Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #230 Charles Eisenstein

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

This was a special one y'all. Charles Eisenstein is a bucketlist guest for sure. As I mentioned a lot of what we got into were questions I hoped to seek clarity on for myself and I hope they helped you find some solace as well. Please enjoy and let us know how this one landed.    Connect with Charles:   Substack: charleseisenstein.substack.com    Show Notes: Eisenstein’s most recent episode on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast Spotify Apple  Sponsors:   BIOptimizers Go check out P3OM tear up an entire steak at  Code “Radicallyloved10” at p3om.com for 10% off their top tier probiotic that will support your immune system this sick season! Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. PaleoValley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! Connect with Kyle:   Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com  Zion Node: https://getzion.com/ > Enter PubKey  >PubKey: YXykqSCaSTZNMy2pZI2o6RNIN0YDtHgvarhy18dFOU25_asVcBSiu691v4zM6bkLDHtzQB2PJC4AJA7BF19HVWUi7fmQ   Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

All right, y'all. We got Charles Eisenstein on the podcast today. Bucket list guest. There's just no other way to put it. He has had a profound impact on my life. And I feel, I mean, I just felt out of this world fortunate to be able to meet him in person when he spoke at our second Fit for service event this year, uh, over the summer out in Austin. And, um, I just love this guy inside and out. And he's had some really, really grounded and amazing takeaways from this last year and a half. And, um, you know, this podcast was really me asking questions that pertain to, um, know, in a lot of ways, what my path was for this last year and a half. And of course, where I stand now on it is still in that Red Pill podcast that I did, the solo podcast. So a lot of where I stand with what's occurring in the world can be found there. Catch up on that if you missed it. I doubt if you're listening to this, you skipped the red pill solo podcast, but, um,

Charles has been great in, in really, you know, continuing to, to use a filter on the self and examine and poke holes in some of, um, our ideas. And then still, you know, seeing the gaslighting taking place and really what is happening in the world that we can agree on, that we can see for ourselves that isn't something way out in the spiritual realm or ETs or something that's necessarily unprovable.

There's quite a bit that is provable. There's quite a bit that we see that does raise one to say, I've had enough. And Charles is just brilliant. He talks about his experience in the unfolding of the last year and a half. He talks about being canceled. He talks, you know, openly and vulnerably about himself in many ways. This is the first of many to come. I hope, I truly hope that we're going to circle back and do one face-to-face. We did this over the interwebs. My voice might change about five minutes through,

as I forgot to hit the local recorder until five minutes in, so it'll be computer audio, then switch over. Please don't say Kingsbury's audio shit and turn it off five minutes in. Give it a be computer audio, then switch over. Please don't, uh, don't say Kingsbury's audio shit and turn it off five minutes in, give it a second. It'll pick back up. But, um, anywho, I love this podcast. I love Charles, uh, charleseisenstein.com. He's on sub stack. We'll link to all that in the show notes. Uh, he has some brilliant, brilliant articles, you know, many, many people, I think the coronation went viral, so likely you've heard of this guy before. Certainly, he's had a couple shows with Aubrey Marcus already and a third one releasing likely shortly, maybe right around the time this does. We'll link to that in the show notes

if it is out and available by the time this releases. Definitely check those out. I try to do my best to steer it different directions, but still cover the things that I find absolutely necessary to cover. So there shouldn't be too much overlay, even if there is some. You can support this podcast by supporting our sponsors. As per usual, we've got great, great sponsors. This show is brought to you today by Buy Optimizers. Winter, a.k.a aka sixth season, is upon us,

and we all know this is the time of year to take extra care to protect ourselves from germs and bacteria. We dive into, you know, on the podcast, terrain theory and its benefits, and germ theory as well. Not wholeheartedly, you know, obviously I have a longer podcast with Thomas Cowan on that, but needless to say, this is the time and the place to take extra care of yourself. You can do everything right.

Wash your hands, keep your hands away from your face, carry around hand sanitizer, but you still get sick. That's why you need to protect your body from the inside, not just the out. And you can do that by building up your immune system with some high quality and high strength probiotics. That's why I'm really excited about P3OM. P3OM is a patented probiotic that might be the most effective probiotic ever developed. P3OM fights bacteria and strengthens

immunity, basically a germ-fighting superhero, but it also helps digestion. It speeds up metabolism and increases energy throughout the day. That's way more than I thought probiotics could do. And just when I thought P3OM couldn't get any more powerful, I watched a video, which you can see at p3om.com slash radically loved of all the probiotic, literally breaking down a piece of steak. After I saw that, I was all in. You'll be amazed too. Check it out. We'll link to in the show notes. And here's some more awesome news. You can get 10% off P3OM right now by going to p3om.com slash radicallyloved and typing in the coupon code radicallyloved10. And if you order it, and it's not everything you hoped for, their support team will give you all of your money back, no questions asked. So if you want to protect yourself from whatever bug is floating around this year and take your digestion to a new level, visit P3, or number three, and letterom.com. And check that out. We'll have it in there,

radically loved. 10 is the discount code to get 10% off. And of course, this is all in the show notes, so don't worry about writing that down. We're also brought to you today by Organifi. Organifi is a line of organic superfood blends that offer plant-based nutrition with high quality ingredients and less than three grams of sugar. This is critical. When I was into the juicing phase of my life later, you know, in the late stages of my fighting career, I was training two or three times a day. So if I had extra carbohydrates in the form of liquid, which is a big no-no, I was going to burn that off. It wasn't that big of a deal. Sticking around with a lot of juicing blends after fighting when I wasn't training that hard and doing maybe three workouts a week, it's really an interesting way to put on weight

through organic juice, but it can happen. It's one of the reasons I absolutely love these guys. They take superfoods and make them super convenient to take. On the go, they've got single-size packets. We did a 10 day road trip out to Sedona and the Grand Canyon and then Kingman for Thanksgiving and my brother-in-law's wedding. It was fantastic. Every single day, multiple times a day, I was using the Organifi greens in their little single serve packs. And it was just an excellent way for me to balance cortisol levels with the ashwagandha and get moringa and a number of these other superfoods in that I'm just not going to cook. I'm not making a tea.

I'm not just adding all these things together. They've done it all for me. And that's one of the beautiful things about this is that it's so convenient and easy to use. And at the end of it, I've only added three grams of sugar or less, so I'm not going to pack on pounds from it. And yet they taste amazing. So again, many of you have heard me talk about, I'm a huge fan of kratom. That certainly helped on the long drives. And this makes not so tasty greens taste much better. If you were going to make a celery juice, I'd add this to celery juice. You can add it to all sorts of stuff. And of course, this is just

one of their many great products. Again, 600 milligrams of clinically proven ashwagandha, which is an adaptogen. It's going to help you regulate all types of stress hormones and different things and regulate mood as well. So it's a really amazing product. The turmeric gold is also one of my all-time favorites. I put it right up there with the greens. I mix that with full fat coconut cream at night. It's got lemon balm extract and a number of other great things to lower inflammation and help me feel nice and sleepy and ready for a good night's rest. Check it all out, Organifi.com slash KKP

and use code KKP for 20% off everything in the store. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash KKP and code KKP at checkout for 20% off the whole deal. We're also brought to you by Lucy. Lucy was founded by Caltech scientists who were former smokers looking for a better and cleaner nicotine alternative. And they researched and developed this for three years. They created a nicotine gum with four milligrams of nicotine that comes in wintergreen cinnamon and pomegranate. And they also have a lozenge with four mg of nicotine in cherry ice wintergreen cinnamon and pomegranate. And they also have a lozenge

with four eggs of nicotine in cherry ice flavor. Their products can be enjoyed anywhere, flights, at work, on the go, even in the gym, which I absolutely love because nicotine is a nootropic. And anything that you do to enhance the central governor of the nervous system, meaning your sharpness and acuity,

will enhance your ability to perform strength. It'll enhance your ability to perform reaction. That's why you see pitchers and batters in baseball games with a huge wad in their mouth. Now, obviously that's not going to be as healthy as a super clean product like this from Lucy. Check it all out. You can get 20% off everything in the store at lucy.co and use promo code KKP. That's L-U-C-Y.C-O and promo code KKP at checkout. And of course, this product contains nicotine derived from tobacco. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. And guess what?

I say yes to that. It is phenomenal and you will be happy with it. We are last but not least brought to you by paleovalley.com. Paleo Valley was a massive hit on this 10-day road trip. Massive hit for me and my son. And even little Wolfie was, I'd have to chew off the skins on some of these so she could snap into them

because it's got good snap on the beef sticks. But this was great. This was so great. I mean, we drove to Las Cruces, New Mexico. And if, look, if it says eight hours on Waze, it's a fucking 13-hour it's just a 13 hour drive even if the kids and mom could go use the shitter in the back there while we're driving still got to pull over to cook properly that way kids aren't putting their hand on the stove which happened to

me when I was two and I'm going way off on a tangent here but all to bring it home that the trip took a very long time. It was extremely exhausting. And one of the pure joys that I had was that in one of the cup holders up front, I had about 10 Paleo Valley beef sticks right there. Anytime I got hungry, I'd crack one open and munch on one or two of them. Super, super, the highest quality ingredients, grass-fed, grass-finished. And many on the market claim grass-fed, but they're actually finished on grains, which is genetically modified grains.

It's genetically modified corn, wheat, and other nasty shit. I don't want that. I want healthy, happy animals. We tell our kids, you want happy cows. You don't want sad cows from McDonald's. You don't want sad cows with health problems that are gonna lead to your health problems.

We use the best. And Paleo Valley uses the best. It's one of my favorite products. They use only real organic spices to flavor their beef sticks versus conventional spices sprayed with pesticides or natural flavors often made from GMO corn. Again, glyphosate, glyphosate, glyphosate. They ferment their sticks,

which creates natural occurring probiotics, which are great for gut health. So again, if you have, you know, get some jerky from Bucky's when you're in town, see how that makes your gut feel. You don't feel good. It's not a good thing. I was mowing these down on a daily and had no GI issues whatsoever. And I would have heard about it. You know, if I was cranking out farts in this tiny RV, it's like a 24 foot class C, it would have spread throughout the cabin. So thankfully, didn't piss my wife off. Not to say I went 10 days without farting, that would be a lie. But I kept it to a minimum and these weren't the culprit. So 100% grass-fed beef has higher

levels of omega-3 fatty acids. That's going to lower inflammation and improve cognitive function. Vitamins and minerals, fat-soluble vitamins and minerals that you're only going to get with fat, which is in the beef stick. Glutathione, which is nature's perfected antioxidants, the liver's most potent antioxidant is found in this. CLA, conjugated linoleic acid, which is the fat that burns fat. Bioavailable protein. They're also keto-friendly. And even though I haven't been in ketosis for a while, I'm going to do that. A three-week stint a la Mark Sisson's keto reset diet with a five-day fasting mimicking diet coming up at the first Fit for Service Minor at the end of January. Knowing that's coming up, I'm not in ketosis right

now, but I also don't want to get a bunch of shitty carbs from my snacks. I want to get something that's going to make me feel full and actually aid in my body's ability to remain healthy while I'm on the road, while I'm sitting for 13, 14 hours a day. And this is the product to do that. It tastes great. I use it all the time. It's not just when I'm on road trips, but man, paleovalley.com knocks it out of the park for travel. They have a whole host of other amazing products and supplements as well. These guys refuse to cut corners. They prioritize health over profit and they use conscientious processing and manufacturing. Check it all out, paleovalley.com and use discount code Kyle for 15% off everything there. That's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y.com. Discount code Kyle at checkout

for 15% off everything in the store. Love these dudes. Love all my sponsors. Thank you so much for sponsoring this show. And thank you so much to Charles Eisenstein. Without further ado, here he is. Let me know what you think at Living With The Kingsburys on Instagram

while we're still there. And of course, find me on Zion. Kyle Kingsbury is the name of the group that I'm in. Yeah. Tierman Tierman set me up with you. And I think it was, um, you guys were really discussing sacred economics. I dove into that, uh, brilliant., of course, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, which is, in my opinion, one of my top 10 books ever read. Thank you. I've been following you online. I'm trying to draw this into a circle here of where I'm heading with this opening question. following different people online really to see who are the intelligent people, the people that I really look up to, and how are they viewing the world right now?

And I could kind of see this arc not just with myself but with others like yourself in some of the articles you were writing. Obviously, with the coronation, a lot had changed from there to some of the more recent articles you were writing, you know, obviously with the coronation a lot had changed, you know, from there to, you know, some of the more recent articles you've written, obviously. And so I got to watch that transpire and you came out and spoke it at our second fit for service event this year at Aubrey's parents' house. And it just blew me. I didn't know which way you were going to go, you know,

and it just blew me the fuck away when you dove into the gaslighting that's taken place and really the insanity that one goes through when you do your checks and balances and you're like, wait a minute. I'm seeing it this way. Why the fuck isn't everyone else seeing it this way? How come I can't be the only one that's seeing it this way? What's happening there, right? And you start to lose trust in yourself and you lose trust in the things that you're able to see. And it, and it does lead to a bit of an unraveling. Talk a bit about this process for you and, and, and really, you know, what you spoke to with the ability to rekindle trust and the power of the face-to-face gathering.

Yeah. So I've been thinking a lot about sanity, and I'm probably not the only one who has had moments in the last year or two where I felt like I was going insane, alternating with moments where I thought the I was going insane, alternating with moments where I thought the world was going insane. Because when the world is going crazy and everybody, and I'm using the rhetorical everybody here because it's certainly not everybody, but when the world is going crazy and everybody acts like it's normal, you naturally start to think, well, maybe I'm the one who's insane. Because this is human nature. You know, if like if you and I were hanging out with a group of buddies and you looked

over at the horizon and you saw a UFO like coming down from the sky and landing on a hilltop, what's the first thing that you would do? You jump up and down. Yeah. You're like, do you fucking see that right now? That's right. landing on a hilltop, what's the first thing that you would do? Jump up and down. Yeah. You're like, do you fucking see that right now? That's right. You'd be like, guys, look, is, is, am I seeing what I'm really seeing here? And if all of us said, no, no, no, Kyle, that's a, that's a cloud, man. That's not a UFO. Even if you were pretty sure that that was a UFO, you'd really start to doubt your own eyes because you trust us. It's human nature. We know that we're not infallible.

So we rely on the perceptions of the people we trust and the people we love to help us orient to what's real. And that innate trust, especially in authority, because when you're a kid, who do you ask? It's your parents, right? And in a healthy society, those who are in authority have earned it because their perceptions are reliable. They're respected. They are wise. So this human tendency to, and it's a healthy thing, it's a good thing to orient according to what the people around us are seeing, can be hijacked by manipulative, fascistic, totalitarian powers, which is what I think is happening today. So you can feel, so it sure looks like if you read like mainstream media, you know, and the censored social media and so forth,

it sure looks like you're kind of alone here and, and, and, and, or maybe with the other crazies. So it's been for me this last year and a half or so, it's been quite a journey to really trust my direct perceptions, including my perception of who is trustworthy and to navigate, like, where does that morph into, uh, creating a reality bubble of yes, man, around myself that, that filters out anything that could disturb what I believe, because a lot of that's happening too. So it's not been easy. And I guess what the speech that you're talking about, that came kind of at the end of this long trajectory of going to the foundations of what I know, what I don't know, what is authentic doubt, and what is just shying away from what I do actually know. So yeah, we're all in quite a difficult situation here.

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. You brought up the, I mean, I'm really thinking of this as like an initiation of sorts with discernment as like the main theme, like it's an initiation of our ability to use discernment. truth from fiction, are there any actual inherent truths that exist or is it all just subjective reality? You know, and I'm thinking about that and thankfully, you know, to what you're speaking to, like, have you now just lumped yourself into an entire other group of yes men and everybody that's going to just get around you and kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's those guys or, you know, get on the bandwagon where there's no real growth in that to test what's being proposed. I thankfully, you know, being around Aubrey and Godsey and in the group that I'm in, I'm usually the one that's bringing the far out fucking idea and, and, and trying to wrangle them into seeing it that way. And they're poking holes in that. So I get a fair bit of that.

You know, one of the things that you brought up was on this last podcast with Aubrey is how some people that have been truth sayers in this might take things and then kind of grab on to something that's just getting tossed around that hasn't necessarily been vetted. I think you were talking about nanotechnology in one of Pfizer's new patents. And I was thinking about that and I was like, well, DARPA has that technology patented

from 10 years ago. We don't know if it's in there. And the point that I circle back to is like, without nanotechnology, without whatever that metal is, graphene oxide, without those things in it, is it still experimental or not? And that's been a real safety net for me to rest on and say, yeah, it's fucking experimental. And we're all just walking into this thing, not raising our hand with a question. And if we do, you're canceled. I mean, I've had so many people, this podcast was the Onnit podcast. I was the host of for three years. When Aubrey and I left Onnit prior to the sale, it just became my podcast. Well, it's still in

large part of health and wellness podcast of the vast majority of guests that I've had on have been some of the smartest medical doctors in the world who specialize in a wide variety of things. You know, when I think about these guys and they too have been canceled, you know, we had Dr. Kirk Parsley on who's a Navy SEAL and then a medical doctor for the Navy SEALs and then is now still an actively practicing medical doctor who was banned on Twitter, suspended indefinitely simply for posting photos of what the CDC had on their website without any commentary. He wasn't writing 140 characters to debunk it. He would only post the photo, which was, uh, you know, contrary to something that Fauci had just said, or contrary

to something that he has seen on the news. Like, Oh, Hey, this says different right here. It's on their website. He gets suspended indefinitely. You know, the, the, the reach is just, um, I think the most alarming and that's in part something I, part something I thought we could have all agreed on. I thought we all could have gotten together and said, hey, whether we disagree on this or want to choose this or not, there's some core truths here that we should be able to agree on. I think the largest of which would be that this isn't the Spanish flu. It's not what we were told it was.

Right. this isn't the Spanish flu. It's not what we were told it was, you know? And I, and I, and I, and that's where I see kind of this, um, you know, I can continue to have faith in my process and know what is my fuck. Yeah. The rehearsal is over. Right. I know where I'm going to say yes to, but then still the concern of such a large, um, uh large majority or what appears to be a majority of people that really do just have their horse blinders on and they just want to keep taking the next step forward to the trough to feed. And they just want to go to work and they want to lumber on to watch the game and drink and they want to lumber on to the next thing and just pretend that everything goes back to normal. If I get another booster shot, if I get a vax card, if I get an RFID chip put in me. Yeah. Okay. I mean, there's, there's so much I could go into with what you said. Not sure where to begin, but what do you like to hear me speak to, Kyle?

I mean, really, the couple of things I want to take that with is, and I could have been certainly more clear. That was more of a rant than a question. So my apologies for that. It seems as if for those who know and have done at least some degree of work on themselves to pierce the veil and know that how I choose to show up is just as important as the end result. In terms of the rehearsal is over, it feels like the group of people who answer that call know themselves. And there's a few more that are going to wake up throughout the next, I mean, over the next 10 years, as we see this continue to unfold, the plan for 2030, the plan for the great reset, I feel like there will be another tide of

new people coming in saying, oh, okay. I was on board until this happened. I was on board until that happened. I'm not sure. I guess what I'm asking in regards to that is, is it just a certain group that was already in the plan, that was already in the game of self-work and trying to understand the world differently and trying to understand themselves differently and how they participate in the world. Is that already a small group? And that will be necessarily, possibly the only group of people that show up in the way that we're showing up right now? Okay. Yeah.

So really, you know, what we're talking about is the process of metamorphosis. What does it take for somebody to exit the, I call it the old story, which is the old normal, which is a certain understanding of self, of world, of reality, of how to be human. How do I do this thing? And, and like, you're talking about all these people who are, have got the blinders on and so forth. And it's hard sometimes not to speak contemptuously of them and to forget, like sometimes this happens to me too. I forget that actually what I'm speaking are divine human beings. They are life. Each one of us is life and sacred. So when I recognize that, I can ask with curiosity and not contempt, why are they so intoxicated by the propaganda? Why are they seemingly so unwilling to change when I changed, you know, and I see through it and they don't, what's wrong with them? That whole mindset is actually part of

the problem because it holds them. Like, I mean, I'm, I'm, you're, you're, you know, familiar with the world of coaching, whether athletic or life coaching and stuff, like if you had a client and you were secretly thinking, this guy can't do it. This guy is a wuss down to his bottom of his soul. You know, there's no way that you're going to hold the space for him to, to perform beyond what he knew was possible. So if we want to be powerful in the true sense of the word, we have to be holding a story for humanity that they can step into. That is the fulfillment of who they really are.

And especially be able to hold that story for the people that we might be tempted to hold in contempt. Because as long as we hold them in contempt, we're not inviting them to be anything else. And so with this awareness, then we can go and ask, as I said, with curiosity and not contempt, well, why are you so intoxicated? What is it like to be you? And how does that change? And from what I've seen, it's kind of like you were saying, people do not exit their comfortable, familiar story without a push and a pull. The push comes from something happening to them that just doesn't make sense, that is hard to tolerate. It could be they dutifully go get their vaccine and their second vaccine and their booster and they're told things will go back to normal. And then maybe they have an adverse reaction

or their loved one has an adverse reaction. And at the beginning, they're like, well, that's a very rare event, but maybe there's something in them that doesn't fully believe that. And that, that primes them to be a little more receptive when somebody comes to them and says, Hey, you know, hundreds of athletes have like collapsed on the field or, hey, you know, this doctor's saying that their unit is flooded with vaccine damage patients or like there's an opening there. There's a crack in the container of their reality. And then something else happens. And finally,

they can't hold it together anymore. And that is a huge trauma when everything that you thought was real begins to fall apart because who you are in that reality also falls apart, who you thought you were, where you got your validation, your legitimacy. It's all in relation to what you thought was real. I mean, you might have been going around and making fun of the anti-vaxxers and publicly wishing that they would get sick. And now it's happening. You know, now you're an anti-vaxxer, like, I mean, where you're wanting to be one, but to do that, you have to eat a pretty large slice of humble pie.

We have to recognize that it's really hard to do that. And the deeper the buy-in, the more doubling down, the harder it is to let go. So that with that understanding, maybe we don't frontally assault the people who haven't quote woken up yet. I mean, even that, like, do you really know that you're awake and someone else is asleep? Like that's, that's kind of sanctimonious, you know, that's not friendly, but you've probably seen the research where, where, when somebody's belief is assailed, they react, their amygdala lights up in the same way as if you're threatening their life. And in a way you are, because beliefs a healthy human being knows who they are through their relationships with community, with extended family, with the environment, with plants and animals, with place, with generations. You know who you are because

you're so well known by everything around you, and you're in such intimate, deep relationship. And when we are stranded as consumers and producers relating to each other through markets and technology, we're these alienated selves. We don't have a strong sense of identity. And that makes us susceptible to borrowing identity from our opinion groups. And that's why people are, this is another thing you mentioned, like the yes man phenomenon, like this is why people are so strongly identified with being right and with a certain set of political beliefs, they defend them not because out of any logic or evidence, but because this is who I am.

And you cannot, as the saying goes, you can't change somebody's mind with reason. You cannot change a belief with reason that they didn't reason themselves into to begin with so there's a lot going on here and i think we need to recognize that you know you and i are not immune to this like if some news item comes up in your covid red pills feed or something like that on telegram, it might be unsubstantiated. It might be like, so-and-so doctor spoke out against this and was assassinated, you know, and like, yeah, that's terrible. But did you really look into that? Did you scrutinize that data point that conforms to your narrative? The same way you would scrutinize a data point,

new study shows that vaccines are 95% effective after all. If you saw that come up, would you immediately say, oh gosh, I guess I was wrong? No, you'd be like, okay, let's look at that study. Who published it? Who funded it? What was the methodology? Does it really like we would subject that to intense scrutiny. But when you read something, and I mean, I do this too, you know, like I read something that supports what I think, I tend to just kind of give it a free pass. And I'm learning not to do that because when I cite information that is not solid, it makes me an easy target and people can straw man me by, by cherry picking the weak points of the argument. So I'm learning to be very, very careful. Um, and also like, well, maybe I've said enough for now. Yeah, that's perfect. You know, I've been thinking about, um, you know, the straw manning of the arguments and

scrutiny and things of that nature. And there's something that, that Eric Godsey always brings up, you know, is that it's, it's human nature to take the weakest points and straw man it, you know, and say like, oh, that doesn't exist. Cause you said it this way, right? And really poke holes in how something's presented or, you know, the weakest point of it. But to truly understand that, and Daniel Schmachtenberger is really big on this, we have to steel man their argument. And in doing so, ideally, we come to a place where we actually know their argument better than they do.

And at the very least, it gives us the opportunity to walk a mile in their shoes and see why they view the things the way they view it. You know, Jordan Peterson for years ago on Rogan's was bringing up the point, I think it's in his book, he either uses lobsters or crabs, but he's talking about the, you don't have to put the lid on the bucket because each one's trying to claw themselves back out to the top so no one ever gets out of the bucket.

But I don't even know why I thought of that. But one of the things that he brings up is, you know, when we have a debate with somebody, and you could subscribe to this or not, but from an evolutionary biology standpoint, it's more than just the losing of the argument. It's more than just the need to be right. The need to be right is presented because of the fact that there's an influence that if I am made to be wrong, especially in the public circle or the public square, then that somehow gives me less value in mate selection and in a whole host of things that makes me less important amongst the tribe if i've then lost that so the the clinging to ideas may be something that is inherently built into our biology over time and that that might be reason enough to want to hold ground and pay attention to a narrative that isn't serving anyone.

That could be it in and of itself. I think in large part, the problem that I'm having is that the further we go, the more contradiction there is and the more contradiction there is, that's not necessarily the same thing as being, you know, vaccine injured or, you know, having the world show up at your door the way lockdowns did. But, you know, it seems to me that I'm seeing quite a few people that want to not pay attention and want to just, let's just chug along, you know? Okay. And I'm not, go ahead. Yeah, so there's something else going on here. Like, certainly the display of opinions and the dominating of other people could be some kind of social status drama,

some play of dominance and submission and so forth. But I think that there's something equally primal and maybe more powerful going on, which I call mob dynamics, where in, in, in ancient societies, the biggest problem facing society was cycles of vengeance, blood feuds, tit for tat violence that, you know, somebody, you know, maybe kill somebody by accident or even insult somebody. And then that person's relatives get revenge and then your relatives get revenge. And these would literally rip society apart. And the solution

that ancient societies came up with was that you would take all of that anger and all of that bloodlust and all that desire for vengeance and you would turn on a sacrificial victim where both sides of the conflict would unite. And in what the philosopher René Girard called unifying violence, it would unite and essentially lynch the victim, or it could be a whole subclass of victims, and expiate the bloodlust in this unitive violent act. And then the problem would be solved. Everybody would be satisfied that something has been done. And because the problem was solved by killing the victim, in a kind of reverse logic, people believed that the victim must have been the cause of the problem. And then eventually this became institutionalized as human sacrifice. And the impulse to find a dehumanized subclass and kill them, murder them or remove them from society, sacrifice them is still with us today. And especially in times of social tension, people start looking for who's to blame here. So during the Black Death, mobs went around

killing the Jews, accusing them of being unclean, of poisoning the wells, of being contagious, of being heretics. I mean, I guess they were heretics in the eyes of the Christians, but you had to find somebody to kill, to make everything better again, to placate the gods. In some societies, the king would be the one who would be sacrificed and, in fact, would be required during his reign to perform heinous acts and to break deep taboos so that he would become the concentrated repository of evil and then he would be killed. So when I see a lot of what's happening today, and one reason people are so fearful to speak out is that if you offer a counter narrative opinion, counter-narrative opinion. You mark yourself as a heretic. If you don't conform to the rituals and taboos of the tribe, for example, the body ritual called vaccination, then you are a heretic. You are considered unclean beyond all reason. I mean, we know now that the unvaccinated, that the vaccinated are just as contagious and transmitting just as much-vaxxers and the unvaccinated are actually spreading disease or spreading disinformation or harmed society.

It doesn't matter that the kid in your fourth grade class didn't actually have cooties. But if you align yourself, if you identify yourself as one of that subclass of heretics and the unclean, that is dangerous. And we have a deep instinct that we have antenna out for who's on the in, who's on the outs. You know, who's the popular crowd? Who's the weird kid? I better not associate with the weird kid. I better not do anything that the mob people who don't speak out and who hold their rebellion in secret, the more it looks like those who speak out are alone. Imagine you're in a lynch mob, okay? And the ringleaders say, let's go hang that guy and a bunch of people say yeah now it might actually only be a quarter of the mob that cheered

and you're in the mob thinking man i don't want to lynch that guy well if you i mean it's going to take a lot of courage for you to shout out, no, he's innocent. Cause then they turn to you and it's like, oh, are you on his side? Are you one of the unclean as well? Maybe we'll lynch you too. So you're like, you know, it seems like everybody's going along with it. So I better stay quiet. Meanwhile, three quarters of the mob is thinking the same thing. But because no one's speaking up, each one of them thinks that they're alone. And that is the situation that many of us have found ourselves in, in the last year. Some of us still find the courage to speak out,

but a lot of people don't. And each person who silences themselves, each person who capitulates, makes it harder for others to speak and harder for others to resist. So I guess, I don't know, Kyle, I just, I think it's important to recognize the mob dynamics at work here, because those get hijacked by fascist forces and are used to take over society. And we're seeing a lot of that, you know? Yeah. The whole thing. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's making me, it's making me think about the gulag archipelago another another you know uh three volume series it's obviously been around a lot longer than jordan peterson but he was you know really beaten that drum years ago like pay attention to this it's all in writing and one of the the key things that the author reiterates over and over is that in the gulag, because people had such disbelief, they knew they were innocent. They just went willingly. No one ever put up a fight. So you got yanked out of your apartment in the middle of the night and, you know, the neighbor comes out to look and people are almost trying to hold up appearances where they're like, oh, it's fine. You know,

it's just a mistake. You know, I'll go quietly. And then they make their way there and they think that surely once I give my interview, I'll be sent home because I've done nothing wrong. And then torture ensues three or four years later, if they're still alive, they've admitted to doing things that they never in a million years would do just to make sure that the torture stops. And this happened time and time again. And he said, by the end of his stint, he almost thought that it was, it's a dark view, but he thought it might've been what we deserved

is the way that he put it because no one put up a fight. No one said what was going on as it was happening. No one said, this is wrong, I've done nothing and called upon community to stand up with one another. And so, you know, as you're saying this, I see this as a real potential issue, you know, if we are to remain quiet. And it's been one of the things, you know, there's been two things that have really shifted me in my ability to speak on these things and at least give my opinion, whether that gets me canceled or not, it doesn't matter.

I have a voice and I'm going to use it. First and foremost, this idea that if I'm quiet, it doesn't pan out well. And secondly, the other people that have led the way, J.P. Sears being one of them, he was worried. He has millions of followers on Facebook and worried about getting banned and all these things.

And he just said, look, it turns out there's a large group of people who really respects when someone says their truth. And even in the sea of cancel culture and, you know, bots being sent out, deployed to poke holes in ideas and just ransack people verbally. Even with all that, there's a large group of people who really appreciate when someone speaks their truth. And there's a large group of people who are in alignment with that truth. And that,

for me, was, you know, that put a little light at the end of the tunnel of what I thought was possible. Seeing you do that, put a little light at the end of the tunnel, and seeing other people start to do that has allowed me to feel at least sane in the sense like, okay, it's not me that's just seeing this. You know, and at the same time, you know, you mentioned the cabal and things like that. Look, there are some evidence that fuckery has been a myth for quite a long time. And I watched, I laughed about this on a solo cast I did on my Red Pill solo cast. You know, I watched this documentary, Fall of the Cabal. And it goes, you know, really into,

it's about three and a half hours long and 10 sections. And it really dives deep into human sex slavery and a lot of the things that are happening in the world. And I have friends who are in special forces who work specifically on this stuff. It's not make-believe. And then by the end, they hail Trump as the second coming of Christ and JFK Jr. is still alive. He's been secretly working with them all along. And I'm like, what the fuck, man? That just took three and a half hours of my life away to finish with that. What are we doing here?

So it's like, it could obviously be taken too far. It could be, you could take truths and you can add, I think Alex Jones, he talked about the QAnon movement as taking known truths and then adding layers of fiction above it. And wishful thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Just going to backtrack a little bit. Um, first about, about courage, you know, like, I think what you were saying points to something that I've learned, which is that courage is contagious. Not only because seeing somebody else be brave kind of puts me to shame, you know, and I'm like, okay, I can be brave too. But also because when someone speaks what I've been unwilling to say, it reminds me that I'm not crazy for wanting to say it.

I, so early in the COVID era, I was pretty vocal. I wrote the coronation in which, you know, I'm like, guys, this isn't going to be just two weeks to flatten the curve. You know, once instituted these, these controlling powers, once they, you know, are activated, they're not going to just relent. We could have, I even said like, we could have new viruses. We could have variations, mutations, you know, it's just not going away. And like, I was pretty vocal for quite a few months. And then I got, you know, denounced a lot online, including by, by people I considered close friends and allies. And they were like, Charles, you know, you're killing people with your words. How are you so sure that what you're saying is true? And I really like basically went silent for the next eight or nine months because I had to be sure. I had to know that my descent

wasn't just some psychological outpicturing of my defiance against my father or something like that. I really asked myself, why do I believe what I believe? And eventually, it's a longer story, but I came through really, really clear about certain things, especially the totalitarian direction of society. And it doesn't mean that I accept uncritically every piece of the counter narrative around COVID. Like, for example, I believe that viruses actually exist and there actually is such a thing as contagion. And, you know, that terrain theory is an important lens and that we shouldn't see germs just as these evil pathogens and that we shouldn't see germs just as these evil pathogens and that we

shouldn't see health as a matter of a war against germs. But, you know, there actually is such a thing as a virus. Like, so there's some things I'm just giving that I don't necessarily want to talk about that, but you know, there are some aspects of the mainstream narrative that I do accept and most that I do not. And eventually I came to this clarity and I began speaking out again. Um, and I got, you know, denounced, I got canceled. My own publisher denounced me in public and I got, you know, unsubscribed. And I mean, all kinds of stuff happened. I got to face the fears that had been secretly controlling me to some extent. And yeah, so the other thing, like, you know, the counter narrative, it's not just one narrative, as you were saying.

It goes into these dark, I call them shadow realities, the human trafficking elite, for example, the cabal. And you can take it as far as you want to go. You can take it to off-planet entities, you know, demonic forces and so on and so forth. The question I always have is where do you stop? Like, where do you draw the line? Because once you step into these shadow realities, they kind of take on a life of their own and you can go deeper and deeper in. And on the one hand, you can never be absolutely certain. And on the other hand, you never can step across a discernible boundary line from sanity to delusion. So I don't know, maybe this isn't where we really want to go with this conversation.

I think this is important. It certainly is helping me. I mean, I'm asking a lot of these questions just for myself. So hopefully there's value for the listener. But yeah, keep going. Keep going. it's not like i use a mythic lens to understand them to understand that they carry truth that is independent of the objective truth of whether or not you know hillary clinton you know sacrifices babies in a satanic ritual like like the the the ego in its quest for certainty wants there to be proof. And once I have that proof, then I will know what to believe. And so the hunt for proof never ends because there's never actual full proof that we can surrender our choice-making capacity to.

We would love to not have to make a choice. We would love for belief to rest on a firm foundation of proof. But in fact, belief is a choice of ultimately always a choice of who I am, how I relate to the world. Reality is not something outside of ourselves. So when I understood that there is no certainty that ultimately belief is a choice of who I am, then my thirst for this addictive thirst, you get into that conspiracy world, it becomes an obsession. It becomes an addiction. What are you actually searching for? What you're searching for, you cannot find that way. What you're really searching for is sovereignty, where you take in the evidence, you listen to the king, the king listens to all of his of, you know, whatever, Hillary Clinton or Bill Gates or whoever. It doesn't matter because there are things that I know that are not dependent on the facts.

They're dependent on, they're not dependent on any facts from outside of me. They're dependent on my direct experiences and my gut reaction to things. When I see that photograph of a COVID-safe schoolroom, classroom, where each kid is wearing a mask and has a circle drawn around them and they all are playing by themselves. And they never see a smile. They never see a full human face. They never touch each other all day. And they play solo. Like, I don't care. Like, it sounds okay. If we were facing, like you were saying, the Spanish flu or like the Black Death, and there was a casualty rate of 50% or 30% or even 10%. I would feel differently. But, like, I don't care if masking children in school reduces transmission rates by X, Y, and Z. 2%, 1%, tenth of a percent, whatever. I mean, like, I'm just like, something in me is like no no and and and the the spectacle of

you know people being shipped off to to camps in Australia and and just like the idea of showing your papers everywhere and like this the whole is the whole thing. I'm just like, I'm just like, no. And I don't need to subjugate that no to these elaborate systems of proof and evidence. And guess what? Everybody else does the same. You decide what you're going to believe, and then you arrange the evidence to fit it. And you arrange the reason, and you think you're being rational, but all you're doing is rationalizing. That's what generally people do. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And it's really a good point. You know, it briefly, you know, when I was going through this last year,

I had, you know, the, I thought I had had ego death in plant medicine journeys. This was just a different level because it was actually the death of the reality I thought I was living in. And that was, you know, depression, grief, physical symptoms in my body, the whole gamut as I went through that. And then from that open state, okay, what is the reality I'm living in? David Icke's been right about 80, 90% of this. Are there fucking archons or is this, you know, was this world created as a holographic image of great spirits world, but it's really run by Beelzebub or Baal or Satan, you know, like how far does that go? You know, and ultimately at the end of the day, you know, especially when it comes to the, you know, human, human child trafficking and things like that. And, you know, satanic ritual with children and things of that nature.

Having kids, you know, you're a parent, that'll fuck you up. Like that's just entertaining that idea is enough to cripple one person. And it's no place to stay, you know? I mean, I'm thankful that I was able to bounce out of that and really bring it back to, you know, this old football acronym, WIN. What's important now? You know, really as a compass, what's important right now? Okay, well, again, serenity prayer. What's within my control to do? And, you know, a great question you brought up with Aubrey Marcus is, what do I really want? You know, and if I can really get clear on that, I do still today have enough power within me to shape my reality. If I think we continue long enough down this path, that changes for certain. It already has. I mean, 9-11 changed it to a degree.

But really circling back to that, what do I really want and how do I accomplish that? You know, what are the steps necessary? What's important for me right now to do today to actually start to create and still act and operate as a co-creator of this reality, not as a victim of some deep, you know, thousand year plan that we have our only hope is Donald Trump. Right. Yeah. plan that we have our only hope is donald trump right yeah this is what i'm talking about when i speak of mythic truth or mythological truth because and you just named it you know this this feeling like do i choose to believe that we are victims of a thousand year old, 10,000 year old plan orchestrated by powers with technology so far beyond our

own, that we are essentially helpless. Like if, if the cabal is so powerful, so well organized, like what hope is there, you know, and, and what part, so, so the mythic truth that, that, um, I apply to it actually draws a bit from the idea that at the top of this pyramid are non-human powers. Well, where do these powers reside? Are they in the 3D? Are they somewhere where you could find them at point X, Y, Z at time T, and there it is? That's the reality picture that we have grown up in. It's the modern Cartesian worldview. But in quantum reality, there is no such thing as point X, Y, Z, time T. Either it happened or it didn't happen. Things can be in

a superposition of states. They can both be there and not be there. So the hidden powers that run our world may not be really identifiable as anything of our world. They may live in the same realm as ideas, as stories, as myths, as paradigms. Paradigms have a corporeal existence in a non-3D world. Like a paradigm is a being. controlling powers in a way that we could go to war against them and take them down by the same kinds of force-based 3D methods that are now in control of this world. We have to actually access a different understanding of causality and of being in order to emerge from the nightmare that we are now confined in. So yeah, maybe that might, I hope that that isn't too abstract. No, that was, that was, that was beautiful. Yeah. And I'm thinking right now of Paul Levy,

who I had on the podcast, he wrote the, he wrote several, four books, but dispelling with Tico is coming to mind. And really, you know, that, that the devil exists within each of us. You know, this idea of that, that level of darkness is inherent in all of us. And it's important to understand that. I think that's what Peterson was pointing to in pointing out the fact that Nazi Germany was the blink of an eye ago. This isn't primitive man that formed those ideas. And eugenics was around before Hitler and remains around today. So these things are in each of us and to focus on the external leaves us powerless, but to focus it internal, where is that in me? How am I behaving in this way? How am I parenting in this way? How am I being a boss in this way in my job place? That's where we take the power back

and have an opportunity to really relinquish that and honor the fact that yes, this does exist archetypically, spiritually, psychologically, whatever you want to call that, whichever lens you look through, you can say yes to that. And now what? Yeah. And like, how am I dehumanizing others? How am I exploiting others? How am I in a seat of domination? Because like all this, you know, human trafficking stuff, like the child exploitation stuff, I mean, really what that is, it's dehumanization, objectification, domination taken to its ultimate extreme. And I do not disbelieve that such things happen on Earth. And I accept that human trafficking rings penetrate into the highest levels of our society. And I think that it is almost inevitable that what is ambient in the whole society will be expressed in extreme form somewhere. I don't necessarily accept that the human trafficking elite is in charge of everything in this conscious way, and that we can ascribe all of the problems of the world to a pathogen called the cabal that we could eliminate with,

you know, a vaccine, you know, or some, that the solution, here's the solution template. It's find the pathogen and kill it. That is that the mindless acceptance of that is responsible for COVID hysteria. It's behind industrial agriculture. It's behind the war on terror. You know, it's behind the prison industrial system. I mean, the same mindset where every problem is reduced to one perpetrator, one cause that can be suppressed, contained, destroyed. I mean, even the ecological crisis is being framed in terms of one bad thing, carbon dioxide, and we can control that and

solve all the problems. Yeah, tax will fix that, right? You've seen the memes. Can you tax COVID and make it go away? Right. So like this whole mindset, this is the mindset that is, it runs our whole society. And when we take the same mindset and apply it to the cabal, like I'm suspicious of that, you know, because it just is too comfortable. It conforms too well to the story that runs everything already. Find the bad thing, go to war against it. The solution is always a war against something. It's always to dominate, to out-compete something, winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. The real revolution overturns that whole way of thinking. And that doesn't mean that there's never a time for a fight. It doesn't mean that there's never a time to draw a boundary.

It doesn't mean that there aren't very, very sick people doing horrendously evil things in the world. I accept all of that, but that's not the deepest level of explanation. The same way that, yeah, I accept that there is a virus that is killing people, but that is not the deepest level of explanation for why human beings are so freaking unhealthy today. We're not going to get healthier by finding one bad guy after another, after another to dominate and destroy. That's we've been doing that for a long time and we're getting less and less healthy, less and less happy, less and less safe. Like look at school shootings. When I was a kid, it was open campus.

Anybody in the community could enter any school at any time. And there weren't any school shootings. bombs, you know, like surveillance cameras everywhere, undercover cops, metal detectors. Each one of these measures was to make them more safe. And it adds up to less safety, despite them, or maybe because of them. Same thing with all the health interventions in the body. You know, all these medical, pharmaceutical products, each of which were meant to control something. The end result? That the thing that control seeks gets farther and farther away. to offer a different kind of revolution, which is into a holistic understanding of the world, where we don't have to control everything to enjoy health, well-being, safety, security.

In fact, it's quite the opposite. And the reason is that there's an intelligence in the world beyond human intelligence. The modern mind thinks that we have to impose intelligence onto a world that has none, onto a world that is just a random mess of force and mass, protons, neutrons, and electrons, and we bring order to chaos. We impose the human design onto a world that has no design. But mystics never believed that. Religions never believed that. Indigenous people never believed that. Most people understood that there is an intelligence in the world beyond our own and that we can participate in that intelligence. We can contribute to it. We can look to see what our role is in the expansion of the aliveness of the world. We're not alone here. And I think ultimately all of this

stuff, all this COVID stuff is an initiation into realizing that. Yeah, we had Dr. Will Tegel on the podcast and he talked about this vision he had at night where he saw there was a GPS guidance system within the center of the earth, guiding it about as trajectories and a GPS guiding system within the sun and a GPS, that same GPS guiding system within the entire universe was found within the center of us. And it's our ability to listen to that and kind of go with the flow of life that allows us to tune into synchronicity and tune into the ever unfolding with our intuition and a deeper level of knowing without needing evidence to back it. And he said this, you know, all of these things, whether it's nature medicine, knocking on our front door with the winter storms or any of these things that are causing upheaval within the world are all designed in some way to aid us in circling back to that remembrance. Yeah. Yeah, that's a beautiful image. Yeah, brother.

Well, it's been incredible having you on. I certainly want to have you on more and more. I know we could keep going for a long time, but I really appreciate your time and I appreciate your work. Where can people find you online, Charles? Oh, I guess Substack is probably the best place now. CharlesEisenstein.substack.somethingorother. I have a website also, but my new stuff is there. Very cool. Yeah. And you can,

you can get all your newsletters for free or you can choose like I did to throw Charles some dough each month or sign up for the yearly. And that just aids more of the brilliance that's coming through you. So I truly, truly appreciate all the work that you do and your perspective, which has reminded me of my own sanity and at the same time continued to allow me to poke holes where it's necessary in my own frame of thinking to make sure that I'm not stepping off on a ledge. Really appreciate you, brother. Thanks for your time on the podcast. Yeah, my pleasure you