Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Daniel Pinchbeck

Episode Date: May 24, 2017

Is our world doomed to a smoldering, radioactive future? Maybe not!! Duncan is joined by author and psychedelic luminary Daniel Pinchbeck and they discuss Daniel's new book "How Soon Is Now" and future timelines where harmony and joy win the day.

One in four car batteries is weak and needs to be replaced. Let our professional parts people test your battery for free at O'Reilly Auto Parts. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the glorious sweet Wizards of Light over at Squarespace.com. Go to Squarespace.com, use offer code DUNKIN to get 10% off your brand new beautiful website. Come up for a year of your free domain name. Hello my sweet children of the blistering winds of crag. It is I, Dee Trussell, and thou art listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast.

Let's start this episode off by opening up the mail bag. Burry the tongue of a dead hangman Underneath the tree When you come back the very next day I can guarantee that in its place you will find a mail bag. Mail bag, mail bag, oh god, what have I done? Dear Duncan, even though I'm a billionaire it still bothers me that some of my closest friends are multi-billionaires and I only have one billion dollars. Do you know of any secret tricks for turning your billions into multi-billions?

Sincerely. Karen Carpenter Hey Karen, since I only have 500 million dollars and not a billion dollars, this question is a little out of my league. So I sent over to my friend who is a vampire prince living in Eastern Europe. He has lots and lots of money and he also has a book coming out and this question is perfect for him. Hi Karen, thank you so much for the great question.

The short answer is weapons manufacturing. If you want to turn your billions into multi-billions, get into the weapons manufacturing game yesterday. Buy a copy of my book, How to Turn Your Billions Into Multi-Billions Through Killing Innocent People, just released by Random House. This details the ins and outs of the weapons manufacturing industry, what weapons are in right now, what weapons are out and most importantly how to efficiently harvest the life energy of the innocent beings that your weapons are going to obliterate. A lot of people are using antiquated methodologies but I show a few ways utilizing modern technologies

like the World Wide Web to get the most energy out of the creatures that you'll destroy. And PS, animals have souls too and a lot of people seem to forget that. There's this trend, everybody wants the souls of innocent civilians right now, but I'll tell you, there's a lot of soul energy to be harvested from wiping out species on the brink of extinction and that's an entire chapter in my book. I hope you'll check it out. Thank you so much for listening Karen and I truly, truly hope to see you at the next meeting of the great ones in the pyramid of time.

Friends, if you have any questions for the mail bag, just put them into a pouch with three emeralds and give that to a trained gibbon monkey. Release the monkey on the night of the next full moon and that monkey will come to my apartment in New York City and you might make it into the mail bag. Oh God, what have I done? Friends, if you find yourself coming down with a bad case of the apocalypse blues, also known as the numbs, then this is the podcast for you, author and psychedelic luminary Daniel Pinchbeck is here with us today, but first some quick business.

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Much thanks to those of you who have been donating to the DTFH. And much thanks to those of you who recently ordered stuff from the shop. My apologies. We just switched over to a new merchandise company. And so there's been a little bit of a delay in getting some things out. They are on the way. Hopefully this did not inconvenience you too much. If it did, let us know and we'll do everything we can to make it better for you.

My apologies there. Okay, sweeties, here we go. Joining us today is an author who has written three wonderful books. You've probably read at least one of them. 2012, the return of Quetzalcoatl, Breaking Open the Head, and most recently, How Soon is Now, From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation. This man is attempting to inspire all of us to wrench our eyes away from the glowing hell vortex that is the illusion of the impending apocalypse to a more beautiful, harmonized,

sweet, and humanistic potential future. I came away from this conversation feeling inspired and excited and a lot less dreary. And I hope it will do the same to you. If you want to connect with Daniel after you listen to this episode, all the links will be located in the comments section of this episode. So now, everybody, please spread your wings, open your pineal glands, and send as much light, love, and joy in the direction of this wonderful human being wherever he may be at this moment.

Please welcome to the DTFH Daniel Pinchback. Welcome to the DTFH. Thanks for coming over, man. Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. I have been following your writing for years. And I've kind of watched you unfold from, you've been on a journey, man. And is it say, this last book, How Soon is Now, it has a kind of fervency to it.

You know, like it feels like you are, are you worried that this is the end of the world right now? My word is the end of the world. I think a lot of people are wondering what the heck is going on. And a lot of the data is not great, you know, like the evidential data about what we're doing to the planet. I guess, yeah, it's like a whole process for me that, in fact, like when I started my psychedelic exploration, again, in my late twenties, that led to breaking up in the head.

Some of it was, was catalyzed by, by writing a piece for Esquire on an ecological subject. It was actually about the sperm count going down. Like the sperm count has gone down 50% in the last 50 years. And I was like, why did this happen? What does it mean? So Esquire put me on this, this, the case. And I learned that it had to do with like plastics and pesticides that were changing our endocrine system.

The piece came out and people were sort of laughing it off. And I just began to realize that, you know, we couldn't really focus on what was happening to the planet. And then I, as I analyzed that, I began to realize it had to do with like a spiritual emptiness or vacuity or nihilism that people were feeling or cynicism. And then I felt it also. And I realized that I just was a scientific materialist and a skeptic and I didn't, you know, believe there was anything outside of this material reality, but then I remembered

my psychedelic experiences from college and I decided that I would go and see if there was something deeper there because those would have been really profound and suggestive experiences. So it's a, you know, it's a long answer and the answer could go on and on. But ultimately, yeah, I think that, you know, we're facing an ecological cataclysm approaching. And, you know, the psychedelic substances are of great use in helping people kind of deprogram and awaken and sort of reconnect to the phenomenological circumstance that we're in and maybe also kind of rethink where we could go in the near future. And so in a way, the new book is like sort of applying psychedelic insights to like

political social theory and ecology and so on. But it feels like something, something happened for you where you, you know, something, when I take psychedelics, inevitably a piece of the trip is a feeling that shits about to get so bad and it's scary and it's, it's, uh, it seems so, um, imminent. And I always wonder if this, at the same time, don't you also simultaneously or get the sense that things are soon going to get so great? Well, you know, this is the thing when I've been listening to interviews with you and reading and reading interviews with you, it feels like you seem to think that things are

going to get great after they get a little scrambled up. Is that an inaccurate assessment? Yeah, I think it's more of a simultaneous process and like I see, um, you know, a lot of incredible progress, you know, and happening in my own life, um, and many people that I know, um, on so many different areas. Um, so I think it's like, it's a strangely simultaneous co-evolutionary process or something. Let's talk about that because that's a really perplexing way to look at it because I know what you mean.

Well, you know, I personally, uh, feel this spiritual growth happening in my own life and people around me have been, you know, drinking ayahuasca or having, you know, their depression lifted from ketamine or, or have been experiencing some benefits from psychedelics. I mean, I've, you've seen, I'm sure you've seen the shift when that happens to a person and it's remarkable. It's a remarkable thing to witness. And yet, and yet bombs going off at concerts, Trump's want, you know, waddling through Saudi Arabia, making a $300 billion arms deal.

And yet, you know, these, it's like, I just can't tell if I have a kind of essentially a lazy and naive world view that is based on the desire to not be obliterated in some kind of fiery disaster that seems to be right around the fucking ice caps are melting ice caps are melting carbonate. Let me just, can I for a second, just be the hysteria for a second. Maybe you can help it. The fucking ice caps are melting. It doesn't look, it doesn't matter what how everyone drink ayahuasca, go ahead.

It doesn't matter because there's fucking lunatic religious fundamentalists all over the planet who are eventually going to have access to technology allows them to decimate the planet, the individual, what used to be the school shooter phenomenon is going to be the city nuker phenomenon. You know what I mean? So there's, it doesn't matter. That's all that is exactly the reason why I spent the last 10 years writing this last book, how soon is now really trying to fathom the depth of it and then also to provide like

a path because, you know, I mean, first of all, life is inherently miraculous. It's totally implausible that we're sitting here now on this tiny little rock circling a fireball and an infinite abyss made of 10 trillion cells and microorganisms that mesh themselves together and allow us to like have thoughts and, you know, motor around and stuff like that. Yeah. So, I mean, it feels there's like, you know, as much as there's entropy that physics talks about, there also feels like there's some, you know, purposeful, anti-entropic thrust

to all of it. Oh, yeah. And that the universe or the underlying consciousness field is seeking to create more complexity, more creativity, more amazingness. And, you know, we're part of that process, I would say, we're at the cutting edge of that process. And, you know, all the negative stuff is seems somehow just as necessary to bring about our awakening and our transformation.

Thank God. No, seriously, man, I'm just like, well, I got to ask him is at the end of the world. Well, that's good news because, you know, the, the, the, and I didn't mean to, I don't like saying what I just said on the podcast because I don't like to even put it out there in that way. I don't want to be a fear monger or anything. And a piece of me, a big piece of me understands that thrust that you're talking about. But is that God?

Is that, I mean, to, for lack of a better word, do you think that that's just God operating in the, in the, in the human, human society? Yeah. I suppose. And, you know, obviously people have different reactions to that term and to use it as to shut off a lot of people really quickly. Actually, I was just in my coffee shop this morning and there was this guy's from this Christian church across the street from my house and he was talking about how, oh, you

know, we know that God doesn't want people to change their gender. And so those people are actually acting against God. And actually I got livid and I was like, look, man, like, how the hell do you know what God wants? And I was quoting some stuff you read in an old book that some people wrote thousands of years ago. And he was like, are you a Christian? And I didn't really answer.

I mean, I could say that I'm an esoteric Christian as much as I'm also like a, you know, follow like Vedanta and shamanism. I think, I think that like part of the leap that we can now make as an integrated esoteric understanding of the whole that no longer contradicts science and technology, but actually works with, with our scientific understanding. But anyway, but he, you know, but, but so that's, I think, the reason why God is a dangerous thing to bring in because it suggests all these like moral value judgments and so on. But yeah, there, you know, I like like Amit Goswami, you know, his stuff.

No. He was like a quantum physicist who had the self aware universe that he just talks about like, yeah, there seems to be like a very Eastern, he's sort of bringing together like Eastern metaphysics and quantum physics and, you know, even seeing how like, you know, action at a distance and quantum locality could allow for some type of existence of like a soul or spirit after death. Yes. These kind of, you know, entities aggregates would sort of stay together in some way.

That reminds me of this hilarious article that popped up. Did you see the article where the people from the large Hadron Collider were saying that there were, there were no ghosts? Oh, really? It was so funny. I mean, I thought it was the funniest statement, but they were like, listen, if they're ghosts, we would have picked it up by now. There's no ghosts.

And I, I thought it was such a very, very funny human thing to, to announce, you know, that they discovered that there's no ghosts. And I felt a little disappointed and relieved, I guess, because like if something happens at night and I get scared, it's like, well, they've negated your existence spirits. Um, I use the term God as a term of convenience because it's easier than to say like whatever the, you know, everyone's got different things. Source. Well, I guess you could say source, but that sounds so anonymous and boring and like, fuck

it, God is, you know, fuck it. If someone gets upset by that word, let him get upset. You know, I'm not talking about the goddamn homophobic bro thing I'm talking about, that thrust that we all kind of feel it. But man, it feels like it's, if there is that thrust, it sure feels like it's playing a kind of nerve wracking game of chicken right now. Doesn't it, Daniel? Like, you know what I mean?

Like it's a little nerve wracking at this point. You're like, you want to grab the wheel, right? You want to say to it, hey, whoa, whoa, we don't like just fix this now. Like I've had enough of the creep show here. I don't want any more of this, man. I don't like the dreams I have of the nuclear missiles flying in and I don't like the numbness that I feel, Daniel. I don't like, I feel numb.

I read your book and I like, like feel, feel numb and I think, yeah, like I thought to myself as I was reading it and I thought this is why, you know, I thought, how do I do this interview because I have to be a little confessional with you in the sense that like I feel threatened by some of the things that you were writing about. I feel like I'm part of the problem. Even though I sense this like imminent catastrophe, I can't seem to overcome some very basic blockages in my own psyche when it comes to changing my behavior in a positive way that, because you know, like I just can't fucking, I don't know what to do.

You know, I use, so, so fix me, man. What happened? Well, I'm not like saying that I'm perfect either. You know, I mean, that's not really my point really. But I don't think it's your point, but you are, you know, you are, you have this like, you're doing something. I tried to think about the whole situation almost from an outside, almost like being an extraterrestrial anthropologist, you know, looking at what's happening here and

then thinking about what we would have to do. And it's interesting because the book I think has been challenging for people to, to deal with both because they don't really want to think about the magnitude of the crisis. And then also they don't want to think about the types of changes. Like we're very comfortable in our, you know, I mean, I just got this beautiful almond latte from the cafe downstairs with like beans from Africa and, you know, and so on. It's wonderful. Yeah.

So, and, and, you know, and we do sort of feel like we're somehow living on like borrowed time and like there's some kind of reckoning coming. Yes. Yeah. And we, in your book, you didn't, the problem with the book is it's like, look, if you want to write a best, a book that's going to sell a lot of copies, you want it to be a thing like, well, you could think yourself into wealth or, you know, you could just like kind of relax into enlightenment or just chill out, everything's going to be great, man.

That's a best seller, man. That's a best seller. But to write a book, it's like, hey, look what's happening, man. Look what's happening. And also then to say, but in, in here's some stuff that we could do that isn't very comfortable, man. Like, wait, you're telling me to stop flying to Hawaii, to my Ram Dass retreats? Seriously.

I love it, Daniel. I, I, like, you know what I mean, like I, so I, inside of me, I think is the apocalypse and the sense that. Exactly. Inside of all of us. Exactly. And somehow or another, we have to reckon with that. I mean, that's why Trump is beautiful, not as like, he's not like an outside force.

He's a projection of everything in our own psyche that, that, that can't, you know, evolve or grow or take responsibility. The shadow. Yeah. Yeah. So until we integrate the shadow and deal with it, it's going to get worse. It's just going to get darker. It's going to get, you know, that's, that just seems to be what reality is showing us right

now. I, again, I, I don't, I don't, I'm not generally a skeptical person, but I just feel like being completely honest with you with my shadow so that we can kind of work with that because that's all I got to work with. Yeah. So, okay. So I take psychedelics and I love them and I like to think of myself as a spiritual person. I pray and I, I, I, I meditate and I chant, but I still am not going to stop flying on

fucking airplanes to go to remote tropical locations from time to time. And if I'm not going to stop doing that, then what if things got so amazing around here that it just was like, just began to feel almost laborious, you know, like what if like you could go to like, you know, my friend's farm growing hard upstate and everybody was already in Ram Dass consciousness and maybe it gets a little chilly in, in, in the winter. But you know, you're actually feeling that you're, you're growing together into something greater. I mean, isn't that, isn't that a possible alternative?

It's a possible alternative, but it's a big what if, you know, it's like, it's a, I just think about that and it's like, I don't know, man, I don't know about going to that farm. I think that I want to, I like, I don't mean, I'm just going to be completely, I, I like getting on the plane. Oh, I know. I love it too. I know. I love Hawaii.

I mean, I've been there a couple of times. It's amazing. So we are fucked, but right, because that's what I mean. That's the problem is it's like, we're taught, this is, this is, it, this is, I don't want to say we're fucked guys. I think there's a lot of hope here where I know we're going to turn a corner here, hopefully in the next 45 minutes or so, I just want to put it on the table that inside of me is this, is this like almost immovable thing that this momentum is inside all of us.

It's like, well, we kind of half recycle, you know, maybe if I remember, I'll take the cloth bag down to the grocery store and won't use it. Well, I don't think so. I don't think that it's the individual is going to be strong enough to deal with the circumstance. So it has to be, we have to wreck, that's in a way like the first thing is we have to recognize, which I think you've done, like what the whole conundrum is. And then we have to put on our thinking caps and be kind of like, all right, like this

is the conundrum. What would actually make a difference? Like, you know, what works for alcoholics, for instance, like Hussein 12 step or Al-Anon, like some community peer group where people are being held to a higher standard, where there's support, you know, where they feel love and connection, you know, is there a way to create that around these other situations that we have? I mean, in the book, I talked about even trying to work with Facebook, like we helped organize a thing at Facebook headquarters around climate change.

And, you know, they're reaching 2 billion people every day or something now, which is unbelievable, which is like a new phenomenon in human history. Like, what if every time you open Facebook, you know, it said something like, hey, human family, you know, all this amazing things are happening. But unfortunately, we've overshot the capacity of the ecosystems, and we have to pull back for a while. And here's what you need to know about what's happening in your local environment, on a planetary scale.

Here's what you can do locally. Here's ways to conserve resources. Here's like a ride-sharing system. You don't need your own car, you know, necessarily, you know, I mean, something like that, like ways to use the fact that we're so meshed together now in this one, you know, sort of collective brain to kind of reinvent the systems that are not working for us, you know. Yeah, well, the difference between you and me, well, I mean, there's shows a lot of differences, but one of the differences is you're like actively, seems like constantly

engaged in this effort to forestall or transform this event that is where it is slowly unfolding in front of us. Well, surely there was a time when you weren't so passionately engaged in the pursuit of, for lack of a better word, trying to save the world. Well, I mean, yeah, and honestly, like, yeah, I mean, I see a lot of my own limitations or whatever, but I guess in writing the 2012 book, the second book, I had this crazy transformative episode in the Amazon in Brazil, where I had a channel transmission experience where this entity Quetzalcoatl sort of came through me and said that I was like

an avatar of this force. And, you know, I kind of then felt that I was meant to do something beyond just writing books and commenting. And, you know, so I tried to put ideas into practice. I started like a company and a nonprofit, but I also again and again, you know, kind of failed and saw my own weaknesses and shadow aspects and so on. And so, you know, I don't know if maybe, I mean, like, you know, Terence McKenna thought the eschaton was coming in 2012 and, you know, died before that happened and then it didn't

happen or Jose Aguilas, similarly, Alistair Crowley thought he was going to be like the great beast of the apocalypse and then he kind of died of alcoholism or whatever drug addiction. So, you know, I hold that pretty loosely at this point, but I did give it my best shot. I was like, OK, like, you know, if I'm meant to be in this position, like having written the 2012 book, which was really looking at it in a metaphysical, esoteric, philosophical level, like one of these indigenous cultures saying about the time that we're in this book, the new book, How Soon Is Now, tries to do that, but in a much more practical, tangible

level. Like, you know, for instance, what does it look like in terms of our technical systems? Like, you know, if we're going to survive as a species, we're going to have to shift to renewable energy really, really quickly. If we're going to survive as a species, we're going to have to shift to other forms of farming, regenerative agriculture, because the monoculture industrial farming is destroying the planet's topsoil. So the point where the United Nations says we can only have 60 years of harvest left

with the current way we're farming. But we have these other practices. They're just more labor-intensive. They actually require us in a way like going back in time a little bit. But Daniel, there's a new aliens movie out. You know, it's like, fuck, man. What I mean is, like, yes, you're, I know the topsoil, the oil, the ice caps, all of these things. But the obscuring all of those truths, that low-level, eschatological hum is this.

You talked in an interview, in an interview, maybe it's from the book, a passage from the book, how Taley R. De Chardon always, I don't even know, how do you say his fucking name? I'm so bad about pronouncing this. How do you say his name, though? Please help me. It's French. I guess Chardon. Chardon.

You talk about how he talks about a field of thought, there's a field of thought called the... The newest sphere. Newest sphere. Yeah. But over that field of thought is a field of fucking movies and TV and, yeah, yeah, yeah. And underneath all that is like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, the soil is running out of nutrients and the oil is going to run out and there's people are getting blown up.

Right. Well, I mean, so I guess in a way that's my naive idealistic perspective is like, this is about the evolution of consciousness and that can happen unconsciously. So it actually is about the people like you and I and your listeners saying, okay, like, it's difficult. You know, it's not as nice as just being numbed by science fiction or something, but I'm actually going to take the time, you know, the six hours or 10 hours it takes to maybe read a book like mine or whatever to think about the crisis that we're in and a solution

path to it. And then over time, maybe that will inspire new ways of being, new thoughts or whatever. I was kind of the bet that I was making with the book or my faith in human nature in general is that like the 2012 book was an extremely difficult and challenging book that whatever some of this stuff, but somehow maybe because it was more psychedelic or something, it found a big audience. Yes. So that's it.

That's it. That is. I mean, we don't want to fucking hear about the but it's really not all bad news. A lot of it is actually really, really good news. It's just you have to go through some of the bad news to get to the good news. Well, I mean, in some, but no, look, man, you are too challenging. Like I don't mean, I mean, not in a very sweet way, but I don't mean in the way it popped out, but it's like, man, you, one of the principles you put out there is the destructive

nature of monogamy, right? Like the idea that humans wouldn't go that far. I mean, I think monogamy is perfectly good and even amazing for some section of the population. But as a, as a universal construct that everybody has to conform to, we can clearly see that it's creating hysteria and driving the whole situation even into deeper destruction. Right. Can you talk about that? Yeah.

Well, I mean, just think about like what's happened over the last couple of years. I mean, with the presidential election, you had Donald Trump and grabbing the pussy and his, in his misogyny and flandering. You had Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, his flandering, you know, you had Andrew Wiener and his sexting. Yeah. You had Roger Ailes and his sexual harassment and, you know, and, and Bill O'Reilly and his sexual harassment.

Yes. So it's almost like everybody who's like a major player in this whole thing is tainted by this, you know, and so, so if we step back. You think they're grabbing pussies because of monogamy? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that we've constructed a situation where, you know, if you read that book, Sex at Dawn, like Chris Ryan or you know, Calcedo, Jeladette, we're not naturally monogamous as a species.

Our primate ancestors were not monogamous, particularly, you know, men are more flagrantly maybe not monogamous, particularly alpha male men. So in a circumstance that we've created where, you know, to ensure sexual access, men will seek wealth and power and fame, you know? Ah. Yeah. So then you have that being a major contributor to this type of deformed psychologies who push to the top of these pyramids who are then, you know, cheating on the side, you

know, lying on the side, being hypocritical on the side. I mean, you know, one of the problems with constricted monogamy, you know, is that if people are forced into it, but it's not really who they are, then they're automatically put into a situation of being hypocritical with the person that's closest to them in the world. And then they become able to accept hypocrisy as like a basis, like they accept it as the norm in general. Does that make any sense? Yes.

That's so fucked up. Yeah. Oh. So we have to deal with our authentic nature as human beings and we have to say that, you know, for some people they're in a monogamous relationship and it's amazing, you know, but for most, well, I'm, you know, I'm being nice. Or we have to say that, okay, we're not really like that. So, and being hypocritical is leading to a whole society based on hypocrisy and lying

is leading to a whole society based on lying, you know. So then what do we do? Well, we love each other, like men and women love each other, but we can't, we have to create a system where we can love each other in an authentic relationship. So then we have to think about, you know, how we got into, I mean, monogamy is a construct, you know, according to that book Sex at Dawn and really developed with patriarchy and agriculture and surplus and possession rights and so on. It's not innate.

You don't find it in a lot of nomadic and tribal societies in the same way. So, you know, we have to rethink. And so in the book, I looked at this community in Portugal called Tamara, which I think is an incredibly crucial experiment for the future of humanity, where they basically, they were leftists, like, you know, radical philosophers in the 60s, they were trying to figure out why these utopian ideas of the left and the green movement failed. And when they looked at the movements, they began to realize that it was actually these core issues around jealousy and envy and repressed sexuality and distorted eros.

They talk about eros a lot, which were leading to these movements to fall apart and break apart. So they were like, okay, this isn't working. We actually need to incubate like a new social model. So they kind of created these communities. They stepped outside of society and they spent like decades trying to figure out what would be an alternative. And so Tamara is a community of about 170 people living in, you know, non-possessive relationship,

you know, based on trust and transparency. And they've created all these social tools that just bring everything up that normally gets repressed and, you know, make the community face it, make the individual face it in an ongoing process. They also have cooperative childcare, which I think is crucial for a liberated human society. So for instance, one reason that, you know, in our society, you know, non-monogamous sexuality is very threatening to women in particular, because, you know, if they want to have a child, they need to have a secure investment of a man for like a huge amount of their adult

lives. Right? And if the man scampers off, they're totally screwed. They have to put all of this energy, they don't get to manifest their unique creative essence or whatever they're hampered, you know. So if you, you know, and the nuclear family and the monogamous couple is actually a stupid design for raising children, because it requires so much energy. I had a kid and just, you know, taking the stroller on the subway or taking the kid

to the park. I mean, you know, unless you have money for a nanny and even then it's kind of ridiculous, you know, but a cooperative childcare model would make a lot more sense. So Tamara. How old's your kid? 15. Oh, wow. Cool.

I didn't know that you're a dad. Oh yeah. Yeah. She's the apple of my eye. Really? Yeah. I love her dearly. She's incredible.

I could see it in your eyes right now. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about it. Yeah. Is it the best thing that can happen to a person? Do you have one? No, not yet.

Yeah. It's one of the most wonderful human experiences for sure. Yeah. Anyway, please keep going. Yeah. So, so the idea would be that like with Tamara, the women, the women, if they want to have a child, have to ask for the community's permission, you know, which is a barrier, but then if they get the permission and they have the kid, they know the child will be raised by the whole

community and past the age of like two or three, and a lot of the kids actually choose to live in a kind of children's compound. The women have to ask permission to have a kid. Well, yeah, because they only, they've limited resources in the community. Listen, I, here's the thing. You, this is the problem. I, I, like some of the things you're saying, I like, but I'm just thinking from the perspective of the planet.

In fact, I'm thinking of like the perspective of like, uh, God, what's that? What's that dumb, dumb on Fox news? He throws a football at the beginning of every show. He's like, you know, like he's just like big, is that head of the, I don't know, I don't know, I don't watch that. I think Hannity, like throws a football at the beginning of his show is like, you listen to you, you want women to ask permission to have kids and group sex and, and, and some kind of not some kind of farming shit.

No, it's never, no, it's never going to happen, man. No one is going to not know one because it is happening, but I'm saying, you know what I mean? Like this level of the New York times just had a big feature on open marriages last Sunday. So there is like a big cultural shift happening. It's not the open marriage. I mean, I know there's a cultural shift happening there, but I'm saying that it's the New York times.

You know, it's New York. It's a progressive, advanced, sophisticated, liberal city, but it's like, man, I just, I'm trying to think of like the, the, the clusters of traditional Americans who are like, I, I'd not get, I mean, look, what's the number one insult right now? What it used to be, what would you say if you were an alpha male and you thought somebody was weak, you'd call him a faggot. Hey, faggot. Now what do you call him?

I don't know. A cuck. Oh. Yeah, that's true. You call him a cuck. You don't cuck. I bet you let your wife to hump other men and you'll cuck. Right?

That's an insult. Now, like the thing you're proposing people become is for a large group of people, one of the primary and fashionable insults, you know, so it's like, we're talking about two different tribes here, man, a tribe of people are like, yeah, I do kind of understand this idea of like, I just want to be living with someone I can be completely honest with. That's all. You know, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to go sleep with other people or her to sleep with other people, but I at least want to be able to be like, God, you know, sometimes

it sounds kind of hot, you know, like, and not have to feel like that's the worst thing you could ever say to a person just to announce the truth of your DNA or your genetic structure or whatever, which is everybody feels like that from time to time. So anyway, what you're proposing is I could see that this is a potential way for the planet to be a much more relaxed place to be in. But the to make it actionable in the global sense, I mean, shit, you're a globalist, aren't you? A globalist?

You're a globalist. You believe that the world should be connected as one world is connected. But we got to give up the whole, this is the United States and this is like we're talking, what do they call it? Class A civilization? Or type one and type two, like Macaulay thing? Yes. Type one civilization.

You want that to happen. I think I want that to happen. And for that to happen, there's a lot of little things that have to happen in between nationalities kind of have to go bye bye, getting like addicted to the concept of being an American, European, an Indian, whatever the fuck it is that you think you are. We're a planet. We're a human species on a planet that's running out of resources and we have to do something to connect with one another in a way that isn't currently happening.

I think you and I both agree that that must be true. But the problem is to get to that point, to go into the Midwest and sit down with a group of people and be like, you guys, you should consider to marry a place where you know what I mean? People are like, no. Maybe it's my once again, my naive utopian optimism. There are times of paradigm change that nobody really sees coming. And there are like stresses that are accumulating maybe even unconsciously that then lead to

like a crisis that then brings about a change. I mean, even look at the culture of like, I mean, I guess one of my reference points is the beach generation because like my mother was kind of connected to them. Gated Jack Kerouac. She was with Jack Kerouac when On The Road came out in 57. She was 21. He was in his mid-30s and she saw the cultural impact that that work had and until that time obviously the mass culture was very repressed.

I mean, you know, the work of the beats, which then led to the hippie movement. I mean, there's no, there's not an excuse that, you know, there's no reason that the Beatles are called the Beatles. They were reading the beats. Bob Dylan was reading Ginsburg and so on. You know, they took the seeds of that like liberation and spontaneity and sexual openness and they spread it globally and that actually has had a permanent shift. Like there was a sexual liberation that and, you know, the rock and roll culture became

like the universal language of the world in a way. And that's, that's happened all over the planet, like that change. So there's actually not a reason that other levels of change couldn't happen. That's great. That's great news, man. You're absolutely right. Of course, it's so easy to get caught up in the little things and not to realize the bigger picture.

But I guess only because in this inner conversation, I'm playing the part of the devil. So in the same way that we can see that these widespread changes have happened when we look at like things, when you zoom out a little bit, it can almost also be said for the apocalypse too, right? The apocalypse or the collapse of the ecosystem or the, what's happening is also moving at a very slow yet in retrospect, we can look back and be like, whoa, holy shit. Look at that. I mean, if you look at the satellite images of like, you know, the earth changing over

the last 20 years since we had satellites up there, it's horrifying, isn't it? You've seen those, haven't you? The deforestation that's happening. It's like, man, I don't, like, I don't know. Like, I guess we're telling two different words. I guess it's like Alice in Gray says, there's two windows you can look through, right? One of the windows is the window of the deforested planet, the wiping out of the, the elephants are being, the elephants are being wiped out, man.

Species are going extinct every single fucking day and not just like 150 to 200 species a day out of 8.2 estimated million total species. Yeah. So we're losing something about 10, like 10% of the earth's remaining biodiversity every like 10 to 15 years. Well, so it's, you know, once again, you could say Sayonara and it's all over. Yeah. Or you could say, well, like we're in this circumstance, we've created this circumstance

and now we have to apply our creativity and our cunning and our technical genius to solving it. All right. Well, let's start there. Yeah. Let's start right there. Okay. I'll tell you how I live.

You give me a couple of things I could do that aren't that difficult to change and I'll change them. I'll change them right now. I want to know. So I'm going to tell you what I do. I don't, I, I, I will I recycle, I take the shit down there and I put it in the bins that you're supposed to put that put it in. I stopped eating meat like a week ago.

Yeah. Jesus. What are some other things I could do? I got a backyard. I got a little backyard. Give me some tips. What are some things that people can do? The listeners who maybe are like me, like kind of grudgingly aware of the gradual destruction

of the entire planet and the immense suffering that so many different creatures are going through right now because of our rather lazy, laxadaisical, supremely numb decisions. What are some things we could do, man? Please help us. Tell me some little things. Little things. Yeah. I'm not going to go to fucking Tamaria and let people have sex with my girlfriend who

then has to ask permission to have a baby, but give me some little like, little like something before we get to that point. What's something I could do? Some little things. Yeah. I mean, I feel resistant to answering the question in that way. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Why? Because I don't think it's that helpful. Really? In a way, like, you know, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it feels to me more like the first thing is it's almost like the first thing is to just think about yourself as if you're like a cell in a planetary super organism. Okay. Like, you know, what would it mean to be like a really good functioning cell?

You know, like, what would be your, you know, what would you want to do metabolically? Like, like, you know, how would you want to contribute, you know, that's pretty good. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah. But I think like it's more important from where we are now because the changes we can make individually are very small, you know, but if we were to act together collectively, the changes could be very big.

Like, you know, you have 150,000 listeners or something. Yes. Well, maybe like you could challenge your listeners somehow, you know, around this stuff. Like if you've, if you integrated the value of it, and once again, I'm just, you know, mulling, right? Like, I don't know. Yeah, sure. You know, first of all, you know, that people become aware of what's happening.

And then yeah, like maybe for instance, a non meat eating challenge for 200,000 listeners, that starts to be big. Right? Like if, you know, if 100,000 people stop eating meat, you could actually measure like the level of deforestation that would be averted and, you know, so I think we have to think in terms of scale. And I think that if we're going to make this leap into a survivable and ultimately thrive able planetary civilization, it's going to be like not just incremental and individual.

It's going to be like exponential and scalable, you know, because we have like the manufacturing capacity. So for instance, like, you know, renewable energy, you know, like we know that, you know, we need to get to renewable energy in like 10 to 20 years. Yes. And that is going to require a lot of effort. Like that's a lot of people learning new skills and retraining and, you know, you know, maybe there's like websites like Mosaic is one where people can support solar projects.

Maybe you can make a partnership with like Mosaic and see if people, you know, see if you could raise a million dollars over six months to support solar projects, accelerated or renewable farming, you know, permaculture farms and stuff like that. Jesus, man. I was just hoping you'd be like, here's a kind of soap you could start using. I'm going to raise a million dollars, but I like your brain. It's big. You think big.

You think really big. That's cool. It's inspiring. Man. Yeah. It's a weird thing. I don't know why I think like that. Well, because you're an incarnation of what's that cool?

That's pretty crazy. Is he still taught? Is it a he or a she or is it a hermaphroditic feathered serpent? What's the, I don't know. I have to ascribe gender to the thing, but I felt a little bit more he like, I guess, at the time. Is he still talking to you? It hasn't like, I almost stepped away.

Maybe I, you know, I had a friend, a shaman friend who was like, oh, like you should have, you know, daily conversations and communications. This was now like almost 14 years ago. And I think I didn't want to go more in that direction. I wanted to go more in this direction. I wanted to be more grounded and sort of try to think about systemically what we need to do. Maybe in my future, I'll reconnect with more of these esoteric realms to be in like, like

I'm a huge fan of Rudolf Steiner and I find his esoteric visionary philosophy to be like deeply healing and helpful. Are you familiar with Lynn Margolis? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's my friends with her a little bit. Yeah. The field and stuff. Oh, okay.

Oh, no, no, no. Sorry. Sorry. You joined Michael Cosmos. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, um, I'd like to explore more of the esoteric thing, but I needed to do this first.

Um, somehow it felt like a mission or something. Well, yeah. But what happened to you was really like, I mean, it's kind of the like a nightmare situation to be visited by a deity, isn't it? Because after that happens, you can't be the same after that. You are, it's like a real mess. Like when you look at the archetype of this thing that you are probably have to be, you probably have to be kind of like, the problem is like, if you, like, if there was a strategy

to try to convince people to change, probably the first rule would be like, well, don't tell them that you're a representative of a feathered serpent because they're people will just stop listening. I mean, and then the next one would be like, and don't tell them to be non-monogamous and then don't tell them. Don't tell them. It's like, no one wants to listen. It's, you know, but the first, but so, uh, it is what happened to you.

Uh, I think is really scary. Uh, I was having a conversation with someone and he was saying to me, I really want to find out if there's something more than this. You know, I want to know if there is, if the higher states of consciousness or the stories you hear are true. And I said to him, I bet you don't really want to know that because when you find something like that out, it will force a crisis in your own life because you, you, you have to like, I mean, look at what did, what happened with Moses.

He didn't want to do it. Right. Isn't that the story? He was kind of like, fuck this. Like a burning bush says something to him and I, what, didn't he not want to do it? Wasn't there something where he's like, no way, man, I'm not going to do that. Well, yeah, maybe I'm not a huge biblical scholar, but I think there was a thing where he's like, fuck that I'm not going to do, I think he had a speech impediment.

I think he had, and that was a part of the craziness of the idea that some acacia, burning acacia would say to him, well, you're going to be the person that liberates my people. And he's like, basically, uh, like he has some terrible list or maybe he can't say W's or something, you know, something that you immediately would not take him that seriously. So and also as someone who takes psychedelics, you know, you don't want to be the guy who thinks he's Jesus. You know what I mean? You don't want to be that guy.

Yeah. You don't want to be the savior of planet earth. You don't want to be that guy, you know, but that's not the vibe I get from you. I was a little nervous that when we had this conversation that I was thinking, oh shit, I hope he doesn't have like a Messiah complex or something. But the vibe I get from you is fantastic. Oh really? Yeah.

You're very sweet and like, and it's inspiring. So um, but shit, man. Yeah. It's been really intense. Um, you know, and even though I basically dismissed it as much as I could, it still had a resonant like, um, effect. And I also feel on the one hand, I felt this slightly like martyrdom complex. Um, and then also almost as a negative corollary, a lot of my like own shadow material on my

own, like, you know, uh, wounded parts, uh, also came to the fore. So it's been a very, um, it was a very difficult, um, 10 or 15 years. But I feel that I'm, you know, over the hump in certain respects. Over the hump of having met a God. Um, yeah. I mean, um, over the, the, the weight of kind of, uh, the, the burden in a way. And I think for me, like in a way, like the book, this new book was very much like carrying this, this burden and now at least I feel that I put it out there and I can't, I mean,

I've done, done doing everything that I can to get people to pay attention. And I totally understand why they're, you know, would rather see alien two or five or whatever it is. I don't know which one, um, you know, but all I can really do is put it out there. And so having done that, you know, I feel a little bit alleviated of, of, of this burden, you know, but you didn't just do that. You've got a website called a Volvo. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I, that was another. I mean, I had a whole enterprise that I started that, um, in a way I, I, I cracked a part, fell apart on me, which was, um, very interesting. Oh, it fell apart on you. I didn't know it's still, it's still going, but I had a falling out with my original business partner and didn't want to be, be working with him anymore. And I'd started this nonprofit. We were building these local community networks and so on.

And, you know, some of the, some, because of the way I acted in certain respects and also a lot of projection that was put on me, that also kind of like fell apart. What do you mean, the way you acted? Uh, well, I mean, as I discussed in the book, there was, you know, kind of, um, I mean, because I was really kind of fascinated by this, I've liberated sexuality, you know, in, in some cases that was seen as acting in an exploitative way. And in retrospect, you know, I can see that I made mistakes, you know, in that, um, um, yeah, I mean, um.

It's a lot of energy, man. When you get the big blast, you can easily fuck it up. I mean, it's like. Yeah, exactly. And, and, and, and it's the story is, uh, that people tend to fuck it up because it's like, it's just too much. It's too much, you know, they're like, uh, and you get, it's a bit of a burden, you know, because you, the idea is like, let's say that you came into contact with some kind

of extra dimensional being that assigned some duty to you, this is the archetype, you know? Um, so then you become a translator, right? Now you're a translator. You met this thing and you have to translate what this thing told you into a language that humanity can understand so that you can actually like, um, allow the being that you made contact with to come into the world a little bit more. And so that's a terrible responsibility because if you fuck up that translation in any way, shape or form, then you can do harm.

You can do harm, you know, like if this isn't Buddhism, people talk about how if you, you can actually mess things up a little bit. If you start spreading a message prior to having some internal purification or cleansing, it creates all kinds of turbulences and bumpinesses. And this is why you inevitably hear the story of some incredible spiritual leader being caught, you know, humping some, it's always humping. It's like inevitable, like, you know, like you end up like getting leaders in. What is that?

I was just asking Alex and Allison Gray about this. It's like, it's always comes down to the sexual thing. Kind of like what you were talking about before. Yeah. I mean, I, I went through my own small scale version of it. I mean, um, you were kind of like without getting to, well, I mean, you know, I was, my breaking up in the head came out when I was 35 and that's what kind of color book came out when I was 40.

So I was like, in my kind of middle age, suddenly I was, you know, the sort of psychedelic counterculture figure. Fuck yeah. And you know, in, in these worlds like Burning Man, that, that, you know, had a lot of exploration and also a lot of chaos and a lot of confusion, I think also. So, um, yeah, I mean, uh, non monogamy is complicated. Yeah. So, so, so, so is monogamy, but you can also only do what, what, what is right for you.

Like, um, like, I couldn't, I couldn't unfortunately do the monogamy thing really. And you just ran into some problems with that. I don't know exactly what it was, but you just ran into some sex problems. Yeah. I mean, similar to what happens with the yoga people where, you know, people who are maybe part of the extended evolver community felt that I was using my power for sexual gain. And I probably was and I'm, I'm sorry about it.

What do you mean by that? Like you were just like seducing people or people? Yeah. I mean, I think that also like, um, you know, I, I, I once, um, you know, it, it, I think it becomes addictive. Like once, you know, because I think I felt very, without even recognizing it, I felt, um, you know, like undernourished, uh, sexually when I was younger. And so suddenly I had an opportunity to have more experience and it became a little bit of

like an addictive thing, compulsive, and also due to various aspects of my own, you know, early childhood, wounding and so on. You know, so, and that, that's another thing when I look at what's happening with the cocks and, and, and Trump and, and the alt right and all these men. I mean, there's, you know, I think an under underlying aspect of a lot of it is, is this deep wounding that, that men have around their sexuality. Right. You know, it's the same thing that happens with like, you know, they say that if someone's been

through famine, then it's like permanently alters them. It like, I think it, it like permanently alter, if you've starved long enough, it like really is bad for you for your whole life. Yeah. Like it messes. And so like for some folks, they don't get to have the, like when they're younger, they're just completely sexually deprived and rejected and like, man, you know, it's this whole fucking like.

Well, and that's a lot of like the, the Reddit and the 4chan community. Like there are all these articles about how like, there was a lot of men who felt like they couldn't really make it professionally because the whole work environment has changed and therefore they couldn't find girlfriends or loves or whatever. So they were living in their parents' basement, like on the computer all the time, developing this kind of misogynistic language onto them or connected to this kind of like pickup artist culture. And that actually became like a driving thing that, that helps power this Trump thing.

So I mean, I, once again, I really think that dealing, you know, with human sexuality, approaching it in a much clearer, more objective and compassionate way is, you know, fundamentally necessary if we're going to get out of this circumstance. Right. So that's why it's, it's a thread in the book and why you can't, you know, like Paul Hawken just wrote this book, Draw Down, which is all about, it covers a lot of the same ground as my book in terms of like ways to remove CO2 and, you know, climate, you know, address climate change and, you know, reforest and bioremediate and all that stuff is really, really necessary.

But I think there's other levels of a paradigm shift that are going to have to occur if we're going to come back into balance and actually survive into the future. And, you know, the, you know, the area of sexuality is one of them. And also the area of spirituality and the nihilism that people feel about sort of the meaninglessness of life. Yeah. Sure. I mean, this is, I'm just thinking of like Daniel Penchback, 40.

I was reading, man, I like, you are blowing my mind, man. And like, you're like, yeah, you're a burning man. It's like, you're like Elvis or something, right? And there's, you, I get it. You, wow, you kind of were like, holy shit, were you like a co-leader for a second? Kind of like, did you become like a, a cult leader for a moment? Would you consider yourself that? Let me just, I don't mean that in an offensive way.

I mean, I consider that like a compliment in a lot of ways, but like, you know what I mean? Like, here you are, this charismatic, brilliant, almost messianic, your story, you've, you've channeled an entity that wants you to save the world. You've become this psychedelic luminary. You've become in one of the reviews of a series of essays you put together. They called you, are Timothy Leary, you, you. So here you are, this, this like, and you, a, a, a, a vulva happens and I signed up for it. What was it?

Here you are, the nucleus of all of this, experiencing this like. Yeah. I mean, I, I do think in many ways I was actually doing the right thing because I was really my whole goal. Like, you know, when I started Evolver, I never even created my own website. Like I created reality sandwich. Like I really believe that it wasn't about me, that there needed to be like a cultural movement, you know. So, and, and I really saw that what I wanted to do was empower other people, you know, like we published maybe a thousand writers or more through the, many of them ever published before through reality sandwich and then through the spore thing. The idea was to empower local, you know, volunteers to become community leaders.

And in many cases it was women, which I was really proud of also. And then I edited this book series of all of our editions, you know, so I really put my own creative career on hold in a way and, and really wasn't trying to put myself forward at all. I was almost trying to hold space for this larger movement. And actually, in retrospect, it's hard not to regret that because it was very costly on a lot of levels. Oh, wow. Wow. What a great experiment though. What a great experiment. How cool. I mean, you are a rippler and you are, you are, this is just the way that you, you operate is like you're, you want to, you're like doing some kind of experiment or something. You're trying to transform

the world in a very positive way. And it's tricky to do that and it's dangerous to do it. And, and there's blowbacks and backfires and that should be expected, right? Exactly. Yeah. What are you up against, you know? Up against the glowing orb. Did you see the pictures of the fucking orb? Like you look at that and you're like, really, this looks like, this looks like something in one of the Jack Chick tracks, you know, like, you know, Jack Chick, the, you've seen those little biblical comic books that they leave around. You know, it looks like a draw. Like if someone was drawing, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. They're like, you know, let's just put our hands on them. They're, they're that disconnected. There's one, one of two possibilities.

One, they're that disconnected from the way people view them. And they just think that's like, just a normal thing to do is to like, put your hand on a glowing orb after making a $300,000, $300 billion, $300 billion arms deal. Or the other thing is they're trolling us. Like they're like, let's just fuck with them. Let's freak them out. I think it must be the first. Or, or they're not quite human. They're also possessed by just archetypal forces. And I think that there's like, like Steve Bannon has actually in interviews compared himself favorably, like Darth Vader and Satan. Yes. You know, so there's, there, there really does seem to be like an archetypal, you know, thing happening, like, like these archetypes are just moving through

our world and they take these human forms, you know, and that's what these guys represent. They're, they're, they're like empty vessels, you know, for this, what Steiner would talk about is like an aromatic energy to come through. Oh God, I hope. I mean, that too. I just so want them to be like bumbling dopes who get like, who, you know, just, just end up their hubris causes them to be eventually the dream is, did you see Jonathan Zapp wrote these wonderful articles in reality, sandwich about how the Trump, Trump apocalypse reveals that the world is actually like a, like a matrix. Oh yeah, I saw that. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I found those to be really profoundly satisfying because there is like, there's, there's a level, this really does feel

like almost like a dream reality that's unfolding. I mean, even the names, you know, like Trump and the fact that he trumped everything, you know, or doing the, you're telling, I've been saying this on stage, like, you know, Rex, Rex Tillerson is the secretary of state. So if you shorten Rex Tillerson's name, what do you get? You get T Rex, you know, I mean, how, what's that weiner? I mean, how is this, you know, it really feels like, you know, it's giving us, it's like a tell from the universe that's telling us that this is actually like a dream projection or the psyche that all of it or it feels like if there is a programmer, right, then it feels like his kid has somehow snuck in to his office and is starting to do like cheesy shit, like a 12 year old boy would do,

I will make him a T Rex. Yeah, that's funny. Oh, the guy who shows is the guy who shows dick pics, a column weiner. It's unbelievable. It's cheesy is what it is. There's a very interesting, no waddle kind of like shaman teacher, this guy Sergio Magana, and he's written these books like, you know, in a way like, well, I guess in retrospect, I've mixed feelings about even, you know, I put some I put attention on the 2012 thing, although I feel that like, it was like almost like people really almost deliberately misunderstood what I was saying or what I was focusing on. I never thought it was going to be like an instant, right, catalytic, everything would change, you know, but, but, you know, kind of an invitation maybe from the cosmos

for a change. But Magana is somebody who's trained like these Aztec and the waddle lineage, and he's putting out this idea that 2012 to 2021 are actually the sort of in between state between the like the fourth world and the fifth world, or the age of the fifth son and age of the sixth son, and according to his books, we're transitioning from what he talks about as a son of light to a son of darkness. And essentially, when during the son of light, it's all about rationality and reason and materiality and sort of daylight clarity. And as you go into the son of night, it becomes more about the psyche, more about like the dreamlike reality becomes more dreamlike, more psychically malleable. And I don't know, there's something about that that feels very

resonant. I'll tell you, before you came over when I drew as I do for my guests, a tarot card to figure out what we were going to talk about, I got the sun. So yeah, I get it, man. And, and, and, and I do think that the 2012 was the, they were, it's just to me so amazing that people are like, nah, 2012, the aliens didn't come, I guess you were wrong. But it's like, are you fucking kidding me? These people called it, you know, they called it, like, if you look at the world in 2005, and before versus 2012 and after, those are different worlds, man, when we see what's happening. And the fact that these people pre internet, pre tech, pre our current technology, pre electricity, we're able to predict a time in human history where things were radically changing

is mind bending. How, how did they do that? That's, they didn't know, they didn't, there were no satellites orbiting the planet. They weren't doing projections of population growth through the years. They just intuited somehow, or they had some mathematical way of understanding time to know that right around this period is where the shift would happen. I mean, I actually like a lot of people have focused on like Terrence McKenna and time wave zero, but I actually feel that Hose Arguellis is understanding of the mathematics of the Mayan calendar is like far more profound and significant. There's a book he wrote called Earth Ascending, where he looks at these really unbelievably beautiful harmonic relationships between like the I Ching and the Mayan calendar,

the Zulcan. And it really does suggest that there's some kind of, yeah, like harmonic underpinning to this that they understood that it was really like a profound, a sacred science. Yeah. Well, they were, I mean, yeah, they were dead on. Like this is, this is for sure. You know, if you look back, oh God, you know, the stories that go back 20,000. So, okay, yeah, this is it. So I've interviewed people from Singularity University and had them talk about the Singularity. The way they put it is one day will equal 20,000 years of human progress. That's the essentially what we're heading towards. So to understand what that means, if you go back 20,000 years and ask somebody to predict what 20,000 years in the future is going to look like,

they're not going to be able to make any predictions at all based on what's happening, right there. I think they just maybe just started riding horses. It depends on whether you, which history of the earth you subscribe to, you know, I don't know. Maybe they were Atlanteans or whatever. But the essence of it is that the thing that we are in the very beginning of, that seems to be very accurately predicted by calling it December 21st, 2012, is so, so spectacular that we, I think in the next three years, we're going to see something go down. It's like probably AI waking up, something like that. I don't know. It may be an alien visitation. You've heard about these bursts that people are picking up from, what do they call it? The,

you know, I'm talking about, you gotta know I'm talking about. There's some kind of like electrical impulses that people have started picking up. God damn it. Hang on, let me pause it and I'll find it for you. Here, this is actually from a, not from a fake news site, but it's still, this is everywhere. It's called fast radio bursts have been being picked up. And essentially, like no one really knows what these fucking things are. And they're picking up these things recently. And people are saying that it's potentially some kind of alien transmission or something coming out of a massive spaceship or something being used to power light sales. That's interesting. But I mean, you know, in the 2012 book, I talked at great length about the crop circles.

And you think those are real? I think that some of them are not being made by human beings because they've had, even like biophysicists have studied what happens to the crops in the pattern. And they've basically determined that it couldn't be done just by people pushing them down. So it's some type of energy projection, maybe from above that causes the, you know, the crops to change direction. Smart way to communicate with something, identify its food source and then put your messages into the food source kind of makes sense. Yeah. Well, on many levels, because they're public signs, like they can't be copyrighted or obscured. Like once they're

in the public domain, they're just out there. And yeah, I think that that's, could be part of what unfolds. Maybe who knows? It's, it's just, it's going to be something so it's, you know, predicting is probably impossible. I just think it's going to be something so astounding. But, but, but then I would also question that because in a way, once again, like when I wrote the last book, I could have gotten more down that avenue, but then I was like, you know what, like maybe whatever is out there really can only deal with us or, or, you know, connect with us when we've made an evolutionary jump, at least showing that we're going in the right direction. So that would be like, how do we take care of our

planet? Like, you know, Buckminster Fuller wrote Operation Spaceship Earth, you know, it's like, in a sense, we can look at our situation where like the crew of this incredible spaceship and we've woken up and the spaceship works like perfectly, like it has everything we need to be happy, except an instruction manual and operating manual. So we're like tearing it apart instead of like figuring out how to make it operate. And, you know, so, so, yeah. So, so, you know, even at this late date, if, if we redirect what we're doing as a species, we could, you know, really create a garden utopian scenario. And technology would be it would be, you know, would be used in the service of that, we wouldn't be trying to like, I mean, they're, you know, I think we have to make

that's the thing. It's like part of our problem is that our culture is very dualistic. And, you know, there are things that we have to, we have to make distinctions in terms of types of technologies that are helpful and types that could be really destructive, like geoengineering, changing the whole climate of the planet by pouring sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere could be, it sounds extremely horrible to me, like just long-term negative consequences. But, you know, using drones to replant forests, which I have a friend who started a company and they're using, they have drones that can plant like millions of trees in like a day. How does that work? You just have drones that are planting seeds, you know, that, you know,

they're planting whole forests. Wow. Really? Yeah. What are they just like they roll? Are they like rumbas or something? Or how does that even look? I don't know. It's, I think the car, there's a company called biocarbon geoengineering or biocarbon engineering. We can look it up. But anyway, yeah. So, so stuff like that or bio, you know, biochar, which is essentially they figured out that in the Amazon, the indigenous people were actually really stewards of the environment. And the soil of the jungle is actually quite fragile. And they would do this slow burning process with organic matter that would ultimately create like a carbon rich tilt, which would replenish the soil. So now we figured out how to do that industrially. So we can take organic matter,

burn it in these gasifiers, it actually takes CO2 back into the atmosphere, into the soil, and actually can be used to replenish the world's top soil. Wow. So, you know, stuff like that, we can look at different sustainable technologies that can be scaled up really rapidly to restore a lot of the damage. I mean, there's some, obviously, there's some areas that are extremely difficult to address, like ocean acidification and what's happening to the coral reefs. But, you know, once I think that we really turn our creative focus in this direction and eat, you know, and we, in a way, we have to like, and that's one of the things, you know, I was hoping with the book is that we're in this kind of people in this kind of paralysis where they, they're too

scared to look at the problems and to try to think through them. But, you know, I really think that we need to get beyond that state because, you know, we are very creative. And even, which is probably going to happen, we're probably going to lose the coastal cities, we're probably going to see glacier melts and, and, you know, 50 feet of sea level rise in the century or something like that. But, but, you know, even if we lost 100 feet, that's only 5% of the Earth's landmass. So actually, there's still plenty of room for humans to build cities that could even be designed in a way that's, that's more holistic and regenerative. You know, so, so, you know, it's Yeah, man. But I mean, if we're talking about that, Jesus Christ, that, that future is like

the future where like refugees are having to leave their, the cities and are like going, I don't know, where and the Jesus Christ, man. But once again, it's always, it's always a question of how you choose to look at things. I mean, so for instance, like in the book, I talk about this Stanford engineer who's created these things called Regen villages. So they're modular, mass-producible housing units that have composting and aquaponics and renewable energy systems built into them. So essentially, rather than refugees just being dependent in these camps, where they're, you know, forced to take aid, you could have self-sufficient communities that are created using things like Regen villages and so on. You know, this is what I, this is what I like

about your POV, man. It's not naive. It's, I think it's pragmatic and it's, one thing's for certain. If we don't believe that there is a chance to do something to make things better, then that's it. We are, we're done. We're done. Absolutely. And we're not, we're not taking that chance. We're not, we're not using our creative capacity to think through the crisis. And I spent 10 years trying to do that with this book and I can't get people to take six hours to have the exploration with me. Well, because we feel terrible. I mean, like it's, so get over it. We have to get through that where it's only going to get worse unless, unless we, you know, think, you know, use our intellect, our general capacity to, you know,

we're all, I think many people have great intelligence and creativity and we're using it to thwart ourselves in a way, you know, you know, and then think about also the potential value of psychedelics, like everything we're learning about psychedelics for treating like trauma or depression, you know, so like, you know, what's happening now? I mean, basically from my perspective, Trump and Brexit are both caused by already biological change, by climate change, because Syria refugee crisis is, was largely caused by a big drought there, which then destabilized Europe, which scared England, which led to this fear of refugees and immigrants, which, you know, fed the Trump thing and so on. You know, so,

so, you know, we're going to be dealing over the next decades as the coastal flooding happens with tens of millions, not hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. You know, what are we going to do? You know, if we could potentially use tools like MDMA so that they can like process their trauma and be more better assimilated into whatever societies they're moving into, like that's, that could be a really powerful positive tool. I mean, I love the idea of some kind of like special like MDMA and infusing like pre precursors to like entering into a society, you have to hang out at like an MDMA camp or ayahuasca. I mean, I last time I did ayahuasca, I had a vision of like, you know, these huge like vertical hot houses in every city of the world,

just just growing, growing tons of it, you know, so that people can, you know, have the capacity to work through their stuff and reach a more evolved state of consciousness. I love it. You know, this is something I've been here. This is really far out, man. But like, and some, I thought at the Ram Dass retreat, I was talking to someone who was saying that it's so weird, but that like, there's two timelines that are separating right now. And one of the timelines is a timeline where society becomes completely technological. And the other timeline is a timeline where people go more into their hearts. That's the one we're in right now. We're in the, as she put it, a very dank timeline.

And that this turbulence that we're experiencing is actually these two ships, it's temporal ships separating from each other and the Trump and all the trouble he's running into and all the blowback that's happening as people react to that attempt at running a government in this old school way is an indication of these two timelines moving apart because here wasn't, you know, here this thing happened, which at another time in human history, Trump wouldn't, may not, wouldn't have been met with the kind of like ferocious resistance that he's being met with. Like a person like that just gets into power and you're like, yeah, that's just who's the, that's the guy. That's the guy, I guess. That's

the guy now, but there wouldn't be marches. There wouldn't be this infinite, endless, constant blowback to everything that he does, even though he's like succeeding. So that turbulence is a result of these two timelines separating. And I think that the more that I allow myself to live in the pinchback universe of these hot houses and no, I can feel it, man. I can feel it. Like the more we even just allow ourselves to imagine it, I've seen it on mushrooms. I've seen it through psychedelics, the potential and like is the more that we like let ourselves live in that realm of possibility, then it's like we steer the ship in that direction, right? Exactly. That's it. Yeah. Oh, I like it. It's cool. It's cool, man. I'm in. I'm in. I'm going to start a

biofarm. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to do it. I guess every farm's a biofarm. Well, Daniel, thank you so much, man. You're inspiring. This has been a wonderful conversation. You're a transformer. And I think people are going to want to find you. What do you have? Do you have a show? A show? It's not shows. I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, I have my own little podcast, How Soon Is Now on iTunes. And I'm on all the usual social media stuff like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And there's a HowSoonIsNow.info and a pinchback.io for people who want to like follow. But don't you do seminars and stuff? Like I saw something on, are you still like? Yeah. I mean, I'm doing something. I mean, I don't know when we're doing this, but Thursday,

we're going to do something at the Open Center in New York. I'm giving a workshop on the book. And then June 21st, I think I'll do something at ABC Carpet. I put it all up if people don't follow me or wherever. Well, this goes up today or tomorrow. So guys, New York, go see Daniel. He's wonderful. You're wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. He's great to meet you too. Thank you. That was Daniel Pinchbeck, everybody. Be sure to check out his book, How Soon Is Now. Much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. Remember, if you go to squarespace.com, enter in offer code Duncan, you'll get 10% off your first order. Thank you guys for listening. I hope that you have a transcendent week and I'll see you very soon.

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