Can A Philosopher Be A Happy Capitalist?

G.V. Loewen. From Wikipedia.

A Conversation with G.V. Loewen

Joshua Doležal: I’m Joshua Doležal and welcome back to The Recovering Academic Podcast. My guest today is Dr. G.V. Loewen, or, for our purposes, Greg.

Greg has been one of my readers for a while, though he’s only rarely ventured into the comment threads. Before he proposed that we share our conversation with you, I only knew of him as a prolific Canadian scholar. But the more I learned about his transition from higher ed to entrepreneurship, the more intrigued I became.

Here he is talking about the service that his new company, Insightful Ethics Communications, provides.

G.V. Loewen: Insightful places somebody before a mirror that doesn't reflect exactly who they are now, but shows them who they could be. It shows them a better selfhood, a more mature being without the need for them to become their own philosopher.

Joshua Doležal: Greg Loewen is one of Canada’s leading researchers in ethics, education, aesthetics, health, and social theory. He is the author of sixty books and was an award-winning professor for over two decades in both Canada and the USA. He began writing young adult fiction after leaving academe, including his eleven-volume adventure saga, Kristen-Seraphim, an epic narrative that subverts both the meanings and roles of traditional fantasy elements. He also spent over a decade designing analog games for educational purposes and is a principal at Insightful Ethics Communications, a tech startup specializing in health and wellness, which is now preparing for a launch in early 2025. On its streaming app, Insightful will feature a guided series of exercises allowing users to experience the benefit of philosophical ideas in their daily lives.

There is some irony in the fact that at the very time universities are slashing their humanities and social sciences programs, demand for that very kind of content is growing – in the coaching services I provide, in writing cohorts, and in virtual read-alongs. It’s not that humanity ever stopped needing what literature and philosophy can offer – it’s that the structures and communities for supporting inner life are in flux. There’s no guarantee that Greg’s venture will succeed, but by the end of our conversation I think you’ll understand why he thinks his company has such potential.

Joshua Doležal: So, Greg, thanks for joining me. And you mentioned that you found me on Substack as a result of searching for other expat academics or recovering academics. I don't know if you have a preferred metaphor for our diaspora.

G.V. Loewen: Liberated academics maybe would be a possibility.

Joshua Doležal: How long have you been out of academe then?

G.V. Loewen: Well, I've been out of the classroom for, oh, it's getting close to nine years. It's definitely been a journey. The one negative thing is it's been hard on the wallet. So that would be something I would put out right away. But I haven't lost any sleep, in any other manner, over leaving the institution, leaving the classroom. I started writing fiction at that point, which I had never done before.

Joshua Doležal: So you had, I mean, what looked like a very productive academic career. I'm not sure I'm reading all of this correctly. It seems almost too good to be true. You were very accomplished as a researcher. You wrote over 60 books.

G.V. Loewen: I'd only written 20 at that point.

Joshua Doležal: Only 20? Well, I mean, what's 40 more books? But 20 books in ethics, in philosophy, things like that. Those are not fast books to write. So you've been very prolific as a scholar. You were an expert in UFO cults, theatrical organizations, artists, health researchers. There was kind of a long list there. And then as you're signaling, the shift to some of your more literary writing, which is also quite prolific. You won two teaching awards. You were also nominated for four others you've won over a hundred thousand dollars in grants and awards and so on.

So this is the kind of thing that I think people outside academe don't understand. It's not folks who are struggling to publish. It's not those who haven't published and therefore have perished in academe, it’s people who are at the top of leadership or among the most accomplished in their field who are still saying it's time for something new.

G.V. Loewen: I'm kind of a bookish fellow, as you pointed out, and in some ways I think many in today's university would see me very much as a kind of a dinosaur. I mean, who is a phenomenologist these days, who does hermeneutics these days, you know he's 50, and this kind of white male traditionalist, and that might be what I would look like to at least part of today's academy. But pedagogically I was always very heavily text-centered, [a] student-centered classroom. It was a struggle to read for many, many students, probably 90 percent of the students. And this is at an R1 these are students who would have been able to get into most universities, at least in Canada.

Joshua Doležal: As you said, the institutional priorities and sort of the student expectations were shifting away from excellence in teaching and learning, which was really the draw for people like you and like me in choosing an academic profession.

So the values in a corporatized university shift to management, shift to administration, and you had some of that experience as a department head – it sounds like you had perhaps had other roles that were similar in leadership. So why wouldn't you follow that – follow the money, the money would lead you to more administrative positions, possibly an executive position, right?

G.V. Loewen: Yeah, I mean, I sat on so many Senate committees and especially the ethics boards were a fundamental contribution to the campus.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah, so why not cash in on that and become Dean of Faculty or something?

G.V. Loewen: You know, ironically now I'm a CEO of two tech startups. So in that sense, I am an administrator, a manager of sorts. It's a lot more creative than it was at the university, so that's a huge draw. You know, I had a strong resume on the other two sides, but the administrative side was never something that appealed to me.

When you use the word corporatized, again, hard for me to speak to that now because I'm in entrepreneurship. I'm essentially a capitalist now. It feels very different creating products to help people than managing an institution that really struggled to live up to its ideals.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Well, I think that's helpful. So there were some questions about just satisfaction, what was rewarding and enjoyable to you in your work, where you felt like you were most effective, but then also a kind of environmental shift or climate shift. You had mentioned, somewhat quizzically, that you are now a capitalist. I hear a little bit of unease in your voice about that.

G.V. Loewen: So, well, there's some irony to that. Yeah.

Joshua Doležal: So tell me about your path to entrepreneurship. You have two companies that I'm aware of, Vigilance Digital Media, which is a gaming startup, and then also Insightful Ethics Communications.

G.V. Loewen: Vigilance was a complete fluke. My wife and I were living on the East Coast, and there was a community college around the corner and they had a big digital media program. And I, at that point, I had recently finished this lengthy saga, which was a YA fantasy adventure saga. I mean, it's 11 volumes, so it's this vast landscape. And then I thought, well, you know it would be great to digitize it. So I just walked in cold to their program and said, Hey I've got this giant fantasy epic. Is there any interest in it? And immediately there was. So, I was gratified by that and we followed that up and I co-taught a course in game design.

And then I met this young guy who was a student in that course. And the term project was to put together a pitch for the game that was supposed to bring this saga to life in a new way. And his was the best by far, and then so I just asked him, Do you want to move, do you want to push to the next level, do you want to incorporate? And he was immediately on board and he's become one of my closest friends.

I met him when he was 20. He's 25 now. He's a third of a century younger than me. And I've said to him, if I had had even two or three of him in every class, I’d probably still be teaching. Because that's enough, if you're reaching some people.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah, I'm mindful of a kind of irony here as well. I mean you were saying you were losing touch with younger people and yet gaming is very much part of the virtual world that they're growing up in, that they're substituting for traditional literacy. And so for you to be operating in that space, it sounds like you are actually adapting.

G.V. Loewen: Belatedly, I suppose. Yeah. But at the same time if I'm teaching a course in sociology, philosophy, religion, then I want people to crack open a book or two, too. So, I mean, there's I'm not sure how far one can go with that. I mean, if I could turn Max Weber's Economy and Society into an exciting adventure game maybe that would…I'm not exactly sure how I would go about doing that.

Joshua Doležal: Right, and maintaining any kind of academic rigor in the process.

G.V. Loewen: Well, maintaining anything. But, yeah, there is something to what you're saying in that sense because I started writing… I mean, I don't write literary works in any traditional sense or any artistic sense. I write adventure tales for the most part. And for the most part, the age group is, at least the publisher's target market is young people. They want young people to be reading it. And so, we started working out a few small games and then we realized that there was so much more that we could be doing pedagogically and in terms of communicating ideas, and so we formed a second company called Insightful and we are hoping to be up on a streaming platform by January.

And if you're familiar with Headspace, they have a little animated Netflix series, the guide to meditation, there's a sleep guide, et cetera.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah.

G.V. Loewen: And they were a brick and mortar, they still are, they're a brick and mortar company that came to digital very late in the day. Like they'd already been operating for something like 20 years before they got the idea that they should do digital stuff. And so we have a guide, it's the guide to critical thinking. It's kind of a complimentary Western oriented, active thinking guide, but the Headspace guide to meditation was my original inspiration. So that's the kind of stuff we're doing. We've got a cancer guy who has become a psychedelic therapist. He's doing a series on psychedelic therapy. It was kind of a cutting edge therapeutics, now has an amazing remission rate, and the FDA has been all over that of late, I'm told. And so that's the kind of thing that Insightful is shilling, is a health and wellness streaming mobile app.

Joshua Doležal: If Headspace is your inspiration, do you have market research that you've done – do you have a kind of target user or client that you're appealing to? Because I know that sometimes when academics shift to the creator economy, which is what you're doing, effectively, there needs to be a clear outcome. If you're not offering a credential or you're not optimizing performance with statistics, which is another model that people have monetized outside of higher ed – the guide to critical thinking, what return on investment does a client get from that, or who are you trying to reach with that? Where's the demand that you're tapping into for that?

G.V. Loewen: Well, in terms of what we know so far the self-reported rates of anxiety and alienation are at an all-time high amongst people who are 15 to 30, 15 to 35. So that's the incipient target market for the guide. And it's a very broad project in the sense that somebody you know, like gaming, we've got weeklies, we've got dailies, we've got guided episodes.

So there's a number of levels, and the guided episodes also have levels, just like a game, so you're leveling up after you do level one, you can move on to level two, etc. And with each experience of one of the concepts that we're exploring together, there's a deeper, what we hope is a deeper resonance, with a person's day to day life, but also a person's character and their personhood.

As an ethicist, this became a very important sensibility for this health and wellness company, is that we're trying to address character in a transformative way, very much like the pedagogy I used to employ in the classroom was transformative learning.

Joshua Doležal: I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit, which may not be very nice of me. But this all sounds good, right? That there's a kind of real-world relevance of your humanities and social science background that typically one would learn in a traditional liberal arts education – you become a well-rounded individual. You acquire the ability to think critically as part of your reading, as part of your formal writing for college coursework, and you pick up some of this resilience, some of these character qualities along the way. And so now that the focus of college instruction has shifted away from that toward more transactional outcomes, like credentials, like skills, things that would optimize employability, the traditional liberal arts education that would produce a well-rounded individual is falling out of demand.

So how are you certain that people who fit into this demographic would find you? Or to put it another way, let's say I'm someone who's 15 to 30 years old, and I am manifesting anxiety, or I lack the thing it is that you're offering – how would I find Insightful, and what would convince me that this was a good investment for me to make?

G.V. Loewen: I think the only thing that would convince a person who's working through a guided tour of personhood or selfhood, as well as one's own humanity, is that they would notice a change in how they were thinking about themselves first in the day to day.

What we're doing at Insightful is not quite the same thing as what I was doing in the classroom. There is a humanistic basis to it, but it's not discourse heavy in the sense that someone is going to have to become literate in the discursive sense before they can access our materials, quite the opposite, actually.

So when we talk about dailies and weeklies, these are actual exercises. And that was another thing I took from Headspace. Obviously we're working in Western discourse, not Eastern. So all of this is proactive. This is not about contemplation. This is not a Vita Contemplativa here. This is the Vita Activa in a sense, to borrow Hannah Arendt's classifications there.

They're going to look at a daily and they're going to say, okay, yeah, I'm going to try that. It's an exercise right off the bat, right? Insightful places somebody before a mirror that doesn't reflect exactly who they are now, but shows them who they could be. It shows them a better selfhood, a more mature being without the need for them to become their own philosopher, if you will.

You know the host of Headspace, just to reference – I'm giving them a lot of free advertising there – but the guide to meditation, one of the things he says in this first episode is he says, well, I'm doing this so that you don't have to become a monk, you know? And that's fine because who the heck is going to travel to the Himalayas and spend 20 years in the monastery. There's just no possible way anybody's going to do that, right? Well similarly, who is going to spend 12, 13 years with big tuition hikes going and getting a PhD in the humanities or in the human sciences, or who is going to become a philosopher? And the other thing too, Joshua, is…my seminar, my fourth year seminar, we might have 7 people, we might have 12 people, might have 6 people, whatever, why reach 7 people when you can reach 7 billion? I mean, that's kind of the bottom line there.

Joshua Doležal: Let me say back some of your story to see if I am hearing it correctly. There is, as you say, some irony, not just in shifting from a mission driven profession as a teacher as a kind of service role into an entrepreneurial or capitalistic role, but also that I assume that you began your career like I did with a kind of idealistic sense that you were providing something lifelong, that there was a timeless quality to the discipline that you had devoted yourself to, and that this was more than just a skill to get an entry level job, but it was something that would stay with someone throughout their life and not just be a tool to use, but also be enriching, be rewarding, be even enjoyable — reflection, the ability to participate in the unending conversation, to think of oneself as constantly growing in that way.

So there was a demand just in humanity for that kind of discipline, that kind of art. The institution no longer seems to care about that. And so you're still seeing the demand in the world for this. You're seeing results, maladies that have cropped up in humanity as a result of the absence of this. And so you are, in a way, adapting. You felt like you couldn't do it in higher ed, so the place to be innovative and be a teacher, all the things that you were trying to do as an academic philosopher – it's taking a different form, but you're trying to do much the same things. The kind of mission or the value system or the principles underlying your enterprise are not that different from what drew you to philosophy to begin with. Is that fair to say?

G.V. Loewen: Yeah, I think that maybe part of it is somewhat generous, but because I like to joke with my business partner – I said, well I want my Ferrari. I'm not in – this is not a selfless mission here by any means, right? But at the same time, in general, what you said, I think is reasonable because the teaching was my first vocation. I never thought I would become a writer. You know, I had 20 years in the classroom, which were incredibly rewarding and working cross culturally for many years, so there was a sense that whatever was germinating during those decades, I think it's reasonable to say that it's reached a kind of apogee now.

And I think that the pedagogic tactics that were taking place in the classroom would have been greatly enhanced by the kinds of material that I've been able to develop over the past few years, but I simply couldn't have done it back then. You know, it's like sometimes they talk to musicians saying, well, why didn't you put this album out 10 years ago? You doorknob, you know? And then the musician inevitably says, well, I just couldn't – it wasn't ready. It wasn't there. Writing fiction has made my nonfiction far more accessible.

Joshua Doležal: Well, I appreciate the reminder in your story that we don't have to leave a calling entirely. We don't have to think of it as a singular thing that has to exist in a particular kind of institutional structure. We can still follow our gut to some extent, follow those intuitive senses of where we fit and where we don't, continue to take creative risks outside academe, and remain true to ourselves. It sounds like you're still remaining true to yourself and your interests and your creative hunger. And so this is a privileged glimpse that we have of your enterprise before it's actually out in the world. So I appreciate that and wish you all the best with it.

G.V. Loewen: Yeah, it's very kind of you to have invited me here, and I – it gives me some perspective, obviously, when you have to actually respond to a query. When you ask about this new space, which cuts both ways, there's much illiteracy, there's a potential for great literacy. What is driving that is the same vocation but not a naively held sense of vocation anymore. You know, I'm almost 60, I'm not 25. I'm hoping that the learning curve for digital will be where everything now at the beginning is in some ways overprepared. And then perhaps 10, 15 years from now, if I last that long, then what we do at Vigilance and what we do at Insightful will just be effortless.

Joshua Doležal: Thanks for listening! This is the first time I’ve shared a reader’s story, so I’m grateful to Greg for suggesting it. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more like it, please let me know privately or in the comments.

And just for fun, here are a few questions for further discussion: Can a philosopher be a happy capitalist? Can comparable results to years of rigorous study in areas like hermeneutics and phenomenology really be found through guided daily and weekly exercises? What do you think?

Today’s episode is free. To unlock more interviews, essays, and craft resources, please consider upgrading your subscription at joshuadolezal.substack.com/subscribe. I look forward to welcoming you to The Recovering Academic community.