Can We Still Trust Reality? How AI Is Changing Truth Forever | John Vervaeke - PT 2

Tom Bilyeu raises intriguing questions about the socio-political landscape, leadership, and the role of narrative and skepticism in creating meaningful connections. We also touch on the alarming rise in youth suicide, the risky interaction between young minds and AI, and the potential for AI to exploit our quest for meaning. John’s reflections on ancient Greek philosophy and the importance of rational dialogue offer valuable lessons for our modern age, providing a hopeful outlook on how we might navigate and overcome today’s crises. So sit back, tune in, and let's explore the frontiers of human cognition and the pathways to deeper, more meaningful lives. This is going to be an episode you won’t want to miss! SHOWNOTES 00:00 Bullshit jeopardizes meaning by disregarding truth. 09:09 Beliefs depend on trusted, credible influences. 12:27 Developing minds misusing A. I. like dangerous tools. 17:50 Concerns about bias in AI's influence. 24:42 Misframing blocks solutions; insight reveals deceptions. 29:46 Balancing bias, variance: avoiding overfitting in ML. 36:39 Evaluating context and bias in problem-solving. 41:29 Evolution hardwires cultural response mechanisms algorithmically. 47:15 AI understands patterns contextually, hypothesizes author. 52:56 Align machines with truth, beauty, meaning, God. 54:55 Creating autonomous machines requires significant energy resources. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com/ Miro: Bring your teams to Miro’s revolutionary Innovation Workspace and be faster from idea to outcome at https://miro.com https://miro.com/. Legal Zoom: Launch, run, and protect your business at https://www.legalzoom.com/ – use promo code 'IMPACT' for 10% off! Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business: join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call  Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/0482bfe8-8502-11ed-af5d-3bdc320068d7/podcasts/0a41f61a-9ddf-11ed-9eb7-dbb3a40775f5/episodes/8ac68366-8a85-11ef-bb65-abca3ffdcf54/www.twitch.tv/tombilyeuwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby. And then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University. And the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. Let's dive right back into part two with John Vervaeke. What do you think about the following truth? So you've laid out the idea that we want to be connected to what's real. I talk a lot about this is about building a better prediction engine. When I think about any, certainly from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you're always trying to figure out what's true.

• 1:31Tom Bilyeu?

  I think we're terrible at it, but anyway, it's a useful aim because it increases your ability to predict the outcome of your actions. Then I met somebody who had a brother who was schizophrenic. And he believed that he was being pursued by the French government.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And every day for him was like a spy novel. And he was just running from place to place, trying to stay away from them and make sure they couldn't intercept his thoughts. And they finally got him on treatment and he became depressed because his life was boring.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03Tom Bilyeu?

  And so he ended up going off of his medication again. And as the, you know, medicine was still in the system, but he had decided not to take it anymore. He said, "I would rather be schizophrenic and living an exciting life than be bored."

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Okay, now, Tom, that goes exactly to what I was arguing for earlier. You have the predictive processing machine, but what's going on? But remember I said you always have to integrate it with the relevance realization? There's a growing consensus that what's going on are these two things within the schizophrenic.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  You have the predictive processing machine trying to make sense of a what's called salience dysregulation. The salience network, what is being marked for attention and perception as relevant is not functioning properly for these people. So they have this very aberrant salience landscape. And what they have, it's actually called schizophrenic insight. They get an insight in square care quotes that makes sense, that gives the predictive processing, the anticipation for that skewed salience landscape. And that's why they have this bizarre thing they're living in. Now, what the medication does, right, is it flattens the affect.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  It flattens the salience landscape, but you don't want that either. You want a salience landscape that is rich and evolving. And so what you do is you debilitate these people. And the problem also is, even though you've now flattened the salience landscape, the belief network from the predictive processing machinery is still all in place. You haven't disrupted that. It's still looking around for the world that it works in. You haven't done what you need to do. So it actually means that what you have to do is you have to simultaneously, you have to much more carefully calibrate the disruption in the salience landscape,

• 4:02Speaker 01

  encoupled, and you have to couple that with restructuring the predictive processing machinery. So they better fit together and the person will find that viable such that they will, and I'm using this word deliberately, care about it and be invested in it. That's not what we're doing with our current treatment.

• 4:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do psychedelics, not tied to schizophrenics, but why do psychedelics have a profound impact on the salience network such that people come out of it oftentimes wildly transformed?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they make you epistemically vulnerable, right?

• 4:35Tom Bilyeu?

  What does that mean?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  What that means is you come out wildly transformed, but it can go, it can go towards growth and it can also go towards self-destructive. So although psychedelics aren't sort of biochemically addictive.

• 4:49Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say epistemically vulnerable, do you mean that you're not sure what is true?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  So what, no, no, what happens is you're in a state, okay.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  So think about it this way. Remember when you like I have, I've misconstrued a situation. I've misframed it. What I have to do is I have to first break that frame. Right? And so when I'm broken a frame, I'm now in a position of vulnerability because now I need, I have to now make an alternative frame. There's, there's actually, I talk about this in the book on about insight, problem solving. There's this cycle. You have to break an inappropriate frame and then you have to also craft, make a new frame that replaces it. Now, when you, what psychedelics do basically is they do massive frame breaking. And then they put you in a state where there's a lot of things are open for you.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Remember when I was talking about the bias variance problem and you get overfitting to the data? Yep. So your brain is in a lot of ways overfitted. This is why you also, this, this is plausibly why you dream. Dreams are, you're throwing noise into the system to break all that framing up and open up the possibilities. So you're a little less overfitted. You can explore more possibility space. Psychedelics do that, but they do it, right? And so now you're in this, you're in this, you're in this state where you've done a lot of massive frame breaking and you can explore a lot of the possibility space. And so things seem very, very pregnant with possibility for you.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Now, it really depends, and this is why we're increasingly, you hear people increasingly talking about set and setting. You have to have the proper mental set, the proper framing. You have to write the right context setting. I would add two more S's. You, you need a good sapiential, that has to do with wisdom. You need, you need a lot of skills for dealing with self-deception. And you need some sort of, you need some sort of story. You need an overarching worldview that can accommodate these anomalous experiences. If you have all of those, then you'll make frame in a way that actually plugs you, it's like the fantasy novel where you go in and you come back and recover this world and see more deeply into it.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  But if you just break frame and you don't have those four S's, you will gravitate to anything that, like the schizophrenic, that will make sense of that aberrant salience landscape. And so like a schizophrenic, you can go into a paranoid narrative. You can tunnel into weird rabbit hole metaphysics. You can get involved in conspir sexuality.

• 7:27Tom Bilyeu?

  I was li- literally typing or writing age of conspiracy. So I think we're living in the age of conspiracy right now.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, uh, sure. Some people are doing psychedelics, but I don't think that's the big cause. So what is it if that's one way to break the frame and give you nothing back? What is it about modern life that's broken our collective frame of reference and left so many people to chase so many conspiracies?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  The meaning crisis. That's a way of understanding what they're not connected to what's real. They're not what they, so what the meaning crisis means is, right? Do you have a like, do you have an ecology of practices? What do I mean by that? There's because of the bias variance trade off that I talked about earlier. There's no one practice. This is called the no free lunch theorem. This is formally proven. There's no one thing you can do to alleviate all your self deception. That was part of what I was talking about earlier, about no one algorithm kind of thing.

• 8:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Right? So what you know, you need and what you see in like wisdom traditions like Buddhism with the eight spoke path. Right. The eight spoke wheel. You need a bunch of different practices that are complementary. They have complementary strengths and weaknesses. So they, they play off against each other and they play with those trade offs between bias and variance, explore and exploit. So for example, just, just quickly, like I, I want to meditate a practice. I'll use this for my framing, my glasses. And normally I'm not aware of my framing. I'm aware through it. But in meditation, what you do is you learn to step back and look at your framing and note, hey, wait, look at that. That's crap. That's distorting my vision. I'll fix that.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  But that's not, I need something else. I need to know if I can now see better. So I need to do the opposite, the opponent processing. I need to now put on my glasses and see if I can see more deeply into reality. That's contemplative practices and I need to move back and forth. I. Constantly going between them in a self-correcting fashion. And also, you need seated mindfulness practices, like meditation and contemplation, that are in opponent processing with moving practices like Tai Chi Chuan, that are getting you to practice mindfulness within movement between flowing in and flowing out with your environment. So, people need an ecology of practices. They also need those credible individuals that can act as exemplars to them.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Remember, we talked about you internalize people. They become part of your reflective capacity, your ability to reflect on yourself. You get through in-dwelling other people and then internalizing them. You need role models and you need them to be in, like, embedded in a story and a tradition that gives you an overarching worldview, telling you how basically we all agreed we're gonna fundamentally make sense of things. And what used to do that wisdom cultivation were religious frameworks. I'm not here advocating for religion. That's not what I'm here. I'm talking about a historical phenomenon. Cross, and when I mean religion, I don't mean Abrahamic religion exclusively. That's an ethnocentric bias.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I mean things like that other people might call philosophies, like Buddhism and Taoism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism. I mean things that give you ecologies of practices, moral and wisdom exemplars, powerful narratives in which and through which you can identify.

• 10:54Tom Bilyeu?

  And without that, you're just gonna grab on to whatever.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  You're gonna grab on and you're gonna be, and you're gonna be radically, epistemically vulnerable. The frames are all broken and you're gonna grab on, "Oh, it's the, it's, it's the world of a video game." Or, "It's this world that the LLM is creating with me." Or, "It's some weird messed up conspirituality." And it's called conspirituality for a reason, right? When Julian Evans sort of magnified that term. It's a mixture of conspiracy theory and this spirituality, this fundamental identification and this big picture alignment and adherence. You're gonna, that's, that's what's driving the meaning crisis, right? So, it, not only does the meaning crisis cause...

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Right, that massive epistemic vulnerability. These things now emerge, all of these symptoms, the loneliness, the depression, the anxiety, the increased rates of addiction, the over identification with mythological worlds, the weird thing that everybody is deeply disenfranchised by politics, but everything is politicized with a religious fervor. Right, all of this then feeds back and exacerbates the meaning crisis. And that's what we're in the midst of.

• 12:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, uh, one, is this a unique moment in time? Or do we move through these meaning crises throughout history? And two, how do we get out of this moment? You've already been clear about you need this ecology of practices, but I'll just tell you the vast majority of humans are never going to do it. I know enough about your cycle and all the different things you do. Just the average person just isn't going to do it. So if this is a pattern that's repeated in history, how have we pulled ourselves out in the past and how are we going to do it now?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Right, and I'll answer both of those concerns with, uh, at once. We have done this before in the West. It was called the Hellenistic period. So you've got Alexander's empire basically unites most of civilization. I'm not talking about India and China, but a lot, you know, a lot of the world. And, and he does something very powerful. He, he brings the, he creates a, that Hellenic, he Hellenizes, the Hellenic culture goes everywhere, right? That was part of the project. Okay.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And then that world breaks up because he's dies before he, he appoints an heir. And what it breaks up is it breaks up into smaller kingdoms that are constantly fighting each other. So I want to, I want to compare, right? A person who's living just before, uh, Alexander, Aristotle, the time of Aristotle, person who taught Alexander and somebody who's living in the time a hundred years after Alexander, when all these kingdoms are fighting. Okay, you're in Aristotle's time. You live in one place and your ancestors have lived there a long time. Everybody around you is also the same. You all speak the same language. You all worship the same gods.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  You have a terrific sense of identity with this. Polis, right? You, you, this is where we get the word political from, but it didn't mean what we mean now by political. It means this tremendous, the greatest penalty in the, the ancient Greek world was ostracizing people, not killing them, forcing them to live outside of the polis was just, we, we, we think, why is ostracized, being ostracized so bad? I'll leave Toronto, I'll move to Savannah, who cares? No, this is horrible. This is a horrifying prospect. Okay, so that's the world of Aristotle. Now you're in the world after Alexander. You might, you have probably moved to this place. There's people around you that also, their ancestors don't come from this place.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  They speak different language, they worship different deities than you do. Different history, different tradition, different customs. When you're in Aristotle's time, you know the people in power. You literally live in the same city as them. You could even be invested and involved in the government. The time after Alexander, the rulers live thousands of kilometers away from you.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Everything that gave you a sense of belonging and being at home is totally lost. And so this is known as an age of anxiety. And you see the art and everything changing. And you can see the rise of a tremendous sense of ill ease in this period. Now what happens is a change in philosophy.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  The philosopher becomes the physician of the psyche. And epicurus, call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. And addressing.

• 15:44Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a good quote.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, addressing this anxiety, right? Gets.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Sort of layered on to all the previous projects of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And so you get the emergence of the Epicureans and the Stoics and the cynics and the skeptics. Doesn't mean what we mean by skeptic. And eventually the Neoplatonists who draw it all together. You get these philosophies that are attempts to deal with everything we have been talking about here. They are attempts to ameliorate that self deceptive, self destructive behavior and enhance that sense of meaning in life, that enhance of enhance that connectedness to reality, to yourself, to other people in the world. And they create entire ecologies of practices, communities and role models around that. They don't have to convert everybody. They don't, you're right.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  They get about 10% of the population involved and that actually tips the balance and moves them forward.

• 16:44Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll take a quick break here, but stick around. John Vervaeke is just getting started. Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag, but Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories. They skip the middlemen and sell 100% Mongolian cashmere, starting at just 60 bucks. 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Now I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else. I've got their joggers and a couple of their tees as well. And I can tell you their whole line is high quality.

• 17:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. I'll call you back. That's the most expensive sentence in business. You mean it when you say it, but by the time you remember, they've already found somebody else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. The business phone that's built so you never miss a call or a customer.

• 18:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Quo writes up your calls for you and one click turns any of them into a task with a name and a due date. The follow up actually happens instead of living in your head. When you can't pick up at all, Quo's agent does. It answers questions, gets the details and texts them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and you can jump right in. It's also an official connector in Claude and Chat G P T. Ask who called while you were out and it's handled. Quo is the number one rated business phone on G two. It's trusted by over 90,000 businesses. When money is on the line, always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months at quo.com slash impact.

• 18:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That's Q U O dot com slash impact. All right, let's pick up where we left off. What will today's version of philosophy be? Will it be philosophy literally or something else?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  That that that that question sort of purses up, sort of pushes on personal aspects of my own life.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  There's two senses. I I I use two different terms and I use the two different terms, not because I'm trying to be pedantic. I use philosophy to mean what it now currently means by for most people. It means academic philosophy, philosophy that you could go to a university for and get a degree in. I have a PhD in philosophy, for example. I value all of that. I'm not here to like criticize that, but that did not meet the need I met. I was trying to meet when I first went into philosophy and I met the figure of Socrates when I read Plato's Republic. I was in a meaning crisis. And I was looking for a way to ameliorate foolishness, enhance flourishing. I was looking for a role model that I could internalize.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  I found it in Socrates. And I thought philosophy was going to be that. The original Greek is philosofia, the love, the, and philia, the brotherly love, the shared. We share this love together, you and I together in dialogue, dialogos. We share together a love of wisdom. That's what it means. That's what I was looking for. And I think people don't need academic philosophy to deal with what I'm talking about. But we all need to be, we all need to be lovers of wisdom because wisdom is not optional. You, you're, you're, you either have an implicit pursuit of wisdom. You're trying to deal with your self deceptive, self destructive behavior. You're trying, you're trying to enhance your meaning in life.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And you're doing this semi consciously, autodidactively, unreflectively. That's an implicit philosophy in the ancient sense. Or you're doing it explicitly with other people, reflectively, self correctively, self transcending. You're making use of the best that history can offer. And you're creating current and, and being involved in current ecologies of practices. That's another thing. That's a positive symptom of the meaning crisis. Tom, I talked to all of these communities that are springing up around the globe. Yes, I know there's a lot of stupid cultish weird things, but there's also bona fide healthy communities where people are creating ecologies of practices for doing exactly what we're talking about here. That's happening all around the globe, all over the place.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  And then, and they reach out to me and I get so, and I get to go and participate and spend time with them and talk to them and see what they're doing. I think that's what's happening right now.

• 21:44Tom Bilyeu?

  That's very interesting. We will see if it plays out as well as I hope it will, but in the face of AI.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I know there's so many things converging right now. Talk to me about Socrates. So through your eyes, for the first time, I found him incredibly interesting. Why did they kill him? I think that's a really good in for people that don't know what he was essentially willing to die for.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Well, um, Socrates developed a practice of question and answer that was designed to get people aware of their narrative framing and how it is causing them to deceive themselves. This is what he meant, this is what he said when he was on trial for his life. The unexamined life is not worth living. He doesn't mean the minutia of going over your autobiography. He means, are you cultivating rationality and wisdom? Are you learning? Are you developing colleges of practices? Internalizing, developing skills, internalizing role models so that you can constantly and appropriately call into question how you are construing things, how you are framing things, and trying to liberate yourself as much as possible

• 22:55Speaker 01

  from how you are deceiving yourself and potentially bullshitting other people. That's what he did. And so he would go into situations and he would ask people probative questions that was designed to get them to disidentify with their framing. So they could, like I did with my glasses. So they could step back and look at it. Because that's what you have to do. You have to take your glasses off. You have to look at it and see, oh. You have to be in that bigger thing that allows you to see the smaller frame is actually misleading. And he would do this with people that were making claims to being wise.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And he was doing it because, well, he was interested in whether or not they were telling the truth. Not in just a propositional way, but like, were they actually enacting the, right, commitment to get at the truth of things? Which means, were they really practicing a way of thinking and seeing that was dealing with self-deception in an ongoing systematic and systemic way? Now, can, and as you can imagine, think about it today. Think about the, I'm a Canadian, so I get to say this. Think about the fraught political arena, right? That you have right now. People don't like to disidentify with their framing.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  That identification goes a lot towards their central ego narrative of who and what they are. So when he tried to probe people to take off their glasses and look at them, many people, that's a state of epistemic vulnerability. Some people like Plato, his greatest disciple, or Xenophon, another, another important follower, said, "I see." And Socrates famously said, "Wisdom begins in wonder." He doesn't mean idle curiosity. He means calling yourself and your world into question in this probative provocative manner. Some people get, "I see, I see." Other people, "Oh, I don't like that weakness. I don't like that disidentification.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  I don't like losing that cherished identity. You're a threat." That's why they killed him.

• 25:10Tom Bilyeu?

  That's a mic drop there. We're seeing this in politics right now. So this sense of any attack on my politics is an attack on me.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Is a wildly problematic thing in the human psyche. Do you think that the way that we self deceive has evolutionary advantages? Or is this just a byproduct of another need, say, to stay flexible or to learn from culture, maybe a better way to say it?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  That's interesting. So I do a lot of work. I'm trying to get a paper published now. I think it's going to get published because it's in revision. So that's usually a good sign it's going to get published on the connection with Anna Riedel, the deep connections between all this formal work on relevance, realization, predictive processing, and rationality. So I do a lot of work really looking at, you know, all the, the best theoretical debate, the best experimental competition around this. And one thing is becoming really clear. We believe for cultural reasons that we reason, that reason is something we do monologically. That means we do it as a monologue, we do it individually on our own, and also, and

• 26:30Speaker 01

  playing on the word monologue, we use sort of one formal logic. And we talk to her and it's a monologue and we're using one sort of system.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  So, take a standard reasoning task. I won't go into the details, the waste and selection task, right? By all sort of, you know, objective measures, a relatively easy reasoning task. It's kind of like the thing I did with the lily pad with you a while ago. And you give people this problem, we've been doing this since 1966, and this is not suffering from the replication crisis, it robustly, and these are the cream of the crop, I'm at, you know, a top-tier university in the world, these are high IQ, highly educated, socio-economically stable status, all those sort of variables that are supposed to predict success, you put them in the waste and selection task and only 10% of them get it right, reliably, right?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  They only look for confirmation to put it in sort of a nutshell, right? Take the same task, replace it with four people, and tell them to work together. The success rate goes reliably from 10% to 82%.

• 27:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  This is just, read Mercer and Spurber's book, The Enigma Reason, read The Dialogical Roots of Deduction by Doleth Neves, right? So, what's going on here? Well, let's make it hopefully intuitively accessible to your audience. Okay? Have you ever noticed that you're actually really good at spotting other people's biases and misconstrues? Like, you know, you're really good at pointing to your friend, "Hey, you're doing that stupid thing you always do in your romantic relationships, you're doing it again." And they don't do it, and you feel so wise, right? But when it's you, how good are you at finding your own biases?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  It's really hard, it's even metabolically difficult for you.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  We seem to have evolved for this. You are my best vehicle of self-correction and I am yours. And that works only if we're in dialogue. Let's go back to the experiment I talked about. It's not the case. This is what's so intriguing because you can look at the data really carefully. It's not the case that one person comes up with the answer individually and convinces the others. The group as a whole comes up with the answers. And this plugs into the fact that that is our evolutionary superpower. We have a collective intelligence in distributed cognition. Individually, we are pathetic animals. But you get a bunch of us together and we can coordinate our behavior with some pointy sticks and some dogs and we can kill everything on the planet. Right?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  We evolved for a dialogical, multi-perspectival rationality, not a monological one.

• 29:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so then what's going on in politics? Why do people hate it so much when you challenge their beliefs?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Because we have linked that monological model we got from the European Enlightenment, 17th and 18th century, with a individualism and a kind of small L liberalism idea and the autonomy of the individual. And Romanticism reinforced that with self-expression and authenticity. I'm not saying there aren't positive aspects to this. I'm just trying to answer your question. Okay? And so what that means is we progressively have forgotten that the principle of democracy is dialogical rationality. Remember I talked about how we do, within our minds, we do opponent processing? We do this trade-off relationship. Your attention is doing it right now.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  You've got two attentional systems. You have a default mode network that's making you want to mind-wander and introduce variation. And you have a task-focused network that's killing off most of the variation. And what you're doing is you're doing this. And it's exactly the same principles as biological evolution. Variation and selection, variation and selection, variation and selection. And you're constantly, right, evolving like a reproductive cycle. Your attentional fit, that's opponent processing. That's within your attention. But with dialogical rationality...

• 30:56Speaker 01

  There's supposed to be opponent processing between you and I. We're supposed to disagree and challenge each other, but we're supposed to have common unity, community of both agreeing that we fundamentally need each other for self-correction. And we commit to the process above and beyond our position because we have full acknowledgement and identification with the fact that rationality is primarily dialogical. But what has happened is we have forgotten that because of this cultural history and we have replaced evolving dialogical opponent processing between people with adversarial,

• 31:33Speaker 01

  game theoretic, zero-sum processing in which I can only win by destroying you. I think democracy is no longer culturally situated in the United States. Obviously, it's still here politically.

• 31:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Say more.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  What I mean by that is if you think the primary way in which we undertake democracy is through adversarial processing rather than joint commitment to a community of opponent processing and the power of distributed cognition, you have doomed democracy. I will defend that.

• 32:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Defend?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Well, what I mean by that is that if you do not have that, you are losing the capacity for rationality. The point of democracy, like science, this is John Dewey, one of your great philosophers. The point about science and democracy is that they're, democracy is, Winston Churchill said, it's like it's the worst system next to all the rest. Because in many ways, it can be outperformed by other systems. What it has is the best capacity for self-correction, like science has the best capacity for self-correction. It is designed to be rational in the way we have talked about rationality as systemic self-correction.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  If you remove the dialogical rationality and the opponent processing, you remove the rationality that is the guts and the spirit of democracy.

• 33:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so in this moment, you're saying we no longer want our ideas challenged and because we don't want our ideas challenged, we're not getting smarter as a group and we now have a fail state for democracy itself?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:20Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you think this is going to play out? Quick break here, but when we're back, we'll continue this incredible conversation with John Vervaeke. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 34:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. And we're back. How do you think this is going to play out?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  The way it's playing out, I mean, the way it's playing out is we're seeing, we're seeing, we're seeing increasing polarit- and this is not just the United States, this is happening in Canada, it's happening in Europe. We're seeing, we're seeing, what I talked about earlier, we're seeing this weird paradox of people profoundly cynical and feeling disenfranchised with the political, but also deeply politicizing everything. Everything is polarizing. Everything is a culture war. Everything is invested with a religious fervor. And yet we don't think that the system that is supposed to solve these political conflicts is actually functioning. And so we think we have to somehow capture the system, capture the institutions and destroy the opposite side

• 35:20Speaker 01

  in order to somehow achieve our goals. This is how it's playing out.

• 35:25Tom Bilyeu?

  If this self-correcting mechanism is broken, is this just a runaway flywheel that doesn't stop until there's enough pain and suffering in the system that people will change? Or is there a lesson in history here about how we back out of this?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  The Athenian democracy killed Socrates and lost what I was talking about and got overtaken by the demagogues, the bullshit artists of the political arena and drove it into extremity. And you have people like Alcibiades and Cleon and others, and they drive Athens to self-destruction. If we don't step out and address the meaning crisis and properly re-home and re-situate democracy, yes, I think it is doomed.

• 36:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I don't see a way to break the flywheel. That is the, and I'm an optimistic guy, but I like to be able to see what the path forward is, and if I can't articulate that, and history tells me that, I know Thucydides' trap is specifically about a rising power versus an established power, but I'll use it in the sense of that collision that you can see coming a mile away and you just can't stop it.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:39Tom Bilyeu?

  That's what this feels like right now, like the, I am trying to get people to believe in this idea that the center is a destination, that you have to want to end up there, you have to want the friction between the two sides, you have to distrust yourself, you have to want, like, here's my thing.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Here, here, Tom, I just want to reinforce that, okay?

• 36:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, thank you, sir, I appreciate that very much. If we could get a lot more people to reinforce that, I think we'd be in a way better situation. To me, it comes down to, don't trust thyself. Like, you want to know thyself for sure.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:11Tom Bilyeu?

  But you want to be highly skeptical that you will lead everyone to the right place.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  This is what Socrates said. He said, "My wisdom consists in that I know that I do not know." He doesn't mean that trivial sense that we know, I don't know anything about Australian, you know, he doesn't mean that trivial sense of ignorance. He means that existential lack of rationality. The self-knowledge he's talking about is not your autobiography, he's talking about your owner's manual, like the thing that tells you how you work. That's what he's talking about. And what he did was he would burst the bubble of bullshit pretense where people think they know themselves just because they identify with certain ideological positions and propositions, when in fact, they, and I'm willing to point my finger at myself, by the way, we are ignorant.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Profoundly of what is, how we are fundamentally driven and how we are fundamentally self deceived. We have to do a tremendous amount of work, not just individually, but collectively. And not just now, but in a sense traditionally by, like you've been doing with me, asking about relevant historical precedents. We have to do this more deeply.

• 38:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I have a, a deep fear that there's something in the architecture of the human mind, which has made us the most dominant species the world has ever seen. So this is not me saying I could have done a better job if only evolution had left it to me. But uh, we for instance, so this, the idea of the, um, the vulnerability, when your frame of reference gets cracked and how unnerving that is for a lot of people. And how when you attack somebody's belief system, it is like assaulting them directly. Humans want to be intoxicated with certainty. One of the first things you learn as a CEO is you have to do this really weird thing of, okay, the world is presenting us with all these dots, right? The economy is in this place, uh, this is how people think of our product.

• 39:11Tom Bilyeu?

  This is how people think of our, um, the area of the market that we're in, all of that stuff. And now I'm going to tell a story about how those dots connect. And I need that story in order to move forward because I need the, you were talking about bias as a positive thing. I need that bias to know what to focus on, so I know what not to pay attention to. So I can put things literally in priority order. Now, one thing, when you train entrepreneurs, you realize very quickly, people don't, they're terrified to put things in priority order. And what I find is they won't put things in priority order because they don't have a strong narrative about where they're trying to end up and how they're going to get there. And so you have to work with them, hey, decide where you want to get, what I call KYG, know your goal. You know your goal, now what are the dots? We're going to connect them in a narrative.

• 39:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Now you have to go to your team and say, hey, everybody, I guarantee these are the dots. And I guarantee this is how they connect and why we're going to end up where we want to go. You have to intoxicate them with certainty. Yes. And they will fall in behind you and then you can really get momentum, which is a lot of people moving in the same direction. Now, the catch is, as the CEO, while they are running intoxicated with your certainty, you've got to step back and go, I know something is wrong in my narrative. I just don't know what it is yet. Yeah. And so it is this super weird thing of like, all right, everybody, we're marching on that hill. We're going to go get those guys and this is going to be the outcome. And then you've got to step aside and be like, okay, I know there's a flaw here somewhere and I need to find it as fast as I can.

• 40:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And when you then step back in and challenge other people and ask them to challenge your ideas, you start to break some of that certainty. And so it's this really weird thing that I see exacerbated a thousandfold in the political arena, where people need the certainty of their own side in a moment like this, where we're very much following demagogic figures. And it's like, okay, they've told me this is a narrative. I know how to repeat it. So I'm going to repeat that narrative. I'm just going to get behind it. I'm going to move as fast as I can in that direction. And when the other side challenges, like there are actual videos where you can just look how to counteract X, Y, Z argument. Yeah. And so it's like, just give me the talking points, bro. That's all I need.

• 41:23Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't need to actually understand it. I don't even necessarily need to believe it's true. I just need to know how to rebut it. And it's like, whoa. Yeah, so that worries me because that feels architectural in the human mind. I don't know that there's a way, I don't think humans en masse will transcend that. And to your earlier point about philosophy and that it only took like this small group, but you needed that small group to be, to build an alternative vision that people could be excited by, that's in alignment with the times. Because now here's my secret, secret. See, I feel like I should whisper this, but I've talked to my audience about it so much. This is all a debt question. And you can just go back and where are we at in the debt cycle?

• 42:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Because when people are making more money over time from their

• 42:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Their youth until their old age. And when they hand the baton to their kids and their kids make more than they did. So they're ahead of where they were in their twenties. And you have every reason to believe they'll be ahead of you in their sixties and you are in your sixties. Everyone feels great at at the macro level. When that breaks, and for us, it's breaking right now for sure. Uh, everything feels off, but people don't understand exactly why it feels off. In steps, demagogic figure who gives you just a very clear answer. You slot them behind them, they promise everything's going to feel good again. And now you're where we are.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  I I would say you're in a position, the way you described the CEO is sort of the, the, the, the, the balancing act that the religious institutions did in the past. They tried to create the narrative for a civilization to give up momentum, to build cathedrals that where one generation would start and three generations later would see it to give an example, right? Or to go to other places like with the Buddhists who left India and went to China or something like that. So they're trying to get that balance and they're trying to get a balance between a, a narrative. It's there's a bias attached to that. It's called narrative bias. If you give people a narrative, they think they know about the situation more than they do. And they have confidence in it more than they do.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  It's an actual bias phenomenon, but it's empowering. Like you said, it's, we have to always use this word by, in fact, in the literature, we talk about heuristics and bias. A heuristic is when it's working and a bias is when you don't like it.

• 43:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's very well said.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Okay, and so, and you always have to use heuristics because as I was saying earlier, you can't use algorithms because it would get you into a combinatorial explosive search. And what I'll, what bias, what heuristics do is they, they say, only look here. That's what a narrative does. It focuses you, like you said, you get everybody focused and then you get a momentum. So they were, they were doing that and then they had to, but they had people behind the scenes. They had, they had people like Thomas Aquinas or they have Siddhartha, they have the mystics. So they have, they have the, they have the priests. If I can, I'm speaking very broadly here, so I'm asking for some charity here, right? You have the, you have the priests who are basically. Like pushing the narrative, and I mean this in the sense of giving it momentum. But behind it, you have the mystics who are constantly stepping back and yes, but

• 44:29Speaker 01

  wondering about the whole picture and you're constantly toggling between the priest and the mystics within the religious tradition. And what you can do is they were able to manage that for like extended periods of time and you know, create and home entire ecologies of practices. And part of what I'm saying is we lost that at the civilizational level, what you had as a CEO with your particular company. That's another way of talking about the meaning crisis. That's where we're at. And the problem we're making is we think what we need is the super CEO. But no, right? We need, we don't just need somebody who's a leader.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  We need somebody who can do that, can give us the compelling narrative, but is also willing to step back from it and call it into question and evolve it in a way that constantly draws us out of our comfort zone. So we're willing to commit beyond ourselves to what we want to exist, even if we don't, like the cathedral. Now, is that possible even in the face of tremendous economic collapse? Yes. Historical example, Bronze Age collapse. Mega civilizations exist, empires, Egyptian empire, prototypical, lasting for literally millennia, three thousand years, four thousand years. This is the Bronze Age, it's Titanic.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  And it utterly collapses, general system collapse, change in warfare. We don't quite know what happens. It is the biggest collapse in the history of civilization. It's bigger than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire. Trade, the loss of trade, the loss of literacy, the loss of literal loss of cities, much greater.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  But what happened was, there was a invention of, it's like, it's like the asteroid hitting and the dinosaurs going extinct and all the mammals now can move out and evolve. And you've got all these little, these little mammalian kingdoms doing all these experimentation and you get all these new inventions. You get the invention of alphabetic literacy with a standardized reading. You have coinage that teach people abstract symbolic calculation. And when you write things with alphabetic literacy, not like hieroglyphics, way more people can learn it. You go from two or three percent up to maybe 20% of your population.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And now, think about how empowered your cognition is by the ability to do symbolic calculation and write your thoughts down and share your thoughts with your future self, share it with other people. You get a massive empowerment of cognition, critical reflection, and you get this whole new worldview, titanically different worldview arises. The Axial Revolution, the whole two worlds mythology that has become the legacy grammar for us, even though that is now collapsing. So, is a titanic economic collapse possible? You know more than I do.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  I worry about it, but I don't have, I don't have the expertise to properly comment on that. What I can say as a cognitive scientist and a historian is, yes, but, right, we do, we have done this before, Axial Revolution, after Alexander's empire collapsed. And we did this, we were able to bottom up, recreate entire new philosophical, religious narratives and that had this proper tension. I like to use the Greek word "tonus" because tension is negative in English. Where "tonus" like the "tonus of a bow, the "tonus of a lyre," right?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  It has the "tonus" between that narrative momentum and that, right, mystical reflection and that rational criticism gets that right "tonus." We've done it before, we can do it again.

• 48:29Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's absolutely fascinating, John. This has been incredible. Where can people follow along with you?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Well, I would like it if people bought my book Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, because a lot of this, you know, Chris and I have done a lot to really make a lot of this as accessible as possible. There is the video series. I think the book is better because of Chris's involvement. I did the, I fell prey to the very mistake I was, I just critiqued a few minutes ago. I presented the series Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. It's very popular and I'm not, I'm not, I'm, I don't, I don't want to-

• 49:05Tom Bilyeu?

  That's fantastic. I've watched it.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, thank you. But I did it monologically. This book was written dialogically. If I aspire to being Socrates, Christopher is Plato. He takes my arguments and he does what you've been doing here, dialogically, opening them up, making them more accessible, grounding them back for people, showing them how they can be more personally transformative, giving them more examples. There's more, there's much more rigor in the citations, the references, more examples, more diagram. Madeleine Abramian really helped with editing and correcting and removing a lot of the little glitches that are in the video series. I would really, I would really like people to buy the book, actually.

• 49:46Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it, man. Well, I cannot recommend it highly enough. And everybody, speaking of things that I recommend highly, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 50:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require- Six, seven different supplements and Perfect Planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make.

• 50:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.