Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Unf*cking the World — Radical Hope for the Future | Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Jamie Wheal, founder of The Flow Genome Project and author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind.Jamie is one of the most brilliant thinkers I know – he has advised executives at some of the world’s leading companies (Deloitte, Red Bull, Google, Lululemon, Facebook, TD Ameritrade, Nike, and Goldman Sachs), and his work & ideas have been covered in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Inc., and TED. You may remember Jamie from his previous appearance on Finding Mastery back in 2017 where we discussed flow states and altered states of consciousness – that’s episode #67 if you’re looking to check it out. This time around, we discuss some of Jamie’s most recent work where he takes radical research out of the extremes and applies it to the mainstream, exploring macro topics like where we are today, why it’s so hard to make sense of the world, what might be coming next, and what to do about it._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And if we give up the faith, right, then they cannot happen. So we have to keep the faith in case they might. It's a little like Linus in the pumpkin patch, right? We got to keep, I meant when the great pumpkin comes, not if, right? You can't give up the faith or you're fucked. Okay. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training, I'm a sports and performance psychologist. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are exploring the edges and the reaches of the human experience in business, in sport, in science, in life in general. We pull back the curtain to explore how they have committed to mastering both

their craft and their minds in an effort to express their potential for one reason, to help others to do the same. Now, this week's conversation is with Jamie Wheel, founder of the Flow Genome Project and author of Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. He's brilliant. He is a brilliant thinker. And he's able to, with great discernment,

move across multiple disciplines of thought and then dive deep within them. And then he comes back up for air and he's able to build frameworks from that that ties his insights across multiple disciplines together. And it's really wonderful to watch him work. He has advised executives at some of the world's leading companies like Deloitte and Red Bull, Google, Lululemon. The list goes on.

And his work and ideas have been covered in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and TED. Now you may remember Jamie from his previous appearance on Finding Mastery back in 2017, where we discussed flow states and altered states of consciousness. And if you want to search it up, that's episode number 67, and I would encourage you to check that out as well. But this time around, we discussed some of Jamie's most recent work where he takes radical research out of the extremes and then applies it to the mainstream, exploring macro topics like where are we today? Why is it so hard to make sense of the world? What might be the next coming and what to do about this whole thing? So I hope you enjoy Jamie.

He's got a wonderful way about him. Like I said, he thinks deeply at the same time, like he's really working to solve some big challenges that we're all facing in a very intimate way. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Jamie Wheel. Jamie, I usually start these podcasts just kind of checking in. And I want to start actually in a different way. We've known each other a long time. And golly, have I seen like one, your intellectual prowess speaks for itself.

But the way that you have applied your system thinking to what is currently happening in my life and the the lives of many is remarkable and so i'm just going to first start by saying i'm geeked to sit with you and i i know that i could almost ask you one question push back an hour and a half later come up you know for air in a way it's like, that was awesome. That was the only question I asked you. So I feel like I'm in for a treat to be able to hear you work from the inside out on systems that are making a difference in the world. So let's just start with an obvious thought. You think the world is kind of fucked up right now. Well, I always go back to that george clooney and and oh brother where art thou where he's like damn we're in a tight spot you know and and it for sure does feel like that and

and my background like back in graduate school i was studying like long arc history and kind of and sort of and anthropology with an eye towards the classics or race class gender like those are the lenses that you always kind of look at it's like how do societies and even civilizations work but then i was you know fortunate to study with a number of leading folks in the field of environmental history which includes place so just how does the land how does the environment how do resources and resource constraints also interact and inform culture to civilization and the tldr of that was i came up to my wife you know at all the ripe old age of 22 i'm like i think we're i don't think any of this pencils out you know and specifically

like the american west right west of the 100th meridian there's not enough water and of course now lake powell lake mead we're actually getting to that place which you know as a long arc or big big history student plus or minus a decade plus or minus a century is a rounding error for how and when things happen right so but putting very specific pins in very specific maps has always been a fool's errand that's the seventh day adventist that's all the people climbing up on roofs waiting for the rapture and it never came. So there was this sense where a couple of decades ago, I sort of ran the traps. And it was pretty clear there were a lot of just structurally unsustainable things going on in the go-go Western Civ narrative. Now those cans got kicked about as far as they can with everything from quantitative easing to fracking, to drawing down aquifers that took millions of years to charge up. We kicked all the cans. And so the fact that we are coming up against some potentially

sort of hard limits to physics, just people... And in fact vaklav smil i don't know if you know his work he's he's the one that the gates foundation has basically said is like the smartest futurist on the planet and he's this contrarian i think he's hungarian he teaches in canada but he just does energy analysis of just the world and even like and disabuses everybody of all polite notions like even like hey we're not getting that close to solar and electric things because there's so much petroleum baked into our entire economy like never mind things with tailpipes or smokestacks going to batteries like that's the easy stuff he's like concrete fertilizer you know plastics um those things and steel all have so much oil energy embedded in the systems to make them even possible so so just think again right and so you read and his point was like

you know to the peter de manders raid to the cozwell crowd right who have been techno utopians techno optimists like we're going to virtualize everything and it's all going to live in our phones and like then we're going to upload our consciousness to computers and we're going to kind of bypass 3D constraints baklav schmills point is like we're pretty close to optimize physics here folks like the aluminum cans we all drink out of used to be super stiff and you could stand on them in the 50s and now they're like you can buckle them with your fingers like we're not going to get thinner walls on that we We're not going to get that. There's a limit. There's like a 57% maximum efficiency on a wind turbine.

Because if you change the blades anymore, it just grinds to a halt. Right? Like with the same with planes, the same with all this stuff, we're kind of somewhere where we are. And so I guess the long roundabout way of saying it is I do think we are in for historic structural challenges up ahead i think the fundamental name of the game is can we transition from this carbon you've seen kylenny like foil right you know in the open ocean like molokai or whatever and he links swells together right and so

even if he's going through a flat spot he's got momentum from the past swell and he can pump to then hook up with the energy of the next swell and he links them you know across across channels right you can go forever and the question is is are we going to be able to do that same thing right can we take this one-time bonanza of the carbon pulse of the last 150 years where we just happened to find a bunch of buried dinosaurs under the ground which was fundamentally you know like photosynthesis carbon it was just buried starlight and we found out a way to like you know hill beverly hillbilly stick a straw in that thing and light those fuckers on fire and so we basically got a hundred million years of

buried starlight once And it was the equivalent of the college kid whose parents went away and he goes and hits the ATM and scores an eight ball and goes on a weekend long coke binge with all of his... Risky business gone badly wrong. And that's been us. That's the entire 20th century. That's the entire 21st century. And by the way, it includes all economics. So if you've got libertarians, if you've got Milton Friedman, if you've got Austrian economists, if you've got all the people saying free markets do all this stuff, if you've got happy TED talkers being like, we've raised more people out of poverty. More people than ever are literate

and live above $2 a day. All that was in the midst of a weekend long coke binge. And I've heard you talk about it, the framing is that if you compress all of humanity into a 24 hour block, or the history of the universe into a 24 hour block, that we are, how do you say it? I think we're a few seconds before midnight. It's literally like cave paintings are at three minutes before midnight. So just the humility of all that. Well, it's an interesting framing in that, one, I do want to understand kind of

a basic orientation because the framing is like at midnight, the clock strikes and kind of the day is done. Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that part. Yeah, so it's kind of like it's over, right? But I want to know if you don't need to frame it. We don't need to frame it that way. We could frame it another way, which is like we start anew, which could be this radical reimagining and executing against that imagination of what quote unquote new is, hooking from one swell through the lull to the next as bridging a metaphor.

But are you more pessimistic or optimistic about the future? Yeah. I mean, I think it's... I always think like John Lennon, he said, I love humanity. It's just the fucking people I can't stand. And in some respects, there's an element of that, right? Like as far as optimism, pessimism. I am long-term, I think even beyond optimist, I subscribe as a conscious act of radical hope

to believe in the indefinite positive resolution and outcome that is worth us giving everything we've got on behalf of. You know, the Admiral Jim Stockdale, the Stockdale paradox, right? That Jim Collins popularized that idea that the POWs in Vietnam, the pessimists understandably didn't survive, but neither did the the optimists and it was the people who balanced ruthless assessment of current reality without ever letting go of commitment to the long term positive outcome and to me we're all we're all in Stockdale's paradox at this point because if we just do scroll it'll crush us right question is, is what does radical hope look like? How do we articulate it? How do we propagate it? Meaning if I've got some, you can have some of mine and there's more, right? And then how do we galvanize ourselves for anti-fragile worldviews that valorize us,

get us to do the things that's ours to do with courage, dignity, grace, joy, play, whatever we want to, you know, whatever positive attributes we want to harness, but can also survive first, second, and third contact with adverse conditions. Okay. So let me ask a cause-effect question before we get into maybe why this collapse that you are writing about and thinking about came to be. Is our current state of, let's just say the human experience right now, is it an effect of our inability to work from the inside out and to live vibrantly? And this is the downstream effect that we are chaotic beings internally, agitated, frustrated, anxious. And finally, it's kind of catching up. If you don't water your garden for a while, things kind of get to a weird spot.

And so the current condition is more of an effect now, or is there some other position that you're taking about why we are here? Well, gosh, I mean, I just had this hit last night. We were at the Alamo Draft House, which is kind of an Austin film iconic spot. And they were doing the premiere of a Nat Geo documentary called The Territory. And it's about this relatively uncontacted tribe in the Amazon whose territory has been shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and they're kind of dealing with the Bolsonaro era settlers. It's almost like the Afrikaans in Africa, right? It's kind of like this crazy, crazy world. And the film's pretty even handed in the sense that it shows the humanity and shows the complexity. And you just see those settlers coming in and just

hacking down the old growth forest and stripping it. And then it gets hot and then it gets dry. And then they overgraze it, but that their perceived path to success and got gearing into a market economy and becoming owners and take it from the indigenous because they don't quote unquote use it and you just it was just this kind of like encapsulation of the things that we've generated. And it was sort of so bafflingly overwhelming because you're like, there's no way out of this. Like the incentives and the structures and the contradictions and the paradoxes all just get us in this Chinese finger trap, you know, slash Gordian knot. Like where you're like, ah, how did we all get here? None of us want this outcome. And yet we're all hell-bent in either opposition or acquisition to help drive this fucking beast off a cliff. That's a more sinister,

maybe not. I do want to try to get this cause effect thing. Because if the cause is that we have not deeply worked as a set of beings for the last, let's just say the last thousand years, okay? And we haven't tripled down on what, it's interesting. It's just I pulled back for a minute. Many of the great world religions and the spiritual texts kind of were created around the same time. Of course, there's some outliers, but Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity certainly kind of emerged around the same time with plus or minus 500 years. And so let's say that stuff was available

if you want to come from a spiritual framework or the best practices of the Stoics or philosophical rigor to work from the inside out as well. Let's say whatever the on-ramp is, if the assumption that you're making is that we haven't, or the position you're taking is if we haven't invested from the inside out, this is the downstream effect. So the cause is we haven't organized our inner life. We don't know how to make contact with emotions, really. We don't know how to think well to add well-being to the global condition. And so of course, if we haven't done that, we're going to have a downstream effect that is disorganized, chaotic, aggressively lacking humanity. And colonialism would be

the downstream effect. Or is the position more akin to, now, it's not because we haven't. It's that there's just bad actors in the world, colonialism being one set of those bad actors. And bad actors just kind of run the show because this condition of hope is too weak. This condition of hope is outmatched by Darth Sith's, Darth Vader's kind of evil source of the power as opposed to the lighter condition. So I'm mixing metaphors, having a little fun in my own mind with doing it. But before we get into your big idea, can you just kind of hit into that cause effect narrative a bit? Yeah. So fundamentally, are we tainted? Are we carrying the burden of original sin in some shape or form? Is there something wrong or broken with us? Or are we decent

and redeemable? And are there just some bad actors that have made things much worse? Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, again, watching the inexorable logic of that rainforest struggle, I was like, wait a second. Clearly, there's an intelligence. It's almost like an egregore or an entity. There's a consciousness, which is sort of like Western market, private property.

There's just this cluster of memes that were kind of animating and driving the inevitabilities of what was happening in that rainforest situation. And I was like, oh, on the one hand, this is this brilliant, terrifying beast that coordinates activity, that mobilizes capital, that devotes like caloric burn to move matter around the earth in unprecedented scales. You're like, holy shit, that's a thing. And then I was like, like well what's its flaw and it just occurred to me i was like oh well it could just be that this relentless mathematics right this the calculus of let's just say modern market-based economy um is very effective at allocating capital and developing

innovation uh you know doing harnessing and coordinating activities, all these things, the things it's fucking terrible at, that if it had fixed would give us an entirely different world is that it neglects both spatial and temporal externality. So the spatial externality is it's two bucks at the gas pump, but we've overcooked the planet, or Exxon Valdez in marine areas or whatever. So the externalities for folks is just that it's not on the books of the counting or profitability, but it is a cost that should have been baked in to the sticker price and wasn't. And therefore, typically comes as extractive profiteering. So you're saying that that cost should actually be like $25 a gallon because of the tax that

is being paid by the planet. Yeah. I mean, I heard somebody just do some off the cuff calculations on how much should an iPhone cost. And it was anywhere from like 25,000 bucks up to, in a ramp as materials decrease up to a million bucks. It's a crazy resource intensive thing. You've got, you've got Nigerians and Legos tunneling under their kitchen floors and

hollowing out catacombs under the city, digging for cobalt by hand to then get shipped into Teslas and iPhones. Like the market for conflict minerals that support our tech is off the shots. So if you actually baked it in, we would never have one or you'd buy one in your entire life and you'd keep it daily. You wouldn't swap them out every 18 months for a new case. So the externalities, spatial externalities, there are other people around the world or other ecosystems or other just areas of value and concern that are getting dinged while pricing for incenting different behaviors is

completely unrepresentative and then the other and this goes to the the the clash last night with this indigenous tribe and the settlers is that um there's a there's an external externality temporally or through time because these folks are like this is we're the people this is our place we have been here for time immemorial and we are preserving and protecting this for our descendants for time immemorial and market incentives and modern rational egoic identity i am me i can be anything i want i'm not beholden to my town or my place or my grandparents or whatever i get to be me right we tend to highly favor optionality in the moment so it's the we fail the marshmallow test all day long right and so the idea

of what's most profitable now and never mind for whomever downstream and what is the maximum extractive value never mind externalities i feel like if we just included that in the calculus of our market-based system, we would end up with structurally different results. So I feel like our math is bad. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in.

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So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Just for fun, I was at a concert. It was like two weeks ago. Rage Against the Machine. And yeah, I don't know if you remember Rage Against the Machine. Yeah.

They came back for a tour. They're like back. And they're heavy. They're a big time inspirational band for me when growing up. And one of their positions, so, you know, if folks aren't familiar with that, like it's radical music, you know, like the title of their, you know, Rage Against the Machine and the machine is the political system. And the idea is he's got two really massive ideas. One is that people south of the equator, indigenous people south of the equator have been fucked. And he's got this and he's got this he's got this big you know huge board behind the band and it says colonialism equals

murder and then you know the question that's begging like okay you know United States is obviously a colonial society like Like it's, we use those fucking tactics. And is this, is our society built on murder? Which is a really heavy thought. And so I share, I start off by saying, I have a fun story. I'm talking about like, you know, are we living, you know, in a society built on murder?

But, okay. So that's not exactly where I thought I was going to go. So let's go back upstream to a framework that you're starting us with. Well, I mean, funnily enough, we can just pause on the rage story for a second because I was at an event and I was doing a panel discussion and it had Gabor Mate, the trauma specialist, and Wade Davis, the Harvard and Nat Geo anthropologist. And we were literally doing a question, the panel was Western civilization, what to kill, what to keep. Because that's been occurring to me, right? We're having movements on the far left and the far right, all saying burn it down. And then there is this little kind of body politic. And

it's like, well, should it all be burned down down is this rotten to the core or are there vital vital notions and ideals that have come out of let's just say the post-european enlightenment and the age of colonialism that was like like universal human rights no one ever said that non-believers and funny smelling looking people across the river deserve all the same amenities and gifts that we do. Never did anybody try that. So all humans, regardless of race, color, or creed, universal human rights and civil rights, radical, delicate notion, not encoded in any of our neurochemistry or biology or evolutionary adaptation. We are tribal, ethnocentric, like genetic propagation machines, right? So to say, you stranger on the other half of the world, I feel your pain and I stand up for your rights to humanity, that's rare and precious. And even some commitment to

the infinite game of, and this is a seemingly fancy word, but I'll use it because it explains a ton, which is, this is Jonathan Gray at London School of Economics term, but he calls agonistic liberalism is actually the thing we're shooting for. And agonistic just means like antagonistic. It means we're at each other's throats. But the infinite game is not to have my side prevail over your side. That's back to ethnocentric tribalism, right? The commitment to the infinite game is we're not going to see eye to eye. And we've got progressives and we've got radicals and we've got conservatives and and we should have for a healthy immune system and our job is to continue to hash it out on a fair field of play but you know within which we both agree to uphold the rules and the

spirit of the game like to me that's not sexy you don't get retweeted saying something like that but if there was something that we could all stand up and take a stand for. So for instance, like when the George Floyd riots happened, right? One of the things that concerned me the most was the preemptive and overwhelming quasi-military use of force by police departments on otherwise peaceful protesters of citizens. And you're like, holy shit, cannons and beanbags and tear gas. This got salty in a hurry. And it felt to me that you could have a universal rally, left and right, to say, hey, whoa, don't defund the police, but definitely demilitarize the police. But you're picking up on what humans do under duress and stress as we go to what we know. Shaquille O'Neal, just to have a fun example, three seconds left to go, he's not going to take an outside jumper, right?

He's going to put his back to the basket. He's going to plow himself down there. He's going to be three feet from the basket and put up a skyhook that you just can't block. That's what he's great at and he's built for it. And so it doesn't mean that you don't build other capabilities, but we go to what we know, what we trust. And oftentimes that means we go to our training. And oftentimes our training lacks the internal insight work to be able to work from compassion, joy, dignity, kindness, because that takes some serious work to do that with people that don't look like the people in your community or the tribe that you're less associated with, let alone internally on your own tribe. I mean, we've got 50% divorce rates. Even people we promise to, like we're going to stay with you forever, whatever that's

supposed to mean, that even those don't work out because the promises aren't backed by the internal work. And obviously I'm biased, right? The internal work is where I sit. And it scares me that writ large, we don't do the internal work. And we expect that we're going to be happy and healthy and wonderful, but we don't work from the inside out. So we resort to what what we know best and then we can only give what we have if we are of a military mind we are going

to give that if we are of an anxious mind we are going to give that too if we're of a frustrated internal being we're going to give that as well under duress so take us to like this collapse of meaning that's taking place this is your like when i've watched your work and i've loved it over the last i think it's been 15 maybe like when did we first meet 15 probably back around stratos i would think i think it was before that really yeah which yeah so stratos was 2012 i think it was before. I think it was before that. I think it was more like, I want to say like 2010, 2008. Yeah, nice. But yeah, so all that being said, so it's not 20 years.

It's somewhere in that range of 10 to 15. That I've watched your evolution. And I love how you think and the systems that you're working from. And this idea that like we're suffering from a collapse of meaning, your words. Let's start there. Let's start with that kind of why and what and where do we go from that place? Yeah. I mean, and funnily enough, that leads to the thing I wanted to share anyway, which would be my overarching theory is fundamentally what's the problem of evil and what is the case for radical hope, right? So the collapse in meaning is just, you know, I don't think that's news to anybody the moment you say it out loud. But it is to say, how did we used to make meaning and what's changed? And the simplest is just to chunk it into a notion of like, what was version one meaning or meaning 1.0, which was arguably organized religion and wisdom traditions. Like there weren't sort of none of the aboves. I don't go to church on Sundays.

You were either a member of the community and its religiosity and its priest class, rabbis, bishops, imams, or you were a heretic and wildly persecuted to straight up snuffed or run out of town. So just to say that if any human came into this world and said well who am i and what is this all about and what am i supposed to do and how do i deal with this human experience well meaning 1.0 but organized religion was the one which was our sole source then you get printing presses you get all the good things you get the scientific revolution you get the european enlightenment as well as a host of worldwide movements.

And then you kind of get this rise of basically modern scientific, quite often democratic market-driven nation states where five senses, I think, therefore I am, like materialism and some form of analytic truth versus received truth. So there's evidence and it's largely discernible within the five senses. And that makes true or false, good or bad. And the good or bad, as, you know, as Nietzsche said in that, thus spake Zarathustra, right? He says, you know, God is dead. Everybody, you know, re-quotes that bit, but they don't quote the rest of the paragraph where he says,

and be really careful when you kill your god's friends and neighbors because a whole bunch of that morality of you being better than selfish beasts right actually came with your deference to your deity and the morality baked into that religiosity and and service or subservience to a higher power and so be careful so meaning 2.0 that meaning 1.0 offered us salvation. Like if you believe you're saved, but it was at the cost of exclusion. If you don't believe you're kicked to the curb, right? That was the first one. So very, very insular and in-group, out-group and lots of religious wars, lots of suffering, lots of those things that came with that, downsides to the good

sides. And then meaning 2.0 offered inclusion everyone is entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness right um at the cost of salvation nietzsche's god is dead right and scientific materialism has risen in its place and so those for a long time like 20th century kind of propped up the world and you could float between them you could mix and match but like that was the larger dome where they could the big tent that we all lived under and then arguably in the last you know 10 to you know incrementally over time and then the last 10 years super duper accelerating because of kobe because of populist movements and upturned crazy elections and politics because of digital media amplifiers because of because of all the things we know? We had a collapse in both of those.

And when there was nowhere to turn for shared consensus about what it all means or what's going on, we've had the vacuum, right, is sucking people into fundamentalism and not just religious. It could also be traditional religious, but it could be I'm a fundamentalist paleo or a fundamentalist crypto or fundamentalist libertarian or a fundamental QAnon, right? Like there's a whole host of hermetically sealed, unquestionable belief systems, and that's fundamentalism. And then if you're too much of a loner or you're too cynical to be a joiner, right? Then you don't seek the ballast of fundamentalism. You get sucked to the other extreme and just straight up nihilism. None of this matters. Nothing I do can change any of it. And we're doomed seven ways to Sunday. Therefore, throw in addictions, pornography, video games, first person shooters, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, suicide. You have a whole host of symptomatic behavior that result from,

give me a better reason not to. I can't see it from here. So that's our meaning crisis. Yeah. That's the despair that's taking place as well. That nihilism is that people are like, what are we doing this for? There's a hopelessness that I feel for people. Death by despair is a thing and it's new to me in the last couple years yeah and so uh can you can you open up what that is maybe maybe some folks are not familiar with death by despair yeah so i mean there's there's a lot of different phrases there's that there's also diseases of despair which typically indicates anxiety depression addictive behaviors all the way across the continuum to taking one's own life and just the rise in those, not just in developing world or struggling countries, but also very much in first world countries, United States and other places, right? So that would be the kind of situation, meaning 1.0, the collapse of the church, the collapse

of its authority, the collapse of its trustability, but also the collapse in modern liberalism, right? If you think about the shade that has been thrown to or the lack of faith in national governments, NGOs, WHO, CDC, everybody's in the tank. Everybody's got compromised interest. None of this is believed. We're all getting fed a lot of rafter shit, right? So you're seeing that collapse. There's no Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather on the news. There's no singular authority in the fourth estate, AKA media, right? That's all become fragmented and then optimistic, you know, limbic capitalism, as our buddy Tristan Harris talks about, right? Designed to prompt, poke and enrage. And the race to the bottom is, you know, fundamentally money, sex, power, tribalism. That's the crack to the main veins.

And we now have algorithms and artificial intelligence putting more of those things in front of us. So yeah, once again, we're in a tight spot. But the question then is, okay, we need meaning. I mean, my working definition, I'd love to run this past you, of trauma or PTSD. Like, yeah, let's just say persistent trauma, right? Is that it is a combination of the neurophysiological register of an adverse life event, AKA the hit, the scar tissue, the actual live trauma, plus and crucially plus a collapse in explanatory narrative. Like that thing didn't just hurt me, broke my story and because it broke my story i am forever in this recursive loop of reanimating the trauma so like an example would be like two buddies in the marines in fallujah and one's got a brand new baby girl and he's got three days left

on his tour and then he's going home versus a caddish single womanizing, let's say cokehead, let's really characterize it. And the two of them are on their final patrol and the new dad gets clipped with the IED and it's smoked. And the dickhead guy who knows he's a dickhead, who has tons of self-loathing is it you know ends up with with you know tbi a brain injury right and it's why him not me i should have been the one that was taken that day right or anybody you know a young girl or now a woman processing childhood sexual abuse how was it that the grown ups in that house who were supposed to be looking after me and keeping me safe didn't keep me safe. There's a violation of a norm and a narrative coherence. So if you take a hit, but you know why, and you did it willingly, and you

understood it all, that doesn't corrupt the story. So in any event, the point being is that all of us are suffering micro PTSD all the time these days. So the accrual of small events over time that don't get metabolized and end up in a disequilibrium state and then also macro PTSD the actual big hits we've all taken and our narrative of like we're America progress is happening we're on this endless hockey stick to more people with more Ted Talks all being you know groovy together around the world United Colors of Benetton right we've got a black president right Like all that just got shot to smithereens. And our narrative collapse, I think, is actually one of the biggest mental health issues and even geopolitical issues that we could face. Because we have to have a story that not only reconciles and integrates

our lived experience of what the fuck is going on and why is it so wiggy, but also galvanizes us for much stranger, potentially more challenging situations in the decades to come. And if we just have Pollyanna-ish just those stories, like the secret manifestation, you can bring anything you want in your vortex of desire. Hashtag Lambo, hashtag best life, right? Like that is not going to survive for more than another 18 to 36 months. So we need better stories, is I think fundamentally my inquiry these days. Meaning 3.0. Yeah, meaning 3.0. So it's the PTSD bit about the two sub-components of it. There's a little bit of a lightning bolt for me is that I think you're right in the way that you've captorized it. There's a piece that's missing for me, which is PTSD is really about a fundamental organization of life to avoid being re-traumatized. And so the thing happens,

and it's not going to be, I want to be very sensitive how I say this, because I have family members that I'm speaking to right now. It's not the event that caused PTSD. It's the way that that event was experienced. So nothing outside of you can change you, but sometimes they do.

So ultimately, our power comes from the way we think, the way we feel, the way we conceptualize, the way we embody an experience, and that comes from how well conditioned we are to be able to make sense of an experience that we're having. And if it fractures us, which is, I think that's the word you use, but it, or close to it, it's a good capture of how, why it's so traumatic, but it's not the X, it's not the thing. It's the way that we metabolize that thing. And then we

fundamentally, because the story that we've told ourselves, right, to your point, it has fundamentally altered. Then what we end up doing is reorganizing our life so that thing doesn't happen again. And so I just wanted to add that context to those two bits to the context to it. No, I was just going to say the two things that come up is Rick Doblin at Maps and Chris Ardris at Harvard Business School, right? Like, I don't know if you ever came across Ardris' ladder of inference, but he's like the reality, right? And then from the reality, you select events, you make decisions, and then it becomes this self-reinforcing loop of what I think was happening, that tiny sliver of reality I've focused on and animated, right. With a story

and interpretation then becomes a self-reinforcing loop. And that sounds very much like your description of somebody bending and shaping my life based on a, you know, a very high impact, high salience chunk of reality, the traumatic event, so fight, flight, survival system. And then what the hell does it mean? And how do I avoid it at all costs in an ever vigilant, fearful future? If I bridge a couple of things together, you're saying, listen, we're in a crisis of meaning. There's been a collapse as you've recognized. The places and the structures that we went to are no longer holding up. And then I just want to double click on that is why did they fall?

What is it about those structures that we are seeing underfoot a restriction of their power, their service? Their structure. Do you mean kind of like our civilization culture writ large? Yeah. Well, what I was thinking was the decrease in attendance in religion more specifically. Oh, well, okay. So specifically drop-offs in religiosity have been happening across most mainstream, right?

This is a Pew Research Foundation kind of findings, but almost all mainline religions, kind of orthodox, bureaucratic, scaled, and generally speaking, weak sauce when it comes to ecstatic sacraments, right? You're sort of like, it's smells and bells and kneel and sing and do your thing and check the box. Like those ones are tanking. No one wants anything to do with that anymore, except blue haired old church ladies, right? And they're dying. Smells and bells and kneels and what? I don't remember. anymore except blue-haired old church ladies right and they're dying oh my god smells and

bells and kneels and what i don't remember but i that's 10 years of catholics forced forced catholic school talking um but but you know you you've got a complete drop-off precipitous in that non-denominational evangelical and pentecostal churches worldwide like so the ones like praise the lord and pass the snakes like let's get the holy ghost feeling on so much more experiential much more immediate those things are still going gangbusters oh they are so that okay but the actual net result big numbers is there's there is there is the largest you know for the first time in you know the last five years i think um the none of the aboves i'm spiritual but not religious. I'm atheistic. I'm agnostic. Whatever it is, I'm not signed up for somebody's roster. That was now the both largest

for the first time ever, ever in history, which is just something to note. And never in history have there been more people in a community not believing than believing, but it's also the fastest growing. So that's a fascinating dynamic. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits,

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This is the condition that has created a vacuum for, this is your insight, for conspiracy, for charismatic leaders that maybe are bad actors. You know, like, and I'm not sure I can, I'm not saying that all people that are trying to fill this void are bad actors, but certainly we're seeing some kooky stuff be popularized that is meeting, you popular culture so can you elaborate on that point a little bit because your your your solution is so counterintuitive to me you know but um about oh interesting yeah i'm gonna hear more about that um yeah so a couple of things you brought up bad actors more than once right and i think there's there's two really, really helpful frames for folks to wrap their heads around

when we see what seems like just all this mustache-twizzling nefarious activity. And you're like, are we awful fuckers? Or is there a little subset, Illuminati click, that those are the really awful fuckers? But either way, there's a lot of awful shit happening. So somebody's to blame, right? And the first is just kind of game theory 101. Like what do humans do in situations and how do they optimize, you know, benefit and minimize harm for whatever set they're solving for? So as far as the notion of are there bad actors or why are there so many bad actors or is that a sign of our, you know, root rottenness or are they outliers right um one frame that's really helpful is is game theory and

specifically the idea within game theory of what's known as the multi-polar trap and the poles are just different people or different actors and the idea is fundamentally if there's a near certain chance that somebody is going to eat the last slice of cake so somebody's going to do it right that's almost certain so it might as well be me because if I'm generous, altruistic, whatever it would be, and then somebody is going to eat this, some fucker is going to come in and eat the plate. I should have, right? Or my country should take that deep sea fishing, or we should drill, or we should land on the moon first or whatever.

If somebody is going to do it, and this is much of the rationalization for AI acceleration, somebody, China is going to do it. And this is much of the rationalization for AI acceleration. China's going to do it. If we don't do it, the good old US of A Fortune 100 company doesn't do it, then the commies are going to do it. So we get to, right? You can't falsify the logic. So there's a sense of what's really key here. If someone's going to chop down that last old growth redwood and sell it for a million bucks a board foot right then we might we might as well and so what's the key insight there is that you can have sociopathic behavior

with no sociopaths you actually just have to have reasonable actors with a with a certainty that somebody statistically speaking is going to do the shitty thing. So it might as well be me. So you could have a 12 angry men, right? You could have a jury of 12 all looking at each other, and they're all actually decent, upstanding folks, more or less. But they're absolutely convinced that someone else in that room isn't. And then on behalf of stakeholders and on behalf of shareholder responsibility, on behalf of family protection and on behalf of affirming national or tribal identities, I'll do the thing thing so that's the key thing you can have so persistent sociopathic behavior with no sociopaths and for anybody that ever read slate star codex and that

famous blog post that that he wrote which was meditations on malik and he you know used that term from ginsburg and from the old testament ofch, this kind of dark force. And it wasn't just capitalism. And he just lays out very simplistic game theory. But any country is maximally incentive to sign on to a climate pact to encourage all their competing countries to actually limit their carbon output and then cheat. That's the actually most game game, theoretically optimized moves. And which is exactly what we see with Paris Accords and IPCC and COP26 ad infinitum, right? Everybody's stutter stepping and stalling. No one wants to jump in if the big dogs jump, don't jump in. And then pretty much everybody has misreported all of their comment to date. And everybody's, you know, and those satellite maps of like pollution and methane and, you know, all these different gases are still popping off all over the place by people who swore they'd never do it again. So that meditations on Moloch is another descriptor where you're like, oh man, this is the game theoretics of this thing. And it doesn't require actual sociopaths. But now let's talk about the actual sociopaths,

because there was a study that I've mentioned in Recapture the Rapture by an Australian university studying alt-right and far-left. So think sort of Antifa versus Charlottesville March or something, right? Or neo-Nazis actually they studied. And they did a battery. So they had three populations. They had those two and then they had some sort of centrist progressives and kind of swing voter independent kind of folks. And assess the battery on the dark triad personality. So narcissism, Machiavellianism and sociopathy, and then also authoritarianism.

So those were the four that they assessed. And the progressives, the independent sort of free thinking, like live and let live. I have my opinions, but other people can and should be entitled to theirs. Those folks barely registered on all four, but both the far left and the alt-right were off the charts. So what is interesting there on dark triad and authoritarianism, you're like, wait, that's bizarre because sometimes these are noble things. You think of the French revolution, right? Israeli in cry was liberty, fraternity, and equality. Pretty groovy, right? And then you get the original movement. You get Danton and these others guillotined and chopped by Robespierre. And Robespierre flanks them to the left and then mows their heads off in the reign of terror. 40,000 people beheaded in like six months. Pol Pot,

Cambodia. I mean, communism is in theory, pretty groovy sounding. You get Che Guevara and Pol Pot, right? So the idea here is to note that even otherwise positive and aspirational pro-social humanist movements in language, like take the social justice movement, right? It's unimpeachable what they're asking for, which is dignity, care, and concern for all people, regardless of race, color, or creed. It's a timeless one. Now, emphasis, current dialogues, those things become problematic, but you also have seen how several of those movements have been cannibalized and collapsed from within over bare knuckles, power struggles to money power platform you know and varying

corrupting influences and you see that consistently so to know a multipolar traps you can get sociopathic behavior without the sociopaths and lord acton 101 right you know absolute power corrupts absolutely but then he says the next, great men are almost always bad men. So you're like, okay, that's interesting. So now you have both the tendency to see these kind of behaviors just because of our game theoretic dynamics. So we're racing to the bottom just because of gravity. And then you have the folks that rarely start those movements. They wouldn't have coined those positive terms. It's almost like Pepsi buying up a boutique tea brand because they couldn't have

figured out how to get a cult following and have a cool, groovy brand, but they can see it and they can acquire it. Then you get the dark triad folks who are like, oh, these folks have a little bit of a signal. These folks have something compelling. I'm going to sidle in, elbow out, reshuffle the deck, and then claim it for a new platform, which is spewing hate, which is spewing division, which is often antithetical to the espoused values, but their genius is at masking the aggression within noble humanistic terminology. It's a scary... I mean, the scary thought for me is the masking of aggression

that you just slid in there at the end, right? Which is the wolves in sheep clothing. Some of the most dangerous people are the ones that you don't really know, you know? And this is one of the reasons why nihilism and having faith in something is the key mover there is trust. So faith is like, I'm not sure how, I think there's something here, you know, like I need to have faith in something, but if I don't have trust, I can't really express faith writ large. And trust, once you burn trust, it takes a long time. Oh, well, you'll appreciate this. This was my college roommate's grandpa. And he was the advisor to presidents and he was also the chaplain at Stanford.

And his name was Elton Trueblood. And he said, faith then is not belief without proof, but rather trust without reservation. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. So, which is, it's built on a psychological principle, you know, of trust. And unfortunately, trust is baked for most people by the age of two. How about that? Pre-verbal. Is it really? Yeah. So all the, all the caretaker stuff that takes, you know, that we experience,

we're forming like, is the world safe or not? We can't put three words together yet, but we're sorting out like, okay, caretaker's there for me when I cry. Caretaker's there for me when I'm wet. Caretaker's there for me when I'm hungry. But you know what? I think I can trust that this world is actually okay. And these people that are providing for me, this feels pretty damn good. So the threshold for trust is elevated. But if you don't have that at the age of zero to two, and then you get a couple unfortunate set of circumstances that take place, and then all of a sudden trust has eroded writ large, it's a problem. And then you get someone to break your heart or steal some money or

you know, steal your watch or whatever it might be, that it becomes problematic. So we do have a fundamental issue for people's ability to trust, let alone trust self. So this is where we always start, Jamie, is that we're trying to help people trust self, not trust others. If you can trust yourself, yeah, you can go into any environment and be yourself if you're not a trust yourself. And so you might be open to... Yeah, yeah, you can go into any environment and be yourself if you're not a trust yourself. And so you might be open to, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Well, just to tie off potentially malevolent baddies, right? And how do we distinguish and how they're on the rise these days? And especially with disintermediate gatekeepers, I can just start a Twitter following or a TikTok following and I've got my fleasible um, is just to remember that like, so, so game theory rushed to the bottom, like the multipolar tribes, dark triads are attracted to leadership in both far left and far right. Um, and then, you know, and Charles Manson was right 90% of the time, you know? And so like, right. It's like, if you haven't seen it it's worth the watch it it was nominated i think for uh an oscar in like 1973 and it's an original footage documentary not

like those after-school specials with like play actors and shit like that it's actual manson family up in topanga canyon doing their groovy thing and it's and and it is chilling and actually i had this wild professor in college that had us watch that for a terrorism class. We watched that and Brando's scene cuts up the river in Apocalypse. Now he talks about hacking off the kids' arms for vaccines and how they knew they'd never beat the Viet Cong. He showed those two things. We're like, what? What are you doing?

But the thing that blew me away was that the Manson family's worldview, you can go line by line. They're like, hey, you grew up in the Eisenhower fifties, you're conformist and repressed and you need to free yourself. Okay, great. Check. Hey, your sexual identities and personas again are fifties Eisenhower. You need to break out of those and you need to go against your grain and you need to confront your fears and taboos. Okay, cool. Right? Like, hey, weed and free love and psychedelics are great and a natural expression of, okay, yeah, I'm along for the ride at this point. I'm hanging out naked by a waterfall. Why not? And then, hey, life is death and death is life. You're like, okay, I think I remember reading that in the Vedanta stuff. That's pretty Hindu, but I'm down with it right now. Yeah,

it's all one big circle of life. Got it. So let's go kill the pigs. Right? And since death is life and life is death, right? We're just setting them free to another place. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, slow the fucking tape. And so what we're seeing with demagogues, what we're seeing with these dark triad folks these days is that everybody is getting so swept up and enamored with their skillful diagnosis of the problem that we go gallivanting across the finish line in sight to their prescription. What ought we now do so if you think about like 2016 uh political stuff like bernie's diagnosis of what was wrong was america and trump's we're almost identical they're like our working class has lost its dignity our middle class has been hollowed out we're getting a raw deal with all these global trade things we need to bring

back investment dignity and sustainability to the american people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then, right, total fork in the road as to what each of them would prescribe. But the truthiness, right, the visceral resonance and alignment, this goes back to your work in trusting yourself, right? The truthiness is damn near overwhelming, but you've just got to remember that it's in that final closing 10 meters or 10% of the race that you've got to be absolutely rigorous in assessing, are these still pro-social outcomes or intentions? Are we matching the lip service and the slogans? Is there collateral damage? Has there been a warping or a misaligning? And that can only come from checking against your own internal register which i think you're doing such beautiful work helping people develop and live from oh thank

you brother you know so we're while we're hitting on the dark triad you know scott barry kaufman introduced the light triad which is yes um yeah which is pretty fun right which is like treat people as an ends in of themselves. They matter because they have inherent value, you know? And then, you know, there's the dignity. This is the second. So it's Kantianism, humanism, and then what was the third one? Faith in humanity. And so Kantianism is people are in themselves. They're not a means to an end. And humanism is basically like we have dignity and value, like each individual has inherent worth. And then third is faith in humanity, like this idea that it's going to work out a fundamental,

you know, there's a fundamental goodness in humans. And if we can do the inside out work and set the conditions for people to flourish, it can happen. And so the dark triad is scary because you see it and it's like, oh shit. And then when I even say out loud the light triad, it doesn't feel like that can combat the dark triad, the Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader type of battle. So I don't know why I have that response. I want to believe that, but the cunningness that you alluded to earlier is so dangerous and so sneaky and so difficult to deal with. Well, here's the thing. This gets us into the space for radical hope, or what we would say is leaving space for grace. Yeah. That's you know um is leaving space for grace yeah that's right

because you're leaving space for grace leaving space for grace which is which is novelty which is emergence which is serendipity which is which is delayed or deferred luck or or totally you know plannable consequence of yakim but there's there's things we can't see from here and if we give up the faith right then they cannot happen so we have to keep the faith in case they might. It's a little like Linus in the pumpkin patch, right? We got to keep, I meant when the great pumpkin comes, not if, right? You can't give up the faith or you're fucked, right? So we have to keep, we have to keep showing up in the pumpkin patch, right?

For the great pumpkin to ever come and what that might look like right and we're constantly we're you know history is littered and shaped by those anomalous events you know like if you think about what anybody in January have called I mean I was just with um Admiral McRaven less than a week before the Ukraine invasion smart smart, switched on guy, right? Led the bin Laden raid, head of JSOC, all the things, incredibly smart dude. And he was like, yeah, I don't think Putin's going to do it. And who would have called that? Not even the people in the knowest of the know.

And then who would have predicted that three weeks later, Zelensky, a standup comic would say, I don't need a ride with some social media savvy. Yeah, totally. Yeah, right. Said, I don't need a ride. I need bullets. And there was this soul force moment and every single Western politician who would have been ducking and jiving and trying to get out of this and just let realpolitik grind its way

forward was suddenly called on the carpet to some higher notion and who would have called that right who would have predicted right yeah in tiananmen square who would have predicted right so so that right so space for grace is both a it's a choice right it's literally i choose to believe this but it is also i think you know a neuro physiological set point that we can condition in ourselves, right? So if I am stressed, if I am distracted, if I'm living in a painful past or a fearful future, and I'm not in my actual present embodied metabolic, but also sovereign self, then I don't have access to any of those things, right? The present is the only place that our prefrontal cortexes and our thumbs are co-located, right?

So if I'm distracted into the past or the future, I'm in my daydreaming prefrontal cortical self, but I got no thumbs. I can't do shit in the past or the future from here. What is your practice for you to be that way more often? Well, I mean, some balance of physical practices, and that's everything from, you know, biking to back country skiing to stand up paddling to kiting and surfing to whatever, but basically gravity sports for me are a really wonderful center and a discharger of physical energy. Right. So I just get my out as I know you do. Right. And it just simply feels better. Plus, plus nature, right? I mean, I don't, i'm not a triathlete

i don't road ride you know my goal is always connection with trees forests mountains rivers oceans so that's huge um i would say periodic um you know fundamentally ecstatic cathartic release aka kick-ass concerts and shows uh events like burning man you know adventure trips things that really hit the high water mark of peak state information inspiration and then also some form of bodily emotional relational healing and mending integration those things forever drive me forwards um seeking basically seeking novelty and making art, right? Like having new experiences that just fire the synapses and reaffirm our aliveness. And that could be travel.

That could be progressing and learning in a relationship. That could be a thousand things, challenges, opportunities, but just novelty. If my life is the same old, same old hamster wheel, I feel like I'm dying. And the other is make up, right? Like, can I rally against the second law of thermodynamics, you know, that everything ends in entropy and decay. And can I just make anything a little more good, a little more true, or a little more beautiful, simply as a testament to the human spirit, my existence and anybody else who may, you know, experience it. And then the final one is help out, right? Because if I've cracked one or both of those first two,

I'm good at keeping my life fresh and generative and growth oriented. And I am making testaments and it doesn't have to be paintings. It could be a garden. It could be a poem. It could be an old house renovation. It doesn't, anything that is just organizing matter and or mind into

greater coherence good true and the beautiful and and then the helping out is everything from helper's high to any form of karma or saver yoga just fucking every single religion right was not about your own prosperity or redemption it was about you're one of us now jump in and help out and so you know and then all the work all the work on altruism and helper's highs and those kinds of things. If you really were a self-absorbed narcissist, just trying to perfect your own self on endless personal growth workshops and retreats, the missing link, that final bit you're forever seeking isn't coming from seeking more of your own personal fulfillment. It's coming from plugging in and really getting grounded in service and reciprocity. So it's a

win-win-win, however we'd want to say it. But I would say cycling between healing, inspiration, and connection, that kind of flywheel. And then for me, and those three things, the seeking novelty, making art, and helping out, that literally was my lifeline through some of the darkest days of the last three, four years of my life, where having my sort of day job slash irrevocable habit is to peer over the screaming abyss. I'm always curious as to what is beyond the beyond and how far down does it go, which can be quite harrowing at times. And it can leave you without a lot of the comforting handholds of polite society explanations and stories so there would be times i'd be flat on my back being like what's the point this absolutely feels like sisyphus this feels like human nature is locked it feels

like we've got so much inertia and i just give up i can't get i can't get out of bed to face this because all my stories are in tatters. And that seek novelty, that's always my first challenge. If I'm really willing to sort of slip my wrist territory, you're like, oh, how novel has my life been lately? And almost certainly there's been an absolute tanking. I've been stuck, injured, stuck at home, busy. I mean, quarantine, all the things that have happened to all of us also. And you're like, oh, my novelty tank is way, way, I mean, quarantine, all the things that have happened to all of us also. And you're like, oh, my novelty tank is way, way, way low. And just to ground this, you know, Robert Sapolsky's work at Stanford and all of his stuff on the dopaminergic system, et cetera.

A lot of people think it's just pleasure, but it's actually salience. We're constantly seeking two things actually. Salience, can this help me or hurt me? And then also novelty. And the novelty, he calls the magic a maybe, but we are, as hunter-gatherers are on up, we're quadruply rewarded for seeking not just the good thing, but the new good thing. So it is at a very deep level of our seeking-searching system, kind of our default mode

network reality scanning and strategizing network right all the way up to executive functional stuff but like a lot of our horsepower upstairs is fronted on scanning and seeking the new and when there isn't any we become disincented and or static to say nothing of the bob dylan he not busy being born is busy dying right that just kind of covers it right so go out and do some new and then the make art is quite often right i mean there's so much um in fact kevin kelly you know kevin kelly the founder of wired magazine and the noted futurist he has a super beautiful quote which i i kind of feel like has just summed it all up for me because like as we're all doom scrolling and as we get overwhelmed you know by all the graphs showing all the things and kind of the endless

feeds of stuff right now um he said it's much easier to um imagine the devil than god why because because all things end in decay right everything? Everything unwinds. This is a certainty. So pointing out more of it, he goes, that's the easy part. He goes, but, right? Everything good, true and beautiful, right? Everything awesome in the universe from flowers to galaxies to you and me is actually highly, highly unusual

held up against everything ends in decay. So you and I are highly unlikely, right? So we need to actually get much, much better at believing in the improbable, right? And to me, that is such a, it's a nice balance. And I think it's not Dan Gilbert, because Dan's at Harvard. It's the Ron, what's his bucket he did? The Buddha's brain. I think he's at Cal. It'll come to me in a sec. But he basically said, negative experiences are like Velcro and positive experiences are like Teflon. Rick Hansen. But in any event, that's us on a

little cognitive behavioral therapy, one on one answer, Velcro and Teflon. But then on the big picture, the actual laws of the universe, we're looking at some of those things and we actually have to, and again, this goes back to the article of faith, right? We have to actually choose to believe in and animate and protect and validate, right? The improbable. It's very cool. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that.

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better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash findingmastery and use the code findingmastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash findingmastery. Can you help summarize?

Can you help kind of pull some stuff together of what we've been wrestling down with? Kind of a bit of a narrative to some clarity. And then if possible. And then the other is, I do want to know what's next for you. What you're working on now that is intriguing. So take it where you will. Yeah. Well, I mean, just to sum up, right? Because we did kind of bounce around and we sort of got into certain topics and then kind of detoured into others. But hopefully the tapestry is as Wendell Berry encourages us, he says, be joyful though you've considered all the facts. And to me, it's another dialectic, it's's another paradox just like the stockdale paradox is one and i find that's where most juice is because they're never certain you just try them on for size with your current lived experience and be like oh that's the prism like now i get the shot so the

key here is is how do we set aside childish things and have a clear-eyed assessment of current realities you know and possible outcomes and our possible places in this historic moment? And then how do we use basically personal practices, body-brain practices, physiology, what would often be called optimal psych plus biohacking? How do we do those practices? Not as ends to themselves, but in service of us as responsible stewards and leaders in a given moment. Because the bottom line is if you're listening to this and we're recording this and you're hanging out, we're already 1.01 percenters of humanity ever. And this responsibility is ours. And if I can look after myself, be centered, grounded, energized, vitalized enough, then I have energy left over to care for kith and kin,

my primary partners in relationships, children, elders, these kinds of things. And then our unit is thriving. And that's biological. So we can't fudge that or skip it other than at cost. So let's honor it. And then if my family is thriving, can I participate and lead my community? Can I go beyond leading my community into taking a role of responsibility in my country or the world?

And that's a sliding scale based on how we feel in a given moment, right? What is our resource? How resourced are we? You can hit me on the head with the hammer. I'm back to me now, right? You put me on a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. I'm like, everyone, everywhere, everyone, right? And we can play with our resourcefulness

and understand it's a sliding scale and we will get hit. And we can also play with our expanding sphere of concern to be a greater service to the greatest number. So that would be it. Bad ass. Great clarity. And then, so what is next? Well, what's next is trying to articulate meaning 3.0.

So we're doing a couple of things, right? One is exploring fundamentally what is a postmodern theatrical mega church so what would religion 3.0 look like on broadway so take hillsong church take joel osteen right all those folks are using they're poaching like mad things from like edm festival culture they've got smoke machines and cannons and jumbotrons and lasers and if you see any of those services they're indistinguishable from a diplo show right but right there they're indistinguishable from a Diplo show. Right. But right there, they're peddling really old school, outdated scripture. The orthodoxies are still completely unreconstructed pre-Vatican, you know, like gays go to hell kind of stuff.

And you're like, whoa, what people are coming for the Jesus rock. Right. They're staying for the fundamentalist vitriol. Right. They're staying for the fundamentalist vitriol. And so the question there would be, what does it look like to really blow the lid off trickster postmodern mythopoetics? So why should QAnon have all the fun? You're not going to defeat movements like QAnon with a better Wikipedia page or PolitiFact. It's taking place at the level of grand narrative, of mythopoetics, of stories, and it has darkness and light and it has all these things. So surely folks with some creativity and some inclusivity and some sense of play and fun could, and that's

just a giant ass space in the memetic market that I think is entirely unclaimed. And in general, left and the progressives have fundamentally lost their sense of humor back in the 60s and 70s they were doing like street guerrilla theater and all kinds of things and all the zines and all the stuff right like it was high high trickster quotient and now everyone is so self-serious it's insufferable so injecting some fun and and sacramental religiosity into post-modern experience. To me, that is a canvas for the rest of our career, I would say. So this is where I had hinted at it earlier. Oh, I said your solution is interesting to me. Almost counterintuitive, I said. I think I said

counterintuitive. But from going from traditional cults to culty cults to ethical cults, because I think that's what you're describing, right? Is how do we create an ethical cult, which is a community of people that are worshiping, you know, a set of, not a person, you know, but like, I don't know. I would say a set of basically an agnostic Gnosticism, which means the Gnosticism is, hey, here are the protocols for ecstatic cathartic communitas. Here's how you do it. Here's the neurophysiology. Here's the different interventions and here's why they work. Here's their empirical reasons for being. Now, go conduct that experiment.

You knock your socks off. Now, once your socks are knocked off, what'd you see? What'd you think? What'd you conclude? And then that's your N equals one data set. So religions have always been mythological explanatory. Any psychotechnologies they had were buried and cloaked in a whole bunch of misdirection, secrets within secrets, and lack of functionality and drop off over generational transfer. So they lost any mojo they might've originally had, even if, right? And then they go back and decode it as a fucking nightmare. So versus that, which is story first, content meaning, we're going to tell you what it means

and whether or not you get to go see for yourself, like the early prophets and messiahs of your TBD, we don't even really care. And in fact, we might even actively discourage it. So you don't get to go back and check the math. Versus you give people upfront protocols, neurophysiological protocols to generate the high inspiration state, mystical state, whatever you're shooting for and wherever the people land, then they have their own lived experience. is you know et cetera et cetera but that is go see for yourself and now religiosity has become deeply personal experimental and experiential which goes back to how do we honor everybody's diversity these days not have some tops down you know priest class but on the other hand we have we have the neuroscientific and psychological insights and understandings to be able to put people in those zones of epiphanic revelation themselves, which is profoundly democratizing. And I think part of your challenge will be because you are charismatically intelligent, broad thinking, is for you not to get caught in building an ethical cult, but actually turning into a culty cult.

Here's the thing, dude, that was one of the final nuts to crack, right? Completely. Because if you become by default, the hierophant or like the minister of the sacred, I mean, and I wrote about this with that Lisa Feldman Barrett stuff about the fear, fear, follow, fuck, fight, right? That the interceptive responses to a switched on person. Let's just, because I mean, Weber did it. He did, he talked about charismatic, legalistic, and some other form of authority, right? So if you're talking about charismatic authority, you are actually providing an initiatory peak state experience to a group of humans. They will imprint on you like little ducklings, right? Because you're like, are you my mother?

You know, like you must be the thing. And there's all sorts of psychosocial dynamics that happen. And it's sort of, for a long time, I thought that was dysfunctional culty cult leaders getting it wrong, right? But then I realized, oh no, this shit is a feature, not a bug. This is what happens when you connect a bunch of monkeys in the circuit, right? So it's a feature. It's structural. It happens every goddamn time.

So our potential solution, and this is why I was hinting at the Broadway, like, you know, almost archetypal theatrical element, is that you do not put somebody up there and think they can grab the ring. Grabbing the ring corrupts everyone. So the only thing you can do is actually you buffer and cloak the role of officiant or hierophant, right, in role, in costume, in structure. So for instance, like nobody goes home fanboying or stalking the ringmaster for Cirque du Soleil. They understand you put on a top hat and you've got a bullwhip and you've got those fancy tails, you're doing the ringmaster thing, right?

And you could do the same with the folks up front, the sages on the stage. And ideally you would have a man and a woman, potentially all the way up to the stage. And ideally, you would have a man and a woman, potentially all the way up to in mask or in costume, doesn't have to be, but either way they conduct. And then as a member of basically the delivery team, whatever you'd want to call that, you treat people who've been on stage up front, receiving that sort of Robert Johnson, Jungian golden shadow of projected greatness, right? You treat them like you've got Geiger counters out.

And you're like, oh, you've been exposed to a bunch of radiation. You're a little too high on your own supply. So thank you. That was an awesome job. High fives. Now go back and peel potatoes. You're on kitchen duty, right? And an explicit non-hierarchical rotation among roles in that community dynamic and a ritualization of the

folks up front so that it is not personality based. The mask idea is pretty interesting because that's where the ethical cult turns into culty cult. Look at me, even though I want you to, I'm saying, I'm looking, I'm asking you to look over there or look within but please keep looking at me that that would be um it's a super interesting idea uh what's your take on the metaverse and on not sounds too broad no i i can riff on that um i actually there was a fellow who did a podcast i think he's had a kawaii and he had an interesting take um which was that the metaverse is effectively launching unprecedented numbers of people into the liminal realms and that the liminal realms aka neither here nor there the spaces in between the kind of realm of imagination

and and whatever you know magic serendipity play exploration um that only used to come via hard work and effort, drumming, chanting, fasting, plant medicines. There was some trial, sleeplessness, all the things. You had to work your way to get to those zones or spaces. And so his take was we're now taking people there without the initiatory price. They're sort of cutting the line and sneaking in and then also without the you know back to recurring themes without the um burden of community reciprocity like i am going into those realms and think to learn to men to heal to gain insights for the people, not just for me. And so the metaverse undoes those two tethers. I'm going in there for me, and I didn't have to earn it or qualify in any way. So what that then becomes, just purely on that level, that's more of sort of like cultural anthropological

lenses, all sorts of other takes on Web3. But I would just say at the level of meaning, at the level where we've been discussing, it has the potentials i think to probably be imbalanced nutrition for deeply essential needs and yearnings oh that's a cool way to think about it balance nutrition okay what are you interested what's keeping your attention for next? Well, the thing, I mean, fundamentally, I didn't realize this until I started writing more of it, but my next book will almost certainly be called The Story of How We Begin to Remember. And it's going to be a crack at what I just signposted to in Recapture the Rapture, which was meaning 3.0. So what might

that look like? What's a decentralized, almost blockchain version of consciousness and culture, and how does everybody build their own? And for me, I feel like we are in need of a unifying big history story of where do we come from, what's going on, and what do we do now? And for me, some of this was almost like conversations in my head to my son, because he's been following all these things. He gets exposed to a number of our friends and colleagues, like the whole existential risk space and these other things has been in his world since high school. And it's been hard sometimes. So I'm always thinking i have to come up with a place of hope i have to see a way through it because i have to be able to come

back and tell him there's a reason to keep on keeping on right and to try and so for me the first big pain point is how the hell did we get so screwed up like how are we at this place where we've overcooked on so many levels and why and there's seeming such greed and distraction and superficiality and inhumanity and all these things right and to me that's why this like so this book was fundamentally a sense of you know how do you solve for the problem of evil and and how do we explain bad things happening in an otherwise good world and what i realized is that in recapture Rapture, I took really a whole chapter to, I called it evolution is amoral, like without morality. And it was fundamentally a discussion

of evolutionary sexual behavior and just how incented we are for so many things that actually harm us from rape and incest and infidelity to this wide range of things, right? And the case I was making, and it was buttressed by Jared Diamond and Jeff Miller and a lot of other anthropologists and thinkers was just that evolution does not care for our promises or our predilections or our romances or our feelings. It only wants the most robust gene pool possible. And that is the overarching incentive. We can steer against it, but it's a massive gravitational pull. And most of us ended up in that ditch over time, over repeat decisions and actions. And it was just that sense of like, oh my gosh, you can make a case that our sexuality

and our lack of control of it or other people's attempt to control ours, all end up bundled into well over half of the world's trauma war suffering conflict um and even excess you're like holy so how do we reclaim that and how do we learn to use those evolutionary impulses in a judo way right to then actually enhance our own expansion flourishing growth and development so that was i realized a subset example of actually a bigger question which is what is the purpose or role of consciousness on this earth and maybe even beyond it and can we live into a story that is more durable than the collapse of our own civilization right because that's to me is what i'm i'm not banking on it i'm not reading for it i don't

think that it's it's it's it's majority odds but i would say it's non-zero over the centuries to come um and what would a story be that still gives us radical hope that still accesses courage that still accesses belief in doing things on our generations next and it was really the sense of well okay what is the evolution of consciousness and And one of our, you know, how do we get to now? And is there a point, right? Because basically, there's either cyclical history, this is just a forever meat grinder of new things getting plowed under his mulch for the next new thing, right? And there is no forward motion in aggregate. Or there are stories, and we're super fans of them in the West, right? Of teleological certainty we are on a we are on a happy hockey stick curve to some peak culmination and it's getting better all the time right and so in a time where a lot of things

are unraveling those kinds of success stories are getting increasingly threadbare and more and more people are challenging them but our buddy bruce Bruce Dahmer, he's a NASA PhD, has been articulating a new theory of origins of life on the planet. And it's actually at hot springs, not thermal vents. And it's not just any old hot spring or any old space. It's not just kicking it in the hot tub. It's actually the bathtub ring, the scum around the ring where there's been fissionusion fish infusion heat cooling

clustering separation heat cooling the backing and forthing right it was the generator of complex life so you're like oh wow so fish infusion is actually how novelty gets done and novelty always over creates and then dies and collapses and then what strongest or novelist um was either the fittest mutation or or uh innovation persists so you're like okay so novelty is arguably the engine of life and then you get to the next level where you get dendritic exploration so the reason that river deltas look like tree veins look like lungs look like neurons right is that according to like fluid dynamics the fastest way to explore and exploit new space is to branch so that's why we do all the things and whether that's capillary uptake

of oxygen right or nutrients and water or sunlight and photons into photosynthesis that's what we've done so it's niche adaptation. And we hear that notion of explore, exploit. People talk about that for niche adaptation, but you can also add expand and then expire. Because you explore, you do all the branching. You find a niche that's unoccupied, you exploit it. That then produces novelty or population growth too much. And then you expire. And as Bruce says, says he says death writes the code of life so we've got level one fish infusion you got level two dendritic exploration you get level three which is now what we talked about sapolsky which is basically dopamine you know now we're into

invertebrates and what are we doing with consciousness right and you're like oh shit it's dopaminergic incentive of novelty seeking so everybody with neurochemistry and a brain and a brain and a spine and a nervous system, right, are going to be incented by dopamine to seek the new. So now, even in our metabolism and our genetic coding, we're incented to be novelty engines. And then finally, what's level four? Level four is the first place it's elective. We get to choose, but it's fundamentally play. And you can make a case that play is the first consenting and conscious self-aware, right? Culmination of this novelty impulse.

Because Harold Bloom, he wrote a kick-ass book called The Genius of the Beast. And he was talking about capitalism. This is where I got the original idea. He said, capitalism is just a boom-bust system, right? Algal blooms do the same thing. Galaxies do the same thing. Markets just do this thing. It is the maximum generator of novelty.

Now, the same with our sexuality, where we say marriage and romance and falling head over heels in love and lifelong happy partnerships, if we can find them. All those things, that's the good side of evolution slate. We love those things. But then the bad sides, the sexual violence, the infidelities, all the traumas and the grief, those are the bad things. But we're using the wrong rubric to assess what are actual core drivers. And the same thing with market economies. When we say fat cats and robber barons and depressions, boo, that means capitalism is amoral. Well, of course it's amoral, but it's also amoral in the boom times. And it is fundamentally

a novelty engine. So we're assigning a moral human centric, right, value system to what are actually much bigger forces traveling by much different physics. And what we experience as error messages in that, right, we experience as pain, grief, or even the problem of evil. Like, why the fuck are we such shitty people? And you're like, we're not. We're parts of novelty engines. And the novelty engines always boom bust and death writes the code of life which is a son of a to be on

the wood chipper side of that creative destruction but if you think about western civilization right it was a massive series of novelty innovations the fact that we went from under a billion people in 1800 to 8 billion people in 2022 is wildly novel. The fact that we've figured out how to tap fucking buried starlight in the form of fossil fuels, amazingly novel, right? Like all the ticky tack shit and plastic stores in Walmart and China and Target, all super novel. So we are noveltying our asses off and we're heading for a bust, right? And death writes the code of life. So this notion and the final stage, right, is play. And what would we play at, right? This is choice, right? We choose to play the infinite game. We choose to expand the game for as many people

for as long as possible, right? And your point about back when you were like, well, so much feels like it's coming to the end. There's actually a Kiersgesatz, that German company that does those kick-ass YouTube cartoon explainers of philosophy and physics. It's a mouthful of a term, Kiersgesatz, I think. But they have a little 15-minute one that just came out called The Last Man. And it starts with times are rough and everybody's bummed and thinking this is close to the end and then just does this series of fundamentally the effective altruist thought experiments of like how many you know if we stay on this earth we're supposed to have another hundred thousand years of a million million year average lifespan for mammals what if we become an off planetary

species baboo baboo bab species and it's like there's potentially future trillions of people we are just at the beginning of the human story and what does that do right for our choice to lean into this infinite game so if we see that consciousness on this Earth is nothing more nor less than a novelty engine and that novelty has equal parts, destruction to creation, then we cease to see the destruction as the problem of evil. We actually embrace it in a much more kind of stoic Taoist way, right? It's like, suck it up, fat kid. Like that's the stoic part. But then the Taoist part is, and it is what it is, right? And if we see these trends and then we're like, oh, okay, now I begin to understand

how we did all the whack-ass shit we've done. We are novelty engines and that's why it doesn't stop and won't stop. But if we also accept, if we accept our commitment to now steward, back to Kevin Kelly, like you and I are highly improbable, right? If our commitment via play

is to preserve and protect those emergent bits of good true and beautiful because we care because we value them because we take a stand for them that to me feels like a beautiful resolution of what could otherwise be highly impersonal and nihilistic and instead gives us a place to reclaim our agency and also our pot, however small, in shaping a future together. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts to change. That's when people pay attention.

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You have the internal ability to make sense of disparate ideas, but you have a vigor and a vitality in the way that you do it. How do you process your information? Do you write? Yeah. Obviously, you've written books, but on a daily basis when you're not trying to write a book, how are you making sense of the disparate ideas and how they hang together? I mean, I think it might just be that. I'm always just looking for the golden thread to follow because that feels so meaningful, but also like soothing and satisfying. So, you know, some of it, I write newsletters to our community. I'm actually, I'm looking forward to you getting to read this next one because I'm going to discuss population and some other tricky things.

But I was thinking of you as I was writing it. Thank you. So that's helpful. And then some of those end up rolling into books and um and projects and then you know sometimes just sort of voice memos and things like that but to me it's um it's always just what's the greatest story never told i just feel like we're in the midst of such a fascinating human experience and moment in history and the how you know how did we get here is i think super duper relevant and then and i was just

always interested in that so i understood the starting conditions of like now like how do we fucking get here like what are the what's what's the lineages and stuff like that but i have noticed in the last few years two three years that we're also we're also studying history as a sense of what's coming like we're actually you know we are getting into those kinds of historical times we didn't just peace out you know for shopping malls and easy credit cards and this and that. We're getting dragged backwards into historic times like everyone has always lived in. And now we actually need to understand, oh, I'd like to learn a little bit more about city states and the history of them, because it might be that we're having some breakdowns in geopolitical supply chains. What's a regional hub with a hinterland? That's probably relevant. So there's tons of that that I am endlessly fascinated by, and at least in my own contemplation, because in fact, Scott Barry Kaufman took me on to another really interesting idea where most of the time when people talk about the default mode network and most of the studies you really interesting idea where most of the time when people talk about the

default mode network and we and most of the studies you read is it's kind of like it's your almost your sort of neurotic daydreamy inner critic yourself but generally not a fun place to hang and the more time people spend there higher incidences of anxiety and depression and that kind of stuff but scott floated the sort of an alternate room and he said there's a neurotic default mode network and there's a generative one. And you can actually end up in either of those places. And for me, that was a huge insight. I'm like, I just fucking live it.

Daydreaming, mind wandering. Yeah, daydreaming, mind wandering. Forever. Yeah. And I'm super stoked to be there. So that's why I've never, I mean, to my detriment. Is it internal for you? Meaning that it's a thinking, thinking, thinking, or is it more external where your partner

and your family members are like, okay, dude, give me a break. Oh, they definitely say that. They definitely say that. So are you more, so do you, by by default are you naturally more of an internal processor or external but like you know the engine's so big that sometimes it wears people out well i mean for sure that happens i mean they're on dead my kids are like you're a fucking asperger robot dad you know like just no don't do it again so i do have to like worry about like overbending other people's circuits but but for me it's actually not it's the reason um i think maybe if you describe like me seeming

like stoked or revitalized about it it's it's 100 surfing or powder skiing territory it's not me cogitating so it's it feels like some you know the sort of uh indra's net or you know or like interstellar mind lattice it just feels like there's you know, the sort of Indra's net or, you know, or like interstellar mind lattice. It just feels like there's just infinite connections and nodes in any direction. And you just go with, you know, sort of what feels awesome in the moment as far as connectivity, information connections, which is why I wrote about that at the end of Recapture with like Buckminster Fuller, the design realm. Clearly, it seems to me that most of human history, innovation, and cool shit has come from people basically shifting gears of consciousness and accessing, whether it's the muses, whether it's inspiration, whether it's a specific location or designation, it doesn't matter. You just sort of think we're not figuring it all out on the backs of envelopes,

right? There is some access to an information layer or, you know, you can do a monist versus dualist theories of mind. You can split this a bunch of different ways, but some, I think it is, to me, the missing link in all of our consciousness studies, all the evolutions in optimal psych, the psychedelic renaissance, the imaging research that's happening on all those kinds of things, is simply, do we have an information theory of information, inspiration, and cogitation? Is it all within our brains and our skulls? Or are we finding access to what I would add most leanly is called the information layer, and it's assigned all sorts of things here here it's super metaphysically philosophical at this point we don't know is it non-local or is it local yeah and you know you you speak to some of the mystics

and they're like of course it's non-local like you really think you're here you know you're you're yeah your body is here but like that thing that's guiding your body you know and then you talk to the neuroscientist and they go what are you talking about like it is it is here it is although david eagleman right everybody at stanford right wrote in incognito he he bravely i thought i think that receiver notion that like our brain is the hardware and the you know the song coming in over the radio is the signal. He didn't plant both feet there, but he for sure, he re-flagged it. Just for clarity, I'm much more non-local from a philosophical position. I can't point to data to support it other than what as an N of one makes sense to me.

Yeah, I can just say just experientially. The things that leave- Oh, you agree. I do. But not from, I didn't build it from a philosophical stance. I don't necessarily know if I even have one, but I can say that just personally, the two things that have really given me pause that i don't think this is just me and my infinite unconscious is um one is especially if i'm in like a high flow super inspired you know state and words are coming out faster than there's any gatekeeping right there will be times where it is so awesomely bundled with alliteration rhyme illusion this other thing like and i tried to do two of them and then by the time it's out of my mouth there's like five of them and you're like

oh that's that was not even close to me that was accident but perfect accident and and recurring phenomenon and the other is just the ridiculous wicked ball-busting sense of humor that that information layer seems to have. It is both perfectly tailored to you, which you could also use as a defense of this is actually you, but it's perfectly tailored, but then also absolutely hilarious, irreverent, busting ball, zany as fuck. And you're like, okay, how could I have predicted those curveballs? Well, when you talk about it in this way, and we're definitely moving into the really weird esoteric, which I love too, is that I'll make a claim here, put a flagpole down, which is this self-help industry is problematic because it's focused on helping

the self. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for what fucking aim are we doing? And of course, we are going to struggle if the aim is to take care of oneself only. And then you can cleverly say, well, yeah, okay, it's a self-help, you know, build your self-confidence book 101 or build your self-esteem 101. But then on the other side of it, this clever little asterisk, which is so that you can help other people, right?

Yeah, but there's a different starting place than focusing on self. So I say that because it is a bit of a trap I find myself in on a regular basis. It's like helping people become their very best. And I do not want to ever say that without the other equally profound purpose underneath of it is so that you can make a difference in the lives of others. It's not an asterisk. It's not like a small subscript. It is the reason to do it, to know how to put your life first, to know how to work from a place of joy, presence, kindness, compassion, dignity, regard, so that you can offer that for others as well. So all that being said-

It's also the Pink Floyd effect. It's the Pink Floyd effect where it's like, if you don't eat your meat, you cannot have any pudding, right? So when people have access to the personal growth and the peak states and all the things that people do, but they haven't pledged ahead of time. Like no one's coming back for their broccoli. Right. So it does feel like an ethic of access rather than radical democratization of like, you get to just be the most awesome, amazing you, no matter what. Right. It would be like, if, if so, then please give back and can pledge that upfront. I love your ability to discern. I love it. And I'm curious

though, what is your, what path are you on? When I was, when I was a young kid, like I didn't know there was a path and then I was on kind of an aggressive path, like, you know, and then I was on like a stoke path. I just wanted to find big waves and go to, you know, bizarre places to, to, to hunt the surf. And then I found like I was on an educational path, but it's quickly turned into like the path of wisdom and awareness and love. And so that's kind of, I would say that humbly so that's the path I want to be on. What is the path that you're on? Gosh, I mean, I would say being an upstanding member of the Church of the Eternal Stoke. That would be one.

And then on a more practical, like what do I do in the morning? I was actually leading a group on like, what is your, I don't know what the fuck. I don't even like this category, but fundamentally, like what's your core purpose or mission statement? But I realized, I was like, I don't have one. Oh my gosh. And I was like, well, what's mine? And I didn't even have to think. It was like, seek truth and share it. And for me, once again, a dialectic, right? Between two poles. And it was the, if I only sought truth, but didn't share it, I'd end up slinging lightning bolts in a loincloth, you know humanity and everybody else's, right? But if I only shared it and stopped seeking it, then I would become a cheap cardboard knockout of the artist formerly known as me.

So it felt like it has to be that dialectic for me to stay vibrant and alive. It's the shooting the moon and then coming back and sharing it as helpfully as possible. So what's up? Sounds like the Bodhicitta. Sounds like it's a path. Hey, listen, I appreciate you. I know I said it earlier and, you know, I mean, and so thank you. And where do you want to drive folks to, to, you know,

obviously your book, but like, is there a place to send folks? Yeah. I mean, the places we kind of do our actual trainings with Homegrown Humans, including our executive director, who's a former SEAL Team 6 commander and adventure trainings, camps, digital stuff is all at lowgenomeproject.com. And if you wanted to check out the most recent book, it's just at recapturetherapture.com. Jamie Weill, appreciate you, brother. Oh, thanks, man. Okay. Cheers. part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the

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