Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #353 First Principles and First Values(book release) w/ Dr Marc Gafni aka David J Temple

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

The dear Dr Gafni is back in a different capacity than he has been lately. We’re taking a short hiatus from learning the Faces of Eros to discuss a work he has most recently collaborated on with Zach Stein and Ken Wilber under the pseudonym “David J Temple”. The book is "First Principles and First Values" and it is the basis for much of his views on the Cosmo-Erotic Universe. Please go get the book, work through it at a manageable pace and let’s create this more beautiful world fam! Marc’s Books: NEW BOOK "First Principles and First Values" -David J Temple  A Return to Eros(paperback) A Return to Eros(audiobook) The Erotic and the Holy Your Unique Self Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment Self In Integral Evolutionary Mysticism    Connect with Marc: Website: MarcGafni.com  Instagram: @marcgafni Facebook: Dr Marc Gafni X: @marcgafni Substack: Marc Gafni YouTube: Dr Marc Gafni Medium: Office For The Future   Sponsors: HVMN You can save 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone-IQ at Ketone.com/KKP 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! 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. Happy Hippo Kratom is in my opinion the cleanest Kratom product I’ve used. Head over to HappyHippo.com/KKP code “KKP” for 15% off entire store To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    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.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. We have a very special interview today. Most of these aren't interviews. Let me just put it that way. In podcasting, there's kind of the Rogan-esque conversation and there's like the Tim Ferriss interview. And it doesn't mean Tim doesn't have great interjections, but one is more ask questions, receive answers, and one is more shoot the shit and see where it goes. I think both are awesome.

And even though I lean a little bit more towards interview, I do get on rants for damn sure. When I get inspired to say some shit or something lights me up inside, I'll definitely grab some mic time. This podcast today is for sure more interview style. And the reason for that was we didn't have a ton of time, but I realized the person I was sitting across from could hands down break this down in the amount of time that we had. And so while this is the return of Dr. Mark Gaffney, it is the introduction of David J. Temple. David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship

at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Mark Gaffney and Zach Stein. For different projects, specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume,

Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gaffney and Dr. Stein. So no short list here of, it is a short list, but so needless to say, if you've never heard of Ken Wilber, Dr. Zach Stein, or Dr. Mark Gaffney, you're in for a treat. And I interviewed Dr. Mark Gaffney. We've got, we got, I don't know, four in the tank, five in the tank that we've done for the 12 Faces of Eros, only three of which, two or three of which have been on the Faces of Eros. The first two, of course, cover the main logistics

and the nomenclature of what we're speaking about. This book is entirely different. And of course, those other episodes are really expanding upon and helping us dive deeper into a book called A Return to Eros by Mark Gaffney and Christina Kincaid. That's linked in the show notes. This is a brand new book that just came out. It's 42 propositions on cosmoerotic humanism, the metacrisis and the world to come. And it's a short

one here, but Mark really lays down the foundation for why this is critical to our thinking and our understanding. If we don't create a new story yesterday, if we don't create a new story right this second about why we're here, we will lose our humanity. And I'm not a doomer. I don't think that everything's going to go up in nukes. I don't think that the lights are going to turn out for, even though it's a damn strong possibility. I also don't think that AI is going to take us over and we're going to have a full merger. And this thing, you know, the Rogan, everyone reaches this point on a planet and they create something that's super intelligent and it blasts right by you. And I've read Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom, which does pose a lot of concerns. I'm not saying that's not a valid concern, but I think the most valid of all concerns, as Mark

explains it, is we lose our humanity. And this is what I get about, this is what I'm talking about with World Economic Forum type stuff, with Yuval Noah Harari and transhumanism. I think that is far, far more likely the death of our humanity than the death of humanity itself. But both are concerns, they're valid concerns. And both can be addressed if we rewrite and re-understand what it means to be a human, what it means to be on the planet, how does source work, how does consciousness work? You know, and you pick your fucking poison for wordage. You don't have to get obsessed over the word God and all that other stuff. First principles and first values is a way to decode what it means to be alive.

It's a way to give meaning and purpose behind everything we do. And it's a way to see the navigational tools inside of the GPS that's guiding us. Super important. To say that it's important is a huge fucking understatement. I have some, when I read a book, I do little page fold overs.

I don't necessarily highlight because I don't want, if someone else reads it, I don't want them to think this is the only important part. Some other piece, like my wife or my son might read this or my daughter eventually. But I'll fold over on the page where I know there's something that hits me and I'll look at that page.

It's damn near every other page of this book that I have folded over. I mean, this thing is loaded. It's a small book, but it is loaded with spiritual gems. It is loaded with important information. And the thing that I love about Dr. Mark Gaffney, if you've been listening to him so far, is he doesn't beat around the bush with the shitty parts of the world. He doesn't beat around the bush with the negative thinking that has gotten us into this wormhole or rabbit hole, if you're paying attention. It's not a right versus left thing. It's not a Tucker Carlson thing. It's not a,

it's not a, it's not a, you know, they're coming after, what's that damn British guy's name? That's super funny. The comedian. I can only remember Aldous Snow from one of his characters in the Smoke the Jeffrey. Y'all know what I'm talking about. The Jeffrey Smoker. You know, it's not, It's not about any one of these particular people and it's about all of it. And it's about all the people too, who aren't in the fight, quote unquote. How many times have I been told, what do I have to worry about surveillance for if I'm a good person? What do I have to worry about cameras in my home if I'm a good person? I don't have nothing to hide. I have nothing to hide for Google to look into all my emails.

That's not the point. And eventually you do have something to hide if what you do now magically becomes illegal overnight. Like having more than eight people at your house magically became illegal overnight in much of the world. And I put tape over my ring system and said, fuck that. We're going to have 12 people in this house day after day, and no one got sick magically, right? So we don't need to rehearse the last four years and go back over that.

But at the same time, it's really hard to forget. And it shouldn't be something we forget. It should be something we know that there is a playbook at play. And if we continue to allow things to happen to us and not wake up from it and learn from our experiences, that there is more to come, a lot more to come. That COVID is a walk in the park, taste test, and the main course is well on its way. So please, from the bottom of my heart, check this book out by David J. Temple, which is really Dr. Zach Stein, Dr. Mark Gaffney, and of course, Ken Wilber, who has a laundry list of fucking dope books that he's already written. One of the world's greatest thinkers. And I've taken a deeper dive into his work because of Paul Cech. Paul Cech has a section. If Paul Cech has a section

of one person in his library, that person has carved a space for themselves as one of the world's leading thinkers. Ken Wilber has done that. First principles and first values, we will link to in the show notes. And this is a phenomenal breakdown of that. Most likely, we're going to have to take a look back through here again. This is the first of a series of books. So you're going to want to jump on this one, just like we did the first two episodes on Eros that didn't cover the phases of Eros, but covered the totality of it. First principles and first values is your foundation layer to grabbing everything else these guys are going to come up with. So do not miss this one. Pick it up now. It is very easy to read. It's not out there. It's in here. And it's going to make sense to you from the first

time you open it. All right, love Dr. Mark Gaffney. And so thrilled that I got to help promote this book. Really just want his message to go as far and wide as possible. So share this with anybody, anybody that listens to podcasts. And hopefully they dig it and like it and share it with more people.

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I got the book in hand, First Principles and First Values. What's nice about this is it gives us a small break from the 12 Faces of Eros, the series we've been putting together that you've been so graciously giving to the world via my podcast. And I've been the first recipient of the good news and the good word, so I really appreciate that. And you and a small amount of others writing as David J. Temple are putting together a series of books, this, of course, being the first. So break this down. First, break down David J. Temple, if you will, and then break down what this book's all about. So it's great to be with you, Kyle. And yes, I have the

book here also. It's First Principles and First Values. And I want to say tenderly and gently, and this is not about, I'm just saying the obvious, this is the opposite of book sales. This is read this book slowly, and this is an absolute commitment. You will live in a different world afterwards. So it's a book which is not a quick fix. It's short, super short. It's written almost in a bullet point style, you know, terse epigrammatic, not long essays, but it's, you have to read it sentence by sentence. You skip two paragraphs, and it's actually a laying out. I wrote the book,

the first draft of the book about a year and a half ago, two years ago. My co-authors in the book are Ken Wilber and Zach Stein. And we-president of the think tank. Zach and I have been studying for some 12 years in deep dive holy of holies, and he's a wonderful man and thinker and holder of the lineage. The reason we chose Kyle David J. Temple is because in this moment in which we're in a time between worlds, right? We're in a time between stories where we literally could experience either the death of humanity or the death of our humanity. We have one critical response, which has to underlie all other responses,

which can actually carry us through, which is to tell a new story, but not a new story in the postmodern sense. Let's declare a new story. But to tell a new story of value, meaning to aggregate all of the deepest insights of the traditional period across all realms of knowledge, all of the validated insights of the modern period, all of the validated insights of post-modernity, weave them together into a new story of value. And so, and that story of value, we have to be able to tell to 50 dentists, truck drivers, nursery school teachers, professors, gardeners in China, in Outer Mongolia, in Montana, right? In Sweden, in Zimbabwe, which has been renamed, in New Zealand, etc. On every continent in the world. So there's actually a shared grammar of value as a context for our diversity.

So I want to be clear about this, not to homogenize us, not to create some oppressive world government, but actually the realization that there is no local anymore, that we're actually facing global challenges and global challenges require global coordination And global coordination requires global resonance. We have to resonate with each other. We have to be able to do shared sensemaking. We have to be able to have a conversation. We don't have to agree on values. We have to agree on value.

And I want to make that distinction. It's not about, am I in favor of this set of values or that set of values? That's already an interesting and fascinating and beautiful conversation. It's actually about are we together in the field of value? And to be together in the field of value means that value is backed by the universe. Meaning value is not just a social contrivance. It's not just a social contrivance. It's not just a social construct. It's not just, as my colleague from Israel, Yuval Harari, says,

a fiction, a figment of our imagination, a social construct. No, it's actually a quality of the universe that evolves. It's not a static quality. So love is a value of the universe. I was reading last night, there's a lovely, I'm sure he's a lovely man. I don't know him, but a guy named Jonathan Haidt. And Jonathan, you're watching with total delight. So I was vaguely aware of his work, but just for whatever reason, in the last couple of nights, I was looking at it because it's related to some future writing. And so I was looking at a book of his called, I have him down here, The Righteous Mind and another book called The Anxious Generation and his first book called The Happiness Hypothesis.

And he's doing something about kind of moral values and how to kind of, you know, move forward on a number of levels and including the hijacking of attention and he's doing good work. And it doesn't work because, so I'm reading last night, you know, Jonathan's book, The Happiness Hypothesis, and he's kind of very into positive psychology. And he's very clear. He says, I'm going to use words like the sacred, even though the sacred doesn't exist. And I'm going to talk about love, right? And I'm going to cite attachment theory and you know, and, and, and, you know, mating theory and, and nurture theory, right? You know, I'm going to, I know the literature, but I

understand that love's not actually a real quality of cosmos, which has in it an ought. Value means there's an ought. There's something that needs to be done. And when I do that, I participate in the field of value, which is reality. That's what value means. Value means it matters. And it matters ultimately. Value means that realities not just matter. Reality is what matters. And it's the single, literally the single pivot

upon which civilization will either collapse, right? Meaning potential extinction, potential death of humanity or our humanity, based on really the best and most rigorous analysis, or civilization can actually rise. We can actually create the most true, good, and beautiful world that we could ever imagine. But the pivot question, right? You know, Rilke called it the pivoting point. You know, it's that upon which everything rests is

value real? And value is real means that some things are better than other things. Now, that's a frightening thing for some people to say. So I was talking to someone the other day, right, who just, you know, kind of out of the blue, it was kind of a surprise, you know, moment. And this person starts talking a language, which I realized that this person has completely rejected the notion of there being a field of value and that the reason they were talking to me was to kind of attack the position that value is real. So I asked this person to just tell me. Hitler's gas chambers. Good or bad.

And this person, a sophisticated, cultured, well-known, relatively podcaster, refused to say, and the gas chambers were bad. And it's like, wow. But it's hard to get. You would think that's kind of obvious, right? Well, it's not. In other words, if I can't establish that reality is coded with value, and what does value mean? It means, one, my personhood matters. My personhood is a value. Two, my uniqueness matters. My unique personhood matters. Three, my attention belongs to me.

You know, four, right? I have some level of free will which can't be taken from me. Four. Five, right? The unique eros of my life, my unique aliveness, and the unique quality of my desire in the context of the whole needs to be protected and honored. Five.

Six. That actually creating intimate communion, that intimacy is a value of cosmos, and intimacy means shared identity in the context of otherness, and that creating context for intimacy is a core value of cosmos. And in the intimate universe, leaving people out of the circle of intimacy is a fundamental violation because it's an intimate universe that seeks ever greater circles of intimacy. So I want to go from me and my circle, egocentric intimacy, and I want to go from me and my circle, egocentric intimacy,

and I want to go then to a wider circle, ethnocentric intimacy, right? The wider song. And then a third circle, right? World-centric intimacy. I care for every human being. And then an even wider circle, a cosmocentric intimacy. I care for the planet. I care for animals. I care for, so that intimacy is a value of cosmos. But if intimacy is not a value of cosmos, and eros is not a value of cosmos, and choice is not a value of cosmos, meaning my capacity to make decisions, and uniqueness is not a value of cosmos, and my attention is not a value of cosmos, which is the assumption, I want to be very clear, that's the assumption A of closed societies, China, Russia. The assumption is none of those values are real, but it's also the assumption that actually pervades the techplex, the immersive environment of the web, which actually

militates against, which is beginning to generate a planetary stack in an immersive environment that actually undermines our free will, that manipulates our attention, that makes the notion of free elections a joke if you actually understand how attention is manipulated, that actually shapes our desire invisibly through technologies of control that we're not even aware are happening. But why would you not do that? You would not do that if value was real, right? So whether we're talking about the Western versions of a kind of benign or covert totalitarianism, or we're talking about more overt versions of totalitarianism, they're both based on a premise, value is not real. Now, we can't organize a response to that.

We can't create the new world. We assume, let me say it a little bit differently, we assume that human rights are going to live forever. We think human rights, of course, everyone has human rights. Human rights are 300 years old 400 years old that's it they're a blip in history they will be gone unless we assert what are human rights rooted in human rights are rooted in value that which is a value i have a right to like wow that's like a big deal right if freedom is a value i have a right to freedom all right if it if is a value, I have a right to freedom, right? If attention is a value, I have a right to my attention, right? If my personhood is a value, then the defacing of my personhood,

turning me into a number instead of my personhood, right, needs to be protected. So it's only if there's a field of value. Without that, nothing's protected. I'm going to give you just two examples. Suicide and sex. Let's do those two. You would think, who would commit suicide? Well, actually, there's actually a growing movement, Holland, for example, in which assisted euthanasia for people who are not in crisis. I want to be clear about that.

Not this extreme crisis situation, either kind of a radical painful moment of disease or old age or unimaginably painful psychosis, right? There's a number of scenarios in which the moral conversation around assisted euthanasia begins, and it's a complex conversation. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about assisted euthanasia and assisted suicide as an option. You've got a bunch of options. You can do a career, or you can just quit. And so there was recently an essay about the growing of assisted euthanasia in Holland in non-crisis structures. Because actually, Brother Kyle, life's a big effort.

And unless life is an intrinsic value, it's not the result of a pointless cosmos. It's not a random accident. Right? Life is not a tale told by an idiot full of sounds and furies signifying nothing, Shakespeare and Macbeth. And then Faulkner names his book in early existentialism, The Sound and the Fury. No, no, no, it's not. It's not a tale told by an idiot. It's not full of sounds and furies signifying nothing, which just has empty postmodern signifiers. No, actually life is infinitely significant.

We have a yearning for significance and our significance is rooted in value. Value means there's not just matter, it means it matters, it means I matter because I'm a unique incarnation of value. And so we need to identify what is value, A, but not, now stay close, brother, okay, not pre-modern value owned by one religion that says we got the value, you don't,

you've got to accept our particular version of it. No, no, no, not, that's the pre-modern ethnocentric hijacking of value, number one. No, that's off, that's wrong. Not the claim of all of the traditional world that values are preordained and eternal, they never change. Right? This is what love means, and it's never going to mean anything else. No. Love is real, and it evolves. So there's what I might call an evolving parentalism.

There's a Tao. And the Tao, that ancient term from Taoism, the way I like to translate the Tao, and it's a precise translation, the Tao is the field of value. Kyle and Mark live together in the field of value. Now, we can beautifully argue in great paradox about how we're going to understand the field of value. But we won't polarize. That won't create polarization because we're both together in the field of value. And the shared field of value is a context for our diversity. It's not a homogenization, and we might interpret values differently. But we won't polarize because we're both in the field of value. And if there's no field of value, then essentially the world collapses, right?

We can't actually create coherence. And if we can't create coherence, right, then we develop a global intimacy disorder and we have no capacity to create the global coordination to respond to global challenges. And at its core, the global intimacy disorder is based on the incapacity to articulate a shared grammar of value. So what we're doing in this book, right, in First Principles and First Values, is to actually tell the story of value. Now, you'll say to me, why does that matter? No, because there's no reason, unless life's of value, and it's not a given that life's of value, or take sex. Take sex. The amount of sex happening in the world is going way down.

Across closed and open societies in the last 10 years, there's less and less and less sex happening. Why? Well, so people say, you know, high-speed internet porn, fair. You know, AIDS, you know, a couple few decades back, but, you know, kind of fear, fair. You know, Me Too, right? In other words, like, that's complicated, right?

What does consent mean? Fair. So there's obviously, it's a multifactorial story, but there's something much deeper. And it's kind of shocking. It's that great sex with the right person should be had as a value of Cosmos. Sex is a value, right? We took it as a given growing up, Kyle. Great sex with the right person in the right place in the right time, that's a great value.

That is no longer true for the enormous, enormous swath of the emerging populations, youth, men and women. And sex is going down most in the younger, 18 to 24, and the next 24 to 30. And it's not older people. Older people have this memory, oh, that's a value. The failure to launch. What's the root of the failure to launch? Because the value of creativity, the value of efforting, the value of transformation, those are values.

Why would I transform? Let me just stay the way I am. But transformation, those are values. Why would I transform? Let me just stay the way I am. But transformation is a huge effort. It's a lifetime, right, of challenge and agony and ecstasy and holy and broken hallelujahs. Why launch? Unless launching is a value, right? In other words, if we deconstruct the field of value, we have deconstructed reality, and that is what we've done. What modernity did was deconstruct the field of value.

Modernity did that in a hidden way, which we describe in the book. And then that hidden deconstruction of the field of value, which David Hume championed, explodes in post-modernity. And then when a figure like Yuval Harari says that value is but fiction, but figment of our imagination, but social construct. And when Yuval goes on to say that there's no essential difference between a kid from England who goes to slaughter Moors, to slaughter Muslims in the 13th century, and then from the same neighborhood in England, a kid from the same area, right, but this time aroused not by his bad priest but by his good social worker, goes to work for Amnesty International, right, seven centuries later, and Harari writes,

homo deus, there's no essential difference in value between those two stories of value. And they're the same, just stories made up figments of our imagination. That's chapter two in Sapiens. I'm putting the two texts together. Figments of our imagination, social constructs, and fictions. Wow. Like, wow. Right?

And then, you know, and paradoxically, you know, then Yuval writes an entire chapter that free will doesn't exist. There is no free will. Because, of course, forget about what I think is bad philosophy. Let's just bracket that for a second. Right? But in Yuval's world, there's no value. And freedom is not a value. Right?

And so all he can see is materialist antecedent causation. And there's obviously, you know, a lot of literature supporting that, but actually much more deeply, there's actually an experience that we have that's irreducible that's happening, you know, even in our conversation right now. And Habermas pointed to this. He said, you know, Kyle and Mark can't have a conversation unless they experience some degree of freedom in that conversation. We've decided to talk. So yes, our friend Aubrey introduced us, and yes, we're interested. There's a whole series of antecedent causations, but underneath all of that, there's some quality of freedom in our talking, which is our joy. We don't feel like

puppets. We have a direct experience of some degree of freedom. So if I don't value that, I don't protect it. And then we're in tyranny. And from tyranny, right, it devolves to the most abject versions of totalitarianism. And you get every manner of brutality and every manner of evil and every manner of despair. And so we need not the old religion that claims value is mine, not a postmodern deconstruction. There is no value. We need to answer the attacks on value theory. And anyone who's listening, oh, that's too intellectual. I can't do that. Yes, you can. Actually, read slowly, carefully. You actually have to understand why was value theory attacked? Why are those attacks partially right? How do we

respond to them? But it's not a lost intellectual. It's actually simple. You'll get it. It's simple. It's direct. And then let's rearticulate the field of value and begin to realize value is real. And so we actually list in the book, brother,

18 first principles and first values of cosmos. And these are the plot lines of cosmos. These are the actual plot lines of cosmos. These are the actual plot lines of cosmos. And I live in the field of value. So let's say it this way. Three great questions. Who? Who am I?

Who are we? Where? Where am I? Where are we? What ought I do? Those questions are only answerable in one way. Where am I? I'm in the field of value.

And the field of value is not abstract. It's the field of what we call in this book Eros value. Because the primary value of reality is Eros. It's the movement of radical aliveness towards ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness. But that movement of Eros is a value of cosmos. It's not an accident. It's a value. I'll give you a good example. In evolutionary psychology all over the place, which is is a value of cosmos. It's not an accident. It's a value. I'll give you a good example. In evolutionary psychology all over the place, which is an important discipline, but one that's often so thin, it'll say, oh, why do women select for men that are musical or kind? That's not because it's a value.

It's because it helps survival. It's a survival factor. But they a survival factor. But they're forgetting something. Survival is a value. Survival is not a given. Survival means there's a telos, there's a value. What's the value? Life.

And I'm willing to turn over reality upside down and right side up in order to survive. Meaning not just life is a value, my life is a value, which means my irreducibly unique life is a value that's inherent in cosmos. So what evolutionary psychology does is it pretends like there's no value and calls it survival as if survival was like some built and given in the mechanical manual. That's nonsense. So I need to actually realize more life, more creativity, more uniqueness, more care, more kindness, more depth, more goodness, more truth, more beauty, more transformation. These are first principles and first values of cosmos. We actually offer an interior science equation for each of them. But what we do most in the books,

we try and lay out this field of Eros value. Again, it's rapid fire bullet points. And without that, I actually lose access to the plot lines of my own life. Because where are we? We live in the field of Eros value. Who am I? I'm a unique incarnation of the field of Eros value. So I don't only live in the field of Eros value. The field of Eros value lives in me. And then what ought I do? I ought commit the unique, outrageous acts of eros value that are mine to do. And I am an expression of eros value, right? I am, if we would say it in spiritual terms, I'm God's verb. I'm not a noun, I'm a verb, but I'm God's verb. And I'm God's dangling modifier. And I am poised by the

unique context of my life on the abyss of darkness with a capacity to say, let there be light, that no one else that ever was, is, or will be has except for me. And the measure of my life and my life is measured, meaning I'm held to account because I count, not because there's some evil sinister force that wants to hold me accountable for masturbating when I was 17. That's not what we mean by accountability. Accountability means my life matters. It's not just matter. My life matters and I'm accountable. I count because I'm a unique incarnation of value and I have a value contribution, an eros value contribution to make to reality, which is why I was born. And it might be in my

own self-transformation. It might be in my own, the poetry of my life, but every single person has a song to sing, right? A poem to write, a way of laughing, loving being, which has unique value in the world. And the invitation of my life is not to be an imposter, right? It's to live that unique value, to live your story of value. And this book is a step to that. But then the first step is, is I have to know what is value? And how do I ground myself in the field of value? And what are the plot lines of Cosmos?

In all of these plot lines, we're not making a dogmatic claim. They're self-evident. They're self-evident. And we wrote the book as David J. Temple. This is a long way now where as we complete, we can answer the first question because it's not about owning it. It's not an ownership move. This is not a, let's do a win-lose metric author, you know, major intellectual move. That's not the move. We're in a time between worlds and a time between stories like we were in the Renaissance. We're facing a metacrisis of unimaginable proportion. We have to be Da Vinci together. It's not just about one unique self. It's about being a unique self symphony together.

And so we came together at the center to try and do what they did in Florence, right? To in this time between stories to actually tell a new story of value, but not one that's made up. You know, there was a poet that wrote, a poetess actually who wrote, you know, the world's not made up of atoms, it's made up of stories.

That's not quite true. The world is atoms and stories, but atoms are also stories, right? And atom is actually a story of value. It's a story of attraction, allurement, desire to come together, and story evolves all the way up the evolutionary chain. So the invitation of this book is live your story. Live your story of value, but do it at an exponentially higher level than you ever thought you could. Don't give up the field and say, Oh, it's, it's them. They're going to be the thinkers and I'm, I'm doing my thing. Tell me something about Atlantis. Blessings to Atlantis.

I, you know, I, I get you're a Palladian blessings to being a Palladian right now. I mean, I, so I, I want to just bless and honor that because I think that we do have an extraterrestrial cosmos and we do have a galactic cosmos and those things are unbelievably important and we need to bring them to bear in the story. But I can't be focusing on being a Palladian, right? While I'm dissociated from what's the field of value, right?

Because the reason the universe is going to look towards planet Earth is because we have something to offer, right? In the value equation of the cosmos, right? We're moving into a galactic world and value is cosmic. Value is the shared grammar, not of planet Earth, but of cosmos. And so we need to clarify here on planet

earth, the most clarified vision of value for each of us personally. And when I lose access to the field of value alive in me, no matter how successful I become, my sex stops working. My relationship stops working. My joy stops working because joy is aroused by value. Will is aroused by value. So it's a big invitation. And I just, if I can, Kyle, it's just real to ask everyone, really get the book in. Forget about me. Forget about Zach.

Forget about Ken. This is for you. And this is for the Unique Self Symphony and read it carefully. Trust yourself, trust your mind, trust your heart. It's short, but don't read it for a quick fix. This is not a quick hit of cocaine. This is kind of, it's a slow burning medicine that you kind of take. It's intense, step-by-step.

And when you finish it, just stay in it, simmer in it. And I can promise you, it'll transfigure you for life. And then come back to us and offer us your insight, your unique expression of value. Let's do this together. Let's take the next steps together. And let's join the revolution. Let's join the unique self-symphony.

Let's actually become together the new story of value, not just to be the storytellers, to actually be the new story together. First Principles and First Values. I'm so delighted. Here's a picture of the book for those of you who are looking. It's called First Principles and First Values. I'm so delighted. Here's a picture of on the importance of what you're laying out you know we've talked about you've all know where harari and and you know his his uh master claude schwab

who was an understudy of henry kissinger and the long list of folks that uh that seem to be taking you know that seem to have an eye for taking out our humanity and and you know in the last four years i i didn't really panic about the pandemic. I did panic about the potential loss of our humanity and seeing that there has been a long-term play towards that, you know, long-term play to move to a new world order, a one word government. And I think it's absolutely critical in this first principles and first values book, because it

reminds me of, this is how we come to the shared horizon, right? When we talk wholemate, which you've used in many different ways, but not just amongst lovers, rolemate, soulmate, wholemate, it takes us having a shared understanding of everything that we're doing in order to get arm in arm and see the future and see what we're going to do going forward. And I think it's just a beautiful, beautiful short book on how we come into that wholenateness together. That's gorgeous, Kyle. And you just aroused it in such a beautiful way. The reason, see, there's this big move to kind of, and you'll see it around the web, there's this demonization of the one world people, whether it's Yuval or Schwab, et cetera.

I've read a lot of the World Economic Forum stuff, but let me bracket that for a second. Let me just talk about Yuval for a second. I'm sure Yuval's a beautiful guy and I'd love to have him for dinner. And I'm sure we'll meet at some point and we've overlapped. My son was in his class at Hebrew U. You know, we lived in, you know, in proximate to each other in Israel for a period of time. And so this is not about the demonization of a guy at all.

Yuval's making the only move he can make. And, you know, I'll give you another example of it. I can find it here. You know, another person who made the exact same move was B.F. Skinner, who was the behaviorist, you know, psychologist. And I'm completing a book now with Zach. Actually, it's going to be under David J. Temple, which is about, you know, Skinner's book Walden 2, which is his utopian novel that he writes in 1947, which is basically about how you turn the world into a controlled environment, which was called a Skinner's box.

A Skinner's box is technically called an operant conditioning chamber in which rats and pigeons are conditioned by levers, which creates schedules of reinforcement that shape their desire without them knowing that it's happening. And Skinner wanted to know, how do you do that? Not at the level of the animal world. Skinner wanted to know, how do you do that at the level of the human world? But he didn't have, he writes at the end of his life, he said, I don't have the machines and methods to do it. So he does the beginning, but he can't quite get there because he doesn't have the machines and methods. Along comes data science

and places like the MIT Media Lab and the first waves of AI and machine intelligence that's aligned with asymmetric power to human beings to shape their desire and to actually undermine our humanity. And the reason we can undermine our humanity is because no one knows what our humanity is. Until our humanity is challenged, we don't have to assert what does it mean to be a human being?

It's kind of a given. And so that's why first principles and first values are so important. And it's if I don't assert that being a human being means the irreducible dignity of my uniqueness, the irreducible dignity of my capacity for intimate communion, right? The irreducible dignity of my drive towards transformation and deepening in depth, the irreducible dignity of my freedom, of some dimension of freedom. If we don't actually affirm those, not just as human social constructs, there's not just made up contrived values as

let's say Pentland writes in his book Social Physics. But even the critics of the techplex, they don't know how to find value because they're postmodern. So they critique the techplex for doing these terrible things but they have no basis in which to ground the critique. So therefore they can't arouse the will for action because will is only aroused by value. And we're affirming that these values are grounded in cosmos. They go almost all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

And of course they evolve. So love, the field of eros, expresses itself in one way in the animal world and one way in the evolutionary chain. And of course they evolve. So love, right, the field of Eros expresses itself in one way in the animal world and one way in the subatomic world, and a different way between Kyle and his partner and in our friendship. But it's the same movement of separate parts wanting to have deeper contact and form larger holes, which means more value and more depth and more kindness. And as we said in a different context, the only way we can object to evil, because evil is a violation of the field of value.

And if there's no field of value, then there's no evil. I mean, it's so profound. And so Yuval, it's not that, oh, Yuval's some demonic, right? Not at all. I'm sure he's a great guy, right? And a lovely guy to have over for dinner. And, you know, when I'm asked about this, people get always quite upset with me. Goffney must be some secret agent of the World Economic Forum because he refuses to demonize

Yuval. Well, fuck that, right? But Yuval's saying is the same thing Skinner was saying. Yuval is saying, I'm a materialist, and he's a dogmatic materialist, not for particularly good reasons. Yuval is a good storyteller in history and quite a poor philosopher. But Yuval is saying, there's no value and we're threatened by existential risk and we're going to get fucked. So, okay. So Yuval becomes paradoxically

both a critic and a shill for the techplex and he adopts this very subtle position, he kind of critiques and yet endorses at the same time, and Klaus Schwab, when he talks about kind of resetting the world order, it's not per se it's often the case that the first generation of social engineers actually remembers value. But by the second generation and the third, it's gone. C.S. Lewis, and maybe we'll conclude with this, at least on my side, C.S. Lewis writes this, the great Oxford Don, who I disagree with a lot about. He kind of was trying to advance a certain kind of Christianity, but he got the field of value. So C.S. Lewis writes in 1943,

you know, about four years before Skinner's Walden 2 was published. He writes a book called, I'm showing a book, and I know most people are actually listening, so why am I showing it? I was showing the book Walden 2, Skinner's utopian novel. You know, Lewis writes a little short book called The Abolition of Man. And he describes the omnicompetent scientific methods of, and he doesn't use Skinner's name, but he's clearly talking about Skinner, right?

That will actually emerge in which a few men will control all men. And he says in the first generation, they'll still be good guys. They're going to be doing their best to respond to existential risk, a world run amok with no orienting value and no potential for coherence other than invisible levers of control. Because there's no other way to create coherence. But actually, the response to an oppressive and dominating world government is a shared grammar of value.

And it's what actually can cohere us is actually we're living in a shared story of value, again, as a context for our diversity. Right? So every religion should stand and different forms of geographical loyalty in countries. It's all good. It's a beautiful, unique self symphony. But the unique self symphony is music underneath. There's a shared score of music as a context for diversity.

So when we meet around the world, we actually get our life's a value. Uniqueness is a value. Kindness is a value. Personhood's a value. Uniqueness is a value. Kindness is a value. Personhood's a value. And we honor those values. And so I don't think, and I want to, you know, and I apologize for this. You know, I apologize for this. I don't think it can happen without first principles and first values.

And I think, you know, and I avoided, brother, writing, quote, unquote, like a bunch of bestseller books in order to write this. Because the bestseller books here today and gone tomorrow, it's not, I mean, and blessings to all the people writing, you know, those kinds of books. And they're valuable and blessings to them. So I don't want in any way to ride anyone's, you know, beautiful energy. But what we need is a source code evolution. Right? And that's what this book is trying to do. So I'm just really inviting everyone to trust yourself,

trust your capacity to read, trust your capacity to go deep, trust your capacity to, right, understand that without value, nothing moves. And don't try and think, how does this give me a great orgasm tomorrow? Actually, it's not going to do that. It's going to do something much deeper. It's going to actually ground you in the field of desire for the next 50 years.

And everything flows from that. Thank you, brother. Thank you, brother. Cha. I love you, brother. Cha. Ha! you