In this episode, Danny and Gareth welcome John Vervaeke, award-winning professor at the University of Toronto (psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology), director of the Cognitive Science program, and director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory, known for his work on relevance realization, mindfulness/flow, and the meaning crisis, including his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series and the book Zombies in Western Culture.
The conversation centers on a claim with unmistakably Platonic stakes: modernity has split the meaning project from the wisdom project, leaving “meaning” as private preference rather than an existential orientation robust enough to withstand tragedy. Against this drift, Vervaeke argues for a return to virtue as an epistemological–ontological way of life: the reliable cultivation of capacities that reduce self-deception, deepen connectedness, and can be shared communally, because other people are often our best instruments of self-correction. From there, he walks through concrete practices designed to re-weave meaning and wisdom—most vividly his four-role dialectical “jazz” that moves from Dialectic into Dialogos (DID) and aims not at the “right definition” but at coming into right relationship with virtue. The episode then sharpens into Plato’s recurring “hard problem” (the Alcibiades problem) and why the very cognitive machinery that makes us adaptively intelligent also makes us chronically prone to self-deception, demanding ongoing finesse, role-models, and (Vervaeke proposes) the often-ignored dimension of attachment in who actually becomes wise rather than merely clever.
