As I see more deeply into reality, I get better at seeing more deeply within,

which allows me to cultivate the inner peace more powerfully,

which then allows me to see more deeply into reality and the two spin on each other.

Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome John Verveki to the show.

John is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in Psychology,

Cognitive Science, and Buddhist Psychology. His academic interests include wisdom,

mindfulness, meditation, relevance, realization, general intelligence, and rationality.

He is the author of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, YouTube series,

and co-author of Zombies and Western Culture, a 21st century crisis.

This episode I talked to John Verveki about the Meaning Crisis. There is a growing number of people

who are struggling to find purpose in life. Society seems to be losing touch of its humanity.

John argues that we can address the Meaning Crisis by appreciating and grounding ourselves in reality.

We can find relevance by deepening our relationship with the world and the people around us.

In turn, this reverence affords us peace of mind while recognizing inter-connection of all things.

We cover quite a lot in this episode. We also talk about the topics of transcendence,

mattering, narcissism, spirituality, and artificial intelligence. Once we got going,

it was quite hard to stop us. John is a really thoughtful and insightful human and scientist,

and we nerded out at such a deep level that we together felt a great sense of meaning by the end

of this episode. We hope you feel it too, and we hope you learn a lot. In fact, I know you will.

So with that further ado, I bring you Professor John Verveki.

I heard you were trained as a philosopher. Is the word on the street true about that?

Well, yes, in some ways. I did a BA and an MA in philosophy, and then I got sort of disheartened,

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