May 28, 2026
Can transcendence still make philosophical sense after modernity?
John Vervaeke speaks with philosopher William Desmond about Platonism as a living tradition, the meaning of strong transcendence, and Desmond's philosophy of the metaxu: the between. The conversation builds from John's proposal that relevance realization...
May 21, 2026
Why is the modern world making us lose our "taste for the real," and can ancient practices like animal tracking and Socratic dialogue actually save our personhood from the "virtual matrix" of AI?
John Vervaeke, Guy Sengstock, and Kyle Koch announce their second “Reconnecting to the Real” retreat and outline...
May 18, 2026
What if the question is not simply whether life has meaning, but how our capacity for meaning develops?
In this Lectern conversation, Ethan Hsieh speaks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his upcoming course, Matters Over Time: How the Sacred and Significant Evolve in Self and Society. Brendan introduces the...
May 15, 2026
What if flow, insight, and mystical experience are different scales of the same underlying process?
In this standalone Lectern episode, John Vervaeke speaks with Hüseyin and Daniel about their recently published paper on the cognitive continuum: a framework that moves from fluency to insight, flow, mystical experience,...
May 8, 2026
What does it mean to say the world is fundamentally open for play - and why does it take something to even have to say it at all?
In this episode - the third and final in a live-recorded three-part series with Ethan Hsieh, Taylor Barratt, and John Vervaeke - the conversation centers on Ethan as he unpacks the...