helps people connect with themselves, their community and their environment in profound ways. Right, and those are the three axis, the three axes of meaning making, feeling fundamentally connected to yourself, to other people and to the world. So, I mean, I could see why this would make people feel that their lives are more meaningful. And what is it you think about these activities, like what are they doing such that they are bringing about these transformations? Like what are they tapping into? I mean, I guess in one sense, why do they work? Why do they work as opposed to blowing up balloons or collecting porcelain cows or any other myriad things we could consider doing? Why do you think these ones are working? Well, I would have to quote you and your work through the awakening from the meaning crisis. And it puts you in real presence. It puts you into the flow state with tightly coupled feedback loops. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Right. Like nature is the tightest feedback loop that you could possibly get. Like if you build a shelter and it rains and you get wet, you know you did a bad job. Right, right, right. You don’t have to think about it. And so that was the, I would say the core of why I think these are meaningful experiences is because they put you in the essence of like soft flow, as I’ve heard you describe. Right, right, right. For long periods of time. Right, right. I think that totally makes sense to me. Do you think it’s also that, when I’m thinking here of Rafe’s idea, that we’re tapping into sort of evolutionary mechanisms that are inbuilt in us and are in some sense being starved in a non-natural environment. But when we get into the natural world, they can come into activity and we can get into the flow state with them. So they would also deepen the flow for us because they plug into very inbuilt processes and mechanisms. Yeah, one of the things I was thinking about when I listened to your podcast, like with, I can’t think of his name now, but nature needs a seat at the table. Rich Bundell. Yeah, and you were talking about actually how we exacted up some of these processes of like tracking. Yes, yes, yeah. And I think in doing that, we’ve been losing the essence of what got us there. So an example is like, you, your tongue in the modern world is no longer a good tool for detecting poisons. Right, right. Like we’re the only species, or not the only, but we don’t know what we can eat. Yes, yes. So let me make, yeah, let me just unpack that for people. Right, so the tongue originally evolved to be a poison detector and to move food around. And that means it’s really sensitive and flexible. So it’s great for speech, but we’ve used it, we’ve exacted it so much for speech that we’re losing touch with its ability to be a good poison detector. That’s basically what you’re arguing, right? Correct. That’s interesting, because I make the argument that a way of understanding symbolic behavior, other than just as an ornament or a metaphor, is one of the things it does is it reverses the exacted process. It takes the exacted process and plugs it back in to the more primitive content and reactivates that. And then you reexact out of that enriched. And that happened to me when I was at Return of the Source. And so, like, I talk about how you navigate conceptual space because you exact your ability to navigate physical space. When I was done, Return of the Source, the geometry of my thought was way more developed than it had been before I did Return to the Source. And not in a, like I do lots of stuff that’s very conceptually demanding, but Return to the Source opened up the space and articulated the geometry in a way. And I felt like this huge burst of conceptual, theoretical creativity. And of course, Return to the Source had nothing to do with me doing any theorizing or anything. So I take it, I take what you said. I think it’s, I’ve experienced it, it’s highly plausible. And so, yeah, we can do this thing where we can sort of reverse engineer back down to the exactive source and then reexact in a renewed manner. Yeah, that’s great. Go ahead. Yeah, and I think tracking is one of the easiest examples of that. Like tracking is so hard. It is so incredibly hard to be able to look at a scuff on the earth and to know who, what, where, when, and why that creature was there is a profound skill that really hones in on that pattern recognition and then pulling in the greater ecology of like, okay, well, I know it’s a bear, but how is that bear moving? So I’m into the mechanics. Why this time of year? Why at this spot is that bear moving here? So it puts me into kind of the perspective of the world. And then like, it’s so hard to see, right? You’re picking up on like a discoloration scuff, pulling out tons of information. Then you, like humans are actually really easy. It’s really easy to like track your student, right? Or to track your child, right? Like as a parent, you probably are doing this, have done this, you’re aware of the patterns of the people around you, how they’re being, when something’s off. And we can apply that to like marketing and trends and graphs, and we can keep going up into this ethereal space with it. But I think, like you said, if you can learn to identify and see the harder pattern, does that make you better at the easier thing? It’s kind of my like curiosity. No, that’s really good. So two things about that. Some of you should know when I was on Return to the Source, Kyle was doing this with me. He was like, he was pointing, especially the one day we’re on the beach and you were pointing the tracks and he’d ask me, what’s this? And what’s that? I didn’t know. And then he’d say, this was happening and see how this jumped here. And it was really cool to watch this sort of unfold around you. And then again, since I came back, and I’ve been filming the next series after Socrates, and I noticed looking through it that notions of tracking and orientation have now played a huge role in my attempts to understand Socrates and dialectic into theologos. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I don’t think that’s a coincidence at all. I think that was just that even that taste of it opened something up in me that I couldn’t have seen if I wasn’t directly participating in it in these really good circumstance. It was a challenging environment for me. As you said, not what I’m familiar with. And I also had somebody with me, namely you, that could help me scaffold into that broader perspective a little bit more readily than it. I mean, because if I had just come across these things on my own, walking down the beach, I wouldn’t have been able to unpack them in that challenging way that would make me learn the way I did when you were doing it with me and you were opening things up for me. Yeah, and I think that’s one of the key elements that we’re really missing is community and teachers and elders to be able to offer those experiences with us because pretty much now you have to pay to have that experience versus being part of the lived experience of your day to day. Right, right. It’s like a sad thing and it also allows you to hone and direct your curiosity. So yeah, so something that you came up for me that I wanna get your perspective on is the environment. So can you just really quickly highlight what you mean by an ecology of practices? Sure, so what I mean by an ecology of practices is this idea, basically there’s no panacea practice. There’s no one practice that can bring about the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Each practice has its strengths and weaknesses and what you want are you want complimentary practices where there’s strengths and weaknesses, compliment each other and correct each other in a point of processing. So for example, you want both a meditative practice in which you’re stepping back and looking at your mental framing and a contemplative practice and when you’re looking through it and trying to see more deeply into the world and they move your attention in different ways and also at return to the source, you guys were doing that, you’re moving the attention in and then zoom out and then in and back. Why do that? Why not just do this or why not just do that? Because the ability to flow between is actually the most adaptive rather than trying to lock in just one orientation of your attention. You want them to counterbalance each other in a dynamical manner. Now, just think of, instead of just thinking of two, think about many practices in many dimensions counterbalancing each other and you get what you have in an ecology of living organisms. They’re all acting as checks and balances, affordances and constraints on each other so that the whole ecology fits the environment and thrives. And so that’s what I mean by an ecology of practices. Great, so the thing that I wanna kind of expand upon is the ecology of the ecology. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So humans do this really interesting thing where we have designated partitions or separations of like nature and wilderness. And city, even though they’re totally nature in the city and there’s wilderness in the, you know, right? They’re like. Yes. The other thing that I’ve heard, Katie Bowman, who’s an amazing resource for kind of nature and movement and Robin Wall Kimmer, who’s part of the Anishinaabe group is this idea that when we study ecology, we don’t consider the human animal in that ecology. Yes, yes, excellent, excellent. Please expand on that. That’s an important point. And so that’s like the curiosity that I have is like, we, like all the things you said about like an ecology of practice, like we are the way we are because we grew up in an ecology, right? Or we evolved in an ecology. And I’m, and so that’s the other thing is like, so you have these practices, right? Well, then you have the people that are bringing you through these practices. Are they skilled? What’s their skill level? How do they do it? Does that actually, is that fit for your learning style? Right? And then there’s the environment. Yes, very much. And that’s exactly right. You like, you have to put, so let’s say humans are complex dynamical systems, and then you’re cultivating this dynamical system to interact with them, but you test it by putting it into a complex dynamical system, which is, you know, the ecology of the environment. Exactly, I think that’s exactly the case. In fact, I think your degree to curate and create an ecology of practices is going to be based on whatever implicit model you have of ecologies of living organisms. And you need to enrich that model and learn from it, not just, but by participating in it, right? In order to strengthen your ability to curate and create an ecology of practices. I think that’s exactly right, Kyle. I agree with that wholeheartedly. Yeah, and so I have two different directions. I want to, we’ll see where we go. So one is I’m curious, like as you’re doing this work on Socrates and Plato, like, do you think about not just the time period that they’re in, but the ecology, the environment that they’re in, and then maybe the time of year that those wisdoms or insights came about, right? Yeah, I can’t do the second very much because I don’t have the requisite information. But I do the first. Oh, yeah. I do the first a lot. In fact, I’ve changed the format of this. This series is fundamentally different from Awakening for the Meeting Crisis because in addition to being a lecture series like Awakening, there are also points to ponder that I do at the end so people can talk to themselves and other people about. And then I do a section where I teach a practice or a couple of practices that resonate with the lecture. And they also build on each other in an entire course of practices. Oh, great. And so, yeah, then the other direction is again, the ecology. So science is great. And I love and use science to help validate and test ideas. And then it also highlights some very like obvious things. So one kind of great example is like running or walking on a treadmill is not the same to your brain or your cognition as it is running on a track, right? Because on a treadmill, you’re moving, but the world is static. And when you’re running on a track, you’re moving and the world is dynamic. So that’s a different process, right? Then we can also look at like mechanically running on a track versus concrete versus a trail versus off trail are all very different to our body. Very much so. So that’s when I think about these ecologies of practice, which I really believe in and have my own version of that. And what I like about John’s work is it embeds you in the environment. So like, what is it like to do Tai Chi in the office versus outside, outside on a rainy day, outside on a cold day, on a sunny day, barefoot, right? When you’re in the living world around you, there is like a higher set of inputs. And I’m curious again, like how, like I know it’s different. I believe it’s different in profound ways. And I’m like, how is Tai Chi in the park different than Tai Chi in the wilderness setting? And what are we missing by prioritizing one or the other or how do we really integrate by doing it in the rain? Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, cause I’ve done it. So when I was learning, like in the initial 10 years, I was doing Tai Chi outside a lot. And there was even a time where I was doing Tai Chi in the winter on a frozen river, which was very, very different. Cause you’re, of course you’re wearing boots and then the ice is slippery. And although it’s flat, it’s not completely flat cause it’s, you know, it’s deformed in places. And what it does is it tells you where you have relied on a particular expectation too much. And you can realize, wait, I was really relying on the fact that my floor was completely level. And I could trust that the friction was constant throughout and when I’m on the ice, it’s like those constraints are removed. And you can see, well, how much can I adapt so that I can do the form when I’m on the river ice or on the beach. By the way, you know, which is harder? Doing Tai Chi on the beach than doing it on the ice. Because when you’re doing Tai Chi on the beach, your feet dig into and sink into the sand. Right, exactly. And it starts to grab you and throw you off in waves. The ice is of course more difficult than the floor because the ice is slippery, you’re wearing boots. And so there’s a different way and there’s, and so for me, what happens is you vary the environment in a way that makes it more transferable. And this is the main point I wanna make. So let me give you a counter story. COVID had been happening and I live in an apartment and getting out to the green space during COVID was anxiety producing for a lot of people. And you know, and so, and I was having to do all my work inside. And so, and I normally do my practices in the morning inside my apartment, but I was always also doing them in other places. I was teaching them at the university, I was doing it outside. But somebody that I taught one of the forms to came to me after COVID and said, can you go through, review these parts of the sword form with me? And I went outside and I couldn’t remember how to do it because I had been doing it almost unbrokenly in my apartment and I had to reimagine my apartment. So put those two together, put those two together. And here’s the, here’s the, here’s the, for me to take home argument. If you’re training something and it doesn’t percolate through your psyche and challenge expectations and it doesn’t permeate many domains of your life, it’s not gonna be conducive to wisdom. So you need to train it in a way that’s gonna transfer inward and it’s gonna transfer outward and across your life. And that is why doing it in multiple complex domains is really, really essential for any practice to be conducive to wisdom. Yeah, the stoic quote from a few days ago was how do you know if you don’t test it? Yes, yes, yes. And how do you, how do you, and I’d make it even specific. How do you know it will transfer if you don’t test it? Right? And that’s for me the thing. We have lots, and you talked about getting flow in the natural environment. We have lots of devices for getting us into the flow state, video games, but they very often don’t transfer outside of that environment. Whereas if you’re training in the natural environment that is so complex and challenging and it’s percolating into deep areas of the psyche of evolutionary heritage and legacy, the chance that it will transfer to the rest of your life is immensely increased. Yeah, and that’s kind of my interpretation of the story of Stalking Wolf and Grandfather is that like, cool, like you can, like meditation is great and meditating in a heated room on comfy mats and pillows is really awesome, but can you apply that skill when you’re cold, tired, hungry, wet and frustrated? Yes, yes. Right, like, and that was really at the wilderness school, like people are like, what’s the most important survival skill? And it’s like your ability to effectively communicate with the people around you in those challenging scenarios is the most important skill. Like, I’m upset, I’m frustrated, I’m not mad at you, but I am mad and annoyed, so don’t take it personally and we have to work together to build this shelter so that we can live through the night. Yeah, and one of the things I found at Return to the Source is where, like my Tai Chi skills, they did transfer to some of the challenges you guys gave us, but in other areas, it didn’t, it hadn’t prepared me. And so, yeah, learning how to open that up and enhance the transfer. I also wanna point out though, that that has to be scaffolded. One of the things that you and Aaron and Robert and Ray did is you did the Vygotsky thing, you put us in the zone of proximal development. It was always, you always scaled the challenges to people and people could always find an area that was challenging, that required like really pushing beyond your comfort zone, but not so much that people’s life or health was at risk and you were there to scaffold it perfectly. Like I was, I got really impressed to how frequently, repeatedly, I would come to something that I found really, genuinely scary, but nevertheless, I got through it and then I realized that that was so well, like all of you were so good at making that, so I could find that place, exactly that place. I mean, so I wanna emphasize, yes, it’s the environment, but part of the environment is you have to have the right teachers. You have to have the right teachers that really have the sensitivity and the sensibility and the skill to be able to put people in exactly that zone of proximal development. Yeah, and I wanna emphasize that again too, because like one of the saying, like Rafele was told this, like if you wanna learn parkour, like run through the woods as fast as you can, like you’ll do parkour, right? Right. And if you wanna learn to survive, like go outside and walk into the woods, like you’ll probably make it, but at the same time, the amount of challenge and suffering and hardship that will be a part of those experiences is not necessary if you have the right teacher. Yes. Right. Well put, well put, exactly, well put. And the right teacher who could teach you in multiple different kinds of ways. So, you know, we would play games, right? One of the games was we were taking on the role of different birds. Some of us were protecting the nest and others were hunting. And you really get respectable knowing there. What’s it like to try and see the world like a bird and then sharing that with other people where they’re also entering into this new imaginal activity. And then of course, and Kyle was a hawk. And this was like, I think, Kyle, the first day and he came out of nowhere, cause the hawk tackles you. And he just tackled me. It was amazing because it was a really powerful, it was an eye-opening, literally eye-opening experience for me. And that combination of that prospectable playing, which is sort of fun, and then all of a sudden, a pretty significant startling event. For me, they were sewn together just, it really started, well, it helped me invest in what was gonna come later. Like everything built onto the next thing so well. Yeah, so one thing I want to kind of get your perspective and expand upon is, right? So the ecology is important, the environment. And I really love like the Alan Watts idea, like you are not separate from your environment. You are intrinsically, you are made up of literally the environment, right? You drink the water, you eat the food that is made up of the things of the sky, the universe. Like you are an expression of the environment. So you are not separate, no matter how hard we try to make that happen. And yes, I want to catch that evolution of evolvability, that as we move and scaffold and exact up, that we don’t lose the core of what got us here. Yes. And that’s what I believe the core routines are. They’re those primary satisfactions you see in place-based cultures all over the world. You also see children do them naturally. If you leave children to their own kind of, unstructured time in the nature, they will orient towards these things, right? They want to tell you their story. They want to play hide and seek. They want to build shelters. They want to play with fire, right? They’re enamored by the tiniest little bug, right? And as adults, we’re like, why are you looking at that? Like we need to make money and da da da da da. So I want to just emphasize, I think, ecology and environment as a, not just a test, but as the way those practices make sense to us. Like a great example is like cold water therapy, right? So check out Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University, has a ton of science on all the things that I’ll kind of express. But like in Sweden and Norway, in these cold places, it is a cultural practice to do cold water immersion at this time of year before the winter to prepare your physiology to be adapted for the winter. Right, right. Right, so again, environment. The other thing I want to highlight is like circadian rhythm is the sun in the morning is stimulating the hormonal processes to even have you have energy and awareness to do your practices. Yes, yes, yes, that’s important. So what I’m hearing you say, the way the environment activates these deeper levels of your physiology and your biology that scaffold and platform your higher cognition, that is also something the environment is doing. You’re deeply connected and being like adapted and activated in ways you can’t just sink yourself into. I’m just gonna pretend that I’m getting hit by, my pineal gland is being hit by the requisite UV radiation. I’ll just think that to myself. Well, that won’t do anything for you, but you need to actually have it. You need to actually have that causal embeddedness in order for a lot of these things to fully flourish and function well. Yeah, and what I love about the science is like viewing sunlight through a window is not the same at all as viewing it without the window. Yes, yes. So again, you have to be in it. And I think that’s where I wanna highlight the ecology. The world that you live in is crucial to participate in, to then really motivate and fuel these other practices, like a movement practice, mindfulness, meditation, all those things are really important. And I think what I do is I give people an experience of the baseline that I believe it interpenetrates those areas. Like again, like sit spot could be meditation. It could be non-sleep, deep rest, animal forms could be yoga, could be Tai Chi. So I think there is some crossover there. And then the other thing I wanna ask you is, like, so you’re a professor, so you teach some things and then you test your students as a form of like, are they paying attention? What are they getting at? Where are their lapses? So I’m curious and we touched on it a little bit in the environment, but how do you qualify either for yourself or for your students the effect of this ecology of practices? So for me, the metric I use, not so much for the academic. The academic, my metric is, did I enable these people to enter into the practice of science and the community of science well? So if I’ve taught them well, they can become, they can, science isn’t a set of propositions. It’s a whole set of practices and skills and sensibilities you have to craft. Also epistemic virtues. And then can they also, science is definitely distributed cognition. No one person does science, a whole community does science. So have I enabled them to do the practices and belong to the community well? That’s the academic. I use something like that when we’re talking about wisdom. Do, and this goes to what we said, that’s the ecology that they’ve learned transfer broadly and deeply, both outwardly and inwardly. And not only for themselves, but is it, do they become ripples in their community pond for other people? And so I look for that and I tell my students, don’t tell me what you think, tell me what other people are recognizing in you. Tell me if they are seeing you more balanced, more flexible, more insightful, more mindful. And not just at work, but also at home. Not just at home, but when you’re engaged in your recreational activities. That’s the kind of thing I ask people. Nice, that’s a great reflective process. Cause I think for me and what I heard from you is we were maybe not in such a tight feedback loop with our practices and how they were transforming us. But over time, people like, people share with me the deepest, most intimate, crazy stories. And these people will be strangers. And it started happening reliably. And then I heard other people, I was like, oh, like, is that like, and so one of the things I wanna put out there and kind of hear your feedback on is, is so at the Wilderness Awareness School, we have a directional based model. So basically North East, Southwest, and then all of the kind of ordinal directions. And they each represent like an archetypal energy as well as a curriculum area deep. But one of the things people ask us is how, like we don’t have tests. Like we have, we do have rites of passage, but how do we know where people are, these practices are having impact? And then also where are these practices lacking? Where could we encourage people to spend more time in? So we call them the indicators of awareness. These are things that we as mentors look for in our students. And if we see these things showing up, then we could say that we’re having a positive, we’re having the effect we’re hoping to have, right? And you can get more into these, but the eight indicators of awareness are common sense, aliveness and agility, inquisitive focus, caring intending, service to community, awe and reverence, self-sufficiency, and the quiet mind. Yes, yeah. Well, that’s what I mean about many different domains and dimensions. Do you see people noticing a transformation across those? I would ask them to not only self-evaluate, but to ask the people around them if they’ve noticed any changes in those areas of their life. Because for me, that is, well, both scientifically and personally, that’s a more powerful feedback. Definitely ask people to self-reflect, but ask the people whose lives they’re most intimately touching. Have you noticed any changes in where and how? Very open-ended and see what domains other people give feedback on and say, well, I noticed that you’re just way more flexible now in conversations than you used to be. Or I noticed that you can listen now and don’t interrupt as much. Or I noticed that you’re way more patient with the children than you used to be, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That would be a great way of taking that and to my mind, enhancing its effectiveness as providing feedback for you as an instructor. Yeah, and I didn’t get to hear the questions on your questionnaire, but that’s one of the things I like to kind of be in relationship with is like, can we expand upon this model and also dial it in? You can’t measure these things other than talking with people. I did a few behavioral measures. So what Kyle’s referring to is when I was at Return to the Source, I did a pilot study. And of course I asked questions from people, but I also used some scales. And I also used a couple of direct sort of perceptual measures just to get people feedback on how they had been changed by participating in Return to the Source. So the good news about this, Kyle, is the proposal for the grant has gone in. And so keep your fingers crossed because if we get the money, then Jun Sun is definitely gonna be coming to Return to the Source, probably myself and Jun Sun. And we’ll be doing some more specific formal research on it. Yeah, again, I’m curious both like these indicators and can we really measure that and give people kind of a rubric to bring into their life to get that feedback? Yes. You know, if you ask somebody, like maybe you won’t get all of the reflections or all of the transformations that are happening. So that’s where I love the scientific perspective of like, yeah, like let’s try to measure this so that we can validate it for people so that they, cause that’s what I feel like I just do for people. Like I feel like, and you is like, I mostly just give people permission to do the things they either want to do or might do anyway. But in our societal realm, it’s viewed as like not productive or like, you know, it doesn’t make money. It’s, you know, it doesn’t have those things. So I would like to see this character development. Yes. These are attributes of character. And I think, I don’t know, how do you think like virtue fits into like, would you say these are virtues or? I would say a virtue, picking up on sort of the four kinds of knowing. I think a virtue is a living set, like living in the sense of all the things I’m gonna talk about are interconnected. They’re not just listed. There’s beliefs, there’s states of mind, there are skills and there are traits of character and they’re all integrated. And they give you a virtuosity with respect to the environment. They give you the virtuosity of, well, tracking the good. And that for me is what a virtue is. So, and yes, you’re giving people permission, but you’re doing more, right? You’re often also modeling. You’re modeling, you know, states of mind and traits of character. And you’re also, you’re orienting people to different perspectives that they haven’t taken before. So there’s a lot you’re doing in extending their permission. You’re not just extending the permission like in the legal sense of I allow you to, you’re also affording them. You’re also affording them to being able to do it. And so it’s like the difference between just saying, you know, Timmy, you can play baseball and yeah, you’ll play baseball. You can play baseball. I’m gonna come and play with you. So you can actually learn how to play it properly. So, and I think what you’re doing is more the second, but I think that virtue is very much something that needs again, the complex ecology of practices. And to your point, set in a dynamic ecological environment so that people can genuinely evolve their evolvability, not just this trait, not just disbelief or this skill or this state of mind or this character trait, but evolve their ability to put these all together in a way that gives them a relationship of virtuosity with respect to their environment. Yeah, would you say, yeah, I really liked that. Like these are more like ways of being and traits of character that all that put together goes up. Like what does like reciprocity, where does that fit in or how does that come up for you? So for me, one of the primary ways we track the real, we track the good is through reciprocal opening, the opposite of addiction and compulsion. When the other that I’m in relationship to is opening up to me and I reciprocally open and then that, and that’s love, reciprocal opening. And if we do not practice reciprocal opening, we will tend to fall into the opposite, which is reciprocal narrowing in which the world loses its options and I lose my flexibility until I feel tracked or compelled. And so reciprocity is very important. It’s what you need, it has to be in place in order for people to practice reciprocal opening. And the reciprocal opening is one of the ways in which we sense that we are falling in love. And I quote Iris Murdoch here, love is the recognition that something other than yourself is real. And that’s, it’s a realization of reality in a profoundly transformative way. So reciprocity is needed in order to train reciprocal opening, I would propose. Okay, so you asked me earlier, why do I think these core routines like work? Why do they transform people? And so maybe it’s the reciprocal opening. So like today, so I opened myself up to the idea that there are stories on the earth that I can interpret through tracking. Right, right, right. Then that’s in my awareness and I look for that. And then this morning, I, because of that, I come around the corner and I see three bears. Right. And I stop and that’s a, that’s a meaningful experience for me. The world, like I put myself out to this idea and then the world reflected back to me that like, yes, those tracks meant something. They meant, you know, that I get to have this experience that is really cool, right? When you learn about like Rafe, he learned about opened himself up to the idea of bird language. And now he sends me all these amazing stories that are deeply meaningful to him about the bird language experiences he’s having. Yes, yes, yes, yes, very much. And then, so maybe that’s part of it. And then the other thing that I am curious to hear your perspective on is, I think what’s David Abrams, I think his teacher was Merleau-Ponty. Yes. And they have this idea that as soon as I become aware of something, like I affect it, right? So if I be, as soon as I become aware of the bird and give it my attention, I’m impacting that creature in subtle ways, right? At least. And so the kind of two ideas, one idea for me that came out of that is basically your attention gives life to the world. Yes, yes. And vice versa. The world gives life to your attention. And so I’ve been going back and forth, like is there a difference or like, where’s the intersection of love and attention? Because, right, I give my attention to the child, right? There’s like, we always say like love and attention. Yes. And I’m like, are they different? I don’t. And are they the same, right? Like, you understand what I’m saying? I do. I think, so I think attention is one of the primary ways in which we’re doing relevance realization, zeroing in on the relevant information, ignoring the irrelevant. And you know that I argue that central to cognition. And relevance realization is not fold calculation. That’s what computers do. Computers don’t care about the information we’re processing. We care about this information and don’t care about that information because we are beings that have to take care of ourselves because we are making ourselves, like you said, from the environment. So we have to care about ourselves. We have to care about our environment. We have to care about each other. We have to care about some information. So caring and attending are interwoven together. Now, love is a higher order existential mode. It’s about being in a mode in which I’m caring in a way for certain kinds of goals, namely the goals of development. There are other goals we have. There are goals of consumptions. I need to eat food. I need to drink water. But there are also goals that aren’t met by me consuming things. They’re met by me becoming more mature, more virtuous by being more in love. And when we orient the kind of caring to developmental goals, whereby we are growing and affording other people to grow and develop, that’s when I think attention becomes love. Yeah, that was kind of my like thought. Like, okay, you have, you know, at least those three different kinds of love. And then I was like, is attention another form of love? It’s at least a form of caring. And I think all love is a, all forms of love are species of caring. Kyle, I gotta wrap things up for us soon, but I hope we could talk again. But the reason I’m interrupting is I don’t wanna have the last word. I wanna give you the last two minutes for you to have the last word. And before you do, just wanna say it’s been really great to be in your company again. Really wonderful. Yeah, thank you, John, for your attention because I am so aware how valuable it is. I’m so grateful to anybody who watches this video. Again, your attention is so valuable. I both wanna give a plug. If you wanna connect with me, Instagram at Trotting Sparrow and come out and participate in these experiences so that you can carry them into the world, wherever you are. I have people living in cities, big cities, parks, neighborhoods, suburban and deep wilderness. These practices can, you can do them anywhere. I have even people doing them online. So if you wanna connect with me, Instagram is the best way to do that. Also my email, kyle at trottingsparrow.com. And what I wanna leave people with is magic. There’s so much magic that is happening outside. I don’t, yeah. And I just wanna encourage people, whether if you have five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it is, just please, please go outside and offer your attention to the world around you to just sit and notice things. And I believe that is well worth your time. I believe there’s lots of science that documents the benefits of spending your time in that way. And I don’t think you will regret spending your time in that way. And as an adult, I think a lot of people prioritize nature time for their children, that the things that are good for children are just as if not more important for you as an adult, mostly because you haven’t done them in a long time. So you get the novel neural benefits of that. To prioritize those things for yourself and to just spend time every day if possible being outside. That’s great. Thank you so much. I’ll ask Kyle also to send me all that information and I’ll put it in the notes for this video. Thank you so much, Kyle. And I really hope we can talk again. Awesome. Thanks a lot, John. Take care. Bye.