Justin McSweeny

Josh Galt: I’m really, really looking forward to hearing your perspectives and, yeah, learning more because you have a very interesting framework and bio and whatnot. So I guess just to start with, if you could sort of define what your belief system is, what is the framework, the philosophy, religion, what? The foundation of your belief system and a little bit about how you got there and then we’ll go from there,

Justin McSweeny: Okay. Okay. Okay. I can maybe best start from my sort of provenance story, like where I’m coming from in where I’ve arrived or where I’m journeying, you know, the point of my journey that we are right now. In childhood, my parents divorced when I was about six, and so my mom thought perhaps… Trying to, you know, sort of think through her mind, would be good to ground me with something religious, something institutional.

So we went with, she went with Catholicism, and I went into parochial school, Catholic school, I think in second or third grade, and went through the paces there, and then went to get, I think you do confirmation, then Holy Communion, and so went to get Holy Communion. The monsignor at the church that my mother had enrolled me in, they have a school and a church, and he refused to give me communion because my folks were divorced. And so she was… And being the tough Irish broad that she was, she was, you know, I’ll be damned if, you know, so she got a rogue priest to come over to the house and we did a covert kind of First Communion.

And I appreciated that because, you know, that speaks more to my sensibilities than some stuffy Monsignor. So, anywho, that was kind of an exposure. But I have to say… In being immersed in that culture, even at seven, eight, nine years old, I wasn’t feeling it. I felt the guilt. I felt something kind of like the pressure that was coming down from what I now can say as an adult is sort of this prescriptive, deontological, thou shalts and the shalts and the shalts and all that. I just felt that at a young age. It seemed a little awkward, but you know, I abided by it. I don’t want to cross anybody’s and get cross with me.

So fast forward to about 15 and I went to go live with my father. And he wanted nothing to do with religion, and it wasn’t for that I decided I didn’t want to go to church anymore. I just would rather go hang out with my friends and get high and do whatever, you know, what I was doing at 15. And my mom called me one day when I was staying with my dad, and she’s like, are you going to church? And I said, no. And she’s like, why not? And I said, well, I don’t. Want to. And so she didn’t give me anything after that. So I have to give her credit for that she just, she didn’t browbeat me back into, into service, as it were.

So from there, I, in fact, in that same time area, that space of time, I met a guy, Who was an artist at a shopping mall, they were doing an exhibition or a art show. Interesting cat, his art was cool. And so he had this tape that he gave me and it was Robert H. Monroe. Hemi-Sync. And the artist, Lee Stone, suggested I get this book called Journeys Out of the Body. And I thought, oh, that’s intriguing. And again, I was doing drugs and I’m like, you mean there’s more? So I did get the book at 15 and he gave me the cassette tape of Hemi-Sync and he gave me a crystal too. And I’m like, woo. So I had my crystal, I had my tape.

And I read the book, and I thought it was, you know, it was interesting. The guy, Monroe, was from another generation. I mean, he was before, you know, he was like the World War II generation, the so-called greatest generation. He might even been a skosh older than that. So anyway, I found that interesting, because I always associated the New Age spiritualist, First movement with the hippies of the 60s, which was my parents’ generation. I just kind of tied it to them. But, you know, there was these sort of late 19th century, early 20th century spiritualism and divining and seances and all that kind of stuff.

So to get to a point, I Played around with that. And I enjoyed meditation. I really, I really found it, to be a pleasant, alternative to dropping acid or, you know, whatever. Yeah, that had its fun too. So it was a complimentary, practice to just being a debauched teenager. And then I kind of went on the down low with any kind of spiritual, Practice or waymaking until I was probably in my early to mid-20s where I picked back up on some of that kind of New Age adjacent, you know, flirting with spirituality, didn’t take it very seriously. My dad was very much into that kind of stuff. So it rubbed off on me a little bit.

I went to retreats with him and, you know, go to Sedona with him, you know, just to hang out and Talked to the aliens or whatever they were doing out there. So that was kind of fun. You know, I never took it seriously. And then in my early 40s, I had a real nasty health crisis. And so I once again checked back in with spirituality. All the while from the 20s to the 40s, I was just sort of ambivalent, tried to be a decent person and walk a decent path and not, you know, and I can embody some of what I took from Catholicism and embody some of what I took from the spiritual slash New Age movement of the 80s.

And in this health crisis, I had a reckoning and I was, I was extremely ill and I thought I might even end up being a sort of convalescent vegetable kind of situation because my brain was shot. I just, I was losing my faculties. So that was one of those coming to the precipice type moments, right? And I thought, oh, so I, Opened up the, you know, the books of spiritual inquiry again and got involved with some meditation communities and flirted with that and for a couple of years, few years, got good at meditating. I put hundreds of hours of meditation in and enjoyed it and it probably did have a very good impact.

But as I was sort of, it was losing its charm and luster with me, I got into philosophy and philosophy. Asking questions in that vein, and the human enterprise, the epistemic, and the ontological, and all these other, you know, deep thoughts that philosophers were having, you know, since the Axial Age, since the BC years, you know, so…

Found it absolutely fascinating, went down this huge vortex of inquiry, and that’s where I’ve been since then, but I’ve always appreciated the history and the lineage and the development that has occurred in my life, and so where I am now, to get to the first part of your question, I think, this will sound a little…

Hopefully it’s not too ambiguous, but what I do now, having been introduced to lots of different philosophical ideas within the Western canon, Starting with the pre-Socratics, I was absolutely enamored with this idea that is one of my taglines, and it was Sextus Empiricus had gone with Alexander the Great to kind of the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan and then over into northern India, and while Empiricus was He was in the northern Indian region. He met a group of people called the Gymnosophists, and they were early Buddhists. And Gymno means naked, so they were Sadhu-type Buddhists. They renounced everything.

They just walked around naked and asked questions. And it blew Sextus Empiricus’s mind. He comes from the Greek academies. He comes from classical Greek epistemic training. And so… He sat with them, and I don’t know how they spoke to each other, but he learned from them, and he was, again, very taken by what they were doing, so he brought that back to Greece with them, and he… And I, and I’m ignorant of how Pyrrho of Elis came into the story, but I think Pyrrho picked up from Sextus what Sextus picked up from the gymnosophists.

And so Pyrrho of Elis went to the academies, to the dogmatists, the sophists, the skeptics, other schools of skepticism, and the pragmatists and the stoics and all that.

And they would argue in the academy and the stoa and sort of the tenet, that which they were desiring to achieve was ataraxia, which is a kind of state of well-being, like eudaimonia, ataraxia, contentment, nirvana in the east, you know, just this kind of place within yourself where you are feeling at ease, and so what Pyrrho brought was, this is my tagline, epoché leads to ataraxia, so a suspension of judgment leads to ataraxia, and when I heard that, I was like, whoo, that’s, that’s neat. So, that’s one of the tools in my virtual toolkit of almost spiritual practice.

It’s more the psycho-social, psycho-emotional, you know, my psychical profile. I use that to filter how I lens things, how I approach things. And then… Moving forward through history, one of the other things that I found interesting is that the early, not super early Christians, but theologians maybe in the scholastic period were working on how to, again, intellectualize their theology, and there was a school that opened up this idea of apophasis as a means of Being in the presence of the divine or being in practice of their faith. And that has to be on a scale or equilibrium with cataphasis.

So apophasis is a negative spirituality and cataphasis is more descriptive. It is more that, you know, I know what God is and I know what’s on God’s mind, all these different things. So I lean into the apophasis, not necessarily in a purely theological sense, but more in a broad sense, like I approach anything that I encounter with a sense of apophasis, so what the apophatic Christian might say or the theologian might say is that I know not what I am in the world. I don’t know what’s in my presence or what I am in the presence of, but I know that I’m in the presence of the divine.

So it is, I dare not describe that which I am encountering, that which I am experiencing or feeling in my affective states, et cetera, et cetera. So I love that idea because it ties back into this epoché leads to ataraxia, where if I, and I have this epistemic humility that I may be able to enter into reciprocal knowing with something a little more easily. And I could be self-deceptive when I say that.

I might still have all my Percepts and beliefs and ideas onboarded, and I have the selection bias like everyone else, and you know, so this all has to be said with some, you know, caution on the back end of what I’m trying to suggest is my, you know, what I do, excuse me, as I choke on my saliva, so I say that plus I think I try to embrace what I consider the divine and the sacred, but I don’t appeal to the supernatural for a sense of what is divine and sacred, because again, I cannot know.

And I guess I would bring up like if this was a triadic system that I embrace, the last thing I would, I would suggest is ignosticism, which is a rabbi came up with this term and it plays right in with apophasis and epoché, and that is to say, ignosticism, You could say theology, it’s kind of a contradiction of terms, but the agnostic says that there is absolutely no way of knowing what is beyond what we have access to, so everything is speculation, everything is open for debate, there isn’t a living soul alive that could have the truth available to them, there is, despite claims of revelation and disclosure, That this, again, is to be trusted, that this person is actually being honest or is not dealing with schizophrenia or psychosis or any of these other things that they claim that they have spoken to a divine source or whatever.

So I think the rabbi was not making this move, and I’m so sorry, I don’t know his name, but he wasn’t making this move to refute a divine whatever, It was more that we should have, like, again, an epistemic humility and a sense of grounding ourselves in our place. We are these little things, these little creatures scurrying around on a small planet in a small solar system in a, you know, a banal galaxy in a huge universe, you know.

And our ancestors, including the rabbis, you know, theological lineage, you know, They did the best they could to understand, you know, this awesomeness and this horrifying potential of either nihilism or, you know, a great watchmaker creator God or, you know, it’s all just so very overwhelming. And I think the, again, the Western canon, both theological and philosophical, has acted in good faith, so to speak, to produce the best that we can. And I think it constantly needs refining and updating. And that’s where, you know, we find ourselves in all of the great, debates about religion and spirituality and philosophy and so forth.

But, so that, I’ll stop there because I’ve been rambling probably for five minutes, but I’ll stop there and see if you, if you want to pick out anything from that.

Josh Galt: Oh man, there’s so much there, it’s great. So there’s many different paths we can go on this and I want to touch on them all. I think to start, the setting aside judgment is really interesting. Explain how you use that and or maybe why. Why is probably a better question. When you were facing this health crisis, why was it something that you felt like could help you? Were you looking to connect to maybe understand a little bit more or were you…

Were you doing it perhaps from a subconscious guilt standpoint of like from the Catholic or from the Catholic upbringing where it’s like, oh, maybe I did something to do this and now I have to repent or like what was sort of the thinking there of, okay, this is Something that I’m facing that could be mortal. And so in my time, however much is left, if I have a lot left or if it’s going soon, I want to connect with as much as I can know, even though I believe that I can’t know everything, sort of the opposite of dogma. What was sort of the motive there and how did that help you, I guess?

Justin McSweeny: Right. Yeah, because it does seem odd that you have this memento mori, this sort of I’m going to die moment, or I’m going to be a vegetable, which I, you know, I think I would have been more of a, you know, in a nursing home at 41 with very limited cognitive capacity, which would, I’d rather die than have to go through that. But anyway, and to say this is not glib or this is not being said for shock value, but At any moment of my life, since probably that time, I’m okay with dying. I don’t mind. You know, I don’t care what happens when I die, and all I ask is that I don’t suffer.

Like, I don’t get run over by something or split open by a huge chainsaw or something. Yeah, don’t let me feel a lot of agony before I die. I would appreciate that. But to die itself, and I’d be a fool if I said it.

Josh Galt: You’ve made peace with death,

Justin McSweeny: I’m pretty good with it. I’d be a fool if I said, I am not afraid to die. That would be silly and self-deceptive. I mean, I would like to live, you know, for many more years and have a good, fruitful life. But should I die tomorrow? I will say now that I’ve lived a good life. I have a wonderful wife, a partner. I’ve had a great… Time. It was a good time. There’s been challenges like all of us have to face, but I can go tomorrow and feel like I led a good life. And also, and this will circle us back up to the spiritual thing, is I would like to think, with a few minor exceptions, that I’ve led a life that did not cause harm to others.

And, that I may have tried, at least, in my way, attempted in my way, to be a decent human being. and again, I’ve had, I, you know, we’re, I’m flawed, yeah, I’ve, I’ve done things I regret, I’ve done some, not, not, Terrible things, but just things that I’m like, ooh, yeah, I could have done that differently, right? So, you know, who doesn’t? So that would be, I think, to get back into spirituality and the health crisis and why did I choose something such, you know, so odd as to say that, you know, a FOK or a suspension of judgment? By saying a suspension of judgment, I might want to broaden that out a little bit and say that what I…

Josh Galt: Your

Justin McSweeny: Like to think I’ve found in this little triadic system, if we can call it that, is that I am less attached to things in the inquiry process about, you know, who are we? What are we? What is purpose? What is sense? What is meaning? All these things. I don’t feel that hunger and that, There’s not a lure out there of these kind of questions that’s just, you know, driving at me and pulling me in a direction. I think, again, this could be self-deceptive on my part, but I think what I find to be soothing to my, and I’ll say soul, but when I say soul, it is more just my mental feeling. I’m the spirit of who I am. I’m a cognitive person.

I’m having a conversation with you. I’m animated. Yeah, I have feelings, affective states. That’s what I mean by insolument. So I don’t think my soul is transcendent. I don’t think it came into me at birth. I don’t think it will leave me. I hope not when I die.

Josh Galt: Consciousness, I think

Justin McSweeny: Who knows, right? I’m an agnostic, so I don’t know. But, you know, given my druthers, I would rather not exist beyond this. I would love for the life that I experience to be impressed upon living persons who go forward from me. And if there is some weird kind of thing where our, I don’t believe in consciousness, like, you know, transcending or anything transcending, and this is a belief, right? So I have to say I’m, Not necessarily always agnostic, but I, this is just something I would, I would keep to myself as a kind of, I prefer, not rather like I’m doggedly attached, that when I pass, that whatever I do, I will live on,

Josh Galt: It’s

Justin McSweeny: Maybe in these conversations, or maybe in people that knew me, and maybe my story dies when certain people pass away, but that’s fine. But, you know, whatever reverberance we have into the future when our bodies cease to be, is fine with me. Now, if I did endure beyond the passing of my body, okay… Then what I would hope for is maybe it’s a download of life experience and, you know, talk about like Akashic Records and things like that and I think in the Advaita Vedanta or somewhere, you know, it might have emerged from that, I don’t know where it came from, so I won’t pretend to know, but something like that,

Josh Galt: Come from a lot of different places, completely

Justin McSweeny: Something, yeah, a lot of Eastern and, so, If that’s the case, cool, because if that’s a big library or storehouse of information of what this life experienced, then that’s cool, because maybe whatever’s aggregating itself or agglomerating itself in the, you know, whatever’s outside of our capacity to access, that’s cool.

You know, I think that would be interesting, because it kind of gives us a sense of, like, And we can’t know this, but to me, if that was revealed, then it would be like, oh, okay, so this is not for not, you know, this is a meaningful life in that sense, which is why we have the strong narrative of a soul that leaves the body when we die. And again, I don’t know yes or no to that, but I think that’s what gives us that sense of meaning in life is to say, oh, This life is not nihilism. This life is not a vacuum of meaning, you know, or a void.

So it makes perfect sense why we came up with that as part of our psychotechnology that is religion, you know, that we put that together to give us this, you know, otherwise, why would you get out of bed if your life was, you know, meaningless?

Josh Galt: Pointless, yeah, the,

Justin McSweeny: Yeah, you’re in a void.

Josh Galt: Do you think that’s why the agnostic idea came about was, you know, atheism also takes faith to believe that, like, everything just came from nothing of a certain sort? And then to be agnostic, I’ve sort of, I hadn’t heard the term ignostic until I was reading your bio and whatnot, but I think it’s really interesting and interesting.

I had described my journey as coming from very, very Pentecostal Christian side of things to going all the way to agnostic theists, which I guess would be essentially agnostic, where it’s like, I hope that there’s something, just like you’re saying, I hope that I persist after this, I hope that there’s some sort of divine out there that I’m part of. But I don’t see it on this earth, I just don’t see it. And then I’ve come back, personally, I’ve come back to a, my mom would say that it’s new age. So it’s interesting that you brought that up, because I’ve been reading a lot of stuff over the years.

And I mean, I’ve had lots of experiences with plant medicine and different things as well. And so I have my own belief system about it. Why we’re here. And I still question. I mean, it’s part of this. Like, I just, I love to question and have these conversations and hear other people’s perspectives and beliefs and whatnot. But like, what was called new age, like in the 60s, with our parents, like some of the writings were from the early 1900s, right? Like, and some of the like Walter Russell and those guys, like the theories that they had, even Tesla, right?

We’re, we’re very like out there, but also connect sort of in a way to Eastern mysticism and the new age and stuff. So I think the biggest question I have with that is like purpose. And I’ve talked to some some atheists and some Hindus who don’t believe that there’s anything after this life. At all. And they’re very firm in their belief of that. And that, to me, that’s really interesting, because it’s like, man, if I, if I let myself get to that, and let go of the judgment, like you’re saying, or maybe the hope, I don’t, I think I would get nihilistic.

Like, what would be the purpose of this whole thing if, like, at some point it’s going to end? I don’t know when it’s going to end. It’s not in my control. And, you In the end, it is all for naught. Like, that would, that would, that would be challenging. And so I understand why religion plays such a big role in people’s lives, because they need something, especially because life is hard for everyone. Rich, poor, black, white, like, there’s struggles that everyone goes through. On different levels, sure, but we all go through struggles.

And so, religion does play a role in that, but it’s like, How did you, because you said that you lived a fairly good life as far as being a good person, a moral person, where did you draw your morality from, along your journey? Because it wasn’t from a religion, right? Like, was it,

Justin McSweeny: Right, right. I, okay, I would consider morality to be a very strong word for me in my little bubble, in my thought, my thought space. And so I would say that I try to be as amoral as possible, not immoral, not where I’m going around punching old ladies in the face and fornicating with wild animals or anything like that. But to be a, there are arguments in philosophy for a morality, because what we do, What we are getting from that is that it is a social construct. It is a normative.

It is a, it’s kind of a canalizing, a prescriptive, and I’ll use another philosophical, like deontology, which is like the Ten Commandments, thou shalt this, that, you know, that’s the deontological. Immanuel Kant was, you know, you could look to him for some of his own sort of recipes of deontology. Buddhism, the Eightfold Path is deontological in my opinion and people who are good Buddhists might yell at me and throw stuff at the screen right now, but it is the good advice given. It is that which guides you through this journey.

Now, To be a little provocative, I might say that if we feel like there is no continuance, I would argue to you as a parent that there is indeed continuance and it is through the children that you created and through the influence that they will have further in life in 30 to 50 years, what you do now has a lot of meaning. And it will carry purpose because the children that you raise will have a sense of purpose in life, right? It is to care for their children. It is to live a good life. And by good life, I don’t mean vacuous consumerism.

I mean a life where, again, we are in ataraxia or eudaimonia where we are Not on the roller coaster of happy and sad, but just on that nice flat line that between where the sine wave goes up and down, you know, there’s that median line. And that’s where I like to think is an optimal place to inhabit. It’s great to it’s great to be happy. And if it if it arises, ride that truck, you know, the ride it up. And if you’re sad, and we all get set. So that’s natural. That’s just part of the thing. But I think

Josh Galt: Balance.

Justin McSweeny: I think most people would agree that we are living in our modern Western culture where the dopamine spiking of drugs and, you know, and I’m not judging, I did a lot of drugs when I was younger, but, you know, alcohol, booze, sex, shopping, consumerism, food, this kind of thing, it’s all sort of hedonic. It’s a load, a hedonic load that, you know, is to me not terribly natural.

You know, I think it’s better that we Seek a steady state and when happiness arises naturally, great, and when we get sad and depressed, naturally, we can go through it, you know, but anyway, so I’m being a little preachy here, but that comes back to this idea of morality, so if we use the metaphor of the center line through the sine wave of happy, sad, that if you are living a content life and you feel like there is no lack, there is no I think you’re missing out, there’s none, there’s none of the deficits, you know, in a, either hedonic or egoic kind of pursuit, that your lensing, your perspectival knowing of the world and your relationality with others might be, You’re lensed in a way that you will comport yourself in a way that doesn’t necessitate a moral structure, if that makes sense.

Now, it could be defined from the outside as being, you could, so if somebody is walking this path and being a good person and altruistic or egalitarian, whatever the superlative is, You know, that could be seen from the outside as a proper moral life, where they are kind to others, they help when they can, they, you know, they give when asked, but they also take care of themselves and their family, you know, they strike this balance of a well-lived life, that could be seen as a moral life, but I think Morality is good for folks who are maybe caught in an up-and-down rollercoaster scenario of good and bad and these kind of…

These kind of phase shifts of behavior and affect and things like that might be where morality has a place and a purpose, because it is, again, it’s a guardrail, it’s a, it’s a canalizing or an attractor that keeps us from going too far. So in other words, if we might We have a predilection for alcohol and cocaine, and we go to Las Vegas, and there’s a lot of alcohol and cocaine, but you’re from Iowa, and there’s not a lot of cocaine, and you go out there and you just blow $10,000 on booze and drugs and gambling and hookers, and, you know, that could be seen by some as being a somewhat immoral move, right?

But You know, it’s like when you are in your niche of Iowa and you are being canalized by an absence of these hedonic temptations or engagement, you know, if that makes sense, it’s like, you know, that’s where morality can really bring you in. And so when you get off the plane in Vegas, you’re like, I’m not going to do cocaine. I’ll have a few drinks. I’ll go to a show and watch pretty, you know, ladies do the can-can dance or the burlesque or whatever, but I’m not going to go see a hooker at the hooker places. And you know what I mean? So that’s where morality has a place.

I think when we want to go out into excess, when we want to go, and this is what, you know, what religion, again, tries to help people with. It is a social engineering project that helps people with that. Not being tempted with showing prudence and sophrosyne and moderation and all these different control mechanisms that keep us from blowing, you know, getting a second mortgage so that we can, again, go out and blow it all on the craps table or run it up our nose or, you know, whatever it is that we want to do. And I’m not judging if that’s, you know, if you have the money for it.

Josh Galt: But does that matter? That’s exactly, that’s exactly what I was going to ask. So, does that matter if no one’s getting hurt from it, and it’s all consenting adults, etc., and you have the money for it? Like, if a wealthy person wants to go and blow $20,000 on a weekend in Vegas, is that immoral if they are… Of an amoral sort of perspective of like, I think it’s fun, I’m taking my buddies, we’re just going to go do this, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, nobody gets hurt, everybody makes some money, we have fun, yeah, end of story.

Justin McSweeny: Mm-Mm-Yeah. On the surface, I agree. I don’t think no harm, no foul. But there’s the idea of moral absolutism and moral relativism, if we want to open up morality a little bit. And so a moral absolutist might say that if that person with $20,000 for the weekend and a couple friends, if they engage in debauched behavior, if they get drunk, if they engage in…

Fornication outside of marriage or whatever it is that the moral absolutist finds to be a contravenient, contravenience of their, the moral absolutists deontology, you know, their prescriptives, their thou shalts and nots and all that, then, then, We could say that in the context of one person judging the playboys that are out having fun, that there is a moral tension there. Now, if we are morally ambivalent or what they call moral relativism, which is a philosophical thing that can get kind of heated and sticky… Is to say that, hey, who am I to judge? And the person has the means to do that. And they’re going to do that.

That’s, that’s almost a little bit of a moral relativist argument is to say, as you pointed, that if they can do it, and like you said, nobody gets hurt, and everybody goes home, relatively stable and safe, that’s cool. Now, If I were to get somewhere in between the relativist and the absolutist, I’d say, well, this person’s wealthy, they have means, and the $20,000 that they blew for three days of debauched frivolity could have been spent You know, for Habitat for Humanity, or an animal shelter, a Make-A-Wish Foundation grant for a child to go somewhere for the last week of their life.

You know, so I’d throw that in as a Debbie Downer, kind of like really just, you know, throw a real wet blanket on all that debauched behavior. But I don’t know that person who went and blew 20 grand on the weekend didn’t just drop, you know, 40 grand on something like that. So I don’t know. But I, that would be the only thing I could put pressure on that is to say, you know, does this happen all the time? Do they never consider, you know, doing something like noblesse oblige?

Like if you’re really wealthy, that’s what the aristocracy was expected to give a token, you know, You know, pittance to the, to the Neves and the serfs and all that kind of, it was called noblesse oblige, which is the obligation of the wealthy and the aristocracy to trickle down a little bit, you know, so if that person gave, and they felt it, like,

Josh Galt: But didn’t they?

Justin McSweeny: What’s that?

Josh Galt: I mean, didn’t they do that in paying the bartenders and paying the hookers and paying the drug dealers? Like, okay.

Justin McSweeny: That’s transactional. No, that’s transactional. Yeah, I don’t know. Somebody could push back on that. I would see that as transactional because the person is already there working and a person who’s there just to spend $1,000 over two days would level a tip for the drinks purchased and maybe give the same amount of a tip, but they didn’t spend as much or they don’t have as much means behind it. So I’d say, you know, It’s pumping the economy, which is, you know, good, yay capitalism and market enterprise, but I think, you know, it’s all, there’s another relativist perspective is, you know, 60 other people tip that bartender that night. Mm-

Josh Galt: Do… Sure, sure. Do these moral judgment type of arguments help society? Like, are they important? Because you could go, and I’m not trying to get political or anything, but like, you could look at something that one side says is genocide and one side says is self-defense that’s happening in our world today, and there’s moral arguments being made on both sides, right?

And so it’s like, And I’ve read stuff sort of in the amoral side of, or not side, but like in the middle where it’s like, well, how do we even know that good and evil exist outside of our definition of, Our human definition right now in this century of what good and evil are, right? Because throughout history, and if you look at a book that I think is really interesting that often frustrates religious people is The Lucifer Principle, which was written in the 90s. I just read it a few years ago, and I was like, man, that’s really, really interesting.

I think it kind of touches on some of the things that Yuval Harari talks about in Sapiens and whatnot, but sort of humanity is this superorganism that exists on the planet, and it breaks into groups that even though we think we’re an individual and we think we have our individual thoughts and beliefs and whatnot, we’re still going to go with the group that we feel the most connected to and ultimately connect, That’s why there’s so much division and so many battles and whatnot is because each group is fighting for supremacy because it’s survival.

I mean, that really boils humanity down to a terrible place, honestly, that I don’t necessarily agree with fully, but I don’t disagree either. When you look at reality, there’s, yeah, there’s a lot of that happens that just looks like a school of fish where we just sort of, we think we’re individuals, but we’re operating together.

Within this framework, and I think religion plays a huge role in that, in creating those different schools of fish, essentially, that operate based on certain principles and dogmas, and to go outside and be the fish that goes against that and says, you know what, I’m going to withhold judgment, I’m going to be more open-minded to say that I don’t actually know for sure what’s happening.

Have you had a lot of pushback from people like in your life with, I don’t know, with work or business or personal relationships or whatnot of people who are like, well, you just don’t believe anything and so it’s just easy for you to, and how do you respond to that?

Justin McSweeny: I would say that belief is a tool. It’s a utility. And much like you could give someone a hammer and they could go build something like a table or a house or whatever, you know, with other tools, they could use that hammer effectively. I could give the hammer to someone else and they’ll beat someone’s face in to where you don’t recognize them anymore because the hammer is very effective as a weapon. So I would say the same thing with the utility of belief in our human domain, our human experience. And this is one…

This allegory or didact that I really appreciate, and that is the myth of Eden, or as some would very strongly believe, the fall of man in Eden. And I take the Jungian kind of perspective on this allegory of Eden, wherein… Adam and Eve ate from the fruit and they realized they were naked. So the fruit is a fall in a kind of Jungian perspective. The fruit represents a fall into self-awareness. It is metacognition. It is it is.

The capacity to see into the future and see into the past as thinking persons, you know, instinctual animals, they predict a little bit into the future and they might recall some things from the past that helped them not do it again, you know, but we have, one guy that I interviewed calls it a cognitive light cone and we can think really far into the future for our plans and we can remember most of our past. So that’s a that’s a powerful that is a powerful system. And that’s why that’s why the allegory of Eden to me is very significant.

Unfortunately, it gets kind of perverted into this very narcissist and this is very editorializing and some people might get upset, but it gets turned into a narcissistic exercise where you think That the fall of man was a fall into sin rather than a fall into self-awareness and that, you know, you have to beg forgiveness for being born and be born again and all these kind of things.

I very much push back on that because I think that’s just pure narcissism to think that you know, Our, your individual soul is at stake because somebody ate an apple, you know, and committed the first sin, you know, and that your mother giving birth to you is a repetition of that original sin, and that you have to be, you know, contrite for that, and that you have to, you know, seek consilience with your maker for that. Now that’s just to me. Exactly,

Josh Galt: But even more, wouldn’t that be a narcissistic deity, that a deity would create something and say, okay, I’m perfect and you’re good, but I’m going to saddle you with this burden so that you worship me for all of your life, and if not, that I’m going to punish you. That’s where I really, I

Justin McSweeny: Right. And that’s

Josh Galt: Couldn’t deal with that’s where I really.

Justin McSweeny: Kind of the… And so here’s another thing that’ll upset probably fundamentalists is like that in some camps, in some theological camps is why God came down as Christ to be crucified, was to make amends and atone for what kind of God, the God of the Old Testament or the Torah was.

It was a very nasty creature, you know, and again, this is, take whatever you want as being true or whatever, but if we’re, you know, this is what is discussed and batted about, and, you know, some people say Christ died for their sins, so that because, you know, Eve, Tempted Adam with an apple and the serpent, you know, and then there’s a hermeticism, I think, where they say that the snake was actually the good guy and the demiurge is what, you know, and God is above the demiurge, but I like the idea that, and I don’t believe this as a, you know, metaphysical ontological fact or metaphysical fact, but that I like the idea that God came down as Jesus and In kenosis, emptied itself out and became a human being, a very sort of enlightened and divine human being and then was willing to be sacrificed so that this new covenant could be formed rather than, again, for saving your individual soul, it’s more that God is It is the fellow sufferer.

It is, you know, an act of contrition. Like you just said, you know, it’s that God was a little overbearing, a little too much to deal with. And so it made a pact with its creation, i.e. humans and the other little critters that run around on earth. So again, I don’t endorse or advocate any of this. I just like the idea because it is a sense-making tool because the story… If we are to go through the Abrahamic tradition and think about the Old Testament and the Torah and just, again, how kind of ruthless, like Job, the book of Job, and Jung addresses this in his Answer to Job, yeah, right,

Josh Galt: Yes, he does. Yes, he does.

Justin McSweeny: And gee whiz, the devil in the Bible in the Old Testament or the Torah was God’s attorney, basically, an inquisitor who tested the faith of others instead of some, you know, keeper of Hades kind of thing that, you know, I think John the Baptist kind of championed that one. So anyway, it has a beautiful poetic lineage when you can lens it away beyond kind of what evangelical Christianity has morphed it into. And I’m not trying to knock it too much because I know people who are evangelicals who are really…

Josh Galt: And how would

Justin McSweeny: You know, walking the walk and doing good work. But at the same time, there are a lot of people out there who are like, I am born again and I am saved and yada, yada, yada. And I’m like, well, okay, but, you know, there’s other ways to kind of lens the story. So anyway, I don’t want to open up too many cans of worms because I don’t really adhere to any of this. Yeah. But I like that idea that, you know, this soteriological narrative of the Christ figure coming down, teaching us how to be civilized and decent human beings and imbuing upon us what it means to be a good person, and then…

Again, taking that extra step of being willing to be sacrificed to prove a point, you know, that and then you fill in the blank as whatever your belief system is, if you’re listening. So anyway, yeah, but I think what goes back to belief, and I was basically saying belief is a tool, it can be a weapon, it can be a tool of creation. So, It’s different for every one of us, but that’s where, going back to all this stuff I was babbling about with ignosticism and apophaticism and epoché and all these other things, I think that is a good medicine for allowing belief to contain you and that We have to believe in things.

I have to believe that if I walk in front of a dump truck doing 60 miles an hour, that’s going to be it. I don’t want to walk faith and say, no, no, I will suddenly, the truck will pass through and I’ll be fine. No, I don’t believe that for a minute. So I can’t say I’m a non-belief kind of person. But what I endorse or advocate, if anybody wants, if I haven’t run anybody off with the whole thing about Jesus a minute ago,

Josh Galt: You suggest

Justin McSweeny: Is that we loosen our grip and we loosen our apprehension of belief, of the practice of storehousing beliefs, that if our beliefs can be a little malleable, a little bit on a spectrum where it can oscillate and you can have these oscillatory patterns, because I think, Josh, one of the problems that we’ve come across since the Enlightenment project in the, starting in the late 17th through the 18th and 19th centuries when we were becoming Enlightened and there was a bifurcation between church and science, the episteme, is that we are very binary thinkers, you know, we tend to put things in categories and we, either something is true or it’s false or it’s right or it’s wrong or it’s good or it’s bad, and this goes back to almost sounding relativistic again, but With guardrails, I think having the capacity to be cognitively flexible, emotionally flexible, spiritually flexible, in a sense, within your own sensibilities, within whatever is that which makes sense.

I’m going to tell you that it’s going to cause less suffering in your life. So to go back to Buddhism for a second, you know, the Buddha and the Four Noble Truths is one of them is that life is suffering and that the attachment is suffering.

And so I borrow from that and I say, It’s not just attachment to hookers and booze in Vegas and cocaine in Vegas, it’s also attachment to what we think is good, what we think is righteous, what we think is beautiful, and all, and I’m sort of getting myself in trouble here by saying good and beautiful and true, I’ll say true, which is Plato, and we can get to him in a second, but when we When we artifice these ideas of what we think is true and good and beautiful, that we can find ourselves becoming very rigid, you know, I like to use a metaphor that like every belief is a chain that you wrap around your shoulders, and if you have more beliefs and more beliefs and more beliefs, how flexible are you?

How quickly can you move and articulate and dance and all these other things if you’re, if you are restrained by a lot of heavy, And it’s not to say that you go, again, we don’t get binary and say it’s either this or it’s this. You know, we just find that capacity to reciprocate and to be oscillating in that sense. So, and… Mm-

Josh Galt: For someone that maybe, so for me, I’m a very passionate person. I believe that greatness requires obsession. It’s one of the things that I like to talk about and to focus on. Whether it’s sports, whether it’s business, I mean, you see people, and, you know, we can talk about the benefits and the drawbacks of society propping up this idea of, you know, sleeping at the office and the way Elon Musk lives or whatever, but it’s, for me, I’ve seen it in my own life and I really do believe that, If someone does have a desire to be great at something, at anything, with their talents and abilities and purpose, like you have to be obsessed.

And so that to me is a bit of a contradiction in my own life because I do, I mean I lived in Asia for a very long time and I really, even before that time I was more connecting with a lot of Buddhist philosophy and it’s sad to see in some countries over there where it’s become a religion of sorts as opposed to just a philosophy, but the idea of not being attached, of letting go, The story of the Chinese farmer, I’m sure you know that story, where he has a bunch of sons or something, or he has a son, and everyone comes and says, oh, it’s amazing, you have a son, and he says, maybe, and then the son grows up, and then he goes out and he catches a horse.

It’s a long story, I won’t tell it here, but the whole thing, every answer is maybe. So something good happens, maybe. Something bad happens, maybe. Maybe. You know, and in the end, like, the military comes to take his son away, but he has a broken leg because of the horse the day before or whatever, and so it’s like, the moral of the story is detachment, in a way, from what’s happening. It’s maybe, maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. And I really like that idea, but at the same time, it’s a contradiction, and contradictions can’t exist, so I have to check my premises, because…

I do believe in being passionate and having a goal and working towards that and like just being obsessed with it but at the same time I believe that it’s healthier perhaps to be detached so how would you how would you recommend someone live or someone take that contradiction how would you recommend to me to take that contradiction say well maybe look at it from a different angle Yeah.

Justin McSweeny: Mm-Mm-Well, this speaks to this dilemma, I think, that the West finds itself grappling with in the last 100 and, let’s say, 200 years is false dilemmas and dichotomies and contradictions. We’re not good with contradiction, which is, again, why, why Buddhism, It throws out koans and things like that, and they want their didacts and their parables speak of these kind of contradictory scenarios, but I think it teaches a kind of cognitive flexibility wherein one could be obsessive.

I am, I am bad obsessive because I think it’s childhood neurosis, like child, I didn’t have a traumatic, I had a very Machiavellian childhood and so I was, I dealt with a lot of psych games and a lot of BS from certain parents and it was a crucible that annealed me in turn, but I have this really, You know, and I’ve learned to further anneal it and temper it, but I am deeply obsessive, right? Anything I put my focus on, good, bad, or, you know, self-destructive or somewhat productive, it’s there.

And, but we’re in, you know, we can understand temperance and prudence and knowing that this is, this is, A cognitive engine of ours or an affective psycho-emotional engine of ours to be obsessive. And so when we can recognize it that we can hold two things to be somewhat true and Accessible to us as far as like acknowledging that we are obsessive, but at the same time, like you’re saying, we can have the ambivalence and we can have the, you know, again, that steady state, the ataraxia, eudaimonia kind of thing where we’re like, I’m good.

You know, like the maybe farmer, you know, it’s like, you kind of, you can kind of understand some of that perspective. Yeah, no, you don’t want to say maybe to everything, but, and that’s kind of a Freudian, Kleinian thing, like the ambivalence is actually a state that, I don’t know if it was Freud or Klein that developed it, or maybe Melanie Klein. Anna Freud, I can’t remember who in that psychological lineage, but they talk about ambivalence being this kind of state away from what Klein would have called the paranoid schizoid state, which is very kind of self-obsessed, kind of You know, manipulative and divisive and all these other things.

And then she has this kind of depressive reparative state wherein ambivalence can be can flourish. And it’s not depressive like emotional depression. It’s more that the ego is being depressed and that, you know, that there is a space to now occupy where ambivalence can flourish. And so, you know, go team ambivalence when we are too obsessive. Right. And we are because and again, I understand.

In my history, my lineage of obsessive behavior, I, and I dragged my poor wife through this, I owned a restaurant, I owned a newsstand, I owned two landscape businesses, I mean, I was just, I worked seven days a week for years, until I met my wife, I never took vacations, I just worked, I had, you know, I was a chef in the evening, and I had a landscape business in the daytime, and I got rid of the chef thing and became a full-time with landscaping, and then I opened a restaurant and got rid of the landscape. So it’s like I just went from one fire to the next, right, and just constantly nose to the grindstone.

But Now that I’m old and my body’s not like, dude, you don’t want to keep doing that. Like, I don’t do that anymore. And so now I’m trying to enter into this depressive, reparative, ambivalent state where I know I still need to be productive and take care of myself and my partner, but I’m not going to work seven days a week. Now I enjoy my quiet time. I enjoy leisure. And hobbying and things like that. So a long-winded way to getting to this idea that we can have our obsession and make time for that space to be quiet and to open up to other things. And I don’t think it needs to be a contradiction in a sense.

When we’re younger and like, again, when I was 26 and you said, dude, you need to chill, take a day off, I’d be like, No, I don’t think so. I’m going to go do my thing. And thank you very much. It just didn’t occur to me that I should rest and be reflective or go to a museum or something like that. And I would sneak in recreation, but it was just work, work, work. So I think it can be done. I think we are capable persons, even with our cultural values.

The normatives of our culture and the milieu that we find ourselves, I love that word, milieu, that we find ourselves in, where there is this constant go, go, go, hustle, hustle, hustle, work, work, work, work, work, and, you know, achieve, achieve, achieve, so that you can consume, consume, consume, and, you know, some of that’s good, you know, I mean, we all want white picket fences and, you know, nice cars and all that, and, you know, you go out and you get that, but I think when we get too obsessive that we,

Josh Galt: Right. Is that

Justin McSweeny: We burn ourselves out and we crash out and then we get into meaning crisis, then we get into what’s the purpose, what’s the sense of all of this, you know, it opens up its own little can of nihilistic worms, I think, when we when we find ourselves being so transactional and so work oriented and so, you know, go get and achieve and all that kind of thing. So it’s

Josh Galt: Part of what you faced with your health crisis? Is like sort of coming to the end of living that

Justin McSweeny: About

Josh Galt: Way and realizing like, oh, wait a second, like I’m actually mortal, but also is it really necessary to live this way like my whole life? Like what is the meaning and purpose of doing all this?

Justin McSweeny: Mm-What’s really sad, and I say this sort of tongue-in-cheek, is when I went through my health crisis at 41, it didn’t slow me down at all. I was a vegetable up here, but I still had a landscape business to run, and I had 40 accounts to service, and I had customers, and I had projects to do, and bless my wife, she, you know, toed the line and really, you know, kept me I was not glued together enough, but there were times when I would be out working and I shouldn’t be, I shouldn’t have been out. I shouldn’t have been doing things.

I should have been probably under the care of somebody, you know, but I just, I was in, I was in a spinning, you know, boulder down the hill or whatever metaphor you want to use. So I just didn’t have time to be as sick as I was. And I don’t know, I don’t know if that It probably didn’t help at all. And, you know, in hindsight, 15 years later, I kind of cringe about that. And I think, you know, but I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t lose the business, right? You know, isn’t it, you know, there’s nobody, nobody’s stepping in. In fact, she went out and did stuff online.

When I was so incapacitated in certain days, but I tried my best to stay, you know, on board and keep doing the physical work that was expected in that, in what we did. So, but yeah, I probably didn’t do myself any favors, but I got through it. I, you know, I made it through.

Josh Galt: And so you said that was like 15 years ago. On the outside or coming out of that, then how did that change you? And over the last however many years it’s been, how has your perspective and your framework evolved?

Justin McSweeny: Yeah, it was a tempering process. It was a kind of, You know, slow your roll kind of process because, let’s see, that was 41. 41. And I kept that landscape business until about four, almost four years ago, three and a half years ago, I stopped, because my body was just getting too old. I’m 57 now, and so I was 53 when I got out of the landscape business, just because I couldn’t do anything. In fact, I’ve got arthritis in my neck and my hip, and I live with the pain every day of what I did to my body back then. You know, that’s fine. I did that. You know, it’s like a football player. You got to live with your injuries.

Not that I’m comparing myself to a football player, but just, you know, you put your body through bad things. And I’m fine. I’m okay with that. But I wouldn’t suggest that to a 23-year-old who’s just starting. I’d say, you know, walk a balance, walk moderation so that you will, in your 50s and 60s, you will not be in pain and your body will not retaliate for what you did to it.

So anyway, but I’m getting off the point of the idea that I think just old Old, olding, old age, you know, getting older, you know, kind of tempered me besides the illness, you know, it just, it gave me a perspective that, you know, there is value to downtime, there is value to reflection and a balanced life of not just, Hustling all the time. Because I loved all the businesses that I owned. You know, they were all, you know, the restaurant was kind of stressful. We did that for about a little over four years, and then we sold it.

And in the newsstand, we just got the newsstand so that my poor wife could get out of the restaurant and go somewhere quiet. It was right around the corner from the restaurant. We bought it. And I said, yeah, so she could go sit and do paperwork and sell newspapers and magazines. And I dealt with the circus at the restaurant, which was fine. But It, you know, it, there’s balance in how we approach that. So I’m all for people. So, you know, you mentioned some of these like uber successful people like Musk and all that and Buffett, I think, or was it, was it Buffett?

You know, there’s, the children talk about the sacrifices that this guy makes and it’s at the expense of the family, it’s at the expense of relationships. And, So I’ll sound a little pedantic or maybe a little cynical here, but I think, you know, it’s nice to have substance. It’s nice to have a sense of cushion underneath you for… You know, material possession and or liquidity like capital. But I think there’s a lesson in that if you sacrifice the joy of family, of friends, of social engagement for whatever price, you know, I don’t care if you’re a billionaire, I just don’t think it’s… I don’t know.

I mean, obviously, the jouissance of having all that cash is enough for some of those folks. That’s what they live for, is to have all that, you know, that sense that they have cash, you know, but again, and this is just my perspective, I think, you know, there’s greater values. To be had in other things as well. So again, strike a balance, you know, make, make a little money and have a little family and have a little friends and have a little time to go see the beauty of life and the beauty of what the world holds, you know. So. Yeah.

Josh Galt: What about purpose, though? Because I think the counter-argument for Musk or Warren Buffett or anyone that’s uber-successful, Tom Brady is one that’s in the news recently of stories of how, you know, he basically blew up his family for one more year in the NFL, and he was already the GOAT. Like, he didn’t need to play that last year, but that’s their purpose, right?

And for, I would say, just as being judgmental, not in a critical way, but like just looking at it and saying, well, this is what I can deduce from looking at it, like they weren’t chasing extra money, like Elon Musk builds because he loves to build, Tom Brady loved to play football, it’s his life, right? So… Is there, and this, I guess, goes back to the amoral thing, that how do we define that? How does each person define it? And can we judge those people and say, well, but they should spend more time with their kids?

Or, I mean, because you can kind of argue both sides, where I would be like, I don’t know, like Tom Brady seems to spend lots of time with his kids. Maybe his kids… are going to benefit more in their lives, as you were saying, like he passed himself into them, maybe they’re going to benefit more from having seen him at all costs, including his supermodel wife and, you know, maybe part of the relationship with his kids, at all costs, he pursued his purpose.

Justin McSweeny: Yeah, I would open up the idea of purpose to include, what for a lot of these people who become larger than life is a, distorted sense of identity.

So, I would say that the Brady mindset is that, you know, Tom Brady is Tom Brady, Tom Brady is the GOAT, as you said, he’s the cat’s meow, and he has all these stats behind him, he’s in his mind, because I’m 57 again, and I, you know, I think I’m still 18 to 22, you know, I’m somewhere in that range, as far as just my mental space, so I get where he’s probably like, damn, you know, I’m still in college, I’m still good, even though I’m in my 40s, and I think, We can deceive ourselves into thinking that the exterior presentation of an identity is what we are as a being, as a being self, and that the extended self of identity just takes complete control and has complete priority and precedence over that.

And it’s not just Tom Brady playing football, it’s actors acting, it’s politicians acting. It’s these people who feel that they’re a character that they’ve created, the identity that they’ve created. You know, there’s a lot of narcissism and egoism involved in this, too, because they love the adoration of the public, they love the importance that their character serves in the cultural milieu, again, so there’s factors going on that I think drive this otherwise just ordinary being into this obsessive behavior of alienating their supermodel wife or their, you know, whatever, their family is.

For the pursuit of this vainglory, this one last, you know, hurrah. And I, of course, I don’t, you know, I don’t think it’s wrong.

I just, we can analyze it though and say for our ordinary lives, for those of us who aren’t, you know, up in that big, big spotlight, that, you know, You know, to live sincerely and to live, I don’t like the word authentic because authentic is a construction too, I think sincere living, and I’m sort of riffing on some, there’s a guy named Hans-Georg Moeller who talks about these kind of ideas, where there’s something called sincere in authenticity, which is the avatar character that we present to the world when we’re on TikTok or playing football for the NFL or whatever our niche is, And there is the sincerity, which is the person that you grew up being, which is a son or a daughter or a member of a particular community.

And that is your sincerity. That is what the niche construction that built you as this being plus an identity. Because there’s always this being, this physical system, but there is also the identity that is forged because of this sincere development. We interject from our parents some of who they are. We interject from perhaps religious figures in our lives that are in our congregation. You know, our synagogue or our imam or whatever. And so we are this composite of various extra identities that help us form an identity. And that’s what he kind of considers sincerity.

And then the authenticity is a kind of acting out of what we idealize as the identity or the persona or the character that emerges from this sincere identity. So there’s being, there’s sincere identity, or being as a person, and then there is this sort of avatar, or this created persona character that we do. And there’s also furtherance of that, where we are What he calls second order observers on social media, where we don’t really see life through our eyes, we see it through the camera, and we see it through the posts on, you know, pick your favorite social media site.

So I’m getting kind of out there in messy world, but, you know, straying away, which I do a lot. But anyway, so, right,

Josh Galt: No, but it’s perfect, because I want to pull on that thread.

Justin McSweeny: Right. So, yeah, so to get back to the Brady’s of the world, and the Musks, and the Murdoch’s, and all those, yeah. We are seeing a character living out a character’s life. It may not be that because if the character hadn’t been developed as a football superstar or a, you know, go get them bazillionaire, That there would be this sincere person that was forged. And it can be, there can be a shadowy aspect that can be malignant introjection where you have abusive parents, you turn out to be a sociopath, yada, yada, yada. So it goes all ways, you know, so it’s, so anyway, I’ll stop there. If you, if you wanted to.

Josh Galt: No, but I think that’s, I think it’s, I think it’s really important because it hits at a theme that is really foundational to our society and I think our world at this point, which is social media and the idea of being a person, A projection or a fake persona versus being authentic on social media. And, you know, you listen to the gurus talk in recent years and it’s like authenticity wins, you know, just being who you really are and speaking your truth and whatnot is what people are looking for. People are craving that, you know, build in public. The idea of building in public if you’re in a startup is…

Whereas, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it was like you do everything in secret and then you launch, right? Now it’s like build in public. Everyone wants to see your journey. Everyone wants to see the authenticity of your struggles and the things that you go through. And yet what you’re saying is really interesting. So I’m curious your perspective on social media for normal people, you know, so obviously… Those people at that level are perhaps in a different echelon of being even because of the spotlight and whatnot, but for everyone else, And I question this with my own self. It’s like, I’m passionate about this.

I love these conversations. And I actually left it for like the last year because it was just too much work to edit each episode and to do all of the posting. And like, I don’t like posting on social media. I understand the importance of it. And so like, literally, it was only like the last month that I realized like, Oh, AI can edit all of my videos and do everything. This saves me like six hours per episode. I enjoy the conversations. So I want to get back to it and do it. And now AI can make, you know, 20 clips per episode and just post everything for me over time. It’s beautiful. I’m stoked.

But I also can then go and get a little bit meta and I’m like, why am I doing it? Like if I just love the conversations, why do I have to post it on social media?

Am I, do I think that I’m contributing in some way my voice to the world and then am I chasing, am I chasing likes and feedback and do I want it to grow and am I looking for sponsors, all these things, like why am I really doing it and question my own motives because I think that’s healthy for me to say why am I doing it and yet I think that we’re just in this cycle with social media where even if one really does want to contribute in a healthy way or be authentic or be sincere, I mean, I like the, I want you to expound more on that, the difference between those two things, it still has become something that can be sort of a trap.

Justin McSweeny: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was kind of engineered for capture, and they certainly achieved that. So, this might be a combination of a critical analysis of what has been wrought with this Promethean fire of social media, and it’s also maybe will come out as hopefully having some lensing like a shining a little light into it and seeing what the machinations are what the mechanics are of this and so and this is just opinion alert you know it’s just me talking but again I listen to other people who I respect and when they talk about these kind of things that create this malaise which.

Is one of the byproducts, I think, of what we find ourselves immersed in, which again is this sort of alternate universe of the social media ecosystem. And I think above all, when we present in this ecosystem, we present in this ecosystem. A simulacra of ourselves, and that’s what Moeller, he doesn’t really use that word, but I’ll throw it out there, and a simulacra is a copy that doesn’t have an original, so money is a simulacra, money’s not based on anything. You know, you could say gold, but what is gold? Gold is a metal. It doesn’t, yeah, right, right, the gold standard’s been gone forever.

But even if somebody were to argue, well, you know, gold is currency, you know, a coin is worth something, and it’s like, no, that’s just consent.

Josh Galt: Not anymore.

Justin McSweeny: That’s nothing but consent. If an alien came to this planet and they didn’t know about gold and you showed it to them, they’d be like, look, look, they’d be like, oh, shiny metal, okay, yeah, and you fight wars over this, okay. But, you know, money, paper money and coin is a simulacra because there is no original to it. It is something we… We put together or another analogy I use for simulacra is that it’s kind of silly, but there’s a, you know, a cover band called the Retreads and they play covers of a band, a sixties garage band called the Treads. Right. And they play the catalog and they’re very good at it.

They almost sound as good as the Treads, except the only thing is there was never a band called the Treads, right? The retreads are just, well, no, I’m just making this up. Like the retreads are just creating a fictional narrative and saying, you know, there was a band in the 60s and we’re here to play their cover song. But that’s kind of what a simulacra is. It’s like,

Josh Galt: No way. Oh, that’s interesting. Got it. Got it. Right.

Justin McSweeny: It didn’t ever exist, but here we are presenting it to you in a in a new iteration. So anyway, I’ll stop with that. But so when we come on to our to present ourselves in social media, and we’re, we’re looking great, we’re looking fabulous, we’re having a great vacation, we’re a travel influencer, we’re doing all of these things, we’re really hyping and idealizing this character as being, you know, shiny, happy on the Doing well. I do have a little bit of a shady backstory, you know, that I’ve overcome adversity to be this shiny, happy person.

So it’s a gumbo or a creole of narratives that may or may not have It could be a veridical background, you know, like a true background, you know, it could be things that we embellish so that we get more likes, we get more hits, and we really certainly embellish our happiness that we’re, you know, always on vacation, we’re always looking good. These are my beauty tips. This is my haul video where my clothes that I just purchased. A lot of it is to cultivate a positive affective state, a state of feeling good, And some of us are the consumers of that, and there are obviously the producers that we just described.

And so I’d say in that we are consumers of this, especially younger people whose cortical folds haven’t quite leaked come on board yet, you know, we’re about 21 to 24 before our full executive function comes on board. We’re more susceptible to impulsive behavior, we’re more receptive, susceptible rather, to high oscillation and emotional range and things like that.

So, This is dangerous, you know, because this is why, you know, you might hear about children who are self-harming or committing suicide or doing these kind of things because they’re not living up to that idealized life that the 24-year-old, The 18-year-old influencer has imbued upon them in terms of beauty standards, in terms of what you should be doing with your life and how fabulous your life should be. So that’s sort of a blatant criticism that I would have is that we spin up these narratives, these fictitious or these simulacra narratives because it really isn’t based on anything political.

I think that it’s not reifiable or concrete, you know, it’s it may be done since, you know, authentically, I started to say sincerely, but I’m going to, you know, contradict myself, but it may be done authentically, like there may be a lot of truthiness to what this person is presenting, but I think in the minds of the consumer, it can, you Sour very quickly, because, again, we’re not living that idealized life, and we’re just living a mundane life, which I think is reality for most of us, even people that, yeah, that do live the fabulosity spectrum, you know, I think it’s just, you know, life has tedium, life is boring, and if you leave that out of the narrative, I think it’s going to have

Josh Galt: And also,

Justin McSweeny: Kind of a negative impact, you know, false expectations or unrealistic expectations for how one should comport oneself and how one should live. And I don’t want to sound like I’m moralizing it, but I think this… The ecology that we enter into in the social media sphere is fraught with these kind of challenges that we have to sort out what. So it’s like reality television, which is an oxymoron. It’s not really reality television. It’s this fiction.

Fictive thing that’s supposed to make us feel good or bad, you know, and so I know that’s kind of bland what I’m saying, but I think it just needs to be repeated that we have to enter in with a lot of caveats to our engagement with Again, this Promethean fire of social media, especially guiding younger people who are, for lack of a better word, they’re ignorant. They don’t know the nuance. They don’t know how to sort out, like, what is a bunch of, you know, hocus-pocus nonsense about somebody having such a fabulous, incredible life, because it seems real to them, you know, to the consumer.

Josh Galt: It’s comparing your boring aspects of your life or your normal life to that person’s highlights. As you’re saying, like everyone, even those influencers get stuck at the airport or they have, you know, downed it. Days where they just want to stay in bed and they don’t post anything and they don’t do anything. Like, we’re all human. And that’s the thing that I think is missing because it’s just so glorified on everybody’s highlight reel as opposed to the reality. But do you think it can be a tool also for good in the sense of… Education or learning or advancing science or ideas to have conversations like we’re having.

Whatever my deep subconscious motive is with posting this on social media, I do hope that somebody watches one of the videos, the episodes, the conversations, and for as much as I learn from every conversation I have, I hope that someone else learns something too, and in that way contribute my little tiny seeds to the betterment of the species evolving and growing and learning.

Justin McSweeny: Mm-Right, right, right. Yeah, and ditto on this end. I think I could draw up a kind of corny metaphor that, you know, if you’re looking at TikTok or Instagram Reels or Facebook Reels or YouTube Shorts or whatever, and that’s your diet, right?

To use a food metaphor, it’s like eating, we’re coming close to Halloween, it’s like eating those little bite-sized candies, you know, you just, you’re throwing those little one-ounce candy bops and, you know, Snickers or whatever into your mouth, and you’re eating them, and so what we’re doing, not to, you know, pat ourselves on the back, but we’re more like a three-course meal, you know, there’s, it’s a long-form conversation, it might have a sort of Social, cognitive, caloric substance to it or fiber or protein versus the little candy bar. So I think, yes, in this, and that’s how I sort of spend my time. I’m on, I’m old, so I’m on YouTube.

I watch long form videos. There’s a lot of lecture series like Yale. And Stanford have these really incredible, like 20-hour lecture series, and you can just, you know, you just sit, and if you’re ADHD like me, just put it on two speed or one and three quarter speed, and you can just, you know, you know, gobble it up even faster if you have to, but there’s good, there is good, there is good in it, you know, even on Facebook, like I,

Josh Galt: Mm-hm, mm-hm,

Justin McSweeny: I don’t like Facebook, but I still go there because there are animal shelters that I like. There’s a lot of, I love botany and horticulture, so there are botanical journals, there are science journals and stuff that I find some of it interesting, even though some of it goes like this, but some of it I do like to consume. And so there is, if you sort things. You know, wheat from chaff, you will find good stuff. But I would also say, it’s not wrong to consume TikTok. I watch shorts, I watch little reels from time to time, the little 30-second deals, that’s fine.

But don’t make that your whole existence and, you know, give yourself a cognitive caloric

Josh Galt: Mm-hm,

Justin McSweeny: You know, diversity, you know, calories, consumption, you know, give yourself that diversity, you know, do things that expand how you think and how you, how you perceive and you know, you’ll, you’ll be okay, but if we spend all day, and I work, I work with people and they, and you know, when they’re taking a break, they’re just doing this, you know, and they’re, they’re not young, they’re my age and they’re whoop.

Josh Galt: It’s addictive

Justin McSweeny: Whoop, whoop. And I can hear. And it’s just like, okay, that’s good. I mean, you’re on your break. You want to veg out for a few minutes. I get that. But maybe not make that the entire constituency of your consumption of your diet that you consume. Yeah.

Josh Galt: Though, I mean, It’s so easy. You got your phone in your pocket, you go into the bathroom and it’s like, take it out, scroll. You’re sitting, waiting for somebody or whatever, like take it out and scroll. And it’s like, we’ve almost lost the ability to meditate or to be in a meditative state to where if you’re waiting for someone or something and you’re just in a place, just stand and be quiet and observe. Has become such a foreign concept to us. And I, yeah, I do think about that because of my kids and I wonder how they’re going to grow up and what the world’s going to be like.

And I mean, especially with AI, which is a whole different topic, but how they are going to experience life. And I really, I’m seeing this like often. In my own life, I used to spend so much time outside, and so much time in nature, and I mean, when I was running rivers and stuff for a very long time, I was, that was my life. Yeah, I still would be on the computer, whatever, to communicate and to do work for clients and stuff while I was traveling, but it’s like my life was outside. Now, it’s almost like my life is just inside and even if I go outside, I have my device and I have to check it and whatnot and it’s like, this isn’t healthy.

We’ve created this system, this world that we should… Be creating, you know, a deeper connection with nature because we understand more than, you know, in our near history, I’m not going to say thousands of years ago because who knows, millions of years ago, whatever, like our written history of what we know, if any of it is true, is we’ve evolved, especially over the last few hundred years, in many ways, technologically speaking, right, and with machines and whatnot. But yet that should lead us to go back more with nature and enjoy more of the beauty of it as opposed to what seems to be happening is we’re losing that connection.

And I want my kids to have that connection because I see, like my daughter is a toddler and when we, because we do live in the city, but when we do go and touch grass, it’s just this pure joy that comes out of her being of like, Oh, this is like so just happy, I’m in my happy place, you know, and it’s like we’ve put that into pictures on Instagram and that’s how we consume, I think, for a lot of people and that’s the scary thing is it’s like, okay, then you start to get into sort of a nihilistic thing. I mean, we see it all around.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on what solutions are, maybe for the individual or for society as a whole, with everything that’s happening, without taking a side politically, but just, I mean, you can if you want, I’m just saying I’m not taking a side politically, but just the whole system is so messed up, and yet, You know, I talk to religious leaders in these interviews, too, and I’m like, how can your religion be at the forefront of leading people? Without being hypocrites.

Because there’s some religions that can evolve their theology or whatever, like, oh, we got a new download from the prophet or from God, and so now we’re changing, we’re adapting, you know, based on, in some ways, the shifting winds politically or with popularity or whatever. But also there’s religions that can’t and won’t, right, that are like the world’s biggest religions, and they just have their, you know, their thousand year, several thousand year history, and that’s the dogma, and it’s like, well, the world is changing. Are you going to be leaders, or are we just going to continue this constant fighting, whatever?

So, like, how can we as individuals… Be leaders in, it sounds like a contradiction, right? Be leaders in letting go, be leaders in detachment, be leaders in being more zen, being more at peace, being more level, as you said, and setting that example.

Justin McSweeny: Mm-Yeah. Yeah. Let me try to weave a little tapestry of some of the threads that you provided in your statement and your question. First of all, I’ll start out with something a little oblique, and that is one thing I like from some of the cognitive science people that I follow, and I interviewed a couple of them, Mark Miller and John Vervaeke, and I absolutely agree.

Adore the work that they do, is, in their cognitive science, there’s something called predictive processing, and that is the way they posit that the mind works, and this goes from simple little single-celled animalcules all the way up to things like us, is that we construct our reality by prediction, and there’s, Carl Friston is known for something called active inference, which is a Bayesian calculus that kind of does, you know, a sort of formulaic way of describing what this is, and so active inference is basically that we infer a time-space scenario that’s occurring In this sort of present moment, and what the next thing will be, and what the next thing will be, and what the next thing will be.

And if we are not laboring with pathology of the mind of psychic crisis, that we are predicting everything normally and within A healthy capacity to palpate the world and make sense of the world in real time. And we’re kind of oblivious to all of it. Everything seems to be happening very fluid, very seemingly controlled. And that’s again why when somebody has schizophrenia or there’s a psychic disturbance, like psychosis, that this all comes unraveled. But so to speak to Again, mostly normal spectrum behavior and cognition that this idea of predictive processing that the mind is placing bets on what’s going to happen.

Like I’m in a relatively stable environment right now. I don’t expect an elephant to come crashing into the room and stomp. Me to death. If I was expecting that, I would be cowering in fear. I would be preparing for the onslaught. I’d be looking for exit strategies or defensives. So I’m here in this environment, just kind of relaxed and talking to you. And that’s sort of a really cheap, crude way to say that. Now, to speak to the religions that you talked about that are, you know, We are unyielding. This is, you know, the sacrosanct word and it is unerring. That contravenes predictive processing.

As you said, there are belief systems and spiritual practices out there that are more fluid. They’re more capable of adaptation and possibly evolution. And that is what predictive processing is. And I would Love to see a reformation in the Abrahamic systems, specifically Christianity, that affords the faith a little more flexibility and gets away from some of the rigidity and the dogma and more into a fluid nature of what Christ can provide for us in this time that we occupy now. And it’s not so much that Christ has to be, you know, that story has to be fulfilled. Altered very much.

It’s just the perspectival lensing of the story can open up a little bit. And so rather than focusing on guilt or sin or redemption or these other things, just focus on some of the more egalitarian things and the more compassionate ways. works that we can glean from the New Testament. So that’s an example of what could come from a Reformation, which I think is, again, predictive processing. It is an updating of your prior beliefs. That’s exactly what predictive processing is. So that is a potential vehicle for humanity to survive itself in what I consider to be our teenage years of not Darwinian evolution anymore.

We’ve escaped from that, again, with the… The allegory of Eden, we’ve extracted ourselves from nature. We are extra natural at this point, which is different than supernatural. We are just outside of, you know, viruses coming out and wiping out 200,000 humans that don’t have, you know, capacity to deal with a virus or a bacterial thing or, you know, whatever’s going on, fungal infections in our lungs. We have stuff to treat that now.

And so we’ve used medicine and technology and scientific discoveries to sustain ourselves and grant, you know, that’s why for 800 years from like AD 1000 to like the late 1600s, there was about a billion people on this planet. But if you go and look on Google and you see population curves, like from like the late, mid to late 1600s, it goes from just around a billion people. And it spikes to where we are now at 8 billion people. And that’s the progress of science and technology.

It’s the progress of the Enlightenment project where reason and evidence-based thinking and epistemic thinking has, you know, brought us all these advances that keep us happy, healthy and living past 35. So, you know, we have to… I think to further answer what you had asked me about, how do we navigate this situation with technology bringing yet more Promethean fire to us with AI and machine learning and all of this and that, I might be willing to predict that we will, predictive, We will burn out on a lot of this. I think, you know, so I’ll go back to the food analogy with consumption and the ecology of the media.

There are publications that you can find online and in popular science, communicators are talking about it. Excuse me. That the biome of what we would call more Neolithic cultures on the planet, so people living in New Guinea, out in the forests, and nomadic people in the plains of Africa and the rainforests of South America, all share a common microbiome. They share a biome that’s more in touch with their ecology, their environment, what they eat, the food that they take in. We, modern Western humans, don’t have that biome in us anymore.

We have a different microbiome based on the foods that we’re consuming that are, you know, settlement occurred, After the Younger Dryas periods, we started raising grains and meats for consumption that provided us a very narrow channel kind of what we were consuming, and our microbiome reflected that. So I’ll get to where this analogy is going in a second. So we’ve changed. We’ve sort of split branches from, again, what we would Sort of call a more Neolithic culture versus, you know, modern humans.

And I would say the same thing about our consumption of technology in that, you know, we don’t know who these people are that are more primitive than us, but I think it is our potential selves. And here we are consuming a diet of high-tech information saturation, a particular type of information saturation, a particular type of knowing. And a particular type of intellectualizing that is far detached from even the Renaissance human, you know, the people in the 16th century, the 15th and 16th century who were having, you know, there weren’t any plagues, you know, to wipe us out.

So we were, we were creating art, we were creating music, there were relatively clement times. Politically and socially and economically and food availability and so forth. And again, not too many plagues. But, you know, this was a period where there was creativity. At least I can speak for Western Europe in this sense. In other areas, they may have had their belle époque as well. But so to get to a point, you know, this was a time of human flourishing. I don’t think what we’re navigating right now with technology is necessarily that level of human flourishing.

I think it is a what they would call a Molochian dilemma, wherein Moloch was a Hebrew demon that demanded a sacrifice for something good. It wanted something. A pound of flesh, you know, for that which you desired. And so I think we are in a Molochian dilemma with technology where we’re paying a pretty heavy price. And we see that in social media, again, with young people in crisis because they’re not living the idealized life and then they end up, you know, taking themselves out or committing harm to themselves.

So that’s one of the costs of What we got in the early 2000s through now with social media and there are other costs as well like narcissism and other things you know getting into our culture so I will kind of softly predict that we will have a longing or a kind of nostalgia for the more total totalized flourishing of humanity wherein this is a kind of dangerous like Really have to be careful and navigate really choppy waters to imagine a better life or a flourishing or some kind of renaissance or some kind of period of whatever, you know, whatever it is we think we’re chasing, and that we may look nostalgically upon Other periods in human history where, you know, things, and this isn’t nostalgia in a negative pathological sense, because originally nostalgia was a mental illness.

It was in the early 20th century when soldiers went off to war, They would have a mental breakdown because they weren’t in jolly old England anymore. They were in, you know, Pakistan getting shot at by people who really don’t want them there. And they, and they were not living their best life as soldiers dying for what they don’t know what the hell they’re fighting for, you know, the king, you know, what kind of life is that?

So that’s what nostalgia originally was, but we’ve sort of softened it to say, you know, oh, We’re, you know, wasn’t the, weren’t the 70s, you know, or the 80s, you know, and we look back and we obviously filter and selection bias that nostalgia, but I think there is a purer form of nostalgia where we can say, you know, that we can extract some of the goodness that might have been present in certain periods of our time. That might be a, so it’s a, it’s like a fuel or a driver that might, Inspire us to say, well, what are the options on the table besides all this super tech, you know, super technocracy that we’re getting immersed in?

Because again, I think we’re going to burn out. I think we’re going to, I mean, you see, like people are pushing back against data centers and the invasiveness of AI, you know, I fight my phone every day because Gemini wants to download onto my phone and I’m like, I know my phone already spies on me as it is, but I don’t want Gemini. I don’t want it on my, I have an Android, so I’ve revealed myself. I don’t want it. I don’t want it. I’m old. I spent the first 50 something years of my life. Without having that, I will engage with machine learning when I want to, but I don’t want it consuming me. I don’t want it smothering me.

I don’t want it to be my parasocial, to be my paraemotional. I don’t want any of that because I value human contact far more than I do. Now, to Condense something for me and to give me a synopsis of something or an abstract of something, that’s cool. I like that about AI. And it could be, you know, it could be fraught with a few errors or whatever, but if it condenses something for me, a theory that I can, you know, read or an extraction of somebody’s writing in the literature or in fiction or whatever, then that’s neat. That’s really cool that it can do that.

And I think STEM, the sciences, You know, physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, and medicine should really be where AI dwells for a while until it can mature and develop itself, rather than, again, it being foist on the masses. So that’s a lot of editorializing, and I’ll throw it, I’ll hand it back to you and see if that.

Josh Galt: No, but that’s absolutely, absolutely true. I use AI every day and have for like the last three and a half, almost three. Well, it was four years now, since GPT came out in 2022. And I recently did a study on the cognitive impact of AI because I was curious. And there’s a bunch of studies that have been done, like at Berkeley and Stanford, I think, So where people who outsource their thinking to AI are losing their brain capacity by like 50%, whereas there’s another side that I attempt every day to stay on, which is I’m in control of it.

You work for me, I’m not outsourcing my thinking, I’m outsourcing the pixel pushing, for example, editing these episodes, like I’m still doing, I’m still the editor, I still make the decisions on which clips get capped and which ones don’t, all of those things. Like you’re saying, you have it, you choose the book that you want it to give you know, cliff notes on or a review or whatever. It’s a tool, like you talked about before.

It’s a tool that can be used for good and to keep your mind evolving and growing and learning, or it’s a tool where you can just completely Really outsource your brain and become more of an automaton that is letting AI think for you, and I think that’s a danger for sure for society, especially for the younger generation who… Are in school and don’t have that mental capacity of nuance and of understanding of the dangers, and they think that mom and dad don’t want me to use AI because they want to make my life hard, and my friends are using it, and it’s so fast and easy, then they get to play video games, right?

It’s like all of these things that they’re going to be up against, but I have seen, and I want to hit on one other point that you were talking about with Jesus and the shift there, but on the natural nostalgia thing. I have seen a move, and this is a trend, especially with millennials and Gen Z, of going back to nature, of wanting to homestead, and yes, it’s romanticized, no question. Like I have farmed on multiple continents, multiple livestock, animals, crops. It’s difficult. So it’s very much overly romanticized, for sure.

But there’s also something true in this trend that is happening, that people are looking to get back in touch with just raw humanity. And there is truly something energetic about putting your feet in the dirt. And your hands on plants and livestock and just being out in nature and breathing that air and all of those things that, yeah, are still, you know, an Instagram trend, but yet there is some truth in it as well.

And I hope that we as a species do So that our microbiome intellectually and physically from what we’re eating doesn’t get destroyed and we don’t become, you know, just completely controlled by the machine, but that we can get back to that. And I think it is connected. So this is my last point. I can’t believe we’ve, I could talk to you. We’re going to have to do another one of these. Yeah. I try, I try and go 90 minutes and then it’s like, oh, I’m going to go two hours.

But I think I have seen a lot and read some of those older writings from 100 years ago of people taking a different approach to the words of Jesus and the life of Jesus, actually, and what he actually was saying and looking at different interpretations that I think, at least from my upbringing, were very much hidden. Like I’d never heard any of this stuff. And of course, New Age was very much demonized.

But to look at the words of Jesus and the life of Jesus from a different perspective, I’m seeing more and more and more and more out there, kind of with the same people that are trying to get back to nature, and it’s like, wait a second, what Jesus was actually saying is that we’ve got to go inside, not go through a middleman. And have this rigid structure of hating everybody else and this is the only way or else it’s, you know, hellfire and damnation, but we’ve got to go inside because we are the ones who can connect to divine consciousness.

We are the, like, Jesus was saying, the works that I do, you can do greater works than these because you also can connect to, you know, God the Father in the same way. And I think there is obviously a, With a caveat, I guess, because there are people who are sort of making this a cult type of thing, setting themselves up as a guru, you know,

Justin McSweeny: Yeah. Yeah. There’s peril. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Galt: That whole thing. There is danger, but in my own journey, I can only speak to my own process and having, I mean, had experiences in quite a few of the world’s major religions and My own upbringing, and then also, you know, being completely agnostic, along with some really profound experiences with plant medicine. I think that there’s a lot of truth to that has been hidden that I think is good if we take it out, even just to examine it. Because obviously Christ is a figure in the last couple thousand years of human history, right? Who is very, very impactful, very, very important.

Justin McSweeny: Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.

Josh Galt: No matter what your belief system is, whether you believe in God or don’t, like Christ is an important figure. And especially, I mean, Western civilization, right? Like the church played a big role. So what if we take that out and we look at those things and we look at not only his words as interpreted by the church, but we look at them from a different angle of how can that help us to live and live? Be more human, and be more connected together, and be more balanced, and enjoy life more, and have less division, all of these things, I think is important, and I think it is happening.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen it or not, but it’s something that I’ve noticed, especially in the last couple of years, that I think is positive.

Justin McSweeny: Yeah, the John Vervaeke that I mentioned earlier, he had a phrase that he used a few years ago that he doesn’t bring up so much anymore, but it was called, stealing the culture, and Christ stole the culture. He basically, you know, threw a wrench in the works of the Roman occupiers of Christianity. Judea, or Israel, or Palestine, however you want to call it. I don’t want to open a hornet’s nest, but whatever territory the Romans were occupying at the time. And the… Idea was that it was a moment of, you know, transformation and it reformed the culture.

Stealing the culture was a predictive processing moment wherein you updated priors, you know, and so the people that… went forward from Christ. This is where I’ll bring Plato back in. They were informed to some extent by Neoplatonism, which, and that’s, you know, it undergirds a fair amount of Greek Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and whereas Protestantism is more Aristotelian. But To speak to Neo-Platonism and how it influenced Christianity, so Plato spoke of what he called the true, the good, and the beautiful, or the logos, the nous, and the psyche.

These are triadic systems, and the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are sort of derivations of that. So there are ways to interpret The archetypal character of Christ, you know, if you want to be hands-off a little bit before, you know, you zoom into whatever it is that’s relevant to you in the work that Christ did, whether you consider him to be, have, you know, there’s a historicity to Christ, you know, whether that person actually existed. To me, it doesn’t matter because the story of Christ is so powerful.

It, You know, I am on board with the fact that there was a person that they, you know, could pinpoint and say that, you know, that was the figure that, and whether their stories got embellished or not, I don’t care, you know, because here we are, this is what we have. And so again, this triadic system of the true, the good, and the beautiful, or the logos, the nous in the psyche, or the mind, body, spirit, or the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, you know, these are threads that run through our, our lineage, our, our, again, our canon.

So yes, it is an area ripe with opportunity, and it’s not so much that you’re reinterpreting as a destructive means to, you know, what the original intent might be, because we could say that about what religion has done, you know, maybe there was a message that, you know, had been Converted or perverted or whatever by various people along the lineage of the development of the New Testament or whatever, you know, I mean, so we can say that there’s these possible challenges that come up from when we handle something so powerful is this like archetypal character and the messages and the teachings that we can find in the apocryphal texts.

So, You know, if somebody comes up with something that resonates with a culture, that again, I like the idea that if you are a spiritual but not religious person, that if you want to start somewhere, like let’s say you did break out of Like you did Pentecostal Christianity or, you know, a hard shell Baptist or Quaker shakers and Mennonites or whatever, and you get out into the open and you’re, you’re in a kind of vacuum, I’d say, go back to, go back to what the Christians did with the true, the good and the beautiful, right?

And imagine the logos, which is the word and that’s in the Bible, you know, it’s mentioned, but it’s all coming from, from this, from this Greek culture. And so, You know, meditate on that. What is true, good, and beautiful? And true, in this sense, is not propositional. It is to be in faith. It’s a voluntary necessity with another. You know, it’s that you love the other enough to engage with them individually. In good faith, which is to be true to them. You’re true to your partner, you’re true to your children, you’re true to your parents, which is, you know, one of the commandments, you know, or a couple of the commandments.

So this is, these are ideas that you can extract from that don’t have the burden of dogma, they don’t have the burden of, social, pressure, you know, to be one political or social scheme or another, that this is this is coming from a more pure place. So a little bit of a little bit of understanding about what was intended and what was fabricated or artifice or whatever might help one in either developing something from themselves or recognizing salience out there in the world for somebody who is acting in good faith, so to speak, to develop something that will help humanity Develop itself in its spiritual life, in its religious undertaking.

And, you know, religious, the etymology of it is religare, which means to rebind, to reconnect, to, you know, religare or ligatory, you know, there’s, you can hear the Latin in there, and ligatory is like kind of a grip. And so anyway, so play with these ideas, have fun, you know, that’s why we’re here, we’re here to learn, to be like the child in the grass that is just unbounded, you know, I mean, we can learn so much from three-year-olds, you know, and toddlers. And then to get to one other thing, and then I’ll hand it back to you, the youngsters that are going back to the land, and they’re sort of…

Reopening older psychotechnologies and older expressions of how one can And there is a philosopher named Mark Fisher, who was very concerned about the millennial generation and the boomers. And he was my age. He committed suicide a few years ago, but he’s a good philosopher. And he has something called hauntology, which he borrowed from Michel Foucault. But he totally changed this idea of hauntology. And that is that people under 35, let’s say, or under 40, have…

They are growing up in a world that is pretty vacuous and nihilistic and vapid in terms of, you know, consume, consume, consume, work, die, you know, and so they, what he calls their dilemma is a forgotten future. This is the hauntology that he speaks of, and so they go, they go into a retroactive pursuit of a future that is behind them. So he speaks of sort of 80s, 30, 32-bit characters.

Synthwave, you know, stuff that was going on, like when I was a teenager, and they find, and again, in a nostalgic vein, an attachment to this that is reassuring and comforting, because they don’t see a future ahead of them, they don’t see the next thing, like when I was coming up, I always imagined a future, I always imagined that, you know, society would be put together, and there’d be new developments, and new trends, and niches, and cultures, and styles, and fads, and all this, but really, You know, we’re getting away from that again, and I think that’s where these younger folks are turning around and looking back and saying, farmsteading, yardening.

And, you know, living in the woods, you know, which is what the hippies did in the 60s, you know, they formed communes, and they got the hell out of the city, out of college, and just, and it didn’t work, but, you know, it was an experiment. Well, there’s a few of them hanging on still. But anyway, I applaud that, because, again, what Mark Fisher tried to point to, Right. And he, I think he was so verklempt by all of this, you know, this heavy thinking that it took him out, you know, it just was too much, but I really, I admire, you know, and so Foucault’s interpretation of hauntology was all these really empowered Marxists from the 1950s.

Like 40, late 40, post-war, into the 50s, were just going to revolutionize the world and bring utopia in and all the wisdom of the Marxist critique would come to fruition. And, you know, the class consciousness, all that stuff. And it never happened. It just completely vaporized and never came to pass. All you ended up with was totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries. So these French Marxist, you know, whatever they were, thinkers, intellectuals were just distraught. They were just completely beside themselves because they had no future. And that’s why…

Foucault, in a play on words, called it hauntology, rather than ontology, which is a being state, it’s a hauntology, and so he did that as a sort of dirge for the poor Marxists that, you know, nothing happened, nothing came for them, and that’s what Fisher did for millennials and Zs, is to say, you have no, you know, there is no perceptible future, and so we understand why you get into the nostalgia that you do, and so, you know, That can be healthy, but it’s also kind of tragic, you know, that it’s, that it’s like that, so.

Josh Galt: But I think it’s also affecting even older people, me and me, of our age. Like, I’m sort of on a bridge between the Millennials and Gen X. I was born in 80. So there’s like four years where they don’t put us in either group. But, I mean, I grew up, yeah, I grew up with both, right? Like, I grew up riding my bike.

Justin McSweeny: Yeah, Xennials. Yeah, yeah.

Josh Galt: I can do it all the Gen X stuff, drinking from the hose, but also I was the really at the tip of the spear with technology, you know, at a young age, getting online and getting computer and all that stuff. But there’s this sort of melancholy thing that is becoming a trend as well on YouTube and on social media, like there’s one guy that has a huge following, I forget what it’s called, the functional melancholic, I think. And he might be in his 50s, but it’s interesting because it seems like it’s hitting Gen X as well in the idea that, like, do we even have a future for this planet, for society with AI coming?

And I think that’s sort of the pushback against data centers, against the system in general. I think it is different, obviously. History repeats, but, or, what is it doesn’t repeat, but it definitely rhymes. I think that this fourth turning is going to be a little bit different than the World War II fourth turning in that, you know, with AI and with what’s happening globally, we are so connected now in a way that we never were 30, 40, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, you know, It’s going to be interesting, and I think that’s why there is a return in many ways to religion, to spirituality, to why am I here? What is all of this about?

Like, to try and avoid the nihilism, to try and find some semblance of purpose and connection and whatnot. And I think… I think that it’s, I mean, the jury’s out, like, there’s so many different paths and so many options and whatnot, and I think that it’s key for everyone to just go deeper and be willing to ask the hard questions of themselves and of others and of their system and of their structure, their beliefs, all of it. So, one last question that I like to ask everybody, and I agree. I think you’ll probably have a really interesting answer.

Like if there was one action that you would say for people to take for the next month, 30 days, like just do this one thing every day, would it be, well, what would it be? What would you suggest people to do in order to… To, let’s say, improve their spiritual health or improve just their health as a human. It doesn’t have to be spiritual. It could be intellectual. It could be mental, physical, all of it combined.

But like what’s one thing that’s helped you in going through your battle and on the other side of it to be more level, to be more balanced without losing the joy and passion for life and becoming a total cold stoic, but also being, Without saying, oh, do this one dogmatic thing and it’ll make you happy, what would you recommend people do?

Justin McSweeny: Yeah. Mm-Oh, gosh. Well, as I’ve revealed in the conversation, I like triadic systems. I think a triad is more complete than a dyad, which is just this oscillatory pattern, and a monad doesn’t do anything. You know, it’s something we can point to maybe as an example. I don’t know. But anyway, I love triads. But anyway, so one of the triads that I would suggest that somebody consider is… Ritual, Dialectic, and Disruption. Ritual is essential because it’s what we’ve been talking about. It is religion, it is society, it is work, it is play, it is love, it is engagement. So ritual is part and parcel of being a human being.

Dialectic is kind of what you and I have been doing. We’ve been entering into a good faith conversation with each other. We’ve been pushing ideas around, not for either of our sake, but for the sake of the idea of developing itself within the context of this conversation. And my guy, Vervecki, he’ll even call it Dialogos, will show up in dialectic. So if we really open the dialectic up and we get into a flow state, and we’re getting this…

This feeling that’s almost transcendent in the dialogue and the dialectic that the dialogos shows up, which is the logos is the word, right, which is to be, you know, it’s almost a sacred moment and you feel it, you’re, it’s the flow state, you know, and you’re in it. So dialectic has potential, especially in the modern era where we’re so used to argumentation and propositional thinking, you know.

If there’s one thing you could fault the tech revolution, it’s coming from a very narrow bandwidth of human thinking, and that is propositional thinking, has nothing to do with participatory thinking, perspectival thinking, you know, it’s challenged in that it’s very narrow band, so, lightning out there, so we have the ritual, we have dialectic, and then disruption. And disruption is what can bring about a transformative space for you in your life, which is the plant medicine.

It is staying up all night, dancing around a campfire and going into trance, or again, an ayahuasca ceremony, not that I advocate that, or dropping a tab of acid, which is what I used to do. That was my disruption, you know, and it would throw me out of my comfort zone and I was Freaked out, you know, and weird stuff was happening. I was just deconstructing myself, having hell and heaven at the same time, you know, all this weird stuff. And so that’s disruption. And it can be far less dramatic. You know, disruption can be going to the art museum, if you’ve not gone there recently, and being blown away by a beautiful piece of art.

You know, there’s something called Stendhal syndrome. Where a person has a psychotic break in an art museum because they’ve been exposed to something so beautiful, they just start sobbing and they can’t control themselves and they’re just having this moment. But it’s release and that’s what the disruption is for, right? So, or Florence syndrome, you could look that up. And funny, in fact, there’s a YouTube video where a guy is seeing a rainbow, I think out like in New Mexico or something, and he’s having a break, yeah, he’s

Josh Galt: Yes, I remember that.

Justin McSweeny: Having a breakdown behind the camera, this is,

Josh Galt: A double rainbow.

Justin McSweeny: Oh, this is… Yeah, that’s Stendhal’s syndrome right there. You’re so awestruck by beauty that it breaks you know, open. And so those are the three things that I like. And I think that combined with appreciating meta-practice, So as you said, don’t take a prescriptive dogmatic thing that you do these three things, you know, it’s more that you open up into, again, when I use the word meta, I mean it’s to think, you know, to be above it or to be outside of it.

And so, you know, consider what Is on the table in terms of praxis or practice, and just take a broad view of it, the above view from it, you know, that can give you a better salience mapping, you know, that you that things stand out to you differently when you have a broader view. So I could use it for instance, you know, if you want to enter into meditation or mindfulness, enter into contemplation as well, and let those two oscillate with each other. That’s a dyadic system.

So, sometimes they get blurred, like a contemplative practice is to sit still, but to me contemplative is to listen to a philosopher, to listen to, an enlightened, religious figure like, Thomas Merton was a sort of Zen Catholic, John Butler or Richard Rohr, I think, are also Zen Catholics, who have broken the frame of you know, dogmatic Christianity and they bring in some of the perspective of Eastern thinking to make this amalgamation of a different lensing. So these are little things to consider if you’re, you know, feeling angry. Anxious or angsty, like, oh, what do I do?

And, you know, nothing seems to be working, is to broaden the scope of perspective. And just remember, ritual, dialectic, and disruption might be three keys. Just like the true, the good, and the beautiful, the logos, the nous, and the psyche, you know, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They all have such value to them. And, you know, Give it a try. And see, you know, if it helps. And don’t have expectations. Just be open to what comes to you in those experiences, in your trying to relence. So again, I mentioned frame break. You know, that’s so important.

You know, if you’re feeling stuck in your life, it’s because you are in a reciprocally narrowing frame. And so if you can break the frame safely and, you know, without causing psychic disturbance, which again, sometimes psychedelic medicine can do that, but, you know, if you’re in the right space, there’s a lot of modalities that can help you frame break safely. Circling and dialectic encircling. So you get with trusted friends or a group at a…

Like a universal, what do they call them, Unitarian Universalist or Unity Church, and it’s sort of a very light spiritual thing, but you’re, you’re, you’re dialoguing or quadriloguing with people and you’re having conversations that are inspiring and it’s, you’re connecting with other people. So, yeah, those, those things might, might be a good place to start.

Josh Galt: Justin, thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was amazing experience.

Justin McSweeny: Well, thank you. Thank you for opening the space, you know, I appreciate it. As you can tell, I like to talk, you know, and I’ll say this one last thing, because I always like to humiliate myself. Like, none of this that I’ve said is really my original thoughts. I’ve consolidated, and again, I have my own interview show. I think I’ve had 172 or three interviews, so a lot of what’s coming out of this pie hole is from what other people have said, what I’ve read, from being inspired by other people, like, So, it’s just, I’m repackaging it and putting it out for someone else. So, this really has nothing to do with me as a person.

I don’t consider myself to be profound or enlightened anyway. I’m just a… He’s the most average dude in the world, and if an average Joe like myself can wick all this information up and be inspired by it, then it’s possible for anyone, you know. There was a,

Josh Galt: But that’s part of being human, right? To take in all of those things, to learn, to reinterpret through our own experiences, because each individual is… I like to look at it as we are helping the divine to evolve itself. And so each person does have a role and a purpose in that, in that we are all connected, but yet we are all… Unique in the sense of being an individual in this journey, however it shakes out after or before or whatever, but so we do have a role to interpret. So yeah, I keep doing what you’re doing. Where can people find you? You have your own podcast as well? Sure.

Justin McSweeny: It’s on YouTube and Spotify. It’s called the IdeaCast interview series. And And I derive no revenue from that. It’s a thing I’ve been doing for about five years, five and a half years now. And I’m slowing down. I’m getting out like, One or two a month now, and I try to go weekly for a while, and so I’m getting a little burned out, but I’m always hoping, you know, to find another great guest to have and have a conversation. In So, but that’s where folks can find me, just having conversations, and I’ve had some amazing guests, so go scroll through the catalog and see what you think.

Josh Galt: All right, well, we’ll be sure to link it, and I’ll get that out for people to be able to look you up and see some of those conversations. I appreciate the time and the conversation and really enjoyed it, and we will speak again soon. Thank you so much, Justin.

Justin McSweeny: Thanks, Josh, appreciate it. Thanks to the audience. Appreciate