Love & Understanding

About Love & Understanding

In Love & Understanding, the goal is wisdom. John Driggs (https://johndriggs.org), the show's host, is interested in building a personal and secular spiritual life - one that is grounded in honesty, humility, science, reason, meditation, reflection, contemplation, and compassion. John wants you to know yourself, to love yourself, to embody yourself fully. He wants you to learn to walk your own path in peace. Topics covered in this podcast include ancient wisdom traditions, religion, moral philosophy, epistemology, reason and rationality, meditation and contemplative practices, consciousness, the life and physical sciences, art, poetry, literature, society, politics, law, communication, relationships, family, parenting, pedagogy, and many more topics. For John's free meditations, please see The Space of Possibility (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-space-of-possibility/id1611045407). https://spaceofpossibility.org (https://spaceofpossibility.org)

Publisher

John Driggs

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

29 Nov 2022

Latest episode

28 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

63 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Oct 2026

   Escaping the Inescapable with Steven Seidenberg

   What happens when the mind tries to step outside itself and understand what it is? In this conversation, I’m joined by writer, philosopher, and photographer Steven Seidenberg (https://www.stevenseidenberg.com), author of Coda, a strange, funny, philosophically dense work (https://a.co/d/02WhFxzA) that resists the very thing the mind continually reaches for: solid ground. We explore the instability of the self, the unreliability and necessity of memory, and the difficulty of separating experience from the interpretations we place upon it. Steven argues that confusion and contradiction are not always obstacles to understanding. In fact, sometimes they are precisely where deeper inquiry begins. Our conversation moves through Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Buddhist and contemplative traditions, and the question of whether philosophy might sometimes be better understood as a form of art rather than a transparent statement of what its author believes. We also discuss the dangers of taking uncertainty too far. Recognizing the limits of our knowledge does not mean that every claim is equally doubtful, or that truth disappears. Steven reflects on evidence, moral truth, capitalism, exploitation, and the ways our culture encourages us to understand ourselves through productivity and economic value. Toward the end, we turn to silence, mortality, and Steven’s photography. His images often preserve the traces of human beings while leaving the people themselves outside the frame—a practice that raises fascinating questions about objectification, absence, empathy, and what it means to represent another person without reducing them to an object. This is a conversation about consciousness and groundlessness, but also about how to live within them: how to think clearly without demanding certainty, how to remain open to ambiguity without collapsing into relativism, and how art can help us see what our usual ways of thinking leave out.

2. 

   17 Jun 2026

   Tolerance & The Open Society with Jeremy Shearmer

   In this episode, John speaks with Dr. Jeremy Shearmur about Karl Popper's popular paradox of toleration. They highlight the importance of distinguishing criticisms of a person from criticisms of an idea, and how this can be difficult since our identities can contain so many ideas. They emphasized the importance of bringing humility and the recognition of our own fallibility to any critical discussion. They discussed the importance of respecting "background knowledge"--the existing knowledge of experts in any field--while simultaneously acknowledging its fallibility. And finally, they discussed pluralism--not only the plurality of ideas, customs, and beliefs, but also the plurality of paradigms that hold those ideas, customs, and beliefs, including how the heuristics and epistemic approaches they each take--and how pluralism fits into the greater frame of critical rationalism. Dr. Jeremy Shearmur is a Reader in Political Theory in the Faculty of Arts at The Australian National University. Professor Shearmur was educated at the London School of Economics (University of London), where he also worked for eight years as assistant to Professor Sir Karl Popper. Professor Shearmur's Ph.D. thesis on F. A. Hayek was a joint winner of the British Political Studies Association's Sir Ernest Barker prize in political theory. Prior to taking his position in Australia, Professor Shearmur taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and political theory at the University of Manchester. He also served as Director of Studies of the Center for Policy Studies and worked as a research associate professor for the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. Professor Shearmur has published The Political Thought of Karl Popper (1966) and Hayek and After (1996) and was joint editor of H. B. Acton's The Morals of Markets and Related Essays (1993). He has also published numerous papers in philosophy and political thought.

3. 

   28 Apr 2026

   The Problem with Certainty with Jeremy Shearmur

   In this episode of Love & Understanding, I sit down with philosopher Jeremy Shearmur, who worked closely with Karl Popper for nearly a decade, to explore what it means to live in an “open society.” We begin with Popper’s central insight: that knowledge is always provisional, and that progress depends on our willingness to be wrong, to receive criticism, and to revise our beliefs. From there, we examine how these ideas extend beyond philosophy into politics, institutions, and everyday life. Together, we explore: -The tension between certainty and fallibility -The moral and epistemological foundations of an open society -The rise of polarization, populism, and distrust in institutions -How social media shapes (and distorts) our search for truth -The role of criticism, pluralism, and intellectual humility in a functioning democracy Shearmur also offers a rare, personal look into Popper as a human being—brilliant, driven, and deeply imperfect—and reflects on the challenges of embodying philosophical ideals in real life. This is a conversation about truth, error, and the fragile conditions required for a society to remain open, self-correcting, and free.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

1,143

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.5 / 5

19 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 46 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

45

Social presence

0

YouTube

68

Engagement

51

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.