Name: John Vervaeke | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #462
Uploaded: 2023-09-12T15:00:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'John Vervaeke | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #462' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'John Vervaeke | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #462' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-12. Transcript available.

John Vervaeke | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #462

all right i have some new tour dates to let you know about i'll be in norfolk
va virginia on
november 9 i'll be roanoke va november 10 huntington west virginia november 11th
over
there at the mountain health arena formerly known as the big sandy i'll be in
evansville indiana
on november 1 5 at the ford center and winston salem north carolina november 17th
as well as
new orleans louisiana on november 24th at the uno lakefront arena all tickets
are available at
theovon.com slash t-o-u-r um we have been moving into some bigger venues really
grateful for it
um and we'll do a mix of bigger and smaller ones at the time and um just
because we don't want to
be on tour forever you know we want to be on tour for a while we just don't
want to be on
you know until we're deceased or whatever so thank you guys for your support
theovon.com
dr john verveke is a professor of psychology at the university of toronto he
currently teaches
courses on thinking and reasoning with a focus on cognitive development
intelligence
this professor of mindfulness and the psychology of wisdom he is a smarter guy
he's an information man
you know he's also an expert in buddhist psychology he has a 50-part lecture
series on youtube called
awakening from the meaning crisis i've personally been thinking a lot about
meaning and what it what
just meaning of life meaning of self um things like that you know we had a call
about it on
the last solo episode and and uh and that's one of the things that uh dr verveke
is is um is highly
informed about so we're going to spend some time today with him and uh delve
into that and some other
things i'm very grateful uh that he's here today today's guest is dr john verveke
thank you so much for being here
uh john verveke thank you so much for being here it's great pleasure steven
yeah yeah it's really exciting man uh um a lot of my friends have been uh
turned on to you and just
like your ability to like share your thoughts like in a concise and and
informative enough way where
i guess people are able to absorb them and they don't sound too monotonous
where it sounds too much
like you're studying kind of yeah you know well i mean i i really uh well i'm i
really believe in i
don't just believe i really believe in the work i'm doing it's it's like it's a
calling for me
um and so um and it's something that i live and i i part of i mean i've been a
teacher for a very long
time and i think part of being a good teacher is to always be yourself learning
and so i try
to teach by sharing the enthusiasm of the learning i'm going through like even
when i'm doing a lecture
i'll learn something will come up and that moment will jazz me and that's that's
the style i've tried
to develop and it seems to work at least for the material i've been privileged
to get to teach yeah
yeah yeah yeah and you teach all i guess i mean a lot of people like i guess
that a lot of things
that i get shared for about yours are like about meaning and looking into
meaning yes and especially
at a time where it feels like people are or for me even i mean it feels like we're
getting into this
cul-de-sac in america where it's like is there a lot of value to my life do i
am i just a cog in the
wheel am i just a consumer is there any you know what is the purpose for me i
think a lot of people are
starting to ask themselves that yeah yeah i call that the meaning crisis and i
think there's good
evidence that it's becoming very prevalent in the west whatever that means
these days but you know
sort of north america europe you know yeah uh japan hawaii yeah australia you
know things like that
um and the symptoms are you can sort of see symptoms of it uh all through the
culture and
um and i've also seen a significant increase um in in the work i'm doing both
academically
and in the public sphere uh especially since covet covet really ramped a lot of
these issues up for
people in a powerful way what the what the issues of like questioning
themselves what's going
on yeah so the thing the thing one of the interesting things that uh kobe did
is it threw
people back onto their inner life um and what's interesting is our culture
especially north american
culture um right and i'm not the first to observe it you know it has a hyperponderance
of a tendency
towards narcissism being very like you know uh so people have oriented their
lives in a very self-centered
way but and but they thought that right or they can maybe a better way of
putting it they confuse that
with having deep rich inner resources and when everything sort of stopped and
they couldn't
focus the world on them and they had to focus on themselves in order to find
resources and what
you found was a bifurcation like a division uh some people were like whoa that
like that really threw them
um so i i'll i'll say i'll say something to you and i i'm of two of two minds
of it because i'm happy
about it as a scientist because i made a prediction and i'm sad about it as a
human being
because it's not a good prediction um so just as the pandemic was hitting i
said what you're going
to get is you're going to get a rise in a term that julian evans made famous
called conspirituality
this mixture of conspiracy theories and spirituality and that took off and then
i said as we come out of
the pandemic we'll get a mental health spike and then a little bit later sort
of an increase in
crime and all of these things are coming to pass because what had happened is
many people are
thrown into the interior life only to realize for all of the self-centeredness
they've actually not
given any wise attention to their inner life and they were suddenly without
resources other people saw
this as a an opportunity and they framed it that way and so what's been springing
up where all of
these online communities where people not to sound too highfalutin or anything
but people started to
say you know i really want to cultivate wisdom i mean there's tons of
information there's a lot of
bullshit mixed up with it there's you know there's all this stuff and then
there's science and that but
i want wisdom and so and i get and i've gotten involved with quite a few of
these communities so
that was that was there's there's both you have both negative and positive
symptoms in the culture
uh like you know um the number of close friends people have is reliably
declining even for all of our
social internet connections uh loneliness is becoming epidemic and loneliness
is like it's very unhealthy
we are we are we are naturally social cultural beings and loneliness is well it's
becoming a hobby
too for some people in a way it's becoming almost so common that it's like um
or not common but it's
well i guess common i guess and once you start to become something you
there's a part of you that will want to find the most organized way to be it
and to engage in it
yes so even in loneliness it's almost becoming a culture you know it is but it's
a culture with
great cost uh i mean we we have weird things happening like the uk has set up a
ministry of
loneliness which sounds like something out of orwell right like the ministry of
loneliness yeah and it's
like whoa how did we get there yeah it sounds like an ozzy osbourne album oh
yeah maybe yeah
yeah yeah yeah i wonder how he would say that mr lonely
i don't know he might he probably would get one of his kids i don't know if he
can talk anymore
but um but yeah well so so to go back so you're looking at so when you look at
like so covid you're saying had a was an opportunity or caused a lot of us to
like
interflect yes look inside of ourselves yes yes okay and some people did it
like in a healthy way
yes where they kind of looked inside of themselves were like wow i haven't
looked in here in a while
i'm going to find ways to challenge myself and see what's going on here i'm
going to join other groups
and uh people that are curious about um their inner self yes and then other p
and then what the other
group what happened well i mean they a lot of them sort of fell into the things
that were
already at work in the culture the meeting crisis predates covid by like
centuries um but um you know
you saw a rise in mental health issues uh so depression and anxiety have gone
up and they have continued to
increase um and this is fit quite independent of how affluent uh so silicon
valley has a tremendous
problem with depression and anxiety here are the people who are supposed to be
at the pinnacle of
our society you know we split we idolize them right and yet they're they're
they're their kids are in
trouble and they're in trouble in certain ways have we always throughout time
have people always
searched for meaning in their life yes always been like um are we at like uh
because we were like
you're saying that kobe kind of put us in this place where it kind of put us in
a fast forward of
people really going to start to look at that because the the fabric of society
kind of stopped and paused
and so you're left with yourself really yeah um but people have always looked
for meaning that's
exactly right i mean so in the series i did and in the book on on zombies the
book is in the book is
the idea that zombies are a myth that arose to try and give like give people an
image of the
meaninglessness in their lives uh but uh we talked about two kinds of issues
one are what we call like
perennial problems like you said there's issues that human beings always have
confronted and we can get
into why that might be the case um and then there's also historical factors
that are now have been
growing since the late middle ages and accelerating and things have you know
there's been a lot of
major things uh that are accelerants on those historical forces and what
happens is the historical
forces sort of undermine the like you said the cultural fabric that normally
helps people to address the
perennial problems and then what happens is you get a vicious cycle the perennial
problems get worse
the social fabric tears more the perennial problems get and you start to spiral
and that's where it
feels like kind of like we're at yes yes that's that's and and and that's that's
amazing so when
when i i didn't i didn't like how did the awakening for the meeting crisis came
up was actually a former
student of mine took a class with me and said you should turn this into a
youtube series and the
awakening for the meaning crisis is your youtube series yeah i have two major
youtube series i have
awakening from the meaning crisis which is about what we're talking about and
then there's after
socrates which is an attempt to do an in-depth um reconstruction um reverse
engineering of a
socratic way of life um as a way of cultivating wisdom both individually and
collectively what does
that mean a socratic way of life we're not going to know what that means right
so the unexamined
life is worth living so this is a socratic quote he says this on at his trial
uh and they basically
say to him uh stop doing philosophy we'll let you go and he said or or if not
we'll kill you right
oh wow and he says uh well the unexamined life is not worth living i'd rather
die and so socrates
socrates is very very interesting um he has he has two sort of influences one
influence he's influenced
by the sort of the first scientists that are emerging in ancient greece he
takes a look at the
natural science and it's a it's a breakthrough like as opposed to a mythological
way of thinking these
early thinkers are using observation and reason to try and understand the world
he thinks that's powerful
but he finds that the site and this is relevant for us but he he finds that the
scientific information
isn't existentially relevant it doesn't lead to personal transformation it
doesn't tell him how
to become a better person so it gives him a lot of information and it makes him
understand things
but it's not helping him as a person as a in his soul and you see and that's
what how a lot of people
feel about our scientific world view we have a scientific world