John Vervaeke
Philosopher
26
APPEARANCES
13
PODCASTS
Nov 5, 2026
SebastianHOST
And if you can, what exactly is the meaning crisis? What have we lost as a civilization?
John VervaekeGUEST
So that's a multifaceted question because there's both a historical and a scientific aspect.
John VervaekeGUEST
So I'll start somewhere and then I'll ask you to ask me further questions where you think you would like to follow this.
John VervaekeGUEST
Biological adaptivity is an organism needs to be able to connect to its environment in the right way.
52 MINS LATER
SebastianHOST
And where do you think this might be heading if you had to sort of draw some wild conjectures into the future, let's say 50 or 100 years from now, what becomes available for us?
speaker_1ADVERTISER
I
John VervaekeGUEST
I think it would put us on an equal playing field if I gave Dick some of my background and how I'm coming into this.
9 MINS LATER
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, I guess people, if, if they don't know me, I'm an associate professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, where I teach cognitive courses, cognitive psychology and cognitive science.
John VervaekeGUEST
I've been the director, the associate director, the assistant director of the program.
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, in psychology, I do work on intelligence, rationality, wisdom, meaning in life, and, uh, uh, mystical experiences.
18 MINS LATER
John VervaekeGUEST
well first of all let's uh you and i both and if we need to we can go into detail we think that relevance realization is primordial uh you and i are also on the same page it's we think it's even deeper than sort of this framework of predictive processing it's it's has to do with this is some of the work i've done with dan chiappi that fundamental orientation that makes any predictive processing possible.
John VervaekeGUEST
And I think that means, and I want to say that because it's clear that Heidegger is talking about care in this primordial sense.
John VervaekeGUEST
He's not talking about it like in, you know, You know, the way I sort of care about ice cream or something like that, at least not initially.
John VervaekeGUEST
Because it is, as you say, it is bound up, and this is why it relates to the meaning crisis.
John VervaekeGUEST
It's bound up with the fact that we are the beings for whom being is in question.
58 MINS LATER
EvanHOST
It exists in some way, or does it fall out of the physical world?
John VervaekeGUEST
So if I push a cylinder on a table, why does it roll? If we're Newtonian, we think about the initial event and then the events that come from it, and we say that's why it moved, because my finger hit the cylinder and then the cylinder moved, energy was transferred, et cetera.
24 MINS LATER
EvanHOST
What are your thoughts on that approach?
Unknown podcast
Ep.624 ~ There’s Nothing Better Than That - John Vervaeke - Jordan B Peterson ~ Jordan B Peterson
Aug 23 · 6m
John VervaekeGUEST
I'm trying to get at that power is a way of, you know, when, when, when your shot is true, your skill has been effective a- and y- and you're gonna hit the mark, right? But, but, uh, but presence is also a way in which things are, are true to form, right? A- a- a- and then care- the, the participatory knowing is when we're, like, the, the deepest sense of true, which is, you know, related to trust and, and being betrothed to, to the world in an important way.
John VervaekeGUEST
So if you'll allow me to expand what you mean by true to cover all of those dimensions-
John VervaekeGUEST
Uh, how can I put this? Everybody lives from the, the, the non-propositional kinds of knowing emphasized by Plato, and that's what all of s- the scholastic research is pointing to now.
Unknown podcast
Ep.602 ~ Exodus ClipWhen You Confuse Yourself With God ~ Jordan B Peterson
Aug 21 · 4m
John VervaekeGUEST
And the lack of embedding is what is ripe for manipulation, right? Because you can move, this is what we're seeing with sort of mob-like mentality throughout the culture across the spectrum because you can move people like a school of fish because they're not embedded in something.
Unknown podcast
Ep.530 ~ You Wont Believe This About Bees ~ Jordan B Peterson
Aug 15 · 12m
John VervaekeGUEST
I don't know if this, this analogy is, is appropriate, but I think what you're describing is the changing of the, the sort of dyna- dynamic moving of the boundary between order and chaos as you proceed down the level of specificity from the general to the specific.
John VervaekeGUEST
So, so, so actually what's happening there is, is the... it's the same thing as the antibody, is the, the, the boundary is moving.
Unknown podcast
Ep.500 ~ How Perception and Emotion Shape Our World ~ Jordan B Peterson
Aug 12 · 7m
John VervaekeGUEST
Okay, so what do you think of Gibson's ideas? I think most of them are excellent.
John VervaekeGUEST
I've been writing about affordances for some time, and what I think Gibson was weak on is he didn't talk about how affordances are actually tracked in the brain.
John VervaekeGUEST
He sort of threw up his hands about that and said, the information is in the light.
John VervaekeGUEST
Well, yeah, but how does the information in the light get into our heads and do what it does? That's the part that he was weak on, but we're making great progress on that today in the neurosciences.
Jordan PetersonHOST
So you can actually conceptualize both emotional systems from an entropy perspective.
TiagoHOST
So, so h- how, how can we navigate this space?
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, I've turned that around to being a heuristic for generally guiding me, uh- That's-- So I've turned that into, I must be doing something right.
16 MINS LATER
TiagoHOST
So my question to you is, like, how are you trying to not fall prey to that, and what do you think you have been doing well to avoid that trap? And what do you think that maybe you can improve on, or maybe certain experiences in your journey where you felt that, "Actually, I did that, and maybe that wasn't so good, and I need to self-correct"?
Unknown podcast
Ep.441 ~ Immanuel Kant and the Rise of Postmodern Thought ~ Jordan B Peterson
Aug 8 · 10m
John VervaekeGUEST
Well, the postmoderns will use both of those strategies, the anti-empiricist strategy and the anti-rationalist strategy.
John VervaekeGUEST
And what's important about Kant, right, is that Kant is integrating, right, both of those anti-strategies.
John VervaekeGUEST
So in the generations before Kant, the skeptical arguments about perception, right, directed against the empiricists.
John VervaekeGUEST
But then if you don't have good answers about hallucinations and relativity and illusions, right, and so forth, then it seems like your structure, your intellectual structure, whatever it comes to be, if it's all based on probabilistic or possibly faulty perceptual data, then the whole thing is a tottering mess.
Jordan PetersonHOST
And that's a nice set of constraints, and it seems to me that that, at least in some part, goes a long ways to answering the objections to the limits of the scientific method that have been discussed, that were discussed, and that you just discussed, that have been discussed historically and that you just summarized.
Unknown podcast
Ep.396 ~ Why Did Jesus Get Baptized- The Gospels ~ Jordan B Peterson
Aug 1 · 18m
speaker_8UNKNOWN
Mm.
John VervaekeGUEST
Can I ask this question? For Christians, what does that mean to you to have somebody proposing a ritual that's-
John VervaekeGUEST
I, I think, and even the ritual baptism, I, I, I appreciate what you're saying about its psycho-spiritual capacities for transformation.
Robert GrayGUEST
... conceive of as entropy, as very similar to what he's saying or in psychological terms or?
John VervaekeGUEST
I mean, the problem, part of the difficulty is the historical naming of a thermodynamic principle and an informational principle with the same term, and they don't mean exactly the same thing, but they're not totally disconnected, so it's very easy for people to confuse those two together.
John VervaekeGUEST
I mean, at some level something like the free energy principle is trying to... is directed towards entropy in the thermodynamic sense that Robert is talking about.
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, and then you, you, you understand part of the function of autopoiesis is to, uh, dissipate entropy, um, in, uh, uh, in a way that, you know, uh, allows for the, the longevity and, of the, of the individual, the propagation of the species, et cetera.
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, but what we concentrated on is we concentrated on the idea more about something like the mutual predictability between events, mutual information, uh, which is much a better measure when you're trying to, uh, see if there's something going on, uh, you know, cognitively in the brain.
1 HR 5 MINS LATER
Robert BreedloveHOST
So you're tilting human action away from non-productive coercive activity or, or protective, if you want to use the nice framing of it, towards productive cooperative activity.
Unknown podcast
Ep.342 ~ The Antidote to Temptation ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 29 · 7m
speaker_4UNKNOWN
It's all conflated.
John VervaekeGUEST
Well, I think picking up on that, Stephen, the way I'd answer you is I think something is very powerfully being modeled there, like I say.
John VervaekeGUEST
I see Jesus using the sacred text to move to a more encompassing perspective that makes him more oriented to what is more real.
John VervaekeGUEST
We can step outside of our egocentric autobiographical thing, go to the sacred text, look at our situation from that perspective and be called to something beyond ourself.
Stephen BlackwoodMODERATOR
Yeah,
John VervaekeGUEST
So I would agree that we have a meta crisis, as you indicated, we have an interlocking set of crises and we seem incapable of formulating these crises in a way that gives us any tractable purchase upon them.
John VervaekeGUEST
And then the proposal I'm making is because there is a deeper crisis that is basically thwarting us.
John VervaekeGUEST
And it's also limiting us in terms of our capacity to be motivated to make the serious kinds of changes that we would need to make to address the metacrisis.
21 MINS LATER
Unknown podcast
Ep.229 ~ What Is he Word - The Gospels ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 17 · 13m
Douglas MurrayGUEST
So one way of looking at this is to say, well, In the source, there was the word, i.e., to say the Trinitarian reading, although that sounds like an absurd Christian interjection of a much later period, you could see that as making perfect sense with just these initial words.
John VervaekeGUEST
John? Yeah, I want to pick up on the fact that there's actually, I call them the four L's about God.
John VervaekeGUEST
And I'd like to propose we slow down a little bit because the familiarity of those terms to us, I think, is masking something more profound going on here.
6 MINS LATER
Unknown podcast
Ep.197 ~ Why The Gospels Matter in 2026 (More Than Ever) ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 14 · 22m
John VervaekeGUEST
... and that therefore our relationship to it has to be primordially relational.
John VervaekeGUEST
Th- and this is very, very hard for our w- way of thinking because we have got into the mode, and for all kinds of historical reasons we don't need, uh, of thinking of, and, you know, uh, and, and it, uh, uh, that what there really is are individual things.
John VervaekeGUEST
All that's in our head, and then that gives us a dualism 'cause the mind has the patterns, the world...
John VervaekeGUEST
There's, a- and there's something going on here in these, in this language, and I, I, I wanna slow down a little bit and get at...
Unknown podcast
Ep.195 ~ The Highest Can Be Found In The Lowest ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 14 · 16m
John VervaekeGUEST
A- but the thing here is w- we're, we're trying to do the, the kind of play, but we're not just playing again with...
John VervaekeGUEST
And, and, and, and the reason why that's important, uh, and I'll shut up in a sec [laughs] right, is we're, we're talking about transformative experience here.
Unknown podcast
Ep.194 ~ THIS Is Why We Celebrate Christmas ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 14 · 28m
speaker_5UNKNOWN
But they also are trying to move along at a pace that human comprehension can possibly keep up with.
John VervaekeGUEST
If I could just pick up for a second on something, Dr. Peterson, you were saying about, uh, motherhood.
John VervaekeGUEST
You know, the angel, an angel comes to both, uh, both, uh, in both situations, uh, to, to prophesy the birth.
John VervaekeGUEST
And, and in one sense, you know, pregnancy is one of the great examples of fulfillment of nature, right? It's, it's, it's the actualization of the potentiality for, for motherhood.
John VervaekeGUEST
And yet, you know, that fulfillment in both cases is, uh, is a radical self-othering.
speaker_5UNKNOWN
He gives his, you know, like in a way-
Unknown podcast
Ep.192 ~ Understanding Judas ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 14 · 29m
speaker_5UNKNOWN
Mm.
John VervaekeGUEST
He's brought up the whole question, my friend Zach Stein, of teacherly authority.
Unknown podcast
Ep.167 ~ Dantes Inferno Might Shake You To Your Core ~ Jordan B Peterson
Jul 11 · 11m
John VervaekeGUEST
It's, it's very complicated, but what you can do is you can use, um, sort of state space math to translate, uh, like, where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into, uh, like, a, a measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation.
John VervaekeGUEST
So the, the th- one of the things, you know, uh, Kaplan and Simon found that was predictive of insight is a thing they called the notice invariance heuristic, which is what you have to do when you need an insight is l- so the advice we give people isn't actually the best advice.
John VervaekeGUEST
I want to build on what Thomas said, and I think it's an excellent provocation, by the way, Andrew.
John VervaekeGUEST
So modernity is built out of the criticism of the vertical relation between the natural and the supernatural being absurd, because no communication or causation can go that way.
John VervaekeGUEST
And so we will understand the natural in its own terms, and it is real on its own terms.
John VervaekeGUEST
And then this, of course, makes a problem of how do you deal with the one and the many? How do you deal with all of the appearance reality? And how do you deal with normativity? Where's the true, the good, and the beautiful in all of this? And so what modernity does is replace that vertical dichotomy with a bunch of horizontal dichotomies.
John VervaekeGUEST
The subjective objective, the inner, the outer, the is-ought, analytic synthetic, the meaning, the measurement, and they're all just variations on the same thing.
John VervaekeGUEST
And to make a very long story, which I do do in detail elsewhere, the last 400 years of philosophy has, I think, ground to the conclusion that that horizontal dichotomy is just as absurd as the vertical.
11 MINS LATER
John NelsonHOST
I wonder if you could maybe sketch in a bit more detail the kind of philosophical and historical developments that led to the meaning crisis.
John VervaekeGUEST
crisis.Um, so I, I think what I, I would wanna do, uh, is to talk a little bit more about what we mean by meaning and what its relationship is to truth and before we could answer that question well.
John VervaekeGUEST
Uh, because I think as long as we keep certain notions as presuppositions unchallenged, the attempt to talk about myth is going to be hamstrung by all these undisclosed and unquestioned dichotomies.
John VervaekeGUEST
Uh, uh, and so, [clears throat] I wanna get clear on what I think I'm talking about when I'm talking about meaning.
John VervaekeGUEST
Um, and I pref- I prefer to use the, the Latin word religio which is one of the candidates for the etymological origin of, uh, re- religion, religare, which is also ligament and debi- the notion of binding, um, is what I wanna make a reference to.
John VervaekeGUEST
And I wanna start with something that sounds like it has nothing to do with religion or myth at all, which is your intelligence, your making sense ability, your sense-making ability.
speaker_5UNKNOWN
Hmm.
John VervaekeGUEST
And, and this is what my proposal, what I think existential conscience is, as opposed to pathological psychological conscience.
John VervaekeGUEST
Existential conscience is to realize our correct attitude, our correct c- comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly, but it also withdraws in mystery.
53 MINS LATER
John VervaekeGUEST
And that therefore our relationship to it has to be primordially a relational th- and this is very, very hard for our w- way of thinking because we have got into the mode, and for all kinds of historical reasons we don't need, uh, of thinking of, and, you know, a- and it, uh, of that what there really is are individual things.
John VervaekeGUEST
All of that's in our head, and then that gives us a dualism, 'cause the mind has the patterns, the world ...
John VervaekeGUEST
There's, a- and there's something going on here in these, in this language, and I, I, I wanna slow down a little bit and get at, right? These terms are very familiar, and I think that's ...
15 MINS LATER
speaker_10HOST
Yeah.
Scroll for more appearances