Click-bait to lure the masses into communion!

Algorithmic & geometric conversations with Daniel Garner & Aspasia Karageorge

There’s nothing like descending into uncontrollable laughter, making faces, reading poetry, wearing Christmas ornaments on your ears, sharing your children’s drawings and putting it all on YouTube to settle your nervous system in apocalyptic times!

Below are three lengthy conversations I’ve recently participated in with two wonderful friends who have been exponentially enriching my life experience over the last year and a half, a new expansion each time we meet, now on a monthly basis.

I couldn’t possibly hope to outline all of what we covered in these three exchanges - all recorded since the last time I posted here on Substack about them (in fact, I simply cross-posted a beautiful piece that Daniel had written).

All I can tell you is that these conversations are the fruit of profound friendship.

And, as I’ve come to understand, friendship opens the door to philosophy.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve read Plato or Hegel. It only matters whether you have friends with whom you can collectively enjoy exploring ideas.

This is not the philosophy of stuffy intellectuals trying to justify the privileges that come with their academic credentials. This is real people genuinely asking how we can live more fulfilling lives.

Nonetheless, we live in wild times, with the breakdown of institutions and a spreading hunger for deep transformation to bring us back home to the ground of our humanity, even as technology continues to race us forward into a wildly unknown future.

The starting point of this series of conversations has been:

What is ‘authentic resonance’?

In other words, what do we see if we reverse the traditional focus of psychology on “curing pathologies” and ask:

How would it look for human beings to navigate today’s complex world with admirable grace, not only on the psychological plane, but emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and socially?

Given the wide net of this question, our conversations have ventured almost everywhere, but it feels to me like the original seed of ‘authentic resonance’ has produced a powerful thread that keeps me oriented towards a true North that feels nourishing, enlivening and grounding.

So there is nothing more that I want to do than share these conversations.

I’m aware that their length and wandering nature might feel like barriers to entry for some new listeners, but actually, this is exactly how I felt when I first encountered this kind of exploratory conversational communion online a few years ago.

Still, I dove in - and through direct participation, I found these dialogues increasingly made more sense even as they kept introducing me to new areas of mystery.

If you are a lifelong learner, I hope you’ll do the same. If you want to go back to “where it all started”:

• THIS was the very first conversation about ‘authentic resonance,’ and

• HERE you’ll find the complete playlist of all the conversations

Or you can embrace the reality of what Daniel described in our latest conversation, speaking about the experience of reading literature, but I think it also applies to the experience of joining the flowing currents of the Zoom+YouTube “social coordinating mechanism” which is helping to birth something new in the global zeitgeist.

“It’s very important to read books that feel like you’re in the middle, like you just walked into the middle of a conversation or you just walked into the middle of an unfolding, actually.

And I think the reason for that is because it’s actually closer to gestalt* . . .

when you walk into a great book, dare I say, there’s a feeling of being in the middle . . .

because the gestalt is always already [there].”

* gestalt - an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.

---

When Aspasia chose “I don’t care about your degrees”, a casual comment from Daniel, as the title from Daniel for our November conversation, the number of views we got on YouTube spiked and we got some haters in the comments.

(Aspasia: what happened to the guy who said, “if you don’t care about my degree, I don’t care about you!” Did you take it down? Put it back up for the algorithm!)

Since that time, we haven’t been able to stop ourselves from playfully wondering how to hack the algorithms to bring more ‘authentic resonance’ to the masses even as we give each other more permission to act like children in each new episode.

Come play with us!

---

---

---

---