September 18, 2024 • 25 mins
Today we explore Dave's worldview, the life experiences and the thinkers that have formed his present understanding of the world. In the domains of science, religion and philosophy. The notion that Dave stresses in this episode is how ever-evolving our worldview really are.
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TGI, the Global Island.
(00:04):
Today we explore Dave's worldview, the life experiences and the thinkers that have formed
his present understanding of the world.
We take a look at his unique cultural influences from science to religion and philosophy.
The thing that David stresses most in this episode is how ever-evolving our worldviews
really are.
It will be interesting to see how David's thoughts change over the course of these upcoming
(00:28):
conversations.
So welcome Dave.
We're going to be kind of interviewing you today.
Are you my therapist?
Yes tell me all your problems.
I mean today is actually probably like a therapy session.
Today is sort of like a therapy session but instead of a therapy session to try and get
a solution, we're going to use therapy as a way to understand, which I guess in some
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cases is the point of therapy.
Yeah, absolutely.
It makes sense.
We're both going into the field.
Indeed.
Let's start with this.
How did you get here?
How did you get to this point?
Yeah, I ask myself that question every day.
I had a really interesting upbringing.
My parents had a lot of financial and relationship problems.
(01:10):
So they got a divorce right when I was born and they moved out to suburban Long Island.
Yes, shout out.
From where?
From Brooklyn.
Yeah.
And then my dad commuted to work in the city.
He worked for the health department.
And then the relationship just didn't really work out and they ended up getting a divorce
a year after I was born.
(01:30):
And the financial struggles continued in my home.
If anything, got much worse after the divorce.
And then my mom struggled with a lot of mental health problems.
So growing up was a very interesting ride and there was not a lot of stability.
So it forced my brain to kind of develop much more skepticism and much more of an ability
(01:51):
to kind of question things and have a much more robust prediction of the world around
me as like a safety mechanism.
And so I think I am kind of intellectually OCD and I like to have a robust raft worldview
to protect me from the ocean of existential dread and suffering.
(02:12):
So that's a long way to say that that's kind of my early development.
And we can get more into that if you would like.
Well, so I know a part of this from knowing you.
You come from a sort of religious background.
Now understanding the sort of like the working class, the divorce, the mental health, like
these are very common things amongst religious folks.
(02:33):
Now did the religion sort of serve as this cognitive heuristic?
Was there an epiphany?
Did you have sort of a religious experience that brought you into this?
And do you feel that it was self-serving in that time and that it's something you essentially
not necessarily evolved out of, but you sort of used as a method and then continued on?
(02:54):
Sure.
I think there was never a time when I like was growing up that I was like, I'm religious.
I think it was just what the world act like was to me.
That was just my perception.
I had a relationship with God since I was conscious, you know, since I was like, you
know, two, three years old and was able to form thoughts.
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All the memories that I have about me praying to God were in times of difficulty.
So I think I kind of viewed God as like a genie, as like someone that you call out to
when things are difficult and when you're in deep need.
But then I also started to kind of just like talk to God, just random things in my life
and pray for things.
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And so I think I started to build a more robust religious worldview.
My mother was a very cultural Christian.
She didn't really have a lot of theological knowledge.
I think growing up, I didn't really have any strong doctrine of like, this is what Christianity
is, this is what religion is.
Just modeling my mother's behavior of when things were bad.
(03:56):
That's when we cry out to God to help him, you know, save the day and pay the mortgage
bills.
But then when I was in middle school, my local church had this mentorship program where they
were taking a bunch of dads who have already like raised their kids.
They're pairing them with a bunch of single mothers who had boys who didn't have any really
fatherly figure in their life.
(04:17):
And so I got paired with one of the founders of that mentorship movement at the church,
this guy named John DeMarco.
He basically took me out to Applebee's one day and was like, hey, I'm not trying to replace
your dad.
I just love to be a friend for you, a man in your life that you can come to if you need
anything.
I'd love to drive you to youth group every, you know, Wednesday and Friday and just talk
with you in the car rides and get to know you.
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And so I was down for it.
And that relationship was like a catalyst for my kind of spiritual awakening and going
to youth group and learning more about God and reading the Bible.
I then kind of became obsessed with it.
I think I have an obsessive personality where if things are happening in my life, I kind
of just go all into it.
And so I studied theology and upon apologetics and I had a spiritual like salvation moment
(05:03):
where I was listening to this pastor, Francis Chan, who formed a lot of my worldview when
I was growing up.
And so I was preaching out of this text.
I think it's in the book of John where Jesus is preaching to thousands of people.
A lot of them leave because Jesus's message is not really tasteful to them.
It kind of bothers them.
He is kind of countercultural.
He turns over to the 12 who are remaining, his disciples, and he says, are you guys going
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to leave too?
And Peter, one of the 12 stand up and look at Jesus and say, where are we going to go?
If you truly have the keys to eternal life, then where else are we going to go?
And as a little middle school kid, for some odd reason, that just clicked in my brain
and it made sense to me.
Where am I going to go?
I need to just submit everything I have to Jesus.
And in that moment, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.
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I felt the love of God come over me and gently convict me of my sin, how I've been treating
people and how I treated my parents.
Also not feeling ashamed of that, but feeling empowered to actually make a positive change
in my life.
And then from there on in high school, I got deeply into political science and philosophy
and I was just always a very curious kid growing up.
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You know, I was trying to find the most robust safety, a world as I possibly could.
And when you're exposed to different religions and different perspectives, it can be destabilizing
to your raft.
But because I was so curious and I deeply wanted to understand that allowed me to expand
my horizons and I ended up leaving my fundamentalist Christian worldview in high school.
(06:33):
Yeah, and began to have a much more nuanced viewpoint of the world.
But I bet we can go into the weeds of that and go into my own spirituality now and my
thoughts.
So, I mean, this definitely seems like a transition from almost religion to science.
And it's not necessarily a transition away from religion, but rather a different fundamental
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way to actually look at religion and how to incorporate that in your life.
Almost as if somebody that has understood the religion, they put their faith in the
methodologies that they use upon it, and then they continue on searching.
Is that something that you would say is true that you necessarily, you didn't wind up as
a believer, but now you're somebody that has faith in the path that was set forth for you
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because of this experience with the religion?
I would say so like from a sociological perspective, I mentioned this to you.
I love the three B's of religiosity.
You have belief, behavior, and you have belonging.
My beliefs have changed about the world and my beliefs have changed about my dogmatic
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viewpoint about the Bible.
But my belonging, I still feel like I have an in-group membership with other Christians.
There is still a belonging to Judeo-Christian culture, even a strong belonging to Judaism.
I have a lot of friends that are practicing ritualistic Jews.
They practice Shabbat.
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I love having a Shabbat dinner.
I think these are really beautiful rituals.
It's so hard to categorize your belief, especially when you're not a stereotypical believer in
a very specific belief system.
I also don't want to make a false dichotomy between religion and science because like
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I said, I'm looking at religion from a sociological perspective, which is a scientific perspective.
But I also realize, as we have spoken in the past, the need for self-transcendence, the
need for humility.
If you stop believing in sin, you have to replace it with something.
You can't just say, no, this is all bullshit.
There is no such thing as sin and then walk away like your life's going to be perfectly
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fine and the world's going to actually work.
You have to create a new software mechanism in your cognition that allow you to take the
faulty parts of you and actually self-transcend and become better.
You're going to forsake the wisdom and traditions of your ancestors, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that absolutely does make sense.
I think this is going to go into my next questions, which are linked together to a certain extent.
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That is about the guiding philosophy for the reasons why you do what you do in your life.
Two questions evolving with that, with your guiding philosophy, because we have these
ideologies or the definitions of certain words and they can mean different things to different
people.
Sure.
That's really around two things that I feel is lacking in this world, one of which is
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truth.
What is truth to you?
Yeah.
The other one is wisdom.
Yeah.
What is wisdom to you?
Yes.
Beautiful questions.
Okay, so truth, epistemology, how we come to know truth.
I start off with rationality, meaning that there has to be a way to logically figure
out how the world works.
If you disagree with rationality, the only way to just prove it is using rationality.
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Therefore, rationality is the first presupposition about the world.
Then there's something called Bayesian analysis.
Reverend Thomas Bay is an amazing guy.
He was a statistician.
What he came up with is this amazing way to give probabilities to events in the world.
Based off of those probabilities, you can measure how truthful something is objectively
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in reality.
I'm going to give you the easiest way to understand this.
We all have explanations about how the world works, but not all of those explanations encompass
the most amount of data that we have about the world.
Science gives us data.
Science produces little nuggets of objective truth about this is how the world really looks.
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Then we create explanations for that data.
Bayesian analysis says whichever explanations encompass the most amount of data, they have
a higher probability of those explanations being true.
That is my epistemology.
How I come to truth is I try to say, what is the most rational explanation for this
occurrence in the world?
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Which of these explanations encompasses most of the data?
You can give me any claim about the world and I'll be like, okay, well, what's the most
likely explanation for that based off of all the data points we have, if that makes sense?
That's how I come to truth.
By trying to understand, I guess you could say the path of say a child born to a rich
family versus the path of a child born to a single mother, you could take these societal
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boundaries and almost statistically guess where they're going to lie to a certain extent.
Is that what you're saying?
That's just looking at the statistics of how things are going to evolve to occur.
I'm more talking about, let's say, for example, why is there biodiversity in the world?
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What is the most likely explanation for why there are so many different life forms out
there?
If you're a theist, you're going to say, well, God created all of this beautiful biodiversity.
We just have to presuppose that a God exists and therefore he created this biodiversity.
If you actually care about studying the science and figuring out what are the actual mechanisms,
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evolution by natural selection and genetic mutation is the best explanation for all the
biodiversity because it gives us a mechanistic A to B, B to C explanation of the world that
encompasses the most amount of data we have.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
We're looking for the explanation that can answer the most amount of questions.
(12:30):
That makes sense.
I think that's a better.
Now, to answer your second question about wisdom.
This is where Jonathan Vaveky, is that how you pronounce his last name?
Vaveky.
My guy, he is a psychologist from Canada.
Amazing guy.
He left fundamentalist Christianity, but what he talks about is how when he left his religious
understanding of the world, he still had the taste of transcendence on his tongue that
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he was missing.
And this is kind of going back to my point about sin, right?
If you throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater, you have to then create a new robust worldview.
One thing that is deeply missing when we throw out the ancient wisdom is wisdom because wisdom
is applied knowledge.
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Wisdom is, okay, what are our virtues and what is our ethical understanding of the world
and how do we apply what we know about the world already to create some sort of ethical
end goal, right?
For example, science can produce the cure of cancer, but nowhere in science does it
say we should use this cure to mitigate suffering in the world.
That is a wise, that is a moral understanding of the world.
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And so wisdom says, how can we effectively use science to mitigate unnecessary suffering
in the world?
How can I, instead of pointing a finger at my neighbor, at my country or at my government
for failing me or for being corrupt, how can I take responsibility in my life and live
a wise and meaningful existence?
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If that makes sense.
That pretty much, that sort of clears it up and it works nicely into my next question
because I feel as if wisdom is one of those things that's sometimes that differs in how
you describe it from different individuals.
And the next area I want to go into and you sort of touched upon it was morality.
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And specifically because you come from this Christian background and you sort of explain
this through a verveky, like you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,
but do you feel morality, not that it matters to a certain key, but that it's essentially
required, that religion is something that is required of morality?
Do you feel that there are any sort of moral philosophers or ideologies that sort of come
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into your life other than religion?
And do you also feel that there's a moral lacking, I guess, in the outside world as
we seek this?
The first point I want to just drive home is that I do not believe that any religion
has a monopoly on morality.
When I talked to my mom, who is a devout Christian, she tries her best to live as moral as she
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can understand.
My mom believes that unless you're a Christian, you can't be moral, right?
And so some people who are so entrenched in their religious or ideological viewpoint of
the world, they can believe that they own morality.
And so I want to, from the get go, say that no one has a monopoly on morality and that
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morality is negotiated through time.
That doesn't mean that morality is not objective.
Okay?
And I'm convinced of Sam Harris's moral landscape argument that there are these valleys and
there are these hilltops of moral thriving.
And I love his analogy about nutrition.
He says that there are so many different diverse cultures and food groups out there in the
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world.
You can eat Japanese food, Chinese food, American food, right?
We know from nutritious studies that there are certain foods that are essential for the
human body to live a thriving life.
And there are other foods that actually subtract from you being as healthy as you possibly
could be.
That doesn't mean that there's only one culture of food that has a monopoly on what is healthy,
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right?
So I can eat Chinese food, I can eat Italian food, I can eat American food, and I can eat
incredibly unhealthy or I can eat incredibly healthy.
Just because there are different cultural understandings of things doesn't mean that
those cultures have the monopoly on what is healthy.
Does that make sense?
No, fair enough.
Yeah, absolutely.
The same way that all different religions can have beautiful points that lead us to
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a healthy objective morality and other points that lead us towards all of these cognitive
biases that actually corrupt us and lead to the denigration of society and denigration
of the human being.
To answer your question about what my morality is, I would call myself a wannabe sentientist
where I believe that morality is based off of suffering.
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We should be conservative in the fact that if there are beings that have the ability
to suffer, we should do all that we can to minimize the unnecessary suffering of beings
who are sentient.
I still eat meat.
I still sometimes can buy food from factory farms.
I am trying my best to live out that morality as best as I possibly can with the finances
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I have.
But I think that once again, these things become so nuanced and you have to tease them
all out.
I would for the case of just philosophically stating it, I am a wannabe sentientist.
I deeply believe reality can be incredibly pleasureful and meaningful more importantly.
Meaning is more important to me than hedonistic pleasure.
And life can be incredibly painful and have incredible suffering and that every single
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decision that we make as human beings can lean the world a little bit more towards hell
or a little bit more towards heaven.
And we ought to take the responsibility to lean a little bit more towards heaven.
Interesting.
So this question is going to kind of work on that heaven and hell sort of thing and
play on something that's I guess a bit more individual.
And I find that horror movies are sort of overlooked in the world as they sort of show
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what society fears sort of at that time.
I guess my question really is, is there something that you fear?
Yeah, I think at the beginning of the pandemic, I was coming to a realization that my worldview
wasn't correct and it wasn't allowing me to socialize properly in the world.
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I was kind of morally OCD and I really believe that hell was a real place.
I was deeply sober minded at the fact that millions upon billions of people were going
to burn in hell for eternity under my old dogmatic viewpoint.
And so I lived most of my life trying to preach the gospel to people.
This is actually how I got into psychology where I tried to use psychology to try to
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persuade people to believe in the gospel to avoid damnation.
And so to answer your question from this longer perspective, in the beginning of the pandemic,
I kind of had this mental health crisis.
I had a very destabilized worldview.
My raft was sinking.
It wasn't robust enough to help me against the waves that were coming.
And it wasn't like a day I woke up and I said, I've stopped believing.
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It was a very gradual where one belief gets changed at a time type of thing.
But the scary thing is imagine you have all these beliefs about the world and you end
up disproving all of them, but you don't give yourself anything else to believe in.
Now you're left empty.
Now you're left existentially without any sort of grounding.
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And I think this was the dilemma of the new atheist movement where just because you disprove
things doesn't mean that you're providing anything of sufficient value to people because
you need to substitute it with something else.
And so to answer your question about things that I fear, I fear most losing my mind.
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I fear most not having a control over my conscious understanding of the world.
However, I think mindfulness and meditation has allowed me to challenge those deeply because
now any sort of sensation I'm feeling, whether it's positive or negative, I am now noticing
that they are but sensations appearing in consciousness.
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And that could just be a story I tell myself, but it's an incredibly therapeutic story that
has been one that has deeply, deeply helped my anxiety in life and yeah, struggling through
a mental health crisis.
Yeah, that's a wonderful answer to that one.
And I'm going to kind of wrap up here with my sort of final question.
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Great.
Kind of going from the past now, sort of understanding the thought, the history, and now towards
looking forward to the future of goals, of future achievements, of the aims and kind
of about the method of these aims.
I mean, you know, life has sometimes been described as a dance and you know, the goal
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is not to land up in a particular part on the floor.
So what is your method?
Yeah, I love that.
Your goals.
Yeah.
I think my ultimate goal is to be more present in reality as I find myself in it.
I think my goal is to recognize where I've been uniquely gifted based off of just, you
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know, genetics, education, cultural, like all the ways that that makes David unique.
My goal is to understand those things and use them in society for good.
And for good is to mitigate unnecessary suffering.
So where is David uniquely talented and how can David take the responsibility of that
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to then affect positive change in the world?
And what are the things that uniquely piss off David?
What are the problems in the world that David wants other people to fix, but he can't, you
know, take the responsibility on himself to go out there and make a difference?
What are those things and be clear about them and then create a mission to go out and to
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aim up and to solve them?
That's obviously a vague answer.
I feel deeply called into education, deeply called into training up the youth and the
young.
I feel deeply called into the mental health sector, equipping people with tools that they
can self-discover to live a more meaningful life and thrive.
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And so I think, yeah, those are just a few of the areas that I feel called to affect
change.
No, I think you answered that in a sort of a personalized way of how Adam Smith has described
as everyone wants to better their situation.
Don't we all and sometimes bettering our own situation betters everything around us, which
in turn betters ourselves.
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But thank you for that, Dave, today.
It was a wonderful conversation and I got a much better look into, I guess, your history,
the background, the worldview and how we can move forward on this.
Yeah.
And if I could just end by saying, I deeply believe that our worldviews are ever evolving.
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And like, it's kind of amazing to see how much you have grown.
I think it's a really valuable thing to have a paradigm shift, even though it's incredibly
existentially terrifying.
It almost feels like I have shed off all the skin of like the old snake.
Went through multiple versions of David.
And that's a beautiful thing because now I feel like I can relate to people who are totally
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foreign from me.
That's why I love our conversations because the thinkers that have influenced you and the
way that you view the world is so counterintuitive to how I view the world.
And instead of just turning you away and calling you crazy and just not being able to find
some sort of common ground, I think I can relate to that old David and be like, okay,
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I understand you old David.
I am here to listen to you and here to find common ground with you.
And because of that, I think that gives me so much more compassion to the people around
me and so much more curiosity to continue to learn and change my worldview.
And I bet in five years I'm going to listen back to this and be like, what was that kid
talking about?
I got a lot to learn.
So yeah.
You know, that's my biggest problem with writing books is I feel like the second you write
(24:21):
it down, it's already outdated.
That's just a good excuse for why I haven't written a book yet.
So well, now we've got the podcast.
Yeah, exactly.
So you can evolve with it and listen to it.
It's a little bit easier of a medium.
And I feel like it's more relevant of a medium to today.
I feel as if not that books are outdated.
There's always a need for books and that's one of my paths, but the podcast really helps
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you understand through conversation.
Great.
Well, I hope you understood what I tried to communicate.
As much as I could.
All right.
Thank you, bro.
I appreciate you asking me these questions.
Yeah.
It would be nice to talk to you next week.
Great.
Next week, it's Matt's turn.
He's in the hot seat.
Yup.
He's been reading the questions he's been dreading for the past five years.
(25:06):
Stay tuned.
TGI, the Global Island.
(00:04):
Today we explore Dave's worldview, the life experiences and the thinkers that have formed
his present understanding of the world.
We take a look at his unique cultural influences from science to religion and philosophy.
The thing that David stresses most in this episode is how ever-evolving our worldviews
really are.
It will be interesting to see how David's thoughts change over the course of these upcoming
(00:28):
conversations.
So welcome Dave.
We're going to be kind of interviewing you today.
Are you my therapist?
Yes tell me all your problems.
I mean today is actually probably like a therapy session.
Today is sort of like a therapy session but instead of a therapy session to try and get
a solution, we're going to use therapy as a way to understand, which I guess in some
(00:49):
cases is the point of therapy.
Yeah, absolutely.
It makes sense.
We're both going into the field.
Indeed.
Let's start with this.
How did you get here?
How did you get to this point?
Yeah, I ask myself that question every day.
I had a really interesting upbringing.
My parents had a lot of financial and relationship problems.
(01:10):
So they got a divorce right when I was born and they moved out to suburban Long Island.
Yes, shout out.
From where?
From Brooklyn.
Yeah.
And then my dad commuted to work in the city.
He worked for the health department.
And then the relationship just didn't really work out and they ended up getting a divorce
a year after I was born.
(01:30):
And the financial struggles continued in my home.
If anything, got much worse after the divorce.
And then my mom struggled with a lot of mental health problems.
So growing up was a very interesting ride and there was not a lot of stability.
So it forced my brain to kind of develop much more skepticism and much more of an ability
(01:51):
to kind of question things and have a much more robust prediction of the world around
me as like a safety mechanism.
And so I think I am kind of intellectually OCD and I like to have a robust raft worldview
to protect me from the ocean of existential dread and suffering.
(02:12):
So that's a long way to say that that's kind of my early development.
And we can get more into that if you would like.
Well, so I know a part of this from knowing you.
You come from a sort of religious background.
Now understanding the sort of like the working class, the divorce, the mental health, like
these are very common things amongst religious folks.
(02:33):
Now did the religion sort of serve as this cognitive heuristic?
Was there an epiphany?
Did you have sort of a religious experience that brought you into this?
And do you feel that it was self-serving in that time and that it's something you essentially
not necessarily evolved out of, but you sort of used as a method and then continued on?
(02:54):
Sure.
I think there was never a time when I like was growing up that I was like, I'm religious.
I think it was just what the world act like was to me.
That was just my perception.
I had a relationship with God since I was conscious, you know, since I was like, you
know, two, three years old and was able to form thoughts.
(03:14):
All the memories that I have about me praying to God were in times of difficulty.
So I think I kind of viewed God as like a genie, as like someone that you call out to
when things are difficult and when you're in deep need.
But then I also started to kind of just like talk to God, just random things in my life
and pray for things.
(03:36):
And so I think I started to build a more robust religious worldview.
My mother was a very cultural Christian.
She didn't really have a lot of theological knowledge.
I think growing up, I didn't really have any strong doctrine of like, this is what Christianity
is, this is what religion is.
Just modeling my mother's behavior of when things were bad.
(03:56):
That's when we cry out to God to help him, you know, save the day and pay the mortgage
bills.
But then when I was in middle school, my local church had this mentorship program where they
were taking a bunch of dads who have already like raised their kids.
They're pairing them with a bunch of single mothers who had boys who didn't have any really
fatherly figure in their life.
(04:17):
And so I got paired with one of the founders of that mentorship movement at the church,
this guy named John DeMarco.
He basically took me out to Applebee's one day and was like, hey, I'm not trying to replace
your dad.
I just love to be a friend for you, a man in your life that you can come to if you need
anything.
I'd love to drive you to youth group every, you know, Wednesday and Friday and just talk
with you in the car rides and get to know you.
(04:39):
And so I was down for it.
And that relationship was like a catalyst for my kind of spiritual awakening and going
to youth group and learning more about God and reading the Bible.
I then kind of became obsessed with it.
I think I have an obsessive personality where if things are happening in my life, I kind
of just go all into it.
And so I studied theology and upon apologetics and I had a spiritual like salvation moment
(05:03):
where I was listening to this pastor, Francis Chan, who formed a lot of my worldview when
I was growing up.
And so I was preaching out of this text.
I think it's in the book of John where Jesus is preaching to thousands of people.
A lot of them leave because Jesus's message is not really tasteful to them.
It kind of bothers them.
He is kind of countercultural.
He turns over to the 12 who are remaining, his disciples, and he says, are you guys going
(05:26):
to leave too?
And Peter, one of the 12 stand up and look at Jesus and say, where are we going to go?
If you truly have the keys to eternal life, then where else are we going to go?
And as a little middle school kid, for some odd reason, that just clicked in my brain
and it made sense to me.
Where am I going to go?
I need to just submit everything I have to Jesus.
And in that moment, I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.
(05:49):
I felt the love of God come over me and gently convict me of my sin, how I've been treating
people and how I treated my parents.
Also not feeling ashamed of that, but feeling empowered to actually make a positive change
in my life.
And then from there on in high school, I got deeply into political science and philosophy
and I was just always a very curious kid growing up.
(06:12):
You know, I was trying to find the most robust safety, a world as I possibly could.
And when you're exposed to different religions and different perspectives, it can be destabilizing
to your raft.
But because I was so curious and I deeply wanted to understand that allowed me to expand
my horizons and I ended up leaving my fundamentalist Christian worldview in high school.
(06:33):
Yeah, and began to have a much more nuanced viewpoint of the world.
But I bet we can go into the weeds of that and go into my own spirituality now and my
thoughts.
So, I mean, this definitely seems like a transition from almost religion to science.
And it's not necessarily a transition away from religion, but rather a different fundamental
(06:55):
way to actually look at religion and how to incorporate that in your life.
Almost as if somebody that has understood the religion, they put their faith in the
methodologies that they use upon it, and then they continue on searching.
Is that something that you would say is true that you necessarily, you didn't wind up as
a believer, but now you're somebody that has faith in the path that was set forth for you
(07:19):
because of this experience with the religion?
I would say so like from a sociological perspective, I mentioned this to you.
I love the three B's of religiosity.
You have belief, behavior, and you have belonging.
My beliefs have changed about the world and my beliefs have changed about my dogmatic
(07:41):
viewpoint about the Bible.
But my belonging, I still feel like I have an in-group membership with other Christians.
There is still a belonging to Judeo-Christian culture, even a strong belonging to Judaism.
I have a lot of friends that are practicing ritualistic Jews.
They practice Shabbat.
(08:03):
I love having a Shabbat dinner.
I think these are really beautiful rituals.
It's so hard to categorize your belief, especially when you're not a stereotypical believer in
a very specific belief system.
I also don't want to make a false dichotomy between religion and science because like
(08:23):
I said, I'm looking at religion from a sociological perspective, which is a scientific perspective.
But I also realize, as we have spoken in the past, the need for self-transcendence, the
need for humility.
If you stop believing in sin, you have to replace it with something.
You can't just say, no, this is all bullshit.
There is no such thing as sin and then walk away like your life's going to be perfectly
(08:45):
fine and the world's going to actually work.
You have to create a new software mechanism in your cognition that allow you to take the
faulty parts of you and actually self-transcend and become better.
You're going to forsake the wisdom and traditions of your ancestors, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that absolutely does make sense.
I think this is going to go into my next questions, which are linked together to a certain extent.
(09:10):
That is about the guiding philosophy for the reasons why you do what you do in your life.
Two questions evolving with that, with your guiding philosophy, because we have these
ideologies or the definitions of certain words and they can mean different things to different
people.
Sure.
That's really around two things that I feel is lacking in this world, one of which is
(09:32):
truth.
What is truth to you?
Yeah.
The other one is wisdom.
Yeah.
What is wisdom to you?
Yes.
Beautiful questions.
Okay, so truth, epistemology, how we come to know truth.
I start off with rationality, meaning that there has to be a way to logically figure
out how the world works.
If you disagree with rationality, the only way to just prove it is using rationality.
(09:54):
Therefore, rationality is the first presupposition about the world.
Then there's something called Bayesian analysis.
Reverend Thomas Bay is an amazing guy.
He was a statistician.
What he came up with is this amazing way to give probabilities to events in the world.
Based off of those probabilities, you can measure how truthful something is objectively
(10:17):
in reality.
I'm going to give you the easiest way to understand this.
We all have explanations about how the world works, but not all of those explanations encompass
the most amount of data that we have about the world.
Science gives us data.
Science produces little nuggets of objective truth about this is how the world really looks.
(10:37):
Then we create explanations for that data.
Bayesian analysis says whichever explanations encompass the most amount of data, they have
a higher probability of those explanations being true.
That is my epistemology.
How I come to truth is I try to say, what is the most rational explanation for this
occurrence in the world?
(10:58):
Which of these explanations encompasses most of the data?
You can give me any claim about the world and I'll be like, okay, well, what's the most
likely explanation for that based off of all the data points we have, if that makes sense?
That's how I come to truth.
By trying to understand, I guess you could say the path of say a child born to a rich
family versus the path of a child born to a single mother, you could take these societal
(11:23):
boundaries and almost statistically guess where they're going to lie to a certain extent.
Is that what you're saying?
That's just looking at the statistics of how things are going to evolve to occur.
I'm more talking about, let's say, for example, why is there biodiversity in the world?
(11:47):
What is the most likely explanation for why there are so many different life forms out
there?
If you're a theist, you're going to say, well, God created all of this beautiful biodiversity.
We just have to presuppose that a God exists and therefore he created this biodiversity.
If you actually care about studying the science and figuring out what are the actual mechanisms,
(12:09):
evolution by natural selection and genetic mutation is the best explanation for all the
biodiversity because it gives us a mechanistic A to B, B to C explanation of the world that
encompasses the most amount of data we have.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
We're looking for the explanation that can answer the most amount of questions.
(12:30):
That makes sense.
I think that's a better.
Now, to answer your second question about wisdom.
This is where Jonathan Vaveky, is that how you pronounce his last name?
Vaveky.
My guy, he is a psychologist from Canada.
Amazing guy.
He left fundamentalist Christianity, but what he talks about is how when he left his religious
understanding of the world, he still had the taste of transcendence on his tongue that
(12:54):
he was missing.
And this is kind of going back to my point about sin, right?
If you throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater, you have to then create a new robust worldview.
One thing that is deeply missing when we throw out the ancient wisdom is wisdom because wisdom
is applied knowledge.
(13:16):
Wisdom is, okay, what are our virtues and what is our ethical understanding of the world
and how do we apply what we know about the world already to create some sort of ethical
end goal, right?
For example, science can produce the cure of cancer, but nowhere in science does it
say we should use this cure to mitigate suffering in the world.
That is a wise, that is a moral understanding of the world.
(13:40):
And so wisdom says, how can we effectively use science to mitigate unnecessary suffering
in the world?
How can I, instead of pointing a finger at my neighbor, at my country or at my government
for failing me or for being corrupt, how can I take responsibility in my life and live
a wise and meaningful existence?
(14:00):
If that makes sense.
That pretty much, that sort of clears it up and it works nicely into my next question
because I feel as if wisdom is one of those things that's sometimes that differs in how
you describe it from different individuals.
And the next area I want to go into and you sort of touched upon it was morality.
(14:21):
And specifically because you come from this Christian background and you sort of explain
this through a verveky, like you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,
but do you feel morality, not that it matters to a certain key, but that it's essentially
required, that religion is something that is required of morality?
Do you feel that there are any sort of moral philosophers or ideologies that sort of come
(14:45):
into your life other than religion?
And do you also feel that there's a moral lacking, I guess, in the outside world as
we seek this?
The first point I want to just drive home is that I do not believe that any religion
has a monopoly on morality.
When I talked to my mom, who is a devout Christian, she tries her best to live as moral as she
(15:05):
can understand.
My mom believes that unless you're a Christian, you can't be moral, right?
And so some people who are so entrenched in their religious or ideological viewpoint of
the world, they can believe that they own morality.
And so I want to, from the get go, say that no one has a monopoly on morality and that
(15:26):
morality is negotiated through time.
That doesn't mean that morality is not objective.
Okay?
And I'm convinced of Sam Harris's moral landscape argument that there are these valleys and
there are these hilltops of moral thriving.
And I love his analogy about nutrition.
He says that there are so many different diverse cultures and food groups out there in the
(15:50):
world.
You can eat Japanese food, Chinese food, American food, right?
We know from nutritious studies that there are certain foods that are essential for the
human body to live a thriving life.
And there are other foods that actually subtract from you being as healthy as you possibly
could be.
That doesn't mean that there's only one culture of food that has a monopoly on what is healthy,
(16:13):
right?
So I can eat Chinese food, I can eat Italian food, I can eat American food, and I can eat
incredibly unhealthy or I can eat incredibly healthy.
Just because there are different cultural understandings of things doesn't mean that
those cultures have the monopoly on what is healthy.
Does that make sense?
No, fair enough.
Yeah, absolutely.
The same way that all different religions can have beautiful points that lead us to
(16:36):
a healthy objective morality and other points that lead us towards all of these cognitive
biases that actually corrupt us and lead to the denigration of society and denigration
of the human being.
To answer your question about what my morality is, I would call myself a wannabe sentientist
where I believe that morality is based off of suffering.
(16:59):
We should be conservative in the fact that if there are beings that have the ability
to suffer, we should do all that we can to minimize the unnecessary suffering of beings
who are sentient.
I still eat meat.
I still sometimes can buy food from factory farms.
I am trying my best to live out that morality as best as I possibly can with the finances
(17:22):
I have.
But I think that once again, these things become so nuanced and you have to tease them
all out.
I would for the case of just philosophically stating it, I am a wannabe sentientist.
I deeply believe reality can be incredibly pleasureful and meaningful more importantly.
Meaning is more important to me than hedonistic pleasure.
And life can be incredibly painful and have incredible suffering and that every single
(17:46):
decision that we make as human beings can lean the world a little bit more towards hell
or a little bit more towards heaven.
And we ought to take the responsibility to lean a little bit more towards heaven.
Interesting.
So this question is going to kind of work on that heaven and hell sort of thing and
play on something that's I guess a bit more individual.
And I find that horror movies are sort of overlooked in the world as they sort of show
(18:12):
what society fears sort of at that time.
I guess my question really is, is there something that you fear?
Yeah, I think at the beginning of the pandemic, I was coming to a realization that my worldview
wasn't correct and it wasn't allowing me to socialize properly in the world.
(18:33):
I was kind of morally OCD and I really believe that hell was a real place.
I was deeply sober minded at the fact that millions upon billions of people were going
to burn in hell for eternity under my old dogmatic viewpoint.
And so I lived most of my life trying to preach the gospel to people.
This is actually how I got into psychology where I tried to use psychology to try to
(18:57):
persuade people to believe in the gospel to avoid damnation.
And so to answer your question from this longer perspective, in the beginning of the pandemic,
I kind of had this mental health crisis.
I had a very destabilized worldview.
My raft was sinking.
It wasn't robust enough to help me against the waves that were coming.
And it wasn't like a day I woke up and I said, I've stopped believing.
(19:20):
It was a very gradual where one belief gets changed at a time type of thing.
But the scary thing is imagine you have all these beliefs about the world and you end
up disproving all of them, but you don't give yourself anything else to believe in.
Now you're left empty.
Now you're left existentially without any sort of grounding.
(19:43):
And I think this was the dilemma of the new atheist movement where just because you disprove
things doesn't mean that you're providing anything of sufficient value to people because
you need to substitute it with something else.
And so to answer your question about things that I fear, I fear most losing my mind.
(20:03):
I fear most not having a control over my conscious understanding of the world.
However, I think mindfulness and meditation has allowed me to challenge those deeply because
now any sort of sensation I'm feeling, whether it's positive or negative, I am now noticing
that they are but sensations appearing in consciousness.
(20:25):
And that could just be a story I tell myself, but it's an incredibly therapeutic story that
has been one that has deeply, deeply helped my anxiety in life and yeah, struggling through
a mental health crisis.
Yeah, that's a wonderful answer to that one.
And I'm going to kind of wrap up here with my sort of final question.
(20:45):
Great.
Kind of going from the past now, sort of understanding the thought, the history, and now towards
looking forward to the future of goals, of future achievements, of the aims and kind
of about the method of these aims.
I mean, you know, life has sometimes been described as a dance and you know, the goal
(21:06):
is not to land up in a particular part on the floor.
So what is your method?
Yeah, I love that.
Your goals.
Yeah.
I think my ultimate goal is to be more present in reality as I find myself in it.
I think my goal is to recognize where I've been uniquely gifted based off of just, you
(21:30):
know, genetics, education, cultural, like all the ways that that makes David unique.
My goal is to understand those things and use them in society for good.
And for good is to mitigate unnecessary suffering.
So where is David uniquely talented and how can David take the responsibility of that
(21:53):
to then affect positive change in the world?
And what are the things that uniquely piss off David?
What are the problems in the world that David wants other people to fix, but he can't, you
know, take the responsibility on himself to go out there and make a difference?
What are those things and be clear about them and then create a mission to go out and to
(22:13):
aim up and to solve them?
That's obviously a vague answer.
I feel deeply called into education, deeply called into training up the youth and the
young.
I feel deeply called into the mental health sector, equipping people with tools that they
can self-discover to live a more meaningful life and thrive.
(22:35):
And so I think, yeah, those are just a few of the areas that I feel called to affect
change.
No, I think you answered that in a sort of a personalized way of how Adam Smith has described
as everyone wants to better their situation.
Don't we all and sometimes bettering our own situation betters everything around us, which
in turn betters ourselves.
(22:56):
But thank you for that, Dave, today.
It was a wonderful conversation and I got a much better look into, I guess, your history,
the background, the worldview and how we can move forward on this.
Yeah.
And if I could just end by saying, I deeply believe that our worldviews are ever evolving.
(23:16):
And like, it's kind of amazing to see how much you have grown.
I think it's a really valuable thing to have a paradigm shift, even though it's incredibly
existentially terrifying.
It almost feels like I have shed off all the skin of like the old snake.
Went through multiple versions of David.
And that's a beautiful thing because now I feel like I can relate to people who are totally
(23:37):
foreign from me.
That's why I love our conversations because the thinkers that have influenced you and the
way that you view the world is so counterintuitive to how I view the world.
And instead of just turning you away and calling you crazy and just not being able to find
some sort of common ground, I think I can relate to that old David and be like, okay,
(23:59):
I understand you old David.
I am here to listen to you and here to find common ground with you.
And because of that, I think that gives me so much more compassion to the people around
me and so much more curiosity to continue to learn and change my worldview.
And I bet in five years I'm going to listen back to this and be like, what was that kid
talking about?
I got a lot to learn.
So yeah.
You know, that's my biggest problem with writing books is I feel like the second you write
(24:21):
it down, it's already outdated.
That's just a good excuse for why I haven't written a book yet.
So well, now we've got the podcast.
Yeah, exactly.
So you can evolve with it and listen to it.
It's a little bit easier of a medium.
And I feel like it's more relevant of a medium to today.
I feel as if not that books are outdated.
There's always a need for books and that's one of my paths, but the podcast really helps
(24:46):
you understand through conversation.
Great.
Well, I hope you understood what I tried to communicate.
As much as I could.
All right.
Thank you, bro.
I appreciate you asking me these questions.
Yeah.
It would be nice to talk to you next week.
Great.
Next week, it's Matt's turn.
He's in the hot seat.
Yup.
He's been reading the questions he's been dreading for the past five years.
(25:06):
Stay tuned.
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