#313 | Joscha Bach; Mistaken Compassion, Living During a Revolution & Fighting Hopelessness

Joscha Bach [00:00:00] This human suffering that is caused by this is quite tremendous. The number of people that die of drug overdoses is rising and the life that they have before this happens is very dire. I'm Miriam Hoffman, a full-time college student living in Carbondale, Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back

Vance Crowe [00:00:18] To the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Yosha Bach Returns. Longtime listeners of the podcast know that I have a strong connection with Yosha Bach. He is a computational Metas psychologist. I don't even really know how to describe it, but his understanding of how the human mind works and the way that human beings work together is truly phenomenal. I invited Yosha on to talk about the crisis of meaning in our society, why there are drug addicts in San Francisco, what goes on with the church and why has it not been succeeding at bringing people, meaning what's going on with things like cannabis and SSRIs, how to interact with your children and the way to understand what their needs are. This is a phenomenal conversation and I am so deeply grateful to Yosha for coming on. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but first many of you know that I conduct Legacy Interviews right here in the studio. That's when I sit down with your loved ones to be able to tell their life stories, to be able to talk about the stories and the values that they have gotten out of a lifetime of living. If you're interested in having me sit down with one of your loved ones to record these stories so that they can be passed on to future generations so that your children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren know where they came from, know who they are, and know the stories that make them really connected with the long fabric of your family, then go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more.

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] I'd love to sit down with your loved one and we can do it as a half day, as a full day. They can do it as an individual or a couple, and this is a great experience for people that do it. So to learn more, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. All right, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Yosha Bach. Yosha Bach, welcome back to the podcast.

Joscha Bach [00:02:17] Thanks for having me again, Vince

Vance Crowe [00:02:19] Yosha. When I go and listen to your many, many interviews that you've done, I find myself feeling pangs of envy for how your mind works, how you're able to construct arguments about things that I'd never considered before. Do you yourself feel pings of envy about the way other people's minds work?

Joscha Bach [00:02:36] Sometimes, yes, there are people that can do things that I cannot do with my mind. There are people which have more intellectual firepower. There are people which have way better intuition or which are much better at really, really sharp hard reasoning than me. And what I have is a particular mixture in my mind. It's basically I have a very generative mind and I'm not super smart, reasonably smart, and I have inability to basically expand and let a lot of possibilities into my mind and try to start to reason on these possibilities and then weed out and make this into a more concrete image. It's a particular mode of thinking that I specialize in. Is

Vance Crowe [00:03:16] It something that you've worked on over time?

Joscha Bach [00:03:19] I don't think that it was deliberate. I think that I in some sense started with this as a child and due to, due to the way in which I grew up in which I had to make sense of the world, basically I grew up as a child with a mode in which I thought that people that tell me about reality are per default, probably wrong. And back then this made a lot of sense to me. I grew up in an artist family and then when I came out into the world and met other people more or less for the first time, it was in communist eastern Germany. And the things that my teachers told me did not make obvious sense. I had already read a lot of books and so when people told me things, there was very little that I felt I could believe at face value. And so I felt that I always had to reason my own work model together. And from the other said something, I had to translate this into something that I could test in my mind and understand and integrate. And I later when I had a child, I noticed that this child was doing this from a very, very young, young age and my father did it too. As basically as if we are even as very small children, assuming that what our environment says is not necessarily to be trusted, which means he really have to go in and try to construct your own model of reality. And in this way, I basically become an autonomous intellect that only gradually later in I've started to recognize a valid authority in the scientific institutions and other parts of society, but also means that when I see a consensus reality, I see a political process that leads to flattening of complexity.

Joscha Bach [00:04:55] And that's why the com consensus reality often changes faster than the ideas of the smarter people.

Vance Crowe [00:05:02] Did that make you a lonely child? Yes,

Joscha Bach [00:05:05] I was pretty lonely before I got into a mathematics school in ninth grade.

Vance Crowe [00:05:09] And when you think about loneliness, what is that from a consciousness kind of what's going on in the human mind when they feel loneliness,

Joscha Bach [00:05:17] It means that there is nobody there. It means nobody can see you, you cannot interact with anybody. There is nothing you can really belong to. I knew that my parents love me, but they did not actually talk to me in the sense that they were integrating with my ideas and deeply interacting with them. So there was basically nobody there for substantial part of my youth and with whom I could share ideas. And I remember when I was a kid, I had this dream of belonging to something larger and I didn't know how to adapt when I was confronted with how other children adapted this thing that they changed their political and social moral opinions depending on what, what their friends think. This year I thought that I couldn't do this. How can you change your opinion even if you know this is not true and you believe something else yesterday and your ideas have not changed because of any reasoning or observation and you get as an answer? Well, but it's very important that my friends like me and I thought, I don't really want to have friends that require me to change what I believe to be true and good in order to belong. I try to figure out what's good and true to the best of my ability and I try to do this with the best integrity that I can achieve. And it's a very long process, but I cannot just stimulate into a group of people because then I'll be randomly a fascist or a communist or or a social democrat, a good person or a bad person. And for most people, this idea that you can form opinions based on your environment is dominant.

Vance Crowe [00:06:51] But it seems to me that a person that is so separated from the way that the consensus opinion is drawn is actually in a dangerous position because only in certain societies can you have a person that can have heterodox views and be totally separate. You know, I think about East Germany like you were describing, like if somebody wanted to point you out as an other, you wouldn't have the social safety net of being a part of the tribe.

Joscha Bach [00:07:15] Yeah. When I was in the mathematics school, I was in an edgy position because I was always with one leg out of being sworn outta the school for political reasons. But on the other hand, there were always also teachers who protected me and had my hand held a hand over me. And every society is made of people. And if a society has a certain degree of complexity, then all kinds of people are there. Many people are very wise and subtle and when they see a child like I was, they see something that is quite interesting and beautiful and potentially useful and must be protected. So there I think with hindsight, there have always been a few people who tried to protect me and made sure that I could manage to go through life and it's been tough, but eventually the more I realized that yes, I can belong, I just need to find people who get me and who I can interface with vi more. I moved to larger cities and was very mindful of the kind of communities that I was looking for and eventually I ended up with having lots of friends and not being lonely again and having very deep connections.

Vance Crowe [00:08:20] During our last conversation, you brought up an article written by Paul Graham about the lies we tell kids. And I found myself reading that after our conversation and having like a real tension in my mind about if you keep your preserve, your children's innocence because you don't want them to be exposed to all the dark things, then you're not preparing them for autonomy. But at the same time, you know, looking at a 2-year-old who you know, just wants to trust and believe and doesn't have really any other way to do it. I like this writing actually threw me into quite a bit bit of tumult. Do you have that same level of tension about like how much should you share with your children prior to them being prepared for it?

Joscha Bach [00:09:02] I don't think that I should share something with my children that they're not prepared to deal with, but they are prepared to deal with far more than most people believe. The story that Paul Graham gave was triggered by a memory that he had about a family cat that died of some medical complication due to giving birth. And that was what the children had been told. And the reality was that the daughter accidentally stepped on the spine of the cat and this is why the cat died. Right. And I think if the daughter knew this because she probably loved the cat very much, she would've been deeply traumatized and it would've been many years of work to deal with this and probably would've scarred her for a long time. And so this responsibility of dealing this, the death of an animal that you dearly love is, is too hard I think for a child. But dealing with death is something that is acceptable for children. It's children have nightmares that are much more horrible than most of the nightmares than adults get. The possibilities that children are confronted with the horrors that are, remember having experiences as a child but walking through a dark basement, this is very severe and the severity doesn't get worse. When I talk about it, it's something that I have to process that I have to integrate. And so the way in which I think we deal with our children's fears is that we allow them to integrate this, to speak about this, to give names to it, and to understand that the world is a very complicated place in which everything good is has a price and work that has been done for it, and just this fact that we are eating animals and so on, and that these animals are conscious and probably don't want to be eaten.

Joscha Bach [00:10:47] If the, if we were to ask them, this is something that children have also to come to terms with and they realize at some point, right? And by lie about this, it's all these ethical conundrums that we are confronted with in the world. If we lie about them, we end up as people who as adolescents and later on have a very confused way of thinking about how reality actually works. And this does not enable them to answer the hard questions that we need to answer every day. And we end up with situations in our society like tons of homeless people shooting up drugs in the street because we don't really understand the reality of how human motivation works and how the human condition works and how people truly interact with the world. Or may I may have difficulty forming lasting relationships because we do not really understand the economy of human relationships.

Vance Crowe [00:11:39] Wow. I I mean like unpack that for me. You, you believe that, so the, the drug usage is, is to do with the way that people were as young people not understanding the challenges of life and the, the way that relationships work.

Joscha Bach [00:11:52] Well, in some sense San Francisco is largely a city that is dominated by a third generation hippie culture and by cartels who want to sell fentanyl. And there is basically a very dark side to this. There is a a well organized crime syndicate that is making billions of dollars by selling fentanyl on the west coast. And then there are people who want to do good and we conflating the problems of homelessness and drug abuse. And we think that the people who are homeless need our support. And the best way that we can give them support is charity. We are allowing them to camp in the cities. We are not arresting them when they commit shoplifting or break into cars. So we have tens of thousands of car break ins in San Francisco that are basically not being prosecuted. We are getting a district attorney who is decides to fire all the prosecutors who go after crimes like shoplifting and burglaries and so on, and tries to basically take the pressure off these vulnerable people because vulnerable people are good people and good people are of course sacred and we need to protect them. And by just treating them well, they will probably probably get better. And because what they're doing that they're stealing from us, this is what they do out of pain. They do these drugs because they have pain and this is all true in some sense, right?

Joscha Bach [00:13:23] This is because they don't see another future. It's just this career of living in a well temporary city that allows them to live downtown and to get a monthly allowance and free food every day and free servings, right? This is what this gets to, but almost all of the people that are homeless in other cities are sheltered homeless people, which means they cannot afford a home because of bad luck and life circumstances and they need help. But many of them get help from friends, family, their social networks, public shelters, public housing projects and so on. And a lot of the problems that we see in San Francisco is actually a drug addiction problem. And the drug addiction problem is separate from a homelessness problem, but drug addiction is like a derogatory word. We don't want to treat these good homeless people as bad drug a addicts, right? And this leads to a distortion to not seeing that when you don't want to have homeless people shooting up in the street, you cannot allow people to shoot up in the street, right? This needs to be illegal and you need to enforce it. And it's something that most cities in the world understand and something that San Francisco's government pretends not to understand. And it can pretend not to understand this because our values are confused because we identify as good people and good people are gentle and kind and which means they're never stern, they don't say no to people that do bad things. And bad things means stealing and damaging themselves in a way that forces others to clean up after you deal with the consequences.

Joscha Bach [00:15:00] So at the moment I find that downtown San Francisco is almost unlivable and it's probably something that's going to change. And the cost of this human suffering that is caused by this is quite tremendous. The number of people that die of drug overdoses is rising and the life that they have before this happens is very dire. And so out of a misunderstood sense of compassion and kindness, we create suffering, right? That nobody actually wants. And this is not because these people which have these values are evil. They really try to do good at San Francisco's really this fascinating paradox. Most people think that social imbalances and suffering like this is the having enough money, but if San Francisco proves if this was a problem of money, San Francisco would be the city that solve it. It's the city with the highest per capita budget after Washington DC It's really the richest city of the United States because of the tremendous tax income. And there's so much money in public coffers that you get to a situation where building a public toilet costs more than a million dollars because there are so many people who have started to integrate themselves in the food chains. And this makes the city in some sense, it's a resource curse. San Francisco has so many resources that it's very difficult to keep out criminal energy from the public offers because democracy has only so much force to defend itself against subversion.

Vance Crowe [00:16:27] Yeah. Whenever resources are right at the surface, it makes it whoever's willing to go in there and be the most corrupt and be the most violent is able to to, to grab them up. When you think about the problem of compassion, I mean this is, this seems like a, like a paradox, right? Like how can you help people if the, if the compassion that you've been giving them so far has not helped? You're saying like people need to change the way that they view themselves in order to be able to find the right solutions to be able to move those people off of the streets.

Joscha Bach [00:16:58] I find it's a good perspective to say that everybody is me in a different timeline and these different instances of me have different traits and they have different biographies, different traumas, different things that happen to them. But if I actually want to understand why they live the way they do, I need to understand what it's be to be in their shoes. One way of doing this is to spend some time with them, living with them. When I, I was a kid, I was traveling with a bicycle all over Europe and when I was in France I was living under the bridge with and had dinner with them and I met homeless kids in Aven young and later I worked with refugees and I worked with street kids during my, the time of my civil service in Germany. And I learned so much about these perspectives and I learned so much about these perspectives of pain and disruption that happen in the individual biographies to lead them to the life that they live. But this also means that you understand that there are many choices involved that they made and you have to incentivize different choices and to have support these different choices, world is an ecosystem. If there is a niche, then something is growing in this nation is going to occupy it. This is what evolutionary nature are like. And this means that if you don't want to have certain behaviors really need to create incentives against them and alternatives to them.

Vance Crowe [00:18:22] You made mention of like your viewing yourself, viewing others as yourself in a different timeline. There's a fascinating, I think it's a short play that was turned into a YouTube video called The Egg, and it's by the same guy that wrote The Martian. I found that to be exactly what you're talking about. Where he is describing the life is just you dropping into a different timeline and then living out what it's like to be a fifth century Chinese peasant woman or a person living as a New York cabbie. You know? And by going through all of these experiences, you're actually understanding what it is to be human. Because if you just take your one perspective, you don't really understand why people made the decisions that they did. Very easy to judge people. But if you were to say, ah, but truly what if I were living out on that timeline, what would I, what would be different about it for me?

Joscha Bach [00:19:11] Yeah. But of course the other people have the same complexity as you, and the diversity of minds is enormous. And this means that even if I start out with this assumption, the attempt to understand others is very daunting. Yet if I want to understand the homeless people, they're also very diverse. Some of them are probably more like me than others. I still have to understand what it take would it take to for me to become a homeless person and shoot up in the streets or the other way around? How would I become a drug addict and care so much more about drugs than anything else that I would not worry about spending some of my money on maintaining a home and, and all these other things because it's the only thing that I care about now is basically to live out the remainder of my days in that state and, and it's a form of suicide.

Vance Crowe [00:19:58] My, my wife and I argue about this, but like I tell her all the time, like if my life had gone just slightly differently at a few different times in my life, I could have very easily been a broken person on the side of the road. Like the, there, there are so many things that are intrinsic to my personality. The things that make me, you know, have a lot of positive benefit are exactly the thing that would suck me down a hole. And, and addiction would be one that could have very, very easily gotten me had I not had a whole bunch of things luckily stack my way.

Joscha Bach [00:20:30] It's interesting that even many of the heart drugs don what lead to addiction. It did not know this when I was young. And it's not definitely not a recommendation to to hard drugs, I think it's a very bad idea. But the most of the people who sew up for Hughes heroin for a longer period in their life don't need treatment. They stop by their own. And that's because ultimately people are motivated by deeper meaning that they have. And there's basically things that we want to do in our life that give meaning to our own existence. And addiction is doesn't give meaning to our own existence. And addiction is often the thing that is attractive because you don't have any other meaning in your life. And this crisis of meaning I think is at the root of a lot of the addiction problems, right? If you feel you, there's stuff that you actually need to do in your life, you will want to have keep your body healthy. And if you feel that using methamphetamine is something that makes you more productive, at some point you notice that you crash and you become less productive and you will actively work for yourself to get out of your addiction because you want it. And actually if you actually want it, if you have a strong motivation to do something for with your life that is important to you, it is much more important to you than a cheap little rush or an amazing big rush as some of the drug addicts get right? This is this issue that I think we grow up in a world that seems to have very little future in which almost everything is about money and economic relationships and creature comforts.

Joscha Bach [00:22:04] So exploiting yourself to buy more creature comforts becomes bearable. And this does not seem to be very interesting perspective. Basically there is, for many people know deep belief in humanity or in the need to pro produce something for the greater good to integrate with the greater whole.

Vance Crowe [00:22:24] I've noticed that like to fill that meaning gap, which everybody kind of feels, there's like people saying, ah, I really wish that I could go and join like a religion or I could be a part of a group. And yet it's not something easy to do. I mean there are churches all over the place they would welcome new members in and yet people aren't going to church. And and where is the meaning crisis coming from? Does it always exist or are we in a unique period in human history?

Joscha Bach [00:22:50] I suspect that from many people, churches are no longer a very good source of meaning because the way in which the churches operate and the mythology that they're using and the aesthetic of religion that they're providing are not really suitable for people in a rational world. And so for many people they go to church not to find meaning, but to find community that's quite different from the Christian age. We are now busy in a post-Christian age since the enlightenment and after the modernist phase of the enlightenment, we are now in a post-modernist phase where people think that everything is just narrative and text and the text is somewhat arbitrary and everything is just there as a tool that is instrumental to get enough resources to survive and get your kids into the next generation.

Vance Crowe [00:23:39] I mean, I say more about this, I mean like I think that these people want to be able to define the age that we're in, but can't imagine that there would be some other way to describe it than the one that you're putting forward.

Joscha Bach [00:23:50] Yeah, personally, I have always been stuck with a surplus of meaning, not a lack of meaning. I always felt that I have enough stuff to do. I think that does not make the perspective of killing myself with drugs or something like this, an attractive PO proposition. But I also didn't find it to be an attractive proposition to be in church. When I was a child, I went to the education that was offered by the local church in our village in eastern Germany. The church did this outside of the school in parallel. And going to this education basically the an equivalent of Bible study was completely optional. And I decided to go there because I thought for cultural reasons, it's a part of the environment that I'm in, of the culture that I'm in, it gives me more background to understand the world that I'm in. I really should go there. And so I really liked the local priest. He was a very friendly Protestant woman, very warm, very good with the children. He sang songs, we got a lot of stories. But I also read the Bible by myself in this time. And I found that a lot of this stories, especially in the Old Testament, didn't make a lot of sense to me. He had really big difficulty understanding that the morality of these stories and back then I couldn't, I saw that there were basically good examples for this church being immoral. And this religion being deeply immoral or anti immoral even is story for instance of a guy who takes in holy man and the people in the city are very bad people.

Joscha Bach [00:25:25] So they come to his stores and ask him to get an out so they can lunch him and he very good host response by sending his daughter a virgin out over the doorstep. So duplicate the people and he's basically sacrifice the rape her all night. And when he, she's broken found on the doorstep the next morning he sends her away. And this is incredible for right? He, she's just a commodity for him, right? It's a big sacrifice that he makes that he sacrifices a virgin from his own blood to the mob. But and it was actually

Vance Crowe [00:26:04] Asked of him. Yeah, go ahead.

Joscha Bach [00:26:05] Yes. And that is, this is a good thing that this is a moral person who did a noble sacrifice. This is something that is completely incompatible with our world. And I think this is something that points at a difference back then that I couldn't understand between the, the ancient Hebrew cult. It's very different now and modern Christianity, that Christianity introduced an archetype into the religion that didn't exist in the previous and the original form, which was the protection of innocence. Christianity is really the central motive in addition to serving the greatest agent that you can find and be part of is that the resound detra for this is the protection of innocence to make innocence possible. And so in Christianity sacrificing this innocent child would be completely unthinkable because the innocence is actually more important than the other missions that exist and the missions that we are doing that the violence that Christianity can justify happen in the service of protecting innocence. At least that's the basic idea. And innocence is an original Christianity symbolized by Jesus Christ who is this young prophet who finds a bunch of acolytes after he got enlightened and that the Catholics later picked to become the head figure of the cult that they used to replace their failing rationalist society, but also don't have that strong relationship to Jesus Christ.

Joscha Bach [00:27:37] And what I found is that when I watched the Miyazaki movies, Hyam Zaki made a number of groundbreaking animation movies that these movies ask very, very deep questions very often without giving the answer, but with exploring the space of these questions. And the movies tend to be always very multi-layered and they're very unlike Disney movies and that they do not give you some satisfying storyline that works to entertain and to show that evil is being stopped in its tracks eventually and good prevails. But it's really trying to look into oil ammonia, what is a good life in a world that is extremely conflicted and difficult? And the main character in these movies is always the same. It's always a little girl and it has the same traits and in some sense it's always Heidi from the original Heidi book. And I suspect that he discovered Heidi during his field work for the animation movie Heidi, in which he was working before he was the director in Studio Ghibli. And I think that Heidi in some sense is this spirit of European Protestantism because there's no mythology involved. She's completely innocent and she's in some sense a better Jesus figure than Jesus himself. She has an extremely pure relationship to everybody around him, an extremely clean relationship to God. And she ever always relates to other people with this relationship to God. But the God in in these movies is nameless.

Joscha Bach [00:29:08] It doesn't have a shape, it doesn't have a clear personality, it's a spiritual orientation. There is no mythology that is tainting it in any way, but without a mythology that taints it by narrativizing it, by giving it more shape than it actually has or a slightly different shape by anthropomorphizing it. In many ways I think we make religion less powerful, but this it's ization makes it much easier to transport. So the way in which religion existed in the Middle Ages largely existed because it was designed to in to instruct peasants and in a state that would allow them to form a similar image of God and on their minds and to synchronize it. So this mythology is basically not some eternal truth that was found by some sacred mythological magic way of knowing that it's unknown to science, but it is a boot loader. It has been designed to change the minds of people not to impart truth.

Vance Crowe [00:30:06] Yeah, I've heard you talk about this before and I think it's valuable to explore even more, which is that religion and in many ways allows individuals to be able to synchronize so that they can have a shared purpose. And that shared purpose allows human beings to take action longer than just a single lifespan of 30 years, but maybe many, many lifespans. And that as you have a breakdown of religion as as people are no longer doing this, then you have a much harder time being able to synchronize human action. And so there's a tension between you, you seeing that this is, it's the religion is breaking down, but it also is guiding people not necessarily to have correct answers. But then at the same time, this then inhibiting human beings from being able to take long-term actions over things that are, that if they don't resolve could, could end in the destruction of humanity.

Joscha Bach [00:30:57] Yep. There's also a slightly darker aspect to the religion, which has to do with possession with a tribal spirit, for instance. If we think of the way in which minds work, we have something like an outer mind. The outer mind is creating the world as we see it, the world, the objects that we see in our world, the space that I see right now, the tables here in this room, my cat and so on, then all not physical objects. They're all being constructed in my mind. And the system that constructs them has a quite high degree of intelligence. It's basically like a game engine that has been put together in my mind and is modified in real time to accommodate all the changes in my world. This game engine produces all the extended objects that I see that are being constructed over the patterns on my ready now or my skin. And this game changer engine is also producing what my body looks like to me and what the world looks, feels like to me. It produces most of my feelings and my inner self is what I experience as myself, the thing that is accessible to me that I can actually reflect. So I cannot reflect how my feelings are being generated. What I can reflect is how my, I react to my feelings and what I should be doing in reaction to my feelings. But the system that produces my feelings is itself quite intelligent. And if I give this thing a name and if I address this thing, I can maybe start communicating with it. And what many religions do is they take this outer self and allow you to communicate with it.

Joscha Bach [00:32:34] But you do this with the instruments of the group around you. The the religions are synchronizing the inner mind with the outer mind. Basically they ensure that this outer mind actually has a loving relationship to you. And many people, this outer mind does not actually love you, your personal self. And this means that you are being mistreated. You suffer a lot because the organism thinks this is the way in which you get more performance out of you. But if, because in some sense you turns out that your inner self might also not like the mission that your organism is on. And so you start mistreating your body and so on. In this way you can get a dysfunctional relationship in which your mind is working against itself, in which basically an adversarial relationship exists like between a farmer who beats his horse to draw the cart, instead a farmer who is friends with his horse and the horse wants to help him during the cart, right? And in this situation, when you believe in this mission of the auto mind, you are willing to serve it and to submit to it. And the outer mind in return is going to treat you well. You're not going to suffer in your everyday life. And when people feel that they achieve the harmony between the inner self mind, inner self, and the outer mind, they have a much, much better life. And they also notice that they're much more effective because they're doing the right things. And the church is installing basically an exo self on the minds of people and they personalize this outer mind and then they synchronizes within the group. And there are different ways of synchronizing it. You can do this in a quite rationalist way just by a meanses.

Joscha Bach [00:34:07] Or you can do this in an experiential way in which you basically put the people into a trans state and you go, they go into resonance. And in this resonance state they basically share mental state. And this means that there can be an entity in the room that is composed out of the minds of all the individuals. And you see this when in religions that are talking in tongues, for instance, that you basically put entities on the mind of the people that have their own agenda, that have their own intelligence, that have their own agency that might be separate from yours. I think this is also the case in ayahuasca cults where people are using certain medications that are based on plans from the Amazon and they're sitting together and they're sharing these medicines and they go into a trance state, they have no firewalls, and then somebody starts to sing during this ritual and then they start to impart this hive mind onto the others. And you end up with a group of converted people who feel it's very important to get their friends into the ceremony and give them ayahuasca and expose them to the same hive mind because it's so beautiful. But to be part of this shared experience that relieves your suffering. But what people don't realize is I think maybe some of them don't, is that they're being colonized. They're being colonized by an entity that has his own agenda and is basically human minds to propagate. It's very interesting that you basically can get memes that are themselves not just ideas, but that are agents that are implemented in software in their, their, your mind that are self-organizing, that are persistent and can move from mind to mind.

Joscha Bach [00:35:43] So this ayahuasca deity, Pasha mama isn't actually is a God, it's a small G God. It's not a total God, it's not a creator God that has created the entire universe, even though Pasha mama tells people the story that she is actually Mother Earth. And I don't think that is the case. It's just a random entity that emerged in the Amazon and started to possess a few tribes and then American tourists and then it's now it's spreading. It's really interesting, right? And we are unfamiliar with these phenomena, but per Christianity deliberately stomped them out for centuries and tried to replace them with the total guard of Christianity. And when this total guard of Christianity mostly died after the end of the Christian era, there's a vacuum of meaning. And in this vacuum of meaning, we have lots and lots of small movements that are trying to compete for mind share.

Vance Crowe [00:36:31] Ah, would that explain kind of the woke movement in our culture? Then

Joscha Bach [00:36:35] I suspect that woke is an category that evolved on Twitter and it originally evolved out of ideas of the left. And I think part of it happened during the Occupy movement when some people tried to subvert it to, because Occupy movement tried to impose the Tobin text. The, the idea was that if you have a very small tax on every buying and saying a selling of securities of stocks, we increase the friction in the stock market in such a way that Wall Street largely loses its business, right? You will still be able to buy stocks to for your retirement, but much of the speculation is going to go, which means that a large fraction of the money that is being earned without any productivity is, is going to disappear, right? And I don't think Wall Street liked this idea of ovn tax and strongly opposed it. And I think there were intelligent attempts subverting this movement. And if you have a movement that is driven by very strong moral forces, it's very often possible to subvert it with other moral forces, with moral ideas that take on their own life. And so leftist movements often get very split because people get very, very strong moral ideas that, and they're motivated by these ideas, not yet by the outcomes. 'cause most people who work in ideological movements are very young. So they don't think in terms of effects. They think in terms of what is virtuous behaviors, they're more the ontologists, right? In the same way as forcing people to not do drugs in the streets is violence. We cannot do this. This is very bad, right? But leaving them there to die on the street is also a form of violence.

Joscha Bach [00:38:09] Even it's of, it's a violence of not doing, it's not compassionate to let them die like this, right? And in the same way it, I think it would be not of compassionate to bring up your children in a way that does not give them the tools to integrate with life and to develop discipline when they are in a hard situation and to interact with their friends in such a way that their friends do not fall to the streets and so on, right? It also means that we have to impose firm values on each other. Not violent values, but values that allow us to have the strengths that we need to go through the difficult periods in our life.

Vance Crowe [00:38:47] And when you talk about those values, that has to be like internally generated. I'm, I'm, the word that comes to mind is the Damon, right? That I think Gerta talks about where he is saying, it's this internal voice that tells you what you should or shouldn't do and does each time do those values need to be created from, from a blank slate in in each individual human mind?

Joscha Bach [00:39:11] It's, I think quite difficult to find out what values are. When you ask people what values they have, they sometimes vaguely point at concepts. But I think it's difficult for people to actually spell out what these values are. So there might things like kindness and compassion and so on. And much of that is feeling good about yourself and others, right? And, and values are what feels good and right to you. But disassembling and reflecting what these values actually mean seems to be difficult. And there are different value systems that are competing with each other and it's, it's not that clear for most people to spell them out. There's been some work by Jonathan Haight who has been looking at value systems. Personally, I find it interesting to, for instance, look at the original liberal values like because you can enumerate them so easily. You have liberty, equality and fraternity. What do these values actually mean? Like liberty means, I think freedom from unjustified authority, it doesn't mean freedom from all authority. It means we need some authority. Like we want to have a legal system that makes sure that we can resolve our conflicts peacefully and we need somebody to pay for our boards and hospitals. So we need some system that is imposing taxes on us and we need something that enforces paying taxes and we need a military that protects our borders and all these things. So all this authority can be justified and there might be differences in opinion, what's justified and what's not and what would work better than the present system.

Joscha Bach [00:40:49] But some authority I, I think is always justified. The idea that we need to trade, treat all power critically because all power is bad is I think a very naive idea. We need power in order to have authority and we need authority to have order and structure and without order and structure, we don't have civilization, we don't have safety, we don't live long lives without violence because if the state is not exerting some kind of power, some random individual might, and a random individual will always do because they can. It's just the way evolution works. All different strategies or are tried by all, by many different players all the time and what's possible is going to prevail. The next one is equality. And this means that everybody is treated in front of the law according to the same principles, right? And there, there are some difficulties with this. On one hand, we want for instance to give everybody the same chance based on their abilities. If I apply at a university that defines my later career in life, liberalism would say everybody should have the same chance based on the ability. It should not be based on who your parents were for instance, right? And there's also this, this flip side that the law in its great justice is imposing the same laws on poor and rich people when it was forbids them from sleeping under the street. There are difficulties in life if everybody gets treated by the same rules.

Joscha Bach [00:42:21] And this leads also to this big negotiation problem in liberalism. There are people of different abilities and skill levels and most of the professions imagine that you are an extremely good retail worker and you are super good at managing the stuff that happens in the super supermarket. You'll probably never get the same pay as a very bad manager. And that's because there is no scarcity of retail workers. But there is a scarcity of managers because it's much harder to get into this career path. And once you're in it, it means that you'll get paid in a very different way. It's not so much because you're necessarily smarter or put in more hours. And there's a certain degree of unfairness in this. This basically it's a question of supply and demand in a free market that treats everybody by the same rules. And this leads to this weird class society in the US which is very well reflected in the airline classes. You basically have a first class and a managerial class and an economy class. And the vast majority of people are in the economy class. And some people are in the business class and some people are in the owner class, right? And this disparity is something that leads to competition with the system of liberalism because the last principle of liberalism, fraternity that we treat each other as human beings and we treat each other fairly, not based on identity, but on the fact that we have a shared humanity and we try to make the world work as if we are all brothers and sisters in such a way that we, we are all basically different instances of myself in a different timeline and we treat each other in such a way that we are okay on both ends of the trade, right?

Joscha Bach [00:44:06] This is something that liberalism has not managed to live up to. And so wokeness is in some sense also a response to the failed liberalism. And the new values of diversity, equity and inclusion are being sold as an update to liberalism, but they're not. It's a completely different system of values. It's a system of values that ask that every kind of person, every kind of trade, regardless of your ability, should be integrated into all the different classes. There should be palace dwelling quotas for everybody, for every kind of identity. And the groups there are that have to be included are the different identities. And this means if I adopt a certain identity that is underrepresented, I have a right for reparations, a right for inclusion. It's distributive such justice that emerges there. And so we end up with an identity based model of society. And personally I think that identity based models of society are very dangerous. This doesn't end well. And I say this also with the experience of German fascism that once societies does not identify in a alistic way, it is are not liberal in the sense that they allow people to live different lifestyles. That they have different ideas, different systems of values, as long as they are compatible with this notion that this diversity needs to be maintained. But you become totalitarian and identitarian and there will be violence and the outcome of the society I think will be actually less equitable.

Vance Crowe [00:45:39] I think when you ask most people, they feel a sense that the world is in a time of doom right now. Like the religion is breaking down. People feel like the, the diversity, equity and inclusion is causing a great deal of chaos and, and potential violence. Do you sense that in your own way?

Joscha Bach [00:46:00] I think that of course every revolutionary movement is going to create unrest and upheaval and some degree of violence, but it's also driven by actual problems that exist in a society. A lot of people in the US really struggle to make ends meet. To have a decent first world lifestyle, you need to earn extremely high salary. And a lot of people do not make this high salary. And basically the people can earn more money than they can in Europe normally. Normally if you look at the numbers, but what these numbers are buying you is much less than you get in Europe. So in some sense the, you have a diversity of lifestyles where the basic lifestyle of most Americans, despite being nominally higher remunerated than basically they earn more money on paper than the Germans. The Germans or Swiss people are getting more for their money, they get better healthcare, they get better housing and so on at a lower pay rate.

Vance Crowe [00:47:02] I bet that there are people listening to this that are flat out shocked by that, by that sense that there are other people that, that the US is not at the top of the food chain.

Joscha Bach [00:47:11] This is at the top of the food chain in terms of its total social power of its GDP of its ability to maintain the military and to change the course of the world. US is one of those countries that has more agency than all these smaller countries, but smaller countries are much easier to organize. I think that us, there is no other country with 300 or more than 300 million people that has such a good standard of living and such a same social organization. But if you have a very small country, it's much easier to organize it. Well, if you have a country like Switzerland, people basically know each other. And so the feedback loops are very short, accountability is very different, and as result, the regulation is going to work much better. So it is this, it's not because people are evil or the Americans are doing something wrong, I believe it's just reality is difficult to control and to maintain. And every decision that you make to improve something, it's going to have trade offs that make something worse on the other side. And I think that this current ideological revolution, despite many of the things that it destroys and makes more difficult, it also is going to improve many things. And so it's, it's very difficult to see what the outcome will be in the end.

Vance Crowe [00:48:25] Yeah, it's a little like saying, Hey, there's a storm that's coming and after the storm has come, you know, new things will be able to be, or maybe a forest fire is a better example. Like new life will be able to grow, but you're going to first have to endure the wild burning inferno that is a, is a fire to me. That's a very intimidating thing, particularly as you're raising children because chaos is uncertain.

Joscha Bach [00:48:48] Yes, it's an interesting world to live in. And I'm thinking very hard these days of where to stay and where to move so we can create a safe place for our children to grow up. And, and it's just, doesn't mean the physical safety, but the inner safety that they need to become sustainable human beings that find meaning in their life, that know how to form strong bridges to the world around them, to form strong bonds with their neighbors and friends and build community. This requires a certain cultural depth. And we are trying to give our children this cultural depth that is required, this sense of what works, what doesn't, how do I treat people around myself? So the world that emerges around me is one that we want to live in.

Vance Crowe [00:49:39] And when you think about that, I mean, this is a conversation that I have with a i I get together once a week with the same group of people. We've been doing it for almost a decade. It's like the most enriching thing that I do. And we come to the same conclusion that it appears as though everywhere is ideologically breaking down and that that, that there is no place, like if you look at the monetary system, right, this like incredible monetary breakdown. You look at the people like Balaji and, and the people trying to say, oh, we should have this kind of no nation state or the network state. It appears as though none of these things are possible. Do you believe there is somewhere you could go that that things that the, the thing you're talking about is possible?

Joscha Bach [00:50:23] Of course. I mean there are many communities also in the US where people are treating each other well and where people have strong value systems that are built on supporting each other and creating healthy environments to be in. It's, I think that San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. To me, I think it's the most beautiful one and it'll pin me greatly when I leave the Bay Area, but it's also a city that is hard to live in. And it's largely because it's in a gold rush. And when you are in a gold rush, society gets very rough, right? It's, it's all about digging and digging and selling spades. So many of the relationships I find here have some economic element. Even when people go to parties, they think about where they need to spend their attention because they're exciting parties all the time and people do not actually have a separation between work and life here. So every project that they do has potential economic implications. And this means that I really, really cherish when I meet somebody who I sense has absolutely no economic interest in the interaction with me as completely devoid. And this was something that I only noticed as special when I came here because it was totally normal in Cambridge. And it was absolutely standard in Berlin that you would interact based on, I want to hang out with you, you are my crew. I I want to spend time with you because you're a good community and I want to share my life with you and raise my children with you.

Joscha Bach [00:51:57] And not because you potentially want to start a company together or want to make a contract or have each other in our network.

Vance Crowe [00:52:07] Yeah, I felt like that when I moved from Washington DC to St. Louis. And I didn't notice it until I went back to a wedding in DC and then all of a sudden these things that happened when I was living there that I didn't notice. But people always wanted to know, who are you working with? Who are you connected with? And trying to figure out like, is your network large enough that I should spend time on this interaction? And in St. Louis, certainly that occurs to some extent, but it, but the re like here, everybody knows everybody else. So it, the transaction rate or the turnover or the the downside to, to screwing somebody over is much, much harsher than it is in a place like DC where the, where the churn was so high. That's why like customer service was always bad at restaurants, right? If they, if they don't treat you well, they know there's another person waiting to sit down in your chair right away. So one of the things that's been a big change in the Midwest is this rapid proliferation of cannabis. And when you think about the human mind and like the ready availability of things like a non-hard drug, what do you think this does at the individual level? And then, and then again at the social like kind of more corporate level,

Joscha Bach [00:53:23] I have very little insight over the actual statistics. I don't think that the liberation of cannabis has no price. There are definite drawbacks. I have only anecdotal case where I have been working in a company where people dropped out of work because of cannabis. 'cause they basically didn't get out of bed anymore for three days in the week and then were too ashamed to show up at the rest of the week. And so despite my efforts to keep them employed, they basically dropped out. And this dropping out due to cannabis, they typically fix themselves later, but there is a price involved later. I don't think that the addiction due to cannabis is as harsh as other things. It's not as destructive, but there is some damage that is being done to people certainly, I think, or to some people that cannot deal with it. Well, on the other hand, I, I think that the damage is probably less than the one from alcohol. Alcoholism is much worse, much more damaging. And the way in which we treat people who are abusing cannabis or using cannabis when they're too young, that is, should be similar to the way in which we deal with alcohol. This means that there is a culture around it that is built on harm reduction that we teach our children what this is good for and what this is bad about. And your children need to understand why you're not lying. So they don't do this out of opposition to the parents and so on. Because your parents always told you, oh my god, drugs and alcohol are very, very bad. So when I was a child, my parents would not be opposed to us having a small sip of wine at dinner when we were at a party with friends or something.

Joscha Bach [00:55:03] But there was also an understanding that being drunk is really bad for your brain and it's also very bad for your body. And there is actually no benefit in getting into that state and it's also not super tasty. And the reason they do it is because some adults feel that it makes them more relaxed in a party setting, but it needs to be extremely well dosed. And if you dose it too much, you just become stupid. Or eventually you basically get intoxicated. You throw up because you poison yourself and it's not good to do this, right? It's very bad for your liver and your organism through this is super unreasonable. And we tried and we found our parents were not lying. It's not that we got drunk as children, but we basically realized this, that alcohol has very little use for us and it's harming us. And so we are not doing it. And so by not having prohibition, we were not never tempted to binge drink or something as adolescence and later on in our life. And when you create this strong prohibitions where you regulate people from the outside and they get into the situation where they need to make the decision for their own, they're unprepared to make that decision. That's why I believe it's very important to give children a chance to explore the world on their own terms, to learn for themselves to build something like a moral autonomy and responsibility for themselves. And this means that we tell them what we know, but we tell them in the same way as we would want to somebody else to tell us, which means non, I don't want to be lied to. I want to know the truth about this.

Joscha Bach [00:56:35] And I think that's also the case for cannabis. So at some point we need to have the talk with our children about cannabis, what this means and why we see a series who think that they should not do this until very large in their twenties and in big moderation. And why. And they will of course discuss this with their friends. That's inevitable. And so we cannot protect them from cannabis, but we, I hope that we can get them into a state where they can avoid most of the danger. And so as a parent, I'm really of two minds of this. In some sense, I would prefer to be in society where my children are not confronted with cannabis before they're age in their twenties. But the drawbacks of a society in which we enact a prohibition on cannabis are similar to the prohibition that existed with alcohol, right? The, because people still want it. It means that all this stuff goes on the side of organized crime and a lot of people are dying because of bad alcohol. And the liberation of cannabis led to the evolution that was similar to the liberation after the end of the prohibition. It means that if you go now in dispensary, you have a similar variety as in a good liquor store. And this means that you now have different brands of cannabis and kinds of cannabis that are as different as gin, brandy and wine and have diff very different purposes. And if you use them wisely, people tell me that they get very useful results of this. For instance, pain reduction, relaxation, when they're really tense, it replaces often prescription medicines like Xanax for them with much less side effects.

Joscha Bach [00:58:05] Some people find it helpful for A DHD or against dissociative effects. There are many things that are not even properly explored. It's extremely useful cannabis for many purpose, but I think it's basically a medicine and it should be treated very, very responsibly. Yeah. So in short, I'm of, it's a medicine I think on balance. It's very good to make medicines over the counter unless in very rare cases because prohibition is worse. But we also need education, how to harm that is very honest and believable for the kids.

Vance Crowe [00:58:37] Yeah. You mentioned things like the Xanax or these mood enhancing things or, or stabilizing, I'm not even sure how you'd describe it. I had an experience where I was at a, like a parent meeting where people were talking about like how to be better parents. So these people are genuinely and honestly there because they wanna know like, how do I handle my child demanding things of me? And most of them are two working parents. And so they have like very little time and they, they described and I, I was in this situation where this woman was like, I get home and my daughter is pointing at the pantry and she just wants something and I will give her anything she wants to get her to stop screaming. So I pick her up and I let her grab whatever she wants off of there. And another woman said, whenever that happens to me, that's when I take, I can't even remember which exactly drug she used, but in, in the frame of Xanax or something like that, I expected the other parents to be horrified, right? Like, oh, when my child is yelling at me, that's when I medicate myself. But instead all of the parents or a bunch of them were like, oh that, me too. Yes, I agree with that. And I was stunned by this like I almost to a naive degree and I went and looked up the statistics on how many people are on SSRIs and these various like drugs, what is going on that so many people are taking these drugs and what is the consequence to the individual?

Joscha Bach [01:00:06] Yeah. I think that as a, a parent, if you cannot afford to have the presence to actually interact with your children at where they are and listen to them where they are, and it's difficult to be a really good parent and you cannot have that presence when you're stressed out. I remember when we were in a weekend home and for a couple days and we could really, really relax. My daughter was in the bathroom of that home and she screamed and it was really, really annoying. And normally I probably would've yelled at her because we could not talk outside of that bathroom. And I didn't know what she had. And in that state I felt, oh, I understand what's going on. I think she actually really needs attention and she doesn't know how to get it. And the attention that she needs is 'cause she actually wants to interact and produce something with us. So I went to her and suggested to her that we make a show and she's going to be the star of the show, but before she can be the star of the show, we need to practice a choreography and a song. And so we for two hours did choreography for dance and composed a song, and then she performed the song on the stage, which was the bed. And everybody in the family had to sit in front and listen to it. And it was great. And she was super relaxed after this and extremely happy. Of course, he wanted to do the next one right after this. But my son was upset because he found her performance boring and want, he needed attention now I wanted to do something and she understood this.

Joscha Bach [01:01:45] She had got her attention and now we would do something for him and with him and was something that was a big luxury because when do you have two hours quality time to interact with your kid and actually understand what your kid really needs and wants and to facilitate this?

Vance Crowe [01:02:02] Yeah, I think that the, the amount that of pressure that people are under, like the two parents always working and feeling like, you know, I blame inflation, right? I, I feel like the value of our money going down means you have to work more hours in order to stay in the same spot. And then people are always rushing and things get more expensive and the price that gets paid probably the highest is the relationship between the parent and the child. Because the parent can never fully focus on the child in the way that the child needs or certainly wants.

Joscha Bach [01:02:34] I think that can be to some degree compensated if you have groups of children that can work well together. I think you can and principal have very good after school programs if you have a very good school. But it's very difficult to find this and to build it. My parents did not spend a lot of time with us because they had their own projects as artists and we were basically also runs. We were allowed to live in the same house and do our stuff and they made sure that we were dressed and that we would find food when we needed it. But we also, from a pretty young age, expected to outside of the meals and sometimes there were only two meals a day to cook for ourselves and we accepted this, it made sense. They had really other stuff to do and that was very urgent for them. And we were put in the state to take care of ourselves. And I was very lonely as a child, but I don't think that my parents would've understood me anyway. They were not very introspective and not interested in the types of ideas that I was interested in it at the time. And what I would've needed is other kids, other nerd kids that are like this. And they probably, for hindsight, I think they, they understand that they should have found a way to get me to the next city from time to time and find parents who have nerdy kids and let me interact with them. But I think that back then people had no idea what Asperger's is and how it works and how to deal with it. And so in, in many ways they had no idea what to do. They tried to send me to the kindergarten in the next village, and there was there two times and they said, I never want to go there again.

Joscha Bach [01:04:10] This is just horrible what they're doing to us. This is so incredibly stupid and the things that we have to do, like sitting on our hands for half an hour, so we don't put our hand on the table and play with the cutlery and do things on command and run in circles and on command. This is totally couldn't do this. This was like prison. And the way the kinder children interacted with it, I really couldn't relate. I could not relate to their games.

Vance Crowe [01:04:42] Yeah, I was the middle child of seven and I grew up in a neighborhood where there were so many kids that like, like very, very rarely did my, you know, mother go outside and watch me ride my bike or you know, my dad do anything at all with us. But it's funny, I feel a pull for that for my own children because we don't live in a neighborhood with lots of children. And so there's like this, this trade off and you know, if you drive up and down our roads, like yeah, there are kids that live in those houses, but they're not outside playing. And so we're living in this paradigm where it's hard to figure out what is the role of, of a parent and a child and what, how do you help a child, you know, maybe not to be lonely or maybe maybe not worry so much about it.

Joscha Bach [01:05:24] As children, we really roamed the land. We were not supervised, but we were playing outside and we walk for many miles from our house and valley and fell down all sorts of things. And yeah, luckily we survived, but this thing that children lived with each other and played outside without supervision, it was a very different time. And something must have changed in the 1980s that was very dramatic in the US and almost as bad in Europe. Eventually I think it happened, a slight delay 'cause idea that I, I guess it has to do with the fact that we have our children much later than our parents had their children. And so there is this sense that this is the only time that it can work. And if something happens to this child, we are ruined forever. Whereas my parents had us in their twenties, my mother was 23, and it, she had a stable relationship, she was married, everything was good. This was the kind of life she wanted and on the end had subconsciously, I think there is this belief if something happens to these children kind of more,

Vance Crowe [01:06:29] I mean that was definitely what was going on in my family. Like it's not, not that they were like blithely not caring about us, but it was certainly possible that there was a replacement for you that, you know, they'd be sad but life would continue. But in that regard, like I, I see it with my own children. We didn't have kids till I was nearly 40. And so by having those kids now there, there isn't much time to go back and to do something else that we've already made our choices.

Joscha Bach [01:06:55] Yeah. But it's also the way in which we live. If you are in a city or in suburbia, it means that going on the play date means putting your children in a car and organizing it beforehand and then driving for 20 minutes so you can collect a few kids in one place where they can spend an afternoon or evening together.

Vance Crowe [01:07:15] So the other part of that story was people being on things like SSRIs. As somebody that understands cognition in the way the human mind works, what, what is going on with people taking these, these drugs and what is the, the consequence to the, the way the mind works?

Joscha Bach [01:07:34] I think for many people it's an attempt to adapt to a life that is basically unbearable to them. The reason why people are depressed I think, or depression itself is really means that your mind stops anticipating positive things happening in your future. And as a result you lose all motivation and cannot go on anymore. And the reason why people lose the expectation of good things happening in their future is because for a long period of time, nothing good happen to them. Their needs were not met as human beings. All these things that are required for a healthy human existence, spending time in nature, spending time with yourself, interacting with others in, in good ways that are not related to work and so on. This all it's eaten up by other concerns. And so you try to free skin some of that, but it's not enough. And as a result people become unwell. They get out of balance. And normally when I was getting out of balance when I was young and a student, I took my bicycle and traveled. It was a very cheap mode of traveling. And I traveled all over Yuba like this sometimes two months at a time. And I spent extremely little money. I just asked farmers where I could pitch my tent and I could get water everywhere for free. And I needed only a little bit of food every day. And this way I saw quite interesting parts of the world. And when you travel for eight weeks, you get so much out of your normal life. I was in basically a constant state of bliss. And in my normal life I was felt I was stressed out because I was working very hard for my university and for all the projects that I wanted to do at the same time.

Joscha Bach [01:09:15] And while it was very rewarding, I think the needs of my organism, of my human existence were not met. I was only working. And now when I am out of balance, I cannot take two weeks off or eight weeks to get in balance again, right? I have to function every day. And this constant need to be present and to function in a life that does not actually work well for you might require that people are using drugs that they get on prescription by the doctor that allows them to go in the state that is almost as good as if they had relaxed. So that makes them functional again to get them back to some kind of baseline.

Vance Crowe [01:09:54] This seems like a very compassionate understanding of it. This then, and one that resonates with the beginning of our conversation where you talked about how there some people have no meaning in their lives, right? And the, the, the this meaning is what directs you. And if you somehow are disconnected from the larger synchronized, what is it all, what is it all for? Then it makes it so you do need something that soothes that pain. We, we de you know, when we kind of explored religion, it didn't seem like going to church is a good way to find meaning. It seems like trying to find a community, like where should people go to explore and find meaning when they're already in the position maybe of being the retail salesperson that's quite good at their job but never going to make it financially. How, how do they find meaning? What, what, what, where should they go looking for hope?

Joscha Bach [01:10:47] I found that I, my life was always most meaningful when I was in a creative mode where I'm contributing to the world. So instead of just selling my lifetime to, to administration jobs and produce PowerPoints and ideas and code, being in a community where I produce interactions with others, where when we did things like building community movie theater with friends, it was intensely rewarding. And so in some sense what we need to do is we need to build our churches. And this doesn't mean to build a cult. It means creating spaces in which we are doing things together with others and interacting with them. And this is for me, the sign of a healthy community when people create things together, when they create experiences for each other. And this can be something like a barbecue with friends or a big party for the children where you create all sorts of buildings for the children for one day or where you would travel together. And, but really creating a building is, is important. So not not be a consumer, don't try to consume an experience but make it happen.

Vance Crowe [01:11:56] I love this, this resonates very deeply with me. I I think that, I find that I, I'm always like, ah, I don't want to put something together for this group of people, but if I don't do it, it's not going to happen. And then when you do it, then all these people like making a meal together or spending time together, it is deeply meaningful. In fact, some of the most meaningful things I do every year are pushing people together.

Joscha Bach [01:12:20] Yeah, it basically means taking responsibility for the people around you and for your group. And this inspires others to do the same

Vance Crowe [01:12:28] Yosha. If, if people wanted to read more about what you're interested in or hear more about what you're doing, where would they go to learn more about your thoughts?

Joscha Bach [01:12:39] I have too little time to write long form I find between children and work. I hope that I can set some time aside soon. I haven't written a book in a long time and I, I think I have enough material to do so, and I, if I haven't even written my blog that at this point I'm mostly using Twitter as an interactive notebook benefit of doing this is that you can put up ideas that are almost arbitrary, that are just super interesting to you. They're not necessarily something that you strongly believe to be correct or finished, and you can just put them out out there in the world and people will interact with them. And that's quite rewarding 'cause it allows you to develop them further. So I use Twitter a lot as an interactive notebook. And while this has gotten its own dynamic, I also feel that I need to direct this in a, a more productive direction. In some sense Twitter is productive, but it's a very fleeting medium.

Vance Crowe [01:13:45] Well, I am always grateful when you say yes to my invitations to come on the podcast. I, I, I love listening to your ideas and I'm so grateful that you take the time to share 'em here.

Joscha Bach [01:13:56] Thank you too. I really enjoy being on podcasts like this because it's the way to put something that is not temporary. And if you look on YouTube, you'll find a bunch of presentations. I've collected them in my channel. And while I don't produce podcasts myself, I'm very grateful that others go through the trouble of pulling ideas out of me and producing them and giving them to the world. I, I think it's very helpful. Thank you for doing this. It's a wonderful trade. Yoshi b thank you so much for coming on. Thank you too, Vince.