Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #261 Charles Eisenstein

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Charles Eisenstein is a writer, speaker, countercultural philosopher, and the author of several books. His newest book, The Coronation, will be released in the summer of 2022.  It is available for pre-order here Please please work through his writings and support him on his substack. Love yall! Connect with Charles:   Website: charleseisenstein.org  Substack: charleseisenstein.substack.com  Instagram: @charles_eisenstein  Twitter: @ceisenstein  YouTube: Charles Eisenstein  Show Notes:   Some of Charles’s works The Coronation  The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible And The Music Played The Band - YouTube Sacred Economics - Gaia TV     Sponsors:   NutriSense If you’re not checking, you’re guessing. Get the ultimate insight  and guidance on your blood sugar management journey. Head to www.nutrisense.io/kyle and use “KYLE” for $30 off your first month of subscription.  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! Equip Foods Is an ultra-clean protein/supplement company sourcing their ingredients from high quality beef while keeping the flavor on point. Go get their whole host of great products at www.equipfoods.com/kkp and use “KKP” at checkout for 20% off!  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. To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle:   Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  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.

Kind of a loud clap to bring it in. Feeling a little drowsy though. I had a decent amount of coffee, but yeah, that's where I'm at. But it wasn't drowsy for this podcast because I'm always excited to hang with Charles Eisenstein. I've been in his presence two or three times now. This was the best by far. It was the first time we got to podcast together face-to-face. And I've been following Charles for years. He's an author of several incredible books. The Yoga of Eating was his first, Sacred Economics, The Ascent of Humanity,

which I still need to read, actually. I've got that on Audible. And many of you would know this from The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, something that Aubrey and I have been talking about for years now as one of the most transcendent and informative and special books that a person could read to really reimagine how do we want to shape things as the old starts to crumble. Climate, A New Story is another great book that also re-imagines the climate scenario and really alludes to the benefits of regenerative agriculture

and a number of other things. A phenomenal book. In his latest, The Coronation. The Coronation is a bunch of his essays from the COVID moment. So from the COVID moment onward, all those essays are in this book. And if you haven't followed Charles' blog, I highly recommend doing so now. We'll link to it in the show notes.

It's donation-based, so you can throw him a dollar a month if you want. 10, 20, doesn't matter. It's worth it. It's worth saying, here, take this little bit of cheese and I'll read as you write because that's how powerful Charles writing is. He is one of the most brilliant speakers, thinkers, thought leaders, whatever you want to call that, that I've come across. And same with Aubrey, one of the same thing for him. That's how we feel about Charles. We hold him in the highest regard. And he has really helped

me. I talked about it on our first podcast, but I know I bring it back up on this one. He's helped me to not feel insane in the last two years. And that's pretty fucking priceless in my opinion. Absolutely love this guy. You guys are going to love this podcast. Honestly, I could have just kept him there for three hours and likely I should do that at some point, but Charles is a guy I would do three hours with. He is that dialed in and really offers so much. Every time I podcast with him, I learn so much and it is very reassuring and grounding in the way forward. You know, I think that's really what it's about.

Where's my compass? What is the North Star guiding me through the maze of the fucking weird and wacky world that we're all living in right now? And I think Charles does such an excellent job of helping us to hone that within ourselves. You can support this podcast by sharing it with friends. This one I'm sure is going to get shared a lot, but that shouldn't stop you from sharing it. Everybody should share it.

Listen to this podcast. It's dope. And then share it. That helps a lot. Leave a five-star rating with one or two ways the show has helped you out in life. That helps a lot. Leave a five-star rating with one or two ways the show has helped you out in life. That helps a lot. And of course, support our sponsors because they make the show financially possible. I've hand-selected each and every one of these sponsors that's on the show today. They are incredible companies to help you optimize your life inside and out.

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Charles will appreciate this. You know, it's just a, it's not a brand or a logo or anything. It's just, but it is something of significance to me. So I dig it. You are traveling around right now because you have, I believe it's for this book, right? Doing some podcast runs. It's not so purposeful. It's just, I came out here for an event, the Emerge gathering, it's called. That's right. And Schmachtenberger will be there and a bunch of other cool guys, I think Jamie Will. Yeah. Yeah, that's rad.

Can you talk about that or is it secret? I don't know. I mean, I don't even know what's happening there. It's a certain scene, I guess, you know, like those guys are typically associated with the existential risk community, which, you know, I mean, I could talk about that. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think there's, with the, you know, between the conversations I've had and with you and with other people within our group, we know there's certain risks on the table. And that's clearly outlined over the way the last two and a half years have gone. I think my listeners are fairly tuned into that. But it is funny to try to really picture, you know, all these different things, you know, the meta crisis is all the crises lumped into one, you know, the nuclear threat, the environmental threats,

all these things, and then really try to boil that down. I imagine they're going to be really interesting conversations, but it is, to me, it's a funny topic because it's like, for me, it seems a little bit outside the reach of what is within my control to participate in. If you look at any of those particular things, there are very practical steps you can take towards the better world. Yeah. Right? I think that's kind of usually what I look for as opposed to the grand overarching theme of doom and anything like that. Not that that's the way they're going to take it,

but yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I, I ran into some of the people who are going and like a lot of young guys, you know, um,

and they just like, it seemed really heart centered and stuff. And like, so I think it's going to be good. Cool. Yeah. Oh yeah. Super good.

Um, well let's, let's, I know we talked last time, uh, on the podcast before this book was out, but many of these had already been written, if not all of them. Your essays, do you call them essays? Yeah.

Yeah, your essays that have come out really since the beginning of the COVID era. If people missed that, talk a little bit about your progression. Because I think we kind of started off in the same boat like, shit, this is the real deal. We're in trouble. All right. Do whatever's necessary. And then, you know, slowly over time, uh, that narrative started to fall away. Yeah. Um, you know, I mean, at the, at the outset was, like, I was never frightened of COVID. Yeah. You know, even if, like, the, if it had been as serious as they were trying to make it be, it's still, like, on the historical scale of plagues, you know, it wasn't that serious. And it soon became apparent that it wasn't going to be, like from the standpoint of public health, that wasn't for me the main point of the crisis. It was our response to it.

And what I saw unfolding pretty much was my worst nightmare come true, which I'd been been mourning against for quite a while. Like what happens when a society elevates security in all of its forms to the status of a god? We saw that after 9-11 and we see it during COVID. I mean, it permeates our entire political system. It's all about safety, all about security, risk minimization.

And when you live like that, you're not actually fully living. Like any one of us is going to take risks in order to be fully alive. And that's why like the whole idea of existential risk in a lot of these conversations, usually it's around climate change, ecological collapse, could be nuclear armageddon um you know runaway ai uh like the the nanobot apocalypse like there's all of these different scenarios you know but i'm just not willing to live my life according to what do i have to do to survive because i'm not going to survive my life and ultimately our civilization will perish as well. And ultimately, our planet will perish too. This is one of the root causes of the current unfolding

social catastrophe that began with COVID. Well, it didn't really begin with COVID, but it's basically our denial of death. Once we pretend that we can be immortal, maybe through technology or like, it's even irrational, but like, let's keep it safe. And then what, you know? So for me, the whole point is how beautifully and how well we can live, not whether we're going to survive forever. But paradoxically, the more well and the more beautifully we live, ultimately, like the more secure we become too. Not as the goal, but like who is like the healthy thriving people you meet? They're not the ones that are enclosing themselves in a bubble and obsessing about their health all the time.

You know, they're never actually that healthy. It's the people who are, you know, kind of not so uptight, you know? They're enjoying life and they're having rich relationships and like that's being alive. Yeah, they didn't forget how to play, right? Right.

They can. In King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, they talk about how the warrior is balanced by the lover. You know, if the lawyer is too strict and too disciplined, then he forgets the joy of life. He forgets what he's fighting for in the first place. So the lover is that balancing act. And if the lover is too freely experiencing all the things, the addict is the archetype of one of the shadows of the lover. And Casanova, you know, the Don Juan style where it just jumps from woman to woman, never really engaging in the full exquisiteness of relationship, right? Yeah.

So the discipline then balances that. But yeah, I think about things like that. That's a profound book, by the way. Yeah. Just incredible. Yeah. It fundamentally changed the way I looked at my relationship with my wife. It's so humiliating, you know?

When you read it, I'm like, every single shadow archetype, every single immature archetype. Yep. Yep. Shit. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, oh, high-character tyrant.

Yeah. Man. Okay. I know when I was a kid, but oh, 20s? Yep. Early 30s? Yeah. Fuck.

Yeah. Yeah. The inventory on that one is a tough pill to swallow, but definitely worth it. That seems to be a big one. And I think for the initiated, and that could be through a rite of passage or through, you know, any form of ritual upgrade that is going to bring about the possibility and potential of death. I think Melodoma Patrisso May said in Water and Spirit, if death isn't on the table, it's not actually a rite of passage. It can be an initiation of sorts, but it's not

an authentic rite of passage. When you go through that, you face your own death and it can happen through fasting, no food, no water. It can happen from dancing until you can collapse many different ways. The right set and setting with the right amount of psychedelics can do it. What do you think gets people to the place? I want to talk transhumanism and I want to continue on this death thread, but what do you think is going to get the masses to shift so that they can remember it's about living, not about avoiding death? I'm not so interested anymore in what's going to make the masses shift or what solution can scale. Not because I don't want the masses to shift,

not because I've given up on humanity, but because I'm more and more aware of being part of a process that's unimaginably vast and mysterious that I don't have to know how. Like I don't have to come up with a plan and sift through my various life choices based on what's going to have the maximum impact because there's mysteries at work.

And really what I need to know is what is mine to do in any given situation and to tune into that with more and more sensitivity so that I can be an instrument of this inconceivable process of transformation that I sense humanity is going through right now. People are waking up in various ways all over the place. And when I go into my rational mind with its legacy programs, it still seems hopeless, but I know better on some level.

So yeah, I don't, I don't know the answer to your question, but I know that. I think it was, you answered the question that it wasn't a great question. And it's actually where I've, where I've kind of fallen, uh, even just for the sense of the, what is mine is mine you know it's not mine to save everybody it's not mine to figure out yeah uh that's good man because a lot of damage has been done in this world by people trying to save the world yeah you know and right now a lot of damage is being done by the people trying to save the world they become you know population control people, they become, you know, like a lot of this geoengineering stuff, like where they get the idea that the one, this is one of the meta patterns of our society that

is causing a lot of damage, that there is the one thing to go to war against that will solve all of our problems. So ecological collapse, like tree death all over the Northeast, like all these one by one, species by species, the trees are dying. What's causing it? Well, let's find one thing that is amenable to control-based solutions that we're already familiar with. Oh, okay, carbon dioxide. Now we can geoengineer global warming, right? Now we can apply our familiar tools to dominate something and and all the while full of you know self-righteousness that i'm saving the world and this is the most important thing humans have ever done it's not that different in mentality from you know the covid totalitarians not that different mentality from hitler you I mean, he thought he was saving the world or at least the Aryan race. He was full of righteousness. So I'm happy to hear that you're

not. Because the antidote to that is, and you said what's going to wake us up to the reality of death. Like paradoxically, it is reality that includes death, that punctures the bubbles, the artificial realities, the pretenses that we've created. And that does lead to the metaverse kind of stuff. The process you're speaking of, first when you describe- Yeah, and that's good, man, because a lot of damage has been done in this world by people trying to save the world. And right now, a lot of damage is being done by the people trying to save the world.

They become population control people. They become... A lot of this geoengineering stuff, like where they get the idea that the one, this is one of the meta patterns of our society that is causing a lot of damage, that there is the one thing to go to war against that will solve all of our problems. So ecological collapse, like tree death all over the Northeast, like all these one by one, species by species, the trees are dying. What's causing it? Well, let's find one thing that is amenable to control-based solutions that we're already familiar with. Oh, okay, carbon dioxide. Now we can geoengineer global warming, right? Now we can apply our familiar tools to dominate something. And all the while full of self-righteousness that I'm saving the world.

And this is the most important thing humans have ever done. It's not that different in mentality from the COVID totalitarians. Not that different mentality from Hitler. I mean, he thought he was saving the world or at least the Aryan race. He was full of righteousness so i'm happy to hear that you're not you know and like because the antidote to that

is and he said what's going to wake us up you know um to the reality of death like paradoxically it is reality that that includes death that punctures the bubbles, the artificial realities, the pretenses that we've created. And that does lead to the metaverse kind of stuff. The process you're speaking of, first, when you described the process that you can sense with an inner knowing, have you seen the movie Dune? Yeah. So Dune, they talk about, there's a scene with one of the guys in his dreams

where he says life is, and I'm paraphrasing, sorry, I haven't seen it in a while, but life is a continual ongoing process in which if we surrender to the flow of, we come into harmony with. And when we resist, we become out of harmony.

And I fully sense that. We had Michael Mead on recently, and he was very much speaking into the mass scale initiation that humanity is going through. And it is a true initiation. He knew Maladoma, who recently passed away. But he said, you know it's a real initiation because not everyone's going to make it through this. We will see death on a large scale. Yeah, like none of these weekend initiation programs, you know, where you sign,

where like you sign a, where there's like legal liability, like in your waiver, the whole thing is contained in, well, you're going to be safe. You know, a real initiation, you're not going to be safe. You probably won't die,

but you might. It's for real. And people are so craving actually reality. And that's why these hyper stimulating, whether it's films or video games or virtual realities, they never actually satisfy the true desire. They compensate for the loss of real engagement with life with ever more intense stimulation, but they don't meet the real need. Anything that compensates for the real need but doesn't actually meet it is addictive. And that's why not fake reality that characterizes modern life, you know? Yeah. I see your dad. I see this with the kids. It's not like we've got a screen in front of

their face all day long, but you throw an iPad on for 30 minutes of Dora while you're making dinner. So, because there's only one parent in the house. Right. You know, and then the second it goes off, it's total meltdown. It's like, like the dog just died, you know, like that. It's such a strong hook. And when you see it, you know, in a young being, you're like, oh shit, there's a level of attachment to this thing. Like, it's not, it's not just a 30 minute Dora show.

Right. It's more than that. And I think back, I mean, I was, when I was young, the original NES had just come out. And I remember one of our family friends hooked us up as a family. And my mom loved it. She'd play Burger Time and Super Mario and all that stuff. And I had my own favorite games. I pretty much stayed addicted to video games from four or five whenever we got it.

I'd play the maximum allowed time. If you're allowed an hour. I'd be there for 61 minutes until they turned it off. Um, all the way through college. And it was only when I got into fighting where I realized like all the time I invested there is not time you get back. There's zero translation from the fake reality into the real one. You know, some people will argue now like well you can make money and you gotta um whatever the the twitter video thing is for for video games you know those kind of things like oh you can become a star like a youtube yeah you can stream your like yeah i mean come on isn't that if there's any sign of a degenerate culture could it be anything but like people watching other people play video games and they don't want to play. South Park did an episode on that.

It's like, no, he doesn't want to play the game. He wants to watch this guy play the game. PewDiePie. It's so ridiculous. I was like, what are they? I know these guys are really intelligent. They're always making fun of stuff that's actually happened. And then sure enough, I was like, but that's a thing?

It blew me away. I was like, how is that a thing? Yeah. Yeah. But you know, I don't feel like contemptuous about it it's it's it's like you were saying like like you know you're making dinner and the kid is bored and it's almost an irresistible temptation to stick them in front of a screen and that's not like your fault You're in a almost impossible situation because ideally that kid is going to be running around with another pack of kids outside

and like doesn't even want to come home for dinner until he gets so hungry. Yeah, that's how most people grew up for most of history. So once we're in this situation, then like the situation that we're in generates all of these debates that seem really real but are actually just a reflection of of circumstances that we kind of take for granted and one of them is the single family home the division of labor that dissociates us from place and from community. These are the deep patterns that

make it pretty much impossible to meet a lot of authentic human needs. Yeah. Let's dive in a little bit of, you know, you recently had, I didn't quite finish it, but it's brilliant as all of them are, your recent essay on transhumanism and the metaverse. And I do want to thank you because like, there's things where I'm like, please talk about the world economic forum. And then boom, it comes out,

you know, and it was so great. The tongue in cheek, you know, I loved that. And I've been, I've been waiting for something like this, you know,

because it's like, you know, you read, I remember reading sapiens, homo Deus 21 lesson for the 21st century. And I thought they were all great books. And then I've seen videos with, you know, Yuval Noah Harari. And, you know, he's full on into transhumanism and he's full on. And there's other videos, you know, that'll pop up if you

keep watching of a guy talking about, we can engineer humans with CRISPR to half the size. So they'll have less of a carbon footprint. You know, like a three foot tall human. That's where they want to take this? Like this is, it's like fictional almost to the point where- Those guys wouldn't do too well in the UFC though. No, I don't think they would. And that would make very good compliant society.

You know, if a certain percent of the population did not decide to downsize. the narrative is human beings started out helpless and frail ignorant superstitious in a state of nature struggling to survive but thanks to our big brains which differentiate us from all other animals we began to rise above nature and harness natural forces and conquer the conquer the other domesticate the wild um and conquer one frontier after another to become the lords and masters of nature. And we're going to continue this conquest. So someday we will transcend all natural limitations, move beyond earth, conquer even death itself through fusion with silicon and robotics. So this trajectory

is part of a narrative that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years, if not longer. So people like Yuval Harari are merely eloquent proponents of this ideology. And from within their assumption set, everything they say is indubitable. but what so i in in that in the essay you referenced i i look at some of the things that they that are taken for granted in this techno triumphalist narrative and you know one of them i mean i'm not even sure where to begin um i guess one of them would be that we can so one of them okay is is like the basic role of humans on earth this this would draw from the idea of the the the more we can reduce our impact on the planet the better off the planet will be, which buys into the assumption that we are fundamentally a burden on the planet, which is part of the assumption

that we are fundamentally separate from nature. So having othered nature, we treat it as a source of resources and a waste dump. And if you take that for granted, they take that relationship for granted, then of course, the fewer of us, the better. So there's one aspect of transhumanism, which is population reduction. And all this hype about the population overburdening the planet, not that there's no truth in it, but right now we face population crash uh which i've been writing about for a while now you know like um we're gonna have peak population sooner than than most people think like maybe even in the next 20 years um but this idea that we are fundamentally a burden on the planet, we are not natural, where does that assumption come from? What if we had a world where we understood our purpose

as to participate in the unfolding of beauty and life on earth. So it's not leave no trace as the ideal, it's leave a beautiful trace. And there are people, this isn't just a philosophy, you know, there are people restoring ecosystems and restoring soil, like practicing regenerative agriculture, which is yet another word that's being hijacked by corporations, but- Like natural. Yeah. I mean, what natural means eventually. Yeah. Or anyone who's like building a temple.

Like if you look at traditional Taoist temples, that would be a really good example. Where it's not, where beauty isn't something that you can abstract from the surroundings. But the temple is seen as a gift to the place. And it is erected with deep sensitivity to all the other beings around it. Like what if we built our entire civilization on that principle? We would no longer be a burden to the planet. We would be like the next explosion of life. Like the planet would be more alive because of us.

So that's one of the threads of a new mythology that I see emerging in our time that really, where we no longer repudiate nature and we no longer conceive of progress as transcending nature. And so part of that would be to transcend death. So a lot of this is motivated by a misunderstanding of who we are. Like if you accept the modern scientific doctrine of beingness of self like you are it was in one of the articles i quoted in the in the in the essay um an ape-brained meat sack like that's what you are and as soon as the ape-brained meat sack dies your consciousness is snuffed out like a candle flame like that's what I grew up,

that was the religion I grew up in, you know, like rational atheism. So if you accept that, then death is the ultimate catastrophe. It's the total annihilation of consciousness. And of course, you try to do everything you can to prevent that from happening. And your dream would be to preserve your consciousness forever inside you know a digital playground

now i think that the digital playground would very soon turn into a digital hell because you've replaced the infinity of the real world with the finitude of a programmed world where everything you do is still in the matrix and and everything is controlled by something you know that's not actually i mean that would be hell for me so so and people experience this hell like even when even each step we take toward that technotopian dream actually makes people more and more depressed, more and more addicted, more and more anxious. It's like in the essay, I compared it to chasing a mirage.

It's always on the horizon and we haven't gotten there yet. I mean, come on, Kyle. Like we have genetic engineering, we have nanotechnology, we have artificial intelligence, we have genetic engineering. We have nanotechnology. We have artificial intelligence. We have universal surveillance. You know, we should have eliminated all of our problems by now.

We should be able to tweak the brain chemistry so you never suffer and meet every bodily need. And we've come a long way to do that. Why aren't we any happier? Well, it must be because we haven't finished the job. And it just is a few more inventions away. And then finally, when every object is part of the Internet of Things and every physiological process is under constant monitoring and there's micropumps inside your body to tweak whatever levels of hormones and peptides,

then you'll be permanently happy. Like it's always on the horizon. Yeah. Thank you for indulging my rant there. No, I loved that. I loved that. I was like, God, keep going, keep going, keep going. There's a lot I want to jump in on. You know, the fundamental idea that we're a burden is layered. And then I know you've written about this before, but it is layered in everything. It's the idea that human beings are a virus, Mr. Anderson, like that same thing. And that's not the case when we remember the gift of reality, when we remember the oneness of our interconnectivity. And if you've experienced that, it's absolutely undeniable. And it's more undeniable than all of the facts that you were brought up with on why it ends in the world goes black. Which is, once you've experienced that, there is no, no, these are still some pretty good arguments.

It's like all that shit vanishes instantly because it's almost like a memory. Aubrey talks a lot about that, the gnosis. It's beyond belief. You know it in every cell of your body. I think about things like that. And again, I'm not sure that there's even a need for others to track what I've tracked and try to figure that out for themselves.

People are in their own ways, coming to deeper levels of truth and understanding um i think you had spoken with aubrey about uh one of the podcasts about transhumanism and he brought up ray kurzweil wanting to see his father you know and and um that is a noble pursuit you know but then it's like just drink some ayahuasca you know like dude right there are ways to connect to your dad right now right if you accept that that consciousness isn't just an epiphenomenon of the ape-brained meat sack but that that time and space are themselves i mean like like you can yeah you can contact your father like all of your ancestors are still present in you everything that's ever happened

is because we're not these separate selves. That's what it comes down to. And we sure see like, you know, it's not, I don't want to like make it seem like this is just a bad idea that we got because our entire surroundings are yelling at us constantly, you are a separate self.

From our physical infrastructure to the family structures of today to the economy you know which is constantly saying more for you is less for me we're in competition with each other we are separate if we're not separate then more for you is more for me potentially we're in it together yeah i think I think that last point you just made is pertinent when we talk about regenerative agriculture and things like that, because if it's good for me, it should also be good for the planet. The as above, so below works in harmony with that.

So if I am healing the soil, that's making better grass. That's making a better animal. That's making me stronger. And even if I'm just vegan or vegetarian and I'm doing it not in a monocrop way, but with plant and animal husbandry still, that's going to be far. I'm going to be a better person, period. I'm not just going to have a better body. I'm going to be a better person.

I'm going to think more clearly. I'm going to be softer. I'm going to have a better sense of direction in how I manage the stressors of life. It's that big of an impact. Right. Yeah. And even to spin it out even more, you take good care of the soil,

you take good care of the plants, then the water, instead of running off, it soaks down into the aquifers and springs bubble up. And that draws more biodiversity. And after 10 or 20 iterations, there's more songbirds there and you're seeing more animals. And you realize that this is something I experience a lot when I'm in nature, that there's some kind of nourishment that I receive from seeing a diversity of animals and hearing a diversity of sounds that makes me feel whole, makes me feel present, that I just cannot feel when I'm sitting in front of a screen. So this is one of the things that punctures the illusion that this whole system that meets our quantifiable needs for whatever, calories,

for all the things we can measure, actually meets our real needs. All you have to do is experience the real needs being met to understand how impoverished we are and therefore how addicted we are. I mean, you've probably had these experiences, even like eye-gazing experiences, where there's no way after that that you want to go shopping. You go shopping. Yeah, you're full. Yeah, you're full. Your needs are met and it didn't cost a lot of money.

This is the thing, the irony of chasing the mirage. If we only stopped, we'd realize the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there's a nourishment that comes from the world that we create when we devote ourselves to the world. And there's no substitute for it. Yeah, there can't be. There's a couple of things that I wanted to toss in the, right when I was reading the article or the essay, and you talked about, you used the term hell. That was my biggest journey of last year was with Silhwaska. And it oscillated between, and it's not binary, obviously, but it was oscillating between a return to nature versus a deep dive into the metaverse. And the way I described it was hell.

It was like eternal separation. It was, I've never believed in any of that from my upbringing as the truth of what sources and what we are. Eternal damnation, none of that. I don't think that any apparent archetype, whatever up in the sky would damn anything that it's created. And at the same time, if we do have free will, we could select that for ourselves.

And in that selection of a binary world, we wouldn't have the synchronicities. We wouldn't get the God nod, where you're just like, holy shit, that kind of moment. It doesn't exist in there because it hasn't been accounted for. And any random thing would actually be random. It would be a coincidence. It wouldn't be the divine connection that we all have. And so I wanted to tell this story that recently happened on the ranch just a couple of weeks ago. I was out with the kids and we blew up a bunch of paddle boards and my buddy who's helping on the farm, Eric, was out there with his kids. So there's a good group of us and they're all in that big pond where the Moloka is going. And I was playing for a while and then I was like, man, I'm kind of tired. I'm going to meditate for a little bit. I don't think I'll have time later. And I looked

out and we had a couple of dads out there and I was like, all right, I'm good here. They're safe. So I sat at the edge of the shore. My waist is in the water. Just my knees are poked out of it. And I started meditating and I dropped in and it was a hot day, but the water's nice and cool. So I was balanced and I was appreciating all the sounds. And I was appreciating the fact that the last time I tried to meditate there, I kept getting nailed from mosquitoes.

It was like closer to sunset. And I was like, yeah, maybe this is good to come out during the heat. And close my eyes, mantra, maybe this is good to come out during the heat. And close my eyes, mantra, mantra, drop right in. And I hear this, and I was like, ah, and I opened my eyes and it looked like a half bee, half yellow jacket thing. It wasn't like a wasp where I'd be like, shit, I don't want this guy landing on me, but, and he comes over, he lands right on my left knee. And I was like, yeah, yeah, you're okay.

I'm okay. You're okay. You're not going to sting me. And I just dropped right back in. And then something pries my eyes open to the left. And I see a four foot long water moccasin swimming slowly towards me. Also known as the cotton mouth. And I'm looking right at it. And it was almost like this bee yellow jacket thing prepped me because I had the same thought. Are you okay? Yeah, you're okay. And doesn't break eye contact.

This thing had bolted its eyes, locked onto my eyes, swimming very slowly on the shore, goes around my left leg and rests its head on my right knee. Doesn't break eye contact. And I'm just sucked into this thing like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then it swims off. And like that medicine of that experience, it doesn't exist when you're not there to experience it. You know, like the ability to set myself in that position where I have no fear of being bit, that snake has no fear that would make it want to bite me. Now we can share that moment and then it would continue on.

How do you quantify that? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that story. It's beautiful. And you could never have that experience in virtual reality because even though you were not in a state of fear, you knew that this is for real. Like it could bite you, you know, and maybe you die or maybe

it would just hurt. But in VR, nothing hurts. Like there's no kinetic or very little of a kinetic experience. You can't simulate kinesthetic experience, really. It's not... The best vibration technology in your bodysuit is not the same thing. It's not the same as falling. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I was going to go into some nerdy thing about general relativity, and why you can't simulate it. So, if you are inr and you have a virtual reality water moccasin come and rest his head on your knee there's some part of you that's going to be saying this isn't real like there's and this this is what generates a kind of a cynicism that reaches an extreme form when people are immersed in virtual realities,

in the metaverse, you know, in just social media and so forth. I mean, that's one reason why they're so nasty to each other. Like face-to-face, people are not usually that rude, you know, because it's a real person here. So there's this air of unreality that it's always been here to the extent that we are immersed in symbols and representations and images, personas, you know. But it's an extreme form online and in the digital reality but underneath the cynicism there's an intense longing to break through and

yeah like you just like we want that kind of experience people in modern life They want it so bad that they they that given whatever is available. They will create it hence And I don't want to oversimplify things here, but you know domestic violence Like we produce the dramas that we've escaped from

in some other form. Yeah. Most, most like bees, like wasps. If I, if I, if I stay really calm and friendly, they almost never sting.

Scorpions are the exception though. They're just mean. It doesn't matter. They're like, yeah, I'm going to tell this story to a few people at the farm. And I was like, and I don't know, i'm not about to say that i could do that with a scorpion if a fucking scorpion walked on my leg i'd be like god get off me like instantaneous

reflex right you know there wouldn't be any of us we're one i'm cool i'm in your house thank you for letting me be here none of that shit no they're there to sting they're there to sting people sharks though they won't like if you stay really calm, sharks usually won't bite you. Yeah. Thinking about those experiences in nature, you talked about just 30 minutes in the forest is enough to reset you. And it is the things you're not accounting for. There's a spot by our house in Austin where we made, you know, we're in a suburb. And then behind it, they have a big industrial complex.

And in between it, there's a greenbelt with a little creek. And they use that, you know, there's ponds and stuff to filter water before it goes back to the Colorado. And they made a disc golf course out of it. And it's a cool spot because it's like I've been walking there as they were developing it. I played there with my son. But it's mostly just fun to go out and walk through the woods because there's still a lot of trees. And there's this cool little forbidden forest, we call it. How old are your sons?

My son is seven now. And our daughter is going to be two on Fourth of July. Oh, okay. Yeah. They're never happy. The backyard is cool, but it's a joke. It's not nature. It's like our little man-made sandbox. But actually getting outside, like it's, it's the things that we're not expecting. You know, you see like a Mexican Eagle fly by with this white face and it's cool beak or the, there's some Cooper's Hawks that live back there and I don't always get to see them. So when I do, it's like a real treat. And it's odd almost when I see them, it's usually when there's an aha moment, I'll hear the hawk cry out.

And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, is this timed? Like what's going on right now? You know, but it's almost that in a sense is what I call the God nod. It's like the external affirmation of a truth that stumbled upon you know where it's like okay all right yeah and you were saying before something about that that i thought about a lot too like when you have everything under control there's

no room for synchronicity to happen because because like everything's already under control. It's already programmed, which is why a lot of people experience the most synchronicity when they're in a state of transition or instability in life where everything's not predictable anymore. You don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. You move to a new city without a plan. You land somewhere with no plan. You walk out of a relationship, maybe an abusive relationship,

and you don't know where you're going to land. You don't know if you're going to be okay. Those are the kind of releases of control that attract synchronicities which confirm that there's intelligence in the world beyond our own, which means that human progress need not be to impose our intelligence onto a world that doesn't have any. If we recognize that there's an intelligence beyond ourselves, then we can embark on a different course of progress, which is to listen more and more deeply to that intelligence and participate in it. And then we become capable of creation way beyond what we can do through controlling things.

And so this comes up really practically in health and healing. There's a certain amount of security you can get by controlling more and more about your environment, about your body. But miracle-level healing, which I'm sure you've run into this kind of thing a lot, you know, where like something medically incurable like disappears instantaneously and stuff. You can't make that happen. It has to, you have to step into a reality in which it happens. Imagine what our civilization could be if we really accepted that we don't have to be in control of everything yeah it's such a big one thinking of the uh control versus the

the surrender almost through circumstance but like the another way i look at that is the the i've got it all figured out versus returning to a state of wonder. When you're in wonder, you don't know, but you're accepting the fact that you don't know. There's almost like a humility that takes place in letting go of any prefabricated idea that you have about the future. And in that, then synchronicity becomes available. But when you've got everything figured out, then it doesn't happen that way, which is often more times than not, disappointment happens. I look for things that return me to that state of wonder and awe.

I look for that. And that's where I will experience that in nature. I'll experience that with the water moccasin or anything else, even just playing with my kids and paddleboarding up to some baby frogs and watching my little girl's expression when she sees a little baby frog. She's like, frog, frog, frog, you know, just going crazy. I think the tendency for people, when we get into our own routine and systems and design of exactly how everything's going to be, we forget that it's more critical than ever to return to those states of freshness and youthfulness. It's like a homecoming too. As a civilization, we've alienated ourselves conceptually

by thinking that we're the only intelligence, the only full consciousness, but also materially, by living in a built environment that is unnatural. And the more we go into a digital realm, the more alien we are. And to recognize that we're not the only intelligence, it's like we're not alone here anymore. We're one with creation. We're part of the family of creation.

We're in constant communication with beings. Like every culture besides our own believed in or believes in the beingness of the world. Kind of like a child, you know, like if you say to a child, the sun is looking at you right now, it totally makes sense. Like to our own childlike mind,

it makes sense. We understand that. But then science says, no, the sun isn't looking. It's only a ball of fusing hydrogen gas, which actually is ignorant of the incredibly complex structure of the sun, like these electromagnetic fluxes and stable structures and metastable structures. I mean, it's actually quite rational to think that the sun is a being. But anyway, we've been told that it's not, right?

That we're the only being. And like, there's this disappointment that it's like that Super Tramp song, the other one, the logical song. I'm trying to think of it. When I was young, life was so beautiful, magical. Like, and the birds in the trees, like, it's singing.

And then like, he speaks of, like he's living in this magical world where the birds are speaking to him. And then the betrayal happens. He's sent to school. They taught me how to be logical, you know, and his experience of the wonder and the livingness and the aliveness of all things was brutally cut off. Like that speaks so deeply to me. And I'm not sure how,

I think like the, like earlier you spoke of like the awakening. I mean, definitely embracing the reality of death is part of the journey back. But for me, it's mostly been like unexpected, undeserved interventions. By like the reality that we're keeping out and denying, it's not not always unfriendly you know it actually loves us and is constantly trying to give us the gift of awakening to to our at-homedness here and we're keeping it out. But sometimes it breaks through anyway. Yeah, Dr. Will Tegel, who recently passed away, he spoke about that. He worded it differently, but it reminds me of Paul Cech.

Paul Cech talks about the pain teacher. The pain teacher gives you a whisper, then a knock at the door, then will kick down the door eventually if you keep ignoring it. And that Mother Nature is doing the same the same basically to awaken us to a greater degree of understanding. Not through, you know, the climate narrative per se, but just through the way that our interactions with the natural disasters, the droughts, the storms, all these things. And obviously that is as above, so below what we're doing to farming and everything like that plays a big role in that. But, um, I liked the way he put it because

he spoke about this internal GPS system of the earth, the internal GPS system of, of each being the internal GPS system of the solar system and beyond as this guiding force. And that's always moving and it's moving through us. It's moving through the earth. It's moving through everything you can see. And I think of the, there is beauty in knowing that, but there's also a beauty in trying to live that and trying to fall into that state of flow with it

and not be so caught up with whatever, you know whatever sky is falling type scenario. So there was one thing that, there's a few things, but one of the things that I wanted to bring up from the coronation was an essay you had done that I think you had asked your wife, what could medicine look like in the more beautiful world? And I just loved it. I thought it was incredible, her response. Do you remember? I don't remember. No, I don't remember what she said. I don't remember what I said.

I think I got it here. Let me see. All right. Yeah, try to find that. Is it from Beyond Industrial Medicine? Yes. Yeah. That was one of my favorite essays.

So good. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of my favorite essays. So good. Yeah. Yeah, so you asked your wife, Stella, an extremely effective healer, what she thinks healthcare could become. She said, we recognize mind and body as a continuum. We don't see illness as a random misfortune. We know that resonant attention and the holding of space for emergent wholeness can heal and that anyone can do this. We can return medicine to the people.

Yeah. A lot of the alternative modalities, as they're called, at base, draw from the understanding of an intelligence in the body and in the world. And it's like, if you make space for that intelligence to operate, then it will carry you toward wholeness, which usually will look like what we conventionally think of as health, but it might not. Maybe the intelligence carries you to the other side. But usually, like Stella, like most people who come in to see Stella, they walk out healed. And it's not like she's doing anything. She's not fixing and moving things around like a surgeon, but on an energetic level. She's really holding attention in a very specific way so that maybe a process that had been

interrupted can resume so that different parts of the body can begin communicating with each other again, and the intelligence that emerges from that communication can operate. It's that kind of thing. But even something like homeopathy draws from the same basic principle of like, okay, here's whatever malady you have corresponds to a substance in the world that if you ingest it will provide the information that is required to catalyze the healing process or to like it brings in missing information so yeah that's that's a general my general understanding of what health could be, which doesn't exclude conventional

medicine. Like, I just think that the role of that kind of medicine would be less and less and less. I mean, half of healthcare spending happens in the last six months of life in this country. So maybe just accepting that death is not the ultimate medical failure, that would go a long way to transforming our system. But a lot of the... So modern medicine actually can also perform miracles. If you're in a car crash,

if a traumatic injury burns over 90% of your body and so forth, there are... Emergency medicine, I think it can perform miracles. Other kinds of medicine can also. i know a woman who um like a car door got slammed on her thumb and like so hard that the door closed all the way. she screams and they open the door and it's just like

dangling there, you know, from like and she like goes into this meditation state and a minute later, the thumb is completely healed as if it had never happened. And

yeah, like so that kind of thing can happen. I don't want to exclude that and say that modern medicine is the only way to deal with traumatic injuries. I mean, I've heard stories of people getting run over by a car and completely unharmed. And the people watching say, I thought I saw the car disappear and reappear, or your leg disappear and reappear as the car ran over it. Like shit like that happens, you know? So I don't want to like, you know, this is the thing, like to lay down the objective, absolute truth and modern medicine, emergency medicine is good for this

and that's good for that. And like, this is part of the domestication of reality. Not that it's that it's okay to do that, but we got to understand that the mystery is a lot bigger than the categories that we can impose upon the world. This is part of the program of control. That's essentially what science is. It's to attach numbers to everything and to describe mathematical laws that operate upon those numbers. That's what scientific, it's quantitative. That's the

essence of what science is. It's the study of the measurable. And it's fine to do that as long as we don't fall into the metaphysical doctrine underlying science, which is that everything real is measurable. And if you can't measure it, it's not real. And therefore, we can colonize the entire universe with our numbers and our labels and our categories. That gets us into trouble because then we exclude all the things that we can't categorize, that we can't label, that we can't measure, and that therefore can never be put into the virtual reality metaverse either. You can't turn it into zeros and ones and bits and bytes. Then you can never simulate it. So the question then is metaphysical. Can we simulate everything?

And we've tried, but I don't think we can. No. Yeah, I think there's zero chance there. One of the things that you bring up is, you know, amongst many of the things that should be solved, right, from all the advancements that we've made, you talk about depression and SSRIs, and obviously you don't paint it, you know, one particular way. Well, obviously you don't paint it one particular way.

Well, I kind of do paint it one particular way. But I mean, expand upon that because I think this is such an important piece for people. And having gone down the rabbit hole of extreme depression, attempted suicide, hooked on every benzodiazepam that was made available to me, and they were all made available to me that nothing was ever solved in doing that you know i was able to to numb and put life on pause and continue to move through the the the matrix but there was no healing that took place there and all the anxiety and guilt and shame and depression that i had from before was just there waiting for me in the fucking closet when I got off that stuff. Process had to take place and like authentic inventory of what my life had been and why I was upset with it and what I wanted to do going forward that had to take place in order for me to move through that and not carry it with me.

The idea that we can do patchwork on a sinking ship by throwing pills at it. That again points to the, I think, you know, one of the things that you're providing here is there are benefits to surgery and things like that. I had shoulder surgery for a torn labrum. I went without surgery for six months and my arm started, I started punching my arm out of the socket training. And I was like, this is actually pretty serious. I should get surgery, not having the Dr. Strange technique your thumbless friend did. So I loved it for that. But the flip side of that, mental health, wellness, health care, sick care, that did nothing for me. It did absolutely nothing for me. And it's not to say that it doesn't do some things for some people, but that was a bad rabbit hole. Well, it sounds like you have a lot more, I mean, genuine authority to speak on this than I do. But I mean, I can definitely say

I call depression the mutiny of the soul. So here's a life that is offered to you. Here's what you're supposed to be living, Kyle. Here's how you're supposed to be a man. Here's the goals you're supposed to have. Here's how to do it. Here's your box. And some part of you is like, no, I refuse. I will refuse to get up in the morning to live this life. I will, no matter what the rewards and threats, I will procrastinate. I will stop eating. I will continue eating when I'm not hungry. That's depression. It's like a withdrawal from being alive. Is that a problem? From the perspective of this is the well-adjusted person's well-adjusted life that you should be living, yes, it's a problem. But if that is not the life that you're supposed to be living, then that withdrawal is actually a sign of spiritual health.

So if you, as you were saying, throw pills at it, what you're trying to do is make the wrong life still tolerable to live. And then what the brain does is like, hold on, I'm not supposed to be happy right now, but there's all the serotonin that's making me happy. So I better down-regulate the serotonin receptors. Then you need to up the dose. And that happens again and again. And eventually when you, so it messes you up in various ways. Then when you go off those medications, then you're so down-regulated that you just go through hell. And if you look at, one time I saw a database of mass shootings that listed the drug that the person was on or had recently gotten off, the psychiatric drug. I mean, it was astonishing, like page after page after page of these mass murderers and murder suicides that were on one of these drugs. So it's not easy. Like you don't get social support for accepting the message of depression.

In another society, it might've been, oh, it's time for you to go and meditate in the cave. It's time for you to go on a walkabout because maybe the life that you've been living is not yours anymore to live. And we have space for that. But our society doesn't have space for that, like socially, economically, you know, we don't support that. So, you know, if you take our society as we know it for granted, then maybe these SSRIs are a good thing. If you take it for granted that this is the right life for a human being to live, and if you can't do it, then you're maladjusted, but we can adjust you. We can help you.

It's just a little off, the chemistry. Right. So, and, you know, I mean, a lot of the psychiatric profession, they are well rewarded. They have a very high status in the system. So they have a buy-in into validating its legitimacy. And for them to say to a depressed person, there's actually nothing wrong with you. What's wrong is our entire society. They're indicting themselves too, because they have a role in the entire society,

in the system that gives them so much prestige. So it's rare. There are some renegade psychiatrists out there and especially renegade psychologists, but there's not a lot of support. And if you want to heal the depression, then there are, like, on one level, there's like alternatives to the meds. Like you could do kundalini yoga, for example. That can be really powerful. Or some kind of psychedelic therapy. But if you're using those in the same mindset as a pill, going to try to keep everything else the same and just do this one thing, then ultimately it isn't going to try to keep everything else the same and just do this one thing,

then ultimately it isn't going to work. But these other practices can be like a portal to the transformation of your entire life. That's what they're there for, actually. But they're not in and of themselves. They won't do anything. If there's not a willingness to let go of something and to step into the unknown yeah the trap of of doing what you're told the trap of taking everything at face value you talk about that with um depression and the lives that were given or told to lead you talk about it with Monsanto and glyphosate

with modern agriculture. That's already starting upon. There's plenty of good arguments for glyphosate and the controlling of the food system if we're taking this as the standard of care, the standard of food production. Right, if we're assuming monocrop mechanized agriculture, then you do need something like glyphosate.

You can't just keep everything else the same and no glyphosate. You can't keep everything else the same and no pill. If you want to stop using glyphosate, then you're going to have to transition to smaller scale, ecologically diverse, localized farms and a food system. Everything has to change. It's not like the farmers who use Monsanto and the chemists who develop Roundup are stupid or evil. That is one of the biggest obstacles we have to changing the system, is to diagnose the problem as evil people. That's the same mindset as diagnosing ill health by a virus or diagnosing ecological collapse by one, not that, you know, greenhouse gas emissions have no role to play, not that viruses don't exist and have no role to play, but it's the terrain and the entirety of the system that makes us sick.

And yeah, so the same thing with the SSRIs. Yeah, I'm glad you picked up on that. That's kind of where I was trying to go with it. Yeah, it's brilliant. Yeah. Well, I might switch gears here. I want to talk, obviously, you're going to be speaking at Arcadia. Aubrey did a great podcast with you that was supposedly just going to be released to his super cast. And then he ended up releasing that to everybody because it was so awesome discussed at this conference you're heading to, what do those look like? We'll link to the podcast you did with Aubrey in the show notes on finance and, of course, Sacred Economics. We'll link to that fantastic fucking book, one of my favorites. You and your wife kind of tandem on what healthcare could look like in the more beautiful world. What are some of the other things that are kind of looming in the distance where one path leads us there and one path leads us astray?

I mean, I like to think about what various institutions look like in the next world, the next story, the more beautiful world? And sometimes I can see little foreshadowings of it. What would policing look like when it's not about the state imposing its will through the threat of violence and locking people up if they cause a problem. Like if you keep everything else, I wrote a comment on some, some Substack post about this. Like it was talking about the failure of San Francisco's super tolerant policing. Like they're like, okay, we're not going to arrest people for misdemeanors, you know, shoplifting and stuff like that. Because after all, like, you know, they're not evil, you know, they don't deserve to be incarcerated.

They're doing this because of their circumstances. Fine. But what happened was like this outbreak of petty theft, you know, where stores were going, were like losing money. Like people didn't feel safe. You know, people were breaking into cars all over the place, you know, it wasn't working. And that's because they were, at least they weren't just treating the symptom, but they weren't treating the cause either. Like if you leave the cause in place, then you better treat the symptom. So in order to transition out of that, you would have to remove the causes of crime. So that's the thing like about like the whole defund the police thing. I'm like, yeah, that would be a great idea if we remove

the reasons why we need police to begin with. So I think- Not a good idea right now. No. Not at all a good idea right now. No, but the police are, I think, in an unenviable situation. It's like we've created a situation where crime is inevitable. And then we punish people for committing crimes. So let's change that situation. And in that changed situation where not all the causes of crime, like I think all societies have people who violate the taboos and harm others, and they have processes to deal with that. But a lot of the scarcity and trauma of our society is not necessary. That's what generates crime.

We have incredible artificial scarcity. There is no material lack of the means to subsist on this earth. We waste 40% of our food. We devote millions and millions of hectares to lawn grass. There are so many ways that we could be in incredible abundance if we distributed, if we didn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into weapons. Abundance is right here for us. Stone Age hunter-gatherers had more abundance than we have in terms of leisure time, in terms of basic security.

So anyway, I don't need to make that point, but we changed the ground conditions. And then what do police become? So maybe they're the person who, they're the ones who get involved when they see a conflict brewing and they're highly trained in de-escalation and their job performance is rated on how many arrests they avoid, not how many arrests they

make. And they're somebody who is very practiced in non-judgment so that they can hear both sides of a dispute and hold center. And maybe sometimes they protect somebody by force, when somebody really loses their shit and is harming somebody. So sometimes we catch glimpses of what it could be. I'm not sure if this is what you were getting at with your question. Yeah, no, this is great. It is. It's a totally different direction, but it is something that is critical.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I asked the same question about our economic structures, money, the military even. Yeah. I don't have a blueprint for the future. I don't have a blueprint for the future. You know, I don't have a plan. Like long ago, I disabused myself of the idea that the solution will come when somebody comes up with such a brilliant plan that everybody decides

that they're going to follow that plan. Like I remember having a conversation with some parliamentarians in South Africa a number of years ago, a couple of guys, you know, and they were like, Charles, we agree with everything you say, but in parliament, it's useless. There's the opposition party, you know, there's the lobbyists, there's the regulatory agencies, there's the courts, there's this, there's that. We can't do anything other than what we are doing with very narrow leeway. Talk to a corporate executive, he'll say the same thing. Talk to a politician, talk to, like people are very much trapped

in the roles that they occupy. And that's why I decided that the systems change will not happen through engineering primarily, through re-engineering the system, through a bunch of smart guys getting together. Usually they're guys, you know, and coming up with the plan. And here we came up with the plan. We're the smart guys who came up with the plan.

So everybody, you know, go along with it. At the G7 council meeting. Yeah. But in the alternative spaces, it happens too. You know, these solutioneers. Yeah. And I decided it's not, you know, the new systems will arise out of a shift in consciousness. And so how to, and I'm not, yeah, I mean, that's from, you know, each of us has a role to play in the human evolution. And so for me, it's about changing the underlying narratives, the deep mythologies that I've been talking to you a lot about. But it's not just, and I'm good with words, right?

But that change can happen through the way you look at people. It can happen through your acts of kindness and care. It can happen through your parenting that maybe has a bigger impact on a 500-year timescale than anything else that you do. It can happen through the care that you give to animals and plants and soil. Like all of these, the work you do in healing people, in gathering communities, in adding more beauty to the world. Like all of these things are part of a consciousness of which the new story is one shell and the new systems are even on top of that shell. I love that. One last question I want to leave you with, and you can take it as long as you want. I'm not on a time crunch. You talk about the oscillation that you've had over the last

couple of years from knowing, you know, the narrative has been busted. We have enough people that have woken up. The systems and seeds have been planted for more beautiful systems. That's already there. And then that oscillates back over to, no, not enough people have woken up. The narrative is still strong. No one's going to stop this machine that's moving, marching us right off the cliff.

Talk a little bit about that oscillation. It's something that I've lived marching us right off the cliff. Talk a little bit about that oscillation. It's something that I've lived deeply in the last two years. Yeah, I'm aware that was kind of your first question. I never really answered it. Yeah, I mean, it was a real trip for me, COVID. And I went through some periods of pretty intense darkness where my nightmare was coming true of a totalitarian high-tech surveillance state as civil liberties were suspended and people willingly accepted it. and defaulted to the most fear-based orthodoxy and forgot the last 40 years of alternative health. And people I consider deep allies denounced me, like it got kind of personal. And yeah, there were times where,

like the hardest part, so on one level, it was like watching this unfold and not even wanting to leave my house because it was so dystopian to see everybody masked up. But then also, I was like,

well, what if I'm wrong? What if the masks are necessary and they are saving lives? And what if the people denouncing me are right that I'm wrong? What if the masks are necessary and they are saving lives? And what if the people denouncing me are right that I'm killing grandmothers by questioning the COVID orthodoxy? And how do I know that I'm right about these things? Maybe I should trust the science.

So these doubts really got inside and I spent months and months not writing anything because I wanted to be clear, wanted to be sure that what I was saying was true. And ultimately I found that like at one point I found that I was even doubting my own direct experiences. Like, and I realized at some point, hold on, that's not healthy. That's not sane. How do you orient in this world? How do you know what to trust? If not your own direct experiences, not my interpretations of my experiences, but things I actually experienced firsthand. Like for example, healing that science couldn't explain

and other phenomena that science couldn't explain. Am I going to call myself a liar to myself for having experienced those? Like that's gaslighting. Gaslighting is you convince somebody that the real thing that they saw isn't real. I was doing that to myself at one point. And I'm like, hold on here.

I'm going to trust what I've directly experienced. At least I have then a solid foundation. And from there, I was able to rebuild my belief system with a lot more certainty. And that's when I started or when i resumed speaking out as a dissident um but yeah it was i i went through a pretty dark night of the soul to get to that like i came out early on with a lot of dissident stuff before people were that polarized you know and so there was quite a big audience for what I was saying, but then, you know, the denunciation started and,

and that self-doubt began to operate. And then, so I really took a long time off. And then when I came out and started writing about mob morality and all that, I was a lot more solid and, you know know i got canceled a lot and stuff um but it didn't get in as deep as it had before yeah it's a big one i'm just i'm blown away so it's such a similar experience not from the cancellation standpoint of thankfully of a great boss, that kind of thing. And, um, didn't have to worry about that podcast, those kinds of things. But, um, one thing that gave me the strength to speak out was a guy like JP Sears who had such a massive following, you know, and he was like, yeah, I lost quite a few

people following, but I gained that many more people that were seeking the truth, you know, and he was like, yeah, I lost quite a few people following, but I gained that many more people that were seeking the truth, you know, and, um, seeing, you know, someone like you, I've followed for years. It's like, oh, awesome. I'm not insane. Right. You know, like there's that, that big, there's a big thing. There is strength in numbers and understanding that the, of course, more has come out, you know, you read the real Anthony Fauci, things like that. I mean, there's well-documented stuff, Dr. Peter McCullough, guys like that that verify a lot of the hunches or early on science that we were privy to that was largely swept away from the narrative.

But yeah, the hardest part for me too was the questioning my own experiences and questioning the whole of reality. And it very much was a dark night of the soul, but I'm privileged and ecstatic anytime I get to be in your presence. I loved the conversation you gave to the group at Fit for Service out in Texas last year on trusting that real experience, trusting with the feeling of that hug, how much that means, how important it is to be gathered here in community. And those are the truths that I lean on, the truth of the snake in the pond, the truth

of the gathering, the fire pit. That is a great, it is the foundation to build things off of. So I deeply appreciate you, brother. Thank you for coming back on. Yeah. Everyone check out the Coronation Essays from the COVID Moment. You can pre-order now, I believe. Yeah.

Yep. Pre-orders there. Are you going to do an Audible for that? Yeah, I just actually, I recorded it myself, actually. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. The audio version will be good too.

Hell yeah. I'm pumped for that. Where can people find you online? Where can people stay in touch with you? Most of my recent stuff I publish on Substack, charleseisenstein.substack. Cool. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. Thank you.