https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xDgWOSQdR_8
So welcome everybody to another Voices with Verveki. I’m very excited about this, this one. So I’m joined by somebody I consider a really important friend, close friend, somebody whose work I often recommend, Rafe Kelly. And so welcome Rafe, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself. You’ve been on my channel once before, but let’s just give a quick overview and then we can get into more specific topics. Yeah, so I’m the founder of something called the Vault of Play and it’s a ecology of practice, which is a term that I get from you, which started really with parkour and taking parkour into nature, taking people into nature to do parkour, but also combining it with play research and understanding play and with the martial arts. So I was deeply influenced by the literature around rough and tumble play and my own background in martial arts and wanting to combine those with parkour. And then over time, I started to add elements of mindfulness and we had students, I believe you talked to one of them earlier today, Kyle Cough, who brought the nature connection element into our work. And then, so this was all sort of emergent through the retreats that we’ve been teaching for the last decade. And then also our daily, or sorry, weekly classes that we were teaching at the time in Seattle and then our own get togethers and practices. So before that, I had been teaching parkour since 2006 and I also had an extensive background in martial arts. I started martial arts when I was six years old and I’ve trained in tang su do, aikido, some form of kung fu, sistema, Brazilian jiu jitsu, muay thai and kapwata. So all that kind of has melded together to become the ecology of practices that is evolving with play. And I’ve also been deeply influenced by first Jordan Peterson’s work and then following Jordan Peterson’s work by your work that has given me a real frame to think about how movement practices contribute to meaning in life and why that’s actually the optimal thing to focus on in a movement practice over the long-term in your life and how those things need to come together to afford the optimal pathway towards meaning in life. Yeah, there’s so much and we can get into it, we will, about how your ecology plugs into the four E’s, embodiment, embeddedness, enacted, extended, and that’s all there. And then also tapping into the non-propositional ways of knowing, that’s all. And I’m not just saying this now as an observer because I’ve participated in it. Yeah. I recently went in July to Washington State and did Return to the Source with Rafe and with Kyle and other instructors, Aaron and Robert, and then a bunch of just amazing co-students. And then at the same time, David Fuller was there with Chris Altorf and they were filming, Rafe and I, for the documentary film that’s coming out about my work. So it was just, it was just, it was, I called my whole summer the Thunderbolt Summer. There was all these amazing events happening. And so just give me a moment, because I just wanna say, you know, the experience, so I had direct participant experience and I was also doing participant observation. Rafe was kind enough to let me to do a bit of a pilot study while I was there too. And by the way, Rafe, the grant has been sent in, the grant proposal has been sent in, so keep your fingers crossed for that, to do a more formal study on this excellent work. And both of those hats, I suppose, that I was wearing, the student hat and then the scientist hat, were just tremendously impacted by this. I found it a profoundly transformative experience. And then, and I also just got overwhelming evidence for the efficaciousness and the elegance of the ecology. And so I had no, it’s not like I was hesitant before in recommending your ecology, but now I’m wholehearted or whatever, because just the impact. Like one of the things I was talking to Kyle about was, I think I mentioned this to you, it was a phenomenologically accessible thing to me. Like it was prominent that after I had done everything, well, did everything I could do. The space and the geometric articulation of my conceptual capacities was opened up to me in just a profound way. I just could notice that. And then secondly, the sense in which I felt released from hitherto unnoticed, except in perhaps deep meditation, background fear that I’d been carrying in my body, that was also released. And then the third, and then this overlaps with the experience I’ve had doing dialectic and to deal logos with people, this profound sense of intimacy that’s not friendship, that’s not familial, that’s not sexual, but this fellowship intimacy. Like I said to you, I was even haunted by these people, not in a negative way. I kept expecting to see them around the corner or hear their voice just out of range. And so like many dimensions of my cognition, they embody sort of more straight, intellectual, social cognitive, were clearly impacted in a way that carried with me. And then that carried me right through into the next thing I went to, the Symposium on Embodiment. And I was there and I was like, I had a wonderful time. I met Charles Stang, who wrote the Divine Double. Amazing, we hit it off. But the sense that I could feel that I was bringing something more to the arguments I was making when I was making them, they went over very well. Sorry, I’m just gushing right now. But it was just, it was like, so I mean, I don’t wanna give away any of the secret sauce for what happens, but I also, I wanna get into what happened. And then just to foreshadow for the listeners, I had the great fortune, good fortune that both Rafe and I were in Vermont for the Respond Retreat, in which we were trying to get the leaders of these emerging communities of practice to build a community of community. That was also, I think, a very important endeavor. I think that it was, especially for its initial goals, I think it was quite successful. So I’d like to talk to you about both of those. Yeah, sounds wonderful. It was definitely a profound experience for me as well. Those events are always really transformational, even though I’ve been doing them for a decade, they keep changing and we keep growing and making more sophisticated, inviting in new things like, this time we were able to do dialectic and dialogue into dialogos, dialectic into dialogos. Dialectic into dialogos, yeah. We did that. Dialogos, philosophical fellowship. And I had a oneness experience when you were teaching philosophical fellowship there. I’ve continued to play with some of the Tai Chi that you offered us at the retreat as well. So we’re accumulating these really cool social technologies and given the influence that you’ve had on my conceptualization of this and kind of the avenues that I’ve run down to keep building what we’re doing since I’ve run into you and your work, it was really profound for me to do it. And then, you know, facilitating is quite tiring. So I kind of had a week to just recover and then, well, David Fuller stayed in town for a few days after. So I didn’t actually, I wasn’t actually like completely done in some sense with the retreat until you left on Monday, I think. And then like David flew out on Friday. So I had like a week and then I was in Vermont with you. So yeah, it was very powerful summer for me with just trying to absorb and, what’s the word, sort of, those are really powerful, impactful things. And it takes some time to- Metabolize them. Metabolize them, yeah, yeah. And so I’m also still in that process of like, wow, that was a lot. It was a lot of experience. Well, for me, I did like, well, I did Return to the Source, which is like in the wilderness and you’re like you’re really confronting scary stuff, both, you know, physically and socially. Just to frame that, by the way, this is something I was also discussing with Kyle. But the facilitators and the teachers, I mean, this was, I kept coming away with how, first of all, you multi-scale it for different people at different levels and you offer different options at every site. And then there’s the facilitation. So people are in the zone of proximal development. It’s challenging and like, clearly so, but also doable for people. And the way that was pitched every time, I thought, and the way I could see everybody in the group, and there’s different levels of competence. And yet everybody was getting in there and it was being like, yeah, you go to that, like the horizon of this, you know, whoa, but then you also get through it and you go, wow. And so that, but then I went from that, in that sense was like Lord of the Flies. And then I go to the Symposium on Embodiment, which is in July, Symposium on Embodiment, which is in Tuscany in this amazing resort, right, with where there’s, you know, unlimited, you know, champagne and food. And it was just, it was like, and even the contrast, but that was again, in some ways, a very powerful experience too. But yeah, and then to Vermont. But I guess- It’s called Lord of the Rings instead of Lord of the Flies. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, so first of all, so like I said, some reflections for me, further, like more specific ones, I gave like how it clearly impacted on me and I learned a lot. But it was also, it was a lot of stuff that, but first of all, I forgot to thank you. Thank you for letting me teach while I was there. That was also very powerful for me. And I don’t know how to, I’m hesitating because I’m Canadian, but I’ll try and do this as not as self, but like the fact that people, like, for example, Kyle, I could tell at first he was looking at me, like he respected me as a thinker, but it was like, who’s this, you know, 60 year old academic, what’s he gonna do and blah, blah, blah. But then he came to me towards the end and he said, you know, John, you kept showing up and you kept doing everything. And like, and he was like, and he like, he really appreciated that. And I had several of the, you know, the 20 somethings and early 30 somethings come up and say that to me. And, you know, again, obviously that’s egocentric, but it was also just powerful experience for me because, you know, getting feedback for something in an area in which I did not excel by any means, I was put to shame by your son and your daughter, but nevertheless, for me getting that feedback, it was a different kind of feedback than I get for the academic work and the other work I do. And it really, it had a huge, it still had, you can tell I’m starting to get emotional about it. It had a huge impact on me. Yeah, I think there’s, I think there’s, I’m curious about a couple of things there. One is just, it’s an example that the virtue of character that you have aimed to cultivate in these other practices did carry for you. Even if you didn’t have the capacity to express virtue in the achievement of what you’re doing, you could express virtue in the way that you approached it. Well, thank you for saying that. Right, like you said on, I think it was Paul Anlightner asked, you know, how your parkour was. Yeah, yeah. On Twitter and you were like, well, it wasn’t very good, but I was dogged. And you were, right? You were very, you were, you wanted and you set out to, and you stayed with participating as much as you possibly could. And, you know, Beth, my wife, she stayed close to you on the creek run. And she was very, very excited by how, you know, how you just set out with a very strong to do it mindset and you know, kept going. Yeah, yeah. So it was, it was beautiful that way. I also think, you know, we, you know, we all have the places in our lives where we haven’t necessarily felt a strong sense of place or acceptance. Yeah, right. And I don’t know what your history with athletics is, but, you know, maybe that’s a place that, that actually part of the tribe of being accepted and, you know, given praise for where you’re coming from and what you achieve with where you are, is not something you’ve gotten to experience before, perhaps. Yeah, I think that’s accurate. I think that’s accurate, yes. And I think that’s actually one of the really profound things about what we do. If I can go on a little tangent here, but I think that we have a real problem of disembodiment that comes through the professionalization of our athletic culture. When we start with very young children, basically putting them into formalized games where they don’t have the ability to scale it for their own, right? Yeah. Play in their own unstructured ways, their primary goal is play. And so they will develop play cultures where they manage the situation in order to make it rewarding enough to everyone who’s playing. Constantly negotiating the rules to make sure that nobody feels insufficiently successful. Right, right, right. When adults impose, this is the way that soccer is played and we’re gonna play to win. What happens is that there are some kids who don’t feel successful enough at the, whatever the entry point is, it might be developmental, it might be any number of reasons why they’re not successful enough then. But what happens is you demotivate them and you make them feel like physicality is not a welcoming place for them. And then we just, we continue to build it that way. It’s this meat grinder where we take the kids who are successful at the first round of soccer and then we put them in select soccer and then some of them get out competed and then we put them in the next year select soccer and up and up and up until, I have a lot of students who are like national champions or running a nationals at 13 and 14 years old and burned out by the time they were 16. Right, right. And they had this sense that, once they reached the horizon where they weren’t gonna be competitive with the absolute genetic elites, they just gave up on sport completely. So it was all, it eventually just became all extrinsically motivating to them. They lost all intrinsic motivation. Yeah, so I think that’s just, I think it’s very hard to see from outside something like what we do, how much it’s about reclaiming the relationship with movement for people no matter what their kind of starting place is. Because the idea is it really isn’t what you are capable of achieving as far as how far you can jump or how high you can jump. It’s actually about how by surpassing what you personally can achieve in movement, you can change your relationship to the world for yourself. Exactly, it was about embodied extended self-transcendence again and again and again and again. And giving just tremendous affective and phenomenological content to that experience. Yeah, so I kind of took you off on a different direction. No, no, that leads into my point. I won’t say what the last thing was and I couldn’t participate in it, but I forewarned you from the beginning that I couldn’t because of my manures. But when it was done, right, I talked to some of my fellow students and I said, none of you have sort of said, I think I also said it to the group at one point, none of you have sort of declared to be sort of explicitly religious. But what you just did was a religious ritual through and through. They all on hesitantly went, yeah, yeah, it was. Like there was a, so, and for me that’s not, for me religion is not an insult, right? There, so what I wanna move into now is, right, we’ve already been foreshadowing it, yeah, there’s just tremendous movement, there’s challenge, there’s great facilitation, there’s these transformative experiences, but it’s not, it’s woven into, the, what religion used to do, the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and the enhancement of meaning. And so, and again, for me, it was, especially the last two or three days, was like, well, this is a religion that’s not a religion. And again, very powerfully so. And it was like, and I saw the transformation in other people, and some of it was like, really like pronounced and dramatic and powerful. And then I’ve talked to people that have, I talked to one student who’s come back multiple times and he comes back and he gets, he talked about it the way people typically have talked in my past about going to church, right? They sort of get refueled and they get re-energized, they get reinvigorated, they get recreated. And that’s why he was coming year after year to, so, and I know that’s been a journey for you, through Jordan Peterson and my work. And so I don’t wanna say too much more because I don’t wanna impose on you, but that, and we’re struggling for terms. And I move between spiritual and religious and aspirational and sapiential, but broadly that has now become, I think, well, I don’t know if that was the case just for this particular version, but it was so prominent to me when I was there too. And I found it fascinating because it was very much a proof of concept that, something like a religion that’s not a religion could be very profoundly real for people. Could you, I’m sorry, that’s a very vague setup, but could you really respond to that? I mean, that’s something that I’ve been working on trying to articulate really, very much in reference to your thinking for a while. To move away from the loading of religion for a second, you were talking to Lex Friedman on the podcast you did with him recently, you were saying, let’s let go of the term the meaning of life and let’s think about meaning within life. Yes, yes. What affords us meaning within life and its connection? Yes, yes. Right? And so when you introduced me to the idea that religio, the original term from which we derive religion perhaps is about connection, it’s what binds us together. Yes, yes, yes. You might even, tell me if I’m wrong here, but my sense is religio, properly conceived, binds the self together. Yes, yes. The self to the world and the self to others and the self to transcendent powers. Exactly, exactly. And I developed that a lot after Socrates. We filmed episodes by the way. Talking a lot about Raphael religio, the proper proportioning of your connectedness. Yes, very much. And I talked frequently about those three or four connections that you just did. So completely in agreement with what you just said. So we started with the set of practices, right? Like parkour was transformative for me and martial arts had been really transformative for me. And so the question was like, why? And then maybe why, what does it work for some people and fail for other people? And then I went really deep into understanding play and how play is transformative and play is this self-education system and trying to incorporate that and thus the name of Alden’s play. And then I started to think about how to play and how to play with the concept of the play. And so I started to think about the purpose of the practice is to give meaning to life. Cause ultimately if the purpose of the practice is just to jump farther, then you just reach an age at which you’re not gonna jump farther anymore, right? And then are you done? To be the best fighter in the world? Well, you probably not gonna, but even if you are, how long? And so I started asking these questions in my early thirties, late twenties and coming up with this idea that really fundamentally what we were doing was about meaning, that somehow you could do a jump or you could engage in a sparring match and you could learn something about yourself that reorganized your sense of self and reorganized your relationship to the world in a way that was beneficial. So I’ve been working on that for years. And then I found Peterson, he was articulating the idea that fundamentally what we’re missing in our culture was an aspirational sense of meaning. Aspirational is your word, not his, but that was what was implicit in what he was doing and what he was describing that we needed. I wrote something right before, I think it was the month before I encountered Peterson’s work called the self-worth esteem. And the argument that I made was that as a culture, we had made a mistake by telling people that they should just try to love themselves as they are because we actually need to have something we’re aspiring to. We have to create the self that’s worth esteem. I think that I would change that now because I think they’re both true. There’s this weird reciprocal relationship between being able to love yourself as you are and being able to aspire. We have to have that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the time I just felt like we were, I was seeing this narcissism in people and this inability to recognize that there was something in their character that was worth burning off and there was something that was worth burnishing and strengthening. And I was thinking about it in reference to this idea of, well, we had started talking about movement culture, right? That we have a culture around movement. And if you could say that some people are cultivating movement culture, you could say that our culture in general has lost its movement culture. And then you could say that people have lost their food culture. They don’t know how to make food, right? People have lost their music culture. We only listen to music. We don’t perform it. People have lost their dance culture, right? Yeah, yeah. People are losing the culture of sex, right? We’re increasingly people who consume sex. Yeah. Performed by other people on screen. Yes, yes, yeah. Other than engaging with it in real life. That’s literally to the most basic functions of our humanity, we are losing the approach to having personal virtue and viewing everything as something that will just offload to a few professionals. And so I think of this as the narrowing of the self. And I actually think that this is an externality of capitalism. I don’t mean this as a sort of broadside of capitalism has to be destroyed. I don’t believe that at all, but I do think that we have to recognize, I think capitalism is a wonderful system and a terrible God. Well said, well said. When we make it God, we don’t recognize that it has these externalities. And one of them is that it wants you to optimize for whatever is the most efficient way for you to create capital, right? Whatever is capturable within the market mechanism. So, the theory of, what is it? Proportional advantage, right? If I do one thing slightly better than everyone else, I wanna spend as much of my time on that one thing as possible. Yes, yes. Because that’s what’s gonna create the most. But what happens then is that you actually start to erode all the other things that give worth the self. So if you’re in a traditional culture, right? You learn all the skills of your culture. Then you find some things that you’re particularly good at. And there’s lots of ways for you to contribute. So maybe you’re not the best hunter in the village, but you’re really good at singing. And that’s something that’s incredibly valuable to people. Maybe you’re the best wrestler. Maybe you are the strongest guy who can come in and move all the heavy things around. And all those are ways that you can contribute. And when we become more and more narrowed down to how much you earn, we’re actually losing the grounds of the self. So the argument that I was developing then is that to have meaning, to have a self worth esteeming, we have to reclaim our culture. We have to reclaim these things. And then when I encountered Peterson, he was describing meaning and he was describing how it was embedded within narrative and how the stories that we tell about ourselves, the stories that we exist within are so profound for us. So then I came to your work and and I came to that idea of connections, religio, right? Yeah. I started thinking, when I do parkour, it connects me to my body, but also it connects me to different emotions that I experience. Like I might go through my life never experiencing the kind of challenge emotionally, or very rarely experiencing the type of challenge emotionally that comes from taking a jump at height. Yeah. Until it blindsides you when you have a conflict with your spouse or you have to go ask for a raise at work. And so when I go out and I repeatedly experience this powerful emotion through the parkour practice, I get to have a relationship with it. So I think that fear, for instance, is something that you want to have a very well cultivated relationship with. Exactly. And you can think of those all as there’s internal relationships of the self. And then there’s the self and relationship to the external world, right? So I’m also, I know what it feels like to have my hands around things. Yes. How much I can contrast my grip. I know how far I can jump. I know how different surfaces move under me. I have affordances and constraints that are visible to me in the world because I’ve taken on this practice. So I am embedding myself in the world through the practice. So I started to conceptualize it around the internal relationships of the self, the self to the physical world, and then the self to the social and relational others. One of the things that comes out of the play research is that the most powerful way to teach a aggressive, antisocial child empathy is through rough and tumble play. Yeah, absolutely. We have this system of non-lethal combative play that is probably hundreds of millions of years old. And it’s been accepted for all these purposes. And part of it is really, it’s actually maybe the foundation of how we began to really conceptualize the social and relational other, right? You have to have theory of mind to learn to play with somebody. Yep, yep. Comes out of Jean Piaget and Jacques Pengsep’s work. And Vygotsky. And Vygotsky. So we have this profound thing that we as a culture have discarded. We think of it as violence. We think of it as unsafe. But it’s bringing us into, it gives us completely different access to the social relational realm than when we only engage in talking. And I think we just saw this and experienced this at the Respond Project, because we started the Respond Project with a dialogical collective presencing exercise. And I almost had a panic attack. It was really uncomfortable for me. And there was a sense that it wasn’t creating the rapport. We weren’t creating the rapport that was necessary for the group to work really well together. And one of my students who was one of our teachers at, one of the teachers with us at Return of the Source who happened to have driven me up there, did some movement exercises with us. And it felt like it completely shifted the connection. Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that. And then we started doing some every day. People did various versions of movement, touch and interaction. Yeah, it turned things around really dramatically. Yeah. Yeah, so then we have these three fundamental aspects, right? But then I think there’s… And we could kind of divide the body and the mind into maybe two things, but they’re also one thing. So, you know, or relationships maybe. But then there, I think there’s two more, which is the self and relationship to the past and the future. Yes, just like the ancestors. And then the self and relationship to the spiritual realm. And this is where we’re getting to religion and spirituality. And when I share, I think we’re very aligned on our worldview here. We don’t think there’s another dimension where the spirit lives. Right, right, right, yes. Rather, spirits are collective intelligences that emerge from the interaction of individual agents. Yes, yes, yes. And also that there are deeper dimensions to this world that gets closed only when people undergo transformation. Yeah, yeah. So for me, we really are very intentional about trying to build the capacity of the self to relate well to those four primary relationships. And then we are touching on, but intentionally being a little bit less oriented towards those last two relationships, because those do start to sort of transgress the grounds of the traditional religions, which we want our space to be a place that is welcoming to people of whatever religious background they have. I thought you struck that balance perfectly well. And the fact that, I mean, it was a particularly grainy talky group. It was just so much discussion about philosophy and philosophical religion and religious philosophy and connections to four-E cogsi. I mean, that was also just wonderful. And so, and people, I felt free to talk about it from many different backgrounds and orientations. Yet I think everybody found it extremely fruitful and part of the ecology properly, so I thought. Yeah, absolutely. And we do have religious students who join us and we have students who are atheists and it works for everybody right now, which is wonderful. Yeah, and that’s exactly it. I mean, I won’t repeat the arguments about the religio is not primarily carried at the propositional level, et cetera, et cetera. But instead I wanna shift on something that came up as you were talking. Is this also something that became clear to me? I always remembered Aristotle’s, the point is not being angry or not angry, it’s being angry at the right time for the right reason, to the right degree, right? And I now think that return to the source does that, not primarily with anger, maybe a bit with aggression, properly understood, but also primarily with fear, right? And our culture is adopting this disastrous attempt to eradicate fear, that we should never experience fear, we should never experience social fear, we should never experience the fear of rejection, we should never, I mean, there’s of course certain fears we should not be subjected to. People should not be able to threaten us so they can extort stuff from us or manipulate us. Totally, I get that. But the attempt to make a fear-free environment, well, it just strikes me as, it strikes me as a profound mistake, precisely because there’s very little content to the virtue of courage if there isn’t the right religio, ratio religio to fear, and there’s very little depth to a lot of the other virtues if courage is not pronounced in an individual. Did that argument make sense, what I was just trying to, if you don’t get into right relationships with people, if you don’t get into right relationship with fear, you can’t really get deep courage. And to the degree to which your courage is shallow, your other virtues will tend to be less developed. Yeah, this is like, this gets at one of my, what I feel like are my fundamental critiques of our modern system, which is that we are trying so much to create systems to incentivize virtuous behavior without attending to creating systems that actually create virtuous people. Yes, yes. So I think that it is better to live in a world, like you need both, right? Like something that Peterson said that really struck me was that the answer to the corruption of the state is the virtue of the individual. And I think that’s a very important message for where we are, but it’s still a partial truth. This is my sense, is that unless we can literally all become Jesus, and I don’t think that’s possible, there’s always incentive structures that will be sufficient to warp human behavior. So it’s never sufficient to only look at the cultivation of the individual. We have to look at the systems that are incentivizing behavior that’s destructive. But again, it’s this reciprocal causal relationship where we need to scale up our capacity for virtue as individuals while we’re scaling up how our system creates virtue. And I think that what we’ve done in some sense is created a system that runs really well off of virtues that were cultivated by Christianity for a long time, and no longer actually is deriving those virtues and doesn’t realize how much it’s dependent on it and how fragile it is once those virtues start to disappear. And I think this is also, this is one of the many rain shadows of the meeting crisis. And this is why a lot of the social, I don’t know what to call them, institutions movements often are desiccated versions of Christianity without even realizing it. I would add, I would say Christianity, but also at least neoplatonic Christianity. And Plato has a, Socrates and Plato have a big role in that as well. When we think about the, let’s say the traditional systems of virtue cultivation in the West, that’s necessarily a kind of a unification of Athens and Jerusalem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And I think, because the Greeks give us the cardinal virtues, courage, wisdom, softerson and justice, which right, remember there was four, by the way, not just justice, there’s four. And then of course Christianity gave us faith, hope and love, agape, and faith and hope. And that’s a very good set to work with. I’m not saying, I’ll say it again, neither nostalgia nor utopia, but nevertheless, your point is well taken that we are not doing enough to properly afford people the kind of challenging transformation that is integral to the cultivation of virtue and wisdom while demanding from them that they aspire to a kind of moral perfection that is out of sync with the degree to which we educate people. And then we exacerbate that by thinking that, oh, what we need to do is indoctrinate people into sets of propositions that they assert without any question, which is not any of what you and I have been talking about, and certainly not what returned to the source was all about. Yeah, it is the, in some sense, it’s the tyranny of the propositional again. Totally, totally, totally. Your virtue is measurable by your adherence to a specific set of ever-changing propositions. Yes. As opposed to intrinsic to your attunement to relationships that play out in your actual actions. Well, we’ve lost the connection between virtue, virtuosity, and virtual in the older meaning of the possible, the genuinely possible, the possible. The genuinely possible, the patterns and powers. And so I think trying to break, well, I’ve been trying to advocate reintegrating those three together in our understanding. We shouldn’t be thinking of virtue independent of virtuosity and the virtual, both the ancient sense and now the modern sense of virtual. We’ve got to get all that worked out rather than, right? Rather than with a concern with, you know, sort of unquestionable propositions, which I’m finding, I have a concern. I’ve voiced this to you, John Rawls’ concern. You know, don’t empower any state to assert the propositions you like without question, because there’ll be a state that will be then empowered to assert the propositions that you most want to question and you won’t be able to question them at all. And so I really worry that we are getting into a place where we are unthinkingly empowering various power groups to do things that if they were doing them for propositions other than our own, we would find horrendous. And this greatly concerns me. Yeah, I mean, my sense is that in a weird way, the political extremes, even the mainstream are both sort of, you know, we have the left and right for whatever reason there’s these, our system is bipolar, right? And on these two poles, it seems more and more like there’s a willingness to let go of principles in exchange for power under the assumption that when all the principles are gone, you get to be the, you know, if you fight hard enough, you’ll be at the top, right? Your system will be there and then utopia, right? And so that’s the first one. Yeah, and the thing is, sorry for interrupting, but the utopia is the end that justifies any means, basically. Exactly. Yes, yeah. So it’s interesting. I feel like this reflects some of the conversations you and I have been having kind of back and forth via text. And I have a sense it’d be a good conversation to get into this, what is happening with the, I have this analogy, right? I often hear people saying, you know, it’s turning around, it’s getting better. And they point to this one little current of like amazing stuff that’s happening. And I wonder, is it really getting better? Is this just the alternate current, right? Because it seems like whenever the kind of mainstream system moves in a very specific direction, it will tend to create these countercurrents. And sometimes those countercurrents will have a level of virtue that’s really unique. So the example that I give is that, is parkour, right? Parkour is something that literally every child did, right? It’s just a name for exploratory locomotor play, which is universal to children, universal to mammals. We see it in, you know, it’s huge in other primates. So we’ve formalized it, we’ve created philosophy around it, but that’s at the heart of it. You know, it’s also the fundamental kind of urge behind skateboarding, snowboarding, skiing, right? It’s all this locomotor exploration. But there’s this weird thing, which is that we have the greatest parkour human beings, probably, that have ever lived, or at least have lived in historical times, right? Right now. Yes. And yet we have the least competent, on average, population in these realms that has ever existed. So it’s been lost, right? It used to be every kid got to experience running, jumping, and climbing as a regular part of their childhood. Right. More and more, there are literally children who never experienced these things, who’ve never been allowed or given space for real locomotor play, at least since the time they were tiny children. And so we can see this pattern over and over again, right? We spin this off and it’s like, okay, well, there’s these specialists who are taking this thing way deeper than it’s ever been. But if those insights don’t percolate, it doesn’t create change that’s available to the mainstream, ultimately, it’s not helping that many people. And doesn’t it also work in the other way, in that we tend to, like you said before, we sort of atomize these people into that particular virtuosity. And you’ve said this to me, and I won’t disclose any names, but many of these people are kind of jerks, or not what we, they’re not paragons of virtue, even though they have this particular virtuosity. And the same thing with MMA, and I’ve been talking to Rodney King about that, right? About that same thing, right? That we have these people, we’re swinging away, justifiably so, from all the woo, but we threw out with the woo, the philosophy that was about the cultivation of virtue in consonance with virtuosity, and now we’ve separated them, and we get these people who are not exemplars of what it is to be a good human being living a good life, even though they’re excellent fighters, right? And so it also swings that way, don’t you think? Absolutely, I mean, we have, I enjoy that conversation with Rodney, and I have deep background, I’ve done a lot of MMA training, and I follow MMA, so I’m really aware of that. So when you said that, I think you said this actually in our conversation too, because we talked about this, at some point, maybe we did a conversation, maybe even with one of the martial artists, I can’t remember exactly how it went down, but you have to, if you are going to cultivate the capacity to to have virtuosity of violence, you have to be scaling that up with wisdom, or it’s irresponsible, right? Yes, you just, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. And we have, but we actually have a problem, which is that, and this is going back to the systems versus individuals, right? So I can start an MMA school, right? And I can make that MMA school deeply philosophical, and I can try to educate all the people who come through. But if I have a young, talented athlete who now is capable of fighting at a high level, I can either help him fight at a high level, or someone else will, very likely. And once he’s fighting at a high level, if he creates a persona of being extremely aggressive and negative towards his opponents and shit talking and trash talking, he will make more money. Yeah, this is the problem about sobieties with Socrates. It’s exactly what the problem is, right? And Plato wrestled with this extremely beautiful, talented person who’s attracted to Socrates, but he’s more attracted to power, and he of course becomes one of the most corrupt people in Athenian history. Yeah, and so what do you think should be done about that? Again, we’ve got to somehow change. Yeah, so we- Like I feel we careen between two poles, and this is again a pattern in our culture right now. We’re doing everything we can to eradicate violence. We talked about this earlier, from people’s lives completely. And then on the other hand, we glorify a virtuosity of violence that has been completely severed from virtue. And then we wonder why we’re facing a lot of the problematics we have, and a lot of the problems we have around violence in our culture. Yeah, it’s the… Again, it seems to reflect that problem of the externalization of the virtue. So they’re always… The virtuosity is always seen separately, right? And it becomes embodied in a very handful of, a small handful of specialists, right? So again, the best MMA fighters today are probably the best hand-to-hand combat specialists in the history of human beings, at least for their specific task, right? But the general competence in rough and tumble play has never been lower, right? Improvered. Improvered, right? It’s impoverished. And it’s impoverished in a way that it’s actually eroding of our capacity to interact and interrelate with other human beings as well. So we don’t need more Conor McGregors, not just on the personal level of his virtue, but even his skill level. We need more people who can just grapple with each other. Yes. And so again, we’re in this, this how do we cultivate the type of virtuous person and then how do we create systems that are less eroding, right? I was watching the one championships and I was noticing how respectful all the fighters are to each other. And that this feels different than you have seen it before. And that this feels different from the UFC now. And it used to be more typical of the UFC. And it’s like, it is possible, right? It is possible to build cultures that are more like that. But there’s, yeah, there’s these weird reciprocal things where we kind of have, as individual practitioners, as coaches, we have to sort of try to make our students those types of people and recognize that we’re gonna fail sometimes. And then hopefully those types of people are the type of people who will support a fighter who shows grace in victory and defeat and who has care for their opponent and be less supportive of the fighters who are great at trash talking and are disrespectful of their opponents and more importantly, the people in their lives, which is all too often. So I think, I’m not sure how we got off on the stage, but I’m trying to wrap it back to the starting point because I think it’s important. But I have one back, which is, I mean, the two things we’ve been talking about were directed towards the two sides of that imbalanced equation. Return to the source was, what’s it look like to deeply properly reintegrate virtuosity and virtue and help people to cultivate wisdom and meaning in life? And then we went to respond and how can we build these colleges of practices into a community of communities that might actually become a subculture, a viable subculture for people? We were actually addressing both sides of this imbalanced equation and trying to rebalance the equation to my mind. That’s what was happening. Yeah, I think that’s true. It’s a good way to look at it. I do think that the practices that I’ve set up, I think that they are kind of a uniquely powerful set of practices for that cultivation of personal virtue. I think that there’s something in parkour, something in martial arts, something in dance that is necessary and that we need to then put that in a relationship to these higher order principles and this understanding of the goal of gaining meaning in life and creating the type of systems that can afford that to more people. And then that has to be in relationship to how do we solve some of these system wide things that are, you know, one of the central paradoxes of my life is my primary marketing tool is social media. Yes. Which is quite possibly the greatest, super weapon of foolishness. Ever been developed, right? Like there’s an asymmetry of power in social media between the capacity to propagate wisdom and to propagate foolishness. Yes. So even though there’s lots of wisdom available on social media, you and I know each other because of YouTube. The way the system’s set up, it incentivizes the propagation of foolishness. Yes, it does. Yes. So when you interact with that ecology, you can be propagating wisdom through that ecology, but necessarily you are feeding faggots to the, sorry. That’s a, I don’t mean that in a certain way. I’m using old school language here. The bundles of wood. The wood to the fire of foolishness. And then, so that’s a really difficult thing to do well. That’s kind of the main thing. One of the big things that I’m personally wrestling with right now is how to address that relationship right because, and this was also a big topic at the Respond Project. Yes, very much so. Right. Telecommunications are the, you might say that telecommunications are the systems that empower the capacity for collective intelligence. Yes. Right. And we need good systems of collective intelligence in order to manage the problems that we face. Yes, yes. So we have to somehow begin this process of scaling up individual virtue. And as extraordinary as my system is, like it’s really limited in a way. Think about it because we take 20 students per event. Yeah. We’re teaching three events this year and that’s really hard. Like these three events alone are really extraordinarily, like I’m recognizing how deeply costly it is to me to facilitate these. Like as wonderful as they are, as incredible as they are, it’s like, it’s exhausting. And luckily there’s Aaron and Robert and Kyle and those guys we can start to propagate it out, but it’s a long-term play, right? It’s the type of thing that’s gonna have to be fueled up over a very long time to really affect some of these systems. And then it’s got this poison pill inside it, which is that to get the students there, even this group of 20 students generally is requiring this tool that is bringing foolishness into my life, that’s disconnection into my life, right? Like when I put up a video, I’m getting better at this, but for years I would really notice this. When I could have really successful video, I have some videos on Facebook that have like 500,000 views. I’m so addicted to my phone after one of my pieces goes viral. For weeks I’m just like checking that, because I’ve been so entrained by the software that there’s a reward waiting for me if I get this. I know what you mean. I mean, part of it is rational. Part of it is you wanna see if there’s fallout you have to respond to, things like that. And so, but yeah, but there’s also a part that’s just- Part of it’s rational, but I mean, I noticed it when I would be driving and I would arrive at a stop sign and my hand would pull my phone out or my conscious mind recognized what was happening. Like the system hadn’t trained me. And it does directly interfere with the things that actually matter most to me, which is my training, my family, right? So that’s my practices, my family, my personal friendships. It’s like if your device becomes hyper salient to you, it’s actually interfering with the signals from all the other connections that are most important in your life. So, yeah. But I mean, I’m not trying to undermine what you said, but it was really the case that there were several people at return to the source because of awakening from the meeting crisis. Yeah, absolutely. And so there’s a possibility of making it work somehow. That’s what I put in my- Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we talked about this at a respond project as well. Yeah, yeah. Like how many of the connections at respond project are directly due to social media of some kind? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think YouTube is actually much healthier than Twitter or Facebook. Oh, oh, for sure, for sure. Because it affords now, I mean, it wasn’t originally, but it affords now long-term and long form patterns of discourse. And yes, very much so. I try to have a very functional relationship with Twitter and that’s the only other one. Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s just, I just automatically broadcast them through this other software. So I don’t even go on them at all. It’s a smart way to do it. I’m trying to get to the point where I’ve got all those things automated as possible. So I can get myself one degree of remove from it. Yeah. But, so I don’t know that I have the solution for this, but I think it’s just a really important question to look at, which is, we need, is it possible to have, well, it is possible clearly to have social media that guides us more towards, that doesn’t have this asymmetry of wisdom foolishness, right? Yeah, that’s right. I agree. A lie travels the entire world before the truth gets off the starting line. Right. Right. And Twitter is, amplifies that tremendously. Yes. But that doesn’t have to be the case, I don’t think. I think there are structural reasons why that has been chosen by the engineers. I think that’s where Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmackenberger and Zach Stein, they are really looking at these systems. So I do think that there is a potential for that to be done much more virtuously. But I think part of, I think part of the message of Return to the Source is that we crave to live in the real world, not the metaverse. Yes, yes. And we need, I’m gonna say something that is potentially controversial here. I think that the traditional religions aren’t very good technology for getting people out of the metaverse and into the embodied real space. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial. I think it’s, one of my criticisms of them is the degree to which they have moved towards reducing being embodied and being embedded in colleges and practices. And also the degree to which their fundamental grammar of how they construct ritual and how they construct community just has been codified often in a way that massively, the Protestants are the closest because they emerged during the printing press. And so, right? But they’re not ready for social media because they didn’t emerge at that time. And so, I’ve said this before, one of the great, for all the respect I have for the legacy religions is that they do not provide me with evidence right now that they are in any way interacting with social media and other emerging technologies in any kind of innovative fashion that says, oh my gosh, right. That’s how you bring spirituality into social media. I do not see it happening at all. I’m not saying that individual people aren’t doing it. I think Paul Vanderley. I think Kajow and Bishop Barron. Yeah, yeah. Jordan Peterson. Yes, but exactly. But what I’m talking about is I’m talking about at the institutional level. I just don’t see that happening. I don’t see that happening. Yeah, so I think, yeah, we need this. I think, I don’t know. I think that the question of how to negotiate the relationship between the legacy religions and the religion that is not a religion is a really difficult question. Yeah, and you and I differ on that to some people slightly. Maybe. I don’t know that I completely, my thoughts are still not fully developed, let’s say, but I have some skepticism. Yeah, you do. And Paul and Jonathan do too. And I take them seriously. I hope people at least believe that. I think, seriously, I try to respond to them not just in theory, but also in practice and creating practices. Yeah, but yeah. The legacy religions have a lot of advantages in terms of sort of tried and true. And they’ve learned how to scale and they’ve learned how to transfer outside of their particular. But as we just said, they’re not as good at this as they used to be and they don’t seem to be figuring out how to transfer into social media. I also have this question, I guess, right now that’s coming up to me, which is the tendency towards Gnosticism that seems to be intrinsic to, it seems to be intrinsic to everything that’s post axial revolution in the West and also at least in India, right? It seems to happen in India. I can’t speak as comfortably about the Chinese and Japanese traditions, but I think we can definitely say that the Hindu and a Buddhist tradition is very antibody in a lot of ways, right? We were just at a Zen monastery, right? The end of the meditation that is done before every meal is we shall not be born again into this world. Then renunciation of the world is the point. And this is one reason why, you asked me why I identify as a non-theistic Christian. Because in Christianity, I see the reclamation of embodiment even though Christianity has very frequently failed to live up to the promise. Yeah, I agree. But if what we’ve postulated in this conversation is correct, right? Meaning in life is from being well-attuned into these relationships within the self, body, mind, self to environment, self to social relationships, self to higher powers in past and future. That’s actually about drilling into here. It’s not about going there. Yes, I agree. And to your point, social media tends to exacerbate at least certain versions of Gnosticism. I don’t wanna play all of those on brush. But what, and I can’t remember who said it, the fully automated luxury Gnosticism. Yeah, Mary Harrington. Mary Harrington and how we are increasingly trying to escape from our embodiment. Again, people not realizing how this is ancient, when they think it’s new and radical. It’s like, no, no, this is an ancient idea. Yeah, I share that critique with you because I do believe strongly with good reason in for E. coxii. And I guess, I mean, the thing is you can see, even Platonism, Neoplatonism, which had that tendency, when, but Plotinus actually confronts the Gnostics directly and he writes about, no, no, we’re not that. Like when he’s actually given the alternative, he goes, no, no, we’re not that. Creation isn’t evil. The world isn’t evil. The body isn’t evil. So yeah, there is the possibility of reconnecting the whole Neoplatonic, Neoplatonic Christian heritage back deeply to embodiment. But again, I don’t see the institutions undertaking that task. No. I see individuals doing it, very much so. So I think there’s a, I have a hypothesis, I guess, that’s generating for me in this conversation, which is something like our technologies actually reveal the stories that we have invested ourselves in. Right? The metaverse exists. The metaverse is growing because we’re invested in the story of the transcendence out of the embodied world. Yes. But the reverse is also the case, the Heideggerian idea of in framing, Einstein, right? Not Einstein, what is it? I can’t remember the German word. But the idea is, but we also internalize, and I’ve said in the history of cognitive science, right? We were compared to telephone networks and then to computers and then to dynamical system. And we just, we keep comparing ourselves to our most prevalent technology as well. So it’s back. It also feeds back. Another reciprocal causal loop. Yeah, exactly. So there’s this, it’s like there’s this dream of escape. I call it it. I think of it in reference to sort of like, we all have to go to Mars or we all have to transcend into the metaverse. I call that escape eschatology. Yeah. But let’s say that that’s just a local modern species of this tendency towards escape metaphysics. That’s 4,000 years old, 3,000 years old, right? It’s continued to, it’s been this dream that we’ve continued to have. And by the way, just one quick, because that’s another way, it’s occurred to me of distinguishing the imaginary from the imaginal. The imaginary is not only directed away from the world, but it is escapist in orientation, where the imaginal is imagination for the enhancement of perception, and it helps recovery in token sense of the recovery. So yeah, we, and I think our culture has lost the imaginal and we’ve become overindulgent in the imaginary in a very powerful way. Yeah. Because there is something too. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the talk I gave on Gnosis, right? The existential entrapment. You can get existential inertia, you can get existential ignorance, you can be entrapped and Gnosis, and Gnosticism appeals to that. But again, it doesn’t have to be escapist. It doesn’t have to be imaginary escapism. It can be imaginal recovery. Yeah, I remember in Awakening from the Meaning of Crisis, you talk about Gnosis as, the concept of Gnosis is that it’s a way that the concept of Gnosis is something that has to be recovered in the system of- Totally, totally, totally. Even though Gnosticism as a system has this persistent flaw, there’s an insight within it that’s necessary. Right, and I even think it’s possible for people who are attracted to Gnosticism, they could reorient it as an imaginal thing that gets them out of existential entrapment as opposed to an imaginary thing that helps them escape the bonds of physical reality or some ridiculous proposal like that. Well, I’m even saying, I think there’s even, I’m proposing that there’s even a possibility within Gnosticism for a way in which it could be a livable, viable thing for people. It doesn’t have to be fully automated Gnosticism. It’s escapist. It could be, no, no, we’ll take all of the Gnostic stuff and we will reappropriate it as imaginal recovery rather than an imaginary escape. Yeah, I think of, there’s a conversation I think between Jonathan Peugeot and Damien Walters on Rebel Wisdom. Yes, Damien’s excellent. That inspired, I have a bone to pick with him because he likes the New Rings of Power Show, so I’m not very happy with him right now. But, but it inspired me, it helped me articulate this idea that I had of like, the opposite of the escape eschatology is the mythos of recovery. Yes, yes, yes. And Rach, that’s what I saw in the rituals that returned to the source, right? And that’s why I think there was no discomfort in many of the students saying, yes, it was a religious ritual, but it wasn’t imaginary escapism or alternative metaphysics, it was imaginal recovery of a profound religio, ratio religio, like in the four dimensions you’ve been talking about. Yeah, there was no creedal component, right? It wasn’t like, you know, to go through the waterfall, you have to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. But you did use the language of baptism, right? And people were singing a hymn, right? Yeah, we were singing. Yeah, we weren’t just singing, you were singing a hymn. Right, we were singing a hymn. Yes, absolutely. So, but what we’re trying to do is, is recognize how those things are social technologies that really give us the power to transform. We’re also recognizing that they have an actually an inherent danger. Exactly, exactly. This is just another, this is a species of the genus that the very things that make us adaptive make us prone to self-deception. Yes, the superficial similarity of the imaginal recovery and the imaginary escape make it a perennial threat that as we pursue the needed imaginal, we will slip into the deleterious imaginary. Yeah, I mean, as human beings, I think we have a need to subsume ourselves into something larger. Yes, yes. And so, we are both one thing and many things. Yes. And we are also one with things that are beyond us. And the experience of being one with things that are beyond us is profound and deeply meaningful for people. Yes, yes. But it also deludes us. Yes, yes. It deludes us and it catalyzes group identities or group intelligences that can be parasitic. Yes. And destructive, right? Yeah, but this is what you and I, at Respond, we were talking about discerning the spirits as an essential part of wisdom. Exactly, exactly. But- But we’re doing that ritual. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We’re doing that ritual. We’re very intentionally, in some sense, catalyzing a spirit of the group. Yes, yes, yes. And- And you’re doing something deeply imaginal. It really is. Yes, yes. And my sense is that to do that safely, that we need to, one, make sure that the spirit is not localized in an individual. Excellent, excellent, yes. So that the higher order principle doesn’t become conflated with me as the teacher. Also, the group doesn’t think of itself as the special elect amongst all of humanity. I noticed that that was never, never approached at all and I was very grateful for that because I was brought up with that language too. We are the elect, we are the chosen ones, we are the ones, right? You could do that too. It doesn’t have to, it doesn’t, that, that doesn’t, that parasitic thing doesn’t have to ground just in an individual. It can ground in a group as well. Yeah, and that has a lot to do with being aspirationally oriented rather than negatively oriented. Yeah, yes. So you need to talk about the problems that what you’re doing is trying to address. But you want to be very careful about the way that you do that such that the group identity isn’t catalyzed by othering something and making it. Well said, well said, well said. Yeah, well exemplified at return to the source. And so that’s, you know, yeah, it seems it works, you know, like I, as we approach those things, you know, you can get a sense of this power that’s happening, right? And kind of like things get more powerful over time as we cultivate an understanding of the different pieces that are available to us and what people are seeking. And every time it feels like we’ve kind of like hit a new level of power, there’s always this aspect of me that’s like, ooh, okay. Like am I, am I pure enough of heart? Exactly, yes. To be taking people to this place. Yes, yes, yes. Because yeah, if there’s a shadow in me, right? Then it has like a real potential to colonize. Yeah. When something like that’s catalyzed. I thought there was a tremendous amount of self-awareness and self-reflection and openness to self-correction amongst all the teachers. And I also thought that was the same case with the leaders respond. I mean, initially people will like, we’re in their thing, but you know, but we, and you and Aaron were particularly helpful with the movement practices breaking us out. But towards the end, people were no, no, no, let’s, let’s really, it was genuine, you know, the emergence of genuine dialogos in many of the meetings. And so again, I think it, I think it’s possible. I don’t think we’re saying, I think this is a real worry, but I don’t think we also have to despair in the face of it. No, absolutely not. I mean, I think, yeah. It’s, it’s, I have been scarred by my childhood, right? And perhaps to the good in the long term, because I’ve ended up in a position where I am taking on these roles, where I’m taking people through these types of experiences that are deeply connecting, deeply religious, deeply spiritual, you might say. And if I wasn’t very aware of the failure points of those, I might easily stumble into them. Yeah. It was funny, I forget who I was talking to about this. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was talking to you about this. Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll be posting his video, not this week, but next week. But he said, he’s now a university chaplain, but he did work on forgiveness. And he talked about forgiveness, not primarily like, you know, feeling this way or forgetting. He said, he actually was arguing that that’s not, that’s not the Christian model. And it’s actually not psychologically plausible. He said, instead, what you do is, he said you bear the wounds. You come to a place, you, first of all, you have to forgive in the sense of give yourself a head. You bear the wounds in the hope that you will grow from them and appreciate the fact that you were wounded. And so that moment that you just did was actually what he would call genuine forgiveness. You can come to say, well, that was hell. And I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but I’m glad I went through that because I wouldn’t be able to be, I wouldn’t be able to exemplify the virtues needed in this particular situation. I found that that has been part of my reconciliation with my particular religious upbringing too. That those, like you, in a very convergent way, those wounds sensitized me to certain risks and I’m grateful for them. Not that I, again, not that I would put my worst enemy through what happened to me, but nevertheless, and this goes along with something that’s very analogous that he and I talked about. Sorry, I can’t remember your name, his name, but grief is like that. One of the wisest people I’ve met in my life, he said to me, don’t get involved deeply with anybody who has not experienced grief because you ultimately can’t trust them because only people who have gone through grief and grown out of it have an access to a depth of humanity and resiliency that makes them more trustworthy than people who have never had to reach into that resource and I have found that profoundly good advice. I have found that profoundly good and it’s the same kind of thing. The way in which we can come to a kind of forgiveness and a proper grieving about the past so that we can be grateful of how it has tutored us for the present. I think that’s also very, very important. It’s a very important part of this. I’m kind of a little bit wary of people who, well, I take that advice. I mean, one of the reasons why, you’ve talked to me about why you trust me, but one of the reasons I trust you is because I know you have gone through wounding and grief and you’ve turned it into growth and for me, I’m following the advice I was given about, oh, that’s a person I should trust because they are more likely more trustworthy. Well, I think that brings up an interesting pedagogical point. It takes us back to the beginning of the conversation which is that there’s a certain amount of exposure to realness that is necessary to become the type of person who’s virtuous and trustworthy. This is my sense of why parkour is so profound right now, why martial arts are so profound. I find it hard to trust people who’ve never been punched in the face. Yeah, which I have been by the way. Because there’s a sense that there’s a, you know that these things are possible but you don’t know what they’re like. Yes, yes. And that groping for knowledge often results in very bad, just extremely incorrect models, right? And so we don’t want our children to suffer unnecessarily. We don’t want our students to suffer unnecessarily but we also can’t protect them from all the suffer. So I’ve been taking my kids to an all commerce track and fielding, right? And I have very physically talented kids. You’ve been around. Yes, I know. It’s like, well, here I am, clambering over rocks and Audrey is just being being being along. And like that really, yeah, yeah, they’re very talented, very confident and rightly so. Yeah, so, you know, my son won 10 of his 14 sprints that he races, right? And then he lost some, right? And you know, one time he lost because his sister ran into the lane, well, into his lane. She was playing on the sidelines and he was absolutely just destroyed, right? He was so emotionally upset by this. And, you know, I was talking to my wife and it’s like, you know, it’d be wonderful if he was so talented that he never lost, right? Like maybe he just like, if we wanted to signal that he’s gonna be a future Olympic athlete, right? Like he should just be blowing past all the kids his age, right? But he’s not, he’s just better than most kids, right? Which is great too. But ultimately it’s like, if you want him to be an Olympic athlete, you want him to win every time. Yeah. If you want him to be a great human being, you don’t want him to win every time. No, no. Experience loss. He has to experience loss sometimes and that’s why we’re exposing them to a lot of it. So then my cousin came and he brought his child and she did a sprint and she didn’t perform particularly well and she, you know, she got a participant ribbon and she was really upset that she didn’t get the red ribbon, which isn’t the winner’s ribbon, but she wanted the red ribbon. That was the ribbon she wanted. And he was like, well, he should just give all the kids the same ribbon. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely not because the negative emotion is a core part of the learning process. And it’s so much better for them to experience it here now in a place where they are protected, where they have what they need, right? Than to wait, right? I had a student once who had came from an incredibly sedentary physical background. He had played video games his life, his family’s, you know, he was very much a video game kid. He’d been very sort of sheltered and he sprained his ankle in class. And it was the type of ankle sprain where he was walking fine the next day. It was not a, you know, catastrophic ankle sprain. But he actually went into shock, right? Right, because he hadn’t experienced anything like that. He never had pain. He was 14 years old and he never experienced the type of pain that’s associated with even a minor ankle tweak. But having not experienced that when he was little, his system had become hyper reactive by the time he was an adult. I’m reading the Cuddling of the American Mind right now by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Malkianoff, but this is really a core point, right? We have to expose our children to enough stressors that they become anti-fragile, right? Keir has experienced what it’s like to lose. Yeah. Now that can be really emotionally challenging. And so now he’s the type of person who has a little bit more ability to navigate those waters for himself. Yeah, and I wanna bring it back to return the source. And as you know, I was there and then I sort of significantly injured myself on basically the first full day. And there was an initial, and I could feel the physiology of shock. And then I sort of did stuff too. And then Aaron came over and there was support. And then it was like, no, no. I mean, I wasn’t gonna be foolish. I wasn’t gonna do just pretend it wasn’t there. But I went back into things because, right? The part of it was I was saying to myself, no, no, no. Like I committed myself that I was gonna try everything that I was afraid of, other than stuff that was outright prohibited by my man ears and know it. And I went right back into it. Now, I’m not claiming all credit. Part of it was Aaron, he came over. He was extremely helpful and supportive. You were there too, and that made a big difference. But nevertheless, it was also exactly what you’re talking about. It’s like, cause I had set myself propositionally, you’re gonna get injured. And then I wanted, and so part of me was saying, look, you knew this, you knew this. Now act like you know it. Like act like you know this, right? And then do what’s needed to keep going in an appropriate manner. And for me, that was also really, really powerful because I kept doing things, even though I was injured, with people’s help. You were helping me on that rope climb like tremendously because my left arm was not doing very well. I was also scared because of veneers. But still I did it precisely because of exactly the point you’re making. I’m saying I explicitly had sort of did that. It’s like, no, no, no. Like here’s an opportunity to teach yourself in a literally visceral fashion that you can be injured and not be knocked out of the aspiration. Yes, yeah. Yeah, the complexity of bearing the wound, right? Yes, exactly. Can you grow strong enough to bear the wound? Yeah, exactly. That’s what we need to do in some sense is, we can’t protect ourselves or our students or our children from being wounded. Like life, life. Yeah. This is, I think, one of the really beautiful things about Jordan Peterson’s model, this idea that like, there’s no paradise that’s so secure that there’s not snakes in. Yes. Right, and as long as we are chasing that, we’re deluded. Right, it doesn’t mean that we can’t build a beautiful walled garden, but we have to build ourselves into dragon slayers inside the garden. I think that’s beautifully well said. My friend, I think we should wrap this up. I think we did come full circle and I think it was, this was a really rich and powerful discussion and I think we touched well on both return to the source and respond. And so, like always, I want to give my guests the opportunity for the last word before I stop the recording. So, any last words you might have. They don’t have to be summative, they can just be like reflection or whatever, but you have the last word. Thank you. I guess that would be my first thing. Well, thank you, too. I think it’s been three years that we’ve known each other online. Yep, yep. So to get to spend like over two weeks with you this summer was really meaningful to me. Very much so to me, too. So yeah, I’m looking forward to the continuation of our friendship. People who are watching this, if you’re curious about coming to the event, we will be starting to sell it sometime in October. So you can message me now to get on the wait list. Also check out the documentary that’s coming out on Rebel Business Channel with John and myself, that also includes footage from return to the source. I think it’s gonna be, I’m very excited about it. I think it’s gonna be- Yeah, yeah, really good footage. Sorry, I interrupted. No, that’s great. So I think that’s gonna be a really cool thing for everyone who’s in this space, in this corner of the internet. You said something at the beginning, which was you believed in what I was doing, right? And you understood it in a way, but it was different after you came to return to the source. Very much so. And of course it has to be, right? Because that’s your model is that Yeah, yeah. perspectival knowledge are the base, right? So it doesn’t matter how congruent the propositions feel to you. You don’t know it. You can’t speak to it in an embodied sense fully until you’ve experienced it. And that was why it was so important to have you come to me. Yeah, totally, totally. I want people to do that because I think that that, again, we’re talking about the structural problems of the systems that we operate within. This corner of the internet has put this wonderful conversation around wisdom that is taking place primarily between talking heads, exchanging propositions. Yes, yes, yes. And it needs to ground into people sharing practices and rituals and life so that they can have an embodied sense of what those virtues really are and they can share them between each other in a much higher bandwidth way. And so I want to invite everyone who’s watching this, who’s really dedicated to this project that you have put out of overcoming the meeting crisis to ask, can they come to an event like mine? It doesn’t have to be mine though. It can be Thunder Bay. It can be Lehmann-Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey, I believe, are doing an event coming up. Yep, I’ve been promoting that too, yep, very much. So I want to just encourage everybody who’s paying attention to this to recognize that for this thing to fulfill its potential, it has to move past talking heads and propositions into embodied experiences. So that’s my last word. And it is a very good and well-spoken last word. Thank you so much, my dear friend. Thank you, John.