Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #381 Reclaiming the Narrative & Future of Humanity w/ Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

In this podcast, Jamie Wheal, discusses various topics concerning cultural, political, and societal dynamics. Reflecting on past episodes, including their discussions about Wheal's book 'Recapture the Rapture' and the socio-political climate post-U.S. elections. The conversation covers a range of subjects including the role of symbolism in culture, the psychological impact of the election, and the shifts in political alliances. Wheal emphasizes the importance of groundedness and the necessity of new stories to navigate current cultural schisms. He also delves into the implications of evolving population demographics, the challenges of modern civilization, and the need for a reorientation towards Christ consciousness and regenerative societal practices. They also touch upon the psychedelic renaissance and its potential misappropriation in the modern world.      Check out our last podcast together!     Connect with Jamie here: Instagram Homegrown Human's Newsletter Recapture the Rapture   Our Sponsors: - Take the guesswork out of nutrition with @True Nutrition and get 15% off with code KKP at truenutrition.com/KKP! - Do you like free stuff? Well, you're in luck because BIOptimizers' Black Friday deal starts NOW and they are giving away free gifts with purchase! Go to  bioptimizers.com/kingsbu  and use code kingsbu10 to get your discount and free gifts today!  - Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy.  Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site   If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome to today's podcast. We have a very special guest and the return of my brother, Jamie Wheel. It has been some time since Jamie's been on the podcast, but I, Jamie's just someone who I fucking love and admire and have learned so much from. And I'm super fortunate. Anytime I get a chance to speak to an author while they're writing their book, I think there's something special that transpires because I can take a step into their mind for a moment and see exactly how they're working on the problems that they're working on. And I got to do this when Jamie wrote his phenomenal book, Recapture the Rapture. It was a fucking great podcast at my house in South Austin. And that was a few years

back. That was a while ago. So we'll link to that in the show notes if you missed it. It was one of my favorite episodes of all time. This one was for sure one of my favorite episodes of all time. This one you're listening to right here. For many reasons, Jamie frames where we are at as a culture post-election, no matter who you voted for, which side you're on, the existential risk that we have coming our way and the way through it. Hopefully that fucking narrow, narrow, narrow way through it. So I'm very, very excited to release this podcast. I'm also even more excited to dive into Jamie's book when it's finished. And just an amazing gratitude for this guy. Just what a fucking incredible, beautiful, heart-centered human Jamie is. So thank you, brother, for coming on the podcast. Jamie Wheel, welcome to the podcast. So we were going to talk a bit about where the world's at, the necessity of a

new story. I watched the talk that you did for the, what was the psychedelic conference? Spirit Plant Medicine up in Vancouver. Very cool. Yeah. Loved, loved the talk. Loved the slides that you had for it. It was really cool. You know, I thought that was, that was informative, but also very grounding. And that's a conversation we've been having for some time, right? It's a conversation that Aubrey and I wanted you to have with our members in fit for service, which you got to here, right? Because of the, you know, and to paint with a broad brush, the five MEO group and in Encinitas versus people that are actually getting their hands in the soil and making a difference. And, and there are, you know, unfortunately, a stark contrast between the two. Where do we start here? I would love for you to give this backstory on, you know, I loved how you framed the history of humanity. I loved that. So

if you want to take it that route, go for it. Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe even just to kind of pick up where most folks are, which is post-U.S. election, which in itself was kind of a crazy schism in stories, right, where both sides were sort of saying this is the last election. Both sides were saying vote for us or democracy dies. Both sides were saying the future of humanity, goodness, truth, and beauty, and all things we care about is on the line. And granted, some of that is just hopped up political rhetoric. It kind of, you know, happens in many elections, but it felt probably more true to more people. And there was also a very strange set of alliances in particular. I mean, I think the progressive left has always been a

big tent to its detriment, right? Because it can never get its shit together and agree on one strategy on anything. And because it's sort of inclusive to a fault, all it issues or planks or values as well as leaders in charge. And that's consistent with military organizations versus consensus building organizations, all that kind of stuff. But what we saw with the 2024 Trump coalition was meaningfully different than that, right? Because you could sort of say there was the kind of diehard MAGA folks that were always kind of a third of the population, didn't really budge no matter what Trump did. It could be porn stars. It could be Access Hollywood tapes.

It could be felony conviction. It did not matter. That was his whole point about I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and i wouldn't lose a voter like that was the block he was talking about right and then there's sort of folks that were kind of you know what what sociologists would call kind of low information voters that's like i'm busy i'm just trying to keep my head above water just go through my life name recognition i know trump i might have seen the apprentice was awesome pro rough slang he's a rich guy he He must do well. That kind of a decision. So not particularly.

Yeah, not a lifelong politician. Like I don't sign off on all the planks. I'm not even following what he intends to do as a politician or in legislation or any of that. But I mean, I literally like the same way Bobby Kennedy got a bump because of the Kennedy name. You could just say there were people that got a bump because of the Trump brand. But then there was this whole additional category, and I think we have many, many overlapping friends and acquaintances that were in the anti-regime camp, and they might not have had an especially glowing vision of Trump the man, Trump the politician,

whatever it might be. They might have, you know, in the past have voted for Obama, voted, you know, maybe voted against Trump in one of the prior elections, whatever, but now had become convinced that the regime, right, which you could see in COVID policies, you could see in social media, policing of dissent, you could see in, well, you know, depends on, you know, whose information you're borrowing from, but you could see in our geopolitical and military strategies in Gaza, Ukraine, other places, you could see the regime as this big, giant, faceless thing of which Biden and then Harris were kind of the stooges or the front men or women. Right. And we've actually got to shut down the regime, right? And so you're like, holy shit, that is a, and then throw in between Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, this pivot of the tech oligarchs.

So the guys who have masters of the universe in the digital space, at least for the last 20 years, Silicon Valley has been absolutely chapter and verse progressive, right? To a fault, right? Like Google's Gemini AI being woke, all that kind of stuff, right?

No doubt. And yet you had the guys at the tippity top peeling off where Teal was the sole guy out of that crew in 2016. And then now he's got dozens of followers. And Elon's pivot was a major one, as was RFK's. So now you had all these people

who had been following Elon, been following RFK, had been experiencing the excesses of, let's just sort of say, woke extremism, you know, just as a generic placeholder for all of that stuff, you know, slash regime. Something sinister, something big, something faceless, and something kind of doctrinal. We're going to enforce the right way of thinking. And you had that, that arguably is the swing vote. I mean, you can get into the demographics of like Hispanic voters, you know, like, you know, black men voted more, more for Trump and Hispanics voted 45% for Trump and all that kind of stuff. And yes, there was tons of

fine grain stuff and people in democratic governors cities, you know, were like tired of, you know, decriminalization and defund the police stuff. So there was all sorts of movement that was happening. But I think a really significant slab of all that was the anti-regime, conspirituality, independence. And MAHA, right, the Make America Healthy Again, becomes as much of a rallying cry as MAGA, right, and all that kind of stuff. And we're going to take the system down. So that, to me, is interesting, right? Because we've had a flip-flopping or a collapse of our symbol, right? So last week was Veterans Day in the UK. It's Amstis Day, right? It's the, you know, World War I Amstis. And there's this tradition of wearing poppies on your lapel. And

it's a little bit like the Salvation Army at Christmas, but it's, you know, there's a sort of, not the foreign legion, but whatever the, you know, the Veterans Association sells little puppies as fundraisers, and you put them on and you wear them all day. And I remember as a kid, kind of feeling like it was a special day. I didn't, you know, you just kind of pick up those vibes from the adults, and you're like, you know, we're wearing poppies, we're being patriotic, we're remembering old granddad that's buried in a, you know, buried in a field in France somewhere, that kind of thing, right? And I just read a piece in The Telegraph last week, and it was just saying how Poppy Day, wearing of those,

those symbols have now become associated with basically skinhead in England. And so progressives are no longer wearing the red poppies, and instead they've gravitated towards the white poppies, which has tended to signify peace or pacifism. But that's not even enough. That's now been associated with we're pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli. So you're like, holy shit, here's this pretty simple, beautiful symbol of honoring our fallen soldiers, right, that's been around for over a century, is now upside down and inside out. And the signs and symbols, the indicators of what it used to mean now mean something very opposite. that's been around for over a century is now upside down and inside out.

And the signs and symbols, the indicators of what it used to mean now mean something very opposite. The same thing with owning a Tesla, right? I read an article that was pretty funny. Actually, it was all the Hollywood elites who were just desperately trying to flog their Teslas now because of Elon's political shifts and like breaking very expensive leases, selling at crazy discounts just anything possible like get me an audi e-tron you know get me get me a rechargeable mercedes anything to get out of what used to be a shameless virtue signal right of i'm liberal progressive and saving the others was like leo dicaprio driving a prius you know for 25 grand and the funny thing about toyota

was that you know they also sold a hybrid Camry. Nobody bought the fucking hybrid Camry, even though the Camry was the best-selling car in the world at the time. Nobody bought the hybrid because when I was driving it, you couldn't tell I was driving a hybrid. But a Prius, that janky-ass, ugly motherfucking thing. Everyone, you know, look at me in the 405 HOV lane. Yeah. Right? So people bailing, right, on Teslas as symbols, but here in Texas driving a Cybertruck, that still

works. So you see the same with the Matrix and red pill versus blue pill. Red pill used to be kind of a nod and a wink to psychedelic initiation. It used to be a nod and a wink to I've been demystified about conspiracies. I've understood the real way the world works, you know, kind of in line with the movie. And it wasn't until whenever, 2014, 15, on 4chan and various other back alleys of the internet, that being red-pilled was associated with the manosphere, was being associated with incels, was being associated with, oh, there's this militant feminism that's coming for white males and you can't do it. So being red-pilled, which would even then progress to being black-pilled,

which would be even more serious. And you're like, wait, what the fuck? What's happened? And even like this week, Star Wars, the same drill, right? Star Wars used to be the Empire were the baddies and the Rebel Alliance were the good guys and everybody roots for the Rebel Alliance. And then with Steve Bannon, with Peter Thiel, with with some of these other guys they started more cynically you know

Dick Cheney being like you know Darth Vader's good right they the Republican this was back this was 2016 and 2020 when they were building their social media campaign for Trump we're like we're building the death star right of social media so they're owning right something that used to be other um and just this week barry weiss was interviewing peter teal and he's like now the republicans are the rebel alliance and the progressive left are the stormtroopers and the empire and then literally this week disney just punted on their next star wars installment. So it was supposed to come out next year or maybe 2026. And they're like, ah, never mind. Whether it was connected to the election or not, I'm unclear.

But the fact that they have Rey, a young girl, they had a Mexican-American Han Solo-like character. They had all these things, right? And they sort of made it multicultural. And so all of the blowback into the Star Wars space of Star Wars having gone woke versus what it used to be. So you just, you know, you just take a scan at all of our reference points, all of our kind of waypoints, you know, like almost like in the back country, people build rock cons, right? The stacks of rocks to mark where the trail is,

right? And now we might even come across familiar stacks of rocks, but they don't point the way home anymore. And part of that is, I think, you know, for sure, you can take any run at this you want, but starting with the 08 financial collapse and the incredible weird dislocation of that and the fact that all these trillions of dollars were printed out of thin air,

but they just went straight to Goldman Sachs, right? And Bank of America and average Americans kept struggling. They're like, wait, what was this whack-ass shell game that just happened? Did we just get, you know, did we just get schooled into 2016 fracturing of European alliances, Brexit, you know, Trump's initial election. So you barely catch our breath, smack dab into COVID, which just blew everyone super sideways. And there was no ability for people to even pulse check with each other. So it was like we were all, you know, smoking crystal meth and banging away on hand drums and hoping we all stayed on the beat and on the rhythm. And we didn't. We just didn't. And those, you know, what you would, you know, might technically call an

epistemic fracture. Like, how do we make sense of, you know, might technically call an epistemic fracture. Like, how do we make sense of things? And that's broken. So epistemic fractures all over the place. And depending on who your friends were and what particular algorithmic rabbit holes they were getting sucked down, we ended up just drifting from each other. And we were no longer on the same page about anything, but the symbol still existed, which is what makes it so mind-fuck. It's not like, oh, all the old stories don't work anymore. Scrap it. Clean slate. Let's start again. It was up is down, down is up,

good is bad, bad is good, left is right, right is left. I mean, even rhino as a category, right? Republican in name only. If you look at that phrase you know it started with teddy roosevelt back in the day because teddy roosevelt was a populist he was he didn't give a fuck right he was he was the rough rider he was the bull moose party he was just like breaking things and not following anybody's rules including the rules of the republican party so they called him a rhino right and then in clinton's era right clinton famously is like never mind being progressive i'm going to be pro business pro all, pro all these things. He takes the Democratic Party to the center. And then all of the Republicans, you know, who were just kind of career, were like, all right, we're going to we're going to go over here with with old Billy Boy.

He's running the table. And so diehard conservative Republicans, right, that were free markets, that were anti-Soviet Union, that were that were pro-big business, that were all of these things, were like, you fuckers are rhinos. And so rhino for 20, 30 years meant you didn't subscribe to free market economics with like Milton Friedman, that kind of stuff. Like, don't fuck with the market. The market is supreme and ultimately intelligent and any efforts to tinker or tamper with it, right, bad juju. Don't do it. Right? That's Marxist social engineering or tamper with it, right, bad juju. Don't do it, right? That's Marxist social engineering, something along those lines, right? Now you've got Trump being like, we're going to tariff the shit out of everything. We're going to put our thumbs on

the scales all over the place, right? And you've got a bunch of Americans going, USA, USA, right? So you're like, it's totally fine to have a position on that, but it is not a conservative Republican position. The same with the Soviet Union being the evil empire and antithetical to all things American democratic and free market, right? And now you have plenty of people on the right, including Tucker Carlson, right? Including Dave Rubin, including all of these folks who, whether they have been bought and paid for, or just simply influenced, or just all by their own some happen to have come up with these ideas, which I think is the least likely,

are like, actually, I kind of understand where old Vlad's coming from. He's kind of a defender of Western civilization. He's standing up for patriarchy and Christian values. Maybe we should just give him a freebie. Maybe just a little, just a tip, just to see how it feels. Just around Ukraine, just around Poland.

Just let him have some. Because who can blame them, right? And you're like, wait a second, that's fucking nuts, right? And you kind of go down the list and you realize, oh, Trump, love him or hate him, is the absolute definition of a rhino, right? He came over, just hijacked the party. He's like, I've got Twitter, you've got the RNC. You used to be kingmakers and control everything with the, you know, dispensing your funding. I don't need your money, right? And I can bypass your establishment media

and get straight to my people. And he ran the table like that, right? So he comes in as a completely ideological, ideologically, let's just say heterodox. You could say utterly incoherent and impulsive, but let's just say heterodox thinker politically. He doesn't have a consistent position that he sources his decision-making from. He's the rhino, hands down. But he turned that and said, I'm not, you are. So now rhino means, as of the last five years, if you don't bend the knee to DJT, you're a rhino means as of, you know, the last five years. If you don't bend the knee to DJT, you're a rhino, right? Which is just, it's just important to trace the histories and the naming of ideas. And again, you could be on either side of those and you could be cheering the guy on. But just to note, we have actually undergone symbol switching. And when you undergo symbol

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that requires collagen as well as skin. And at 42 and being a sun baby as I am out in Southern Texas, it's important that I get enough collagen. And we simply don't through our diet. I mean, wintertime is a little easier because we do a lot of crockpots, but for the most part of the year, collagen is a supplement that I need day in and day out. And so combining these two has been a really easy way for me to get everything that I want from a performance standpoint, as well as a longevity standpoint. For a limited time, our listeners get 15% off your entire order when you use code KKP at checkout. That's 15% off your order at tru.com with promo code KKP. Take the guesswork out of nutrition with True Nutrition. So imagine, you know, we're all about to go ahead into Thanksgiving. You've got grandma and grandpa, they're Fox News watchers. They're like, Republicans. And you're like, well, wait,

grandpa, you've been carpet bombed with a new republicanism for the last four or five years. You might not even remember that when you were cheering for Nixon and you were cheering for Reagan, right? And you were cheering for Bush and all those things and the values that they held, that you are completely in the upside down now cheering for something that they would never recognize. So again, you know, times change, situations change, we come to new and different conclusions about what matters and where's our North Star and who to follow and all that kind of stuff. But symbol switching, right, is a massive, I think, symptom, right? It's not causal.

It's a symptom that all of our old stories aren't working anymore. And if we look at it, right, and again, going back to 08 into 2016 into COVID and since, right, I think you could make a case that many, many people have come to the conclusion with more or less clarity, right? Some might just feel it.

It might just be disease. It might be anxiety. It might be anger. It might be frustration. Or they could be actually connecting dots and have a articulated position on this, which is the system doesn't fucking work anymore. It doesn't work for me, and it doesn't work maybe more broadly, either for me and mine, my tribe, people I identify with,

or even collectively the whole world. And that could be go to school, you know, work hard, study, get a good job, get a paycheck, buy a house, right, take two-week vacations, have a pension, retire happily, more or less happily ever after i'm going to live in a house that's bigger than my parents did and bigger than their parents did we're upwardly mobile right america's land of the free and the home of the brave right there's upward limit there's unlimited possibilities for our future just that whole kind of american dream slash story of progress right isn't landing so well or credibly for people. The idea of like trust the professionals or trust who's in charge, right? A thousand and one places we've had those epistemic

cracks. And where that leaves us, you know, one of the things you see is all the symbols flipping, right? So now I can't find my way home if I wanted to following the old milestone markers. So I'm just wandering around. And that's actually, funnily enough, sidebar, but I think illustrative of this. We just came back from guiding a course in the Utah canyons. Right. So this place we go adventure, train, do fun stuff. We were shooting a documentary with Adrian Grenier. Right. Oh, cool. Yeah. And and one of the things that's been happening there is that because of Instagram, and I didn't realize this at first, and I'm like, oh, fuck, it's Instagrammers,

have been building rock cons in these epic canyon places and spots, not because it's marking the way, but because it looks awesome as a backdrop and a shot. So we had a group. We had a group of students rolling along trying to get down to the Colorado River following the rock cons. But they were false trails and they ended up cliffed out with like a 300 foot fall. But they weren't even noticing the danger they were in because they were just following the milestones. And of course the milestones must be here on purpose and must lead to where we're trying to go or else why would they be here? So you just see that and then loop that into like

digital narcissism. And like everything is just for images at this point. You're like, okay, you know, crazy town. We're living in a complete upside down. So well, let me let me just pause there. Because that's a that's ideally taking folks from situational assessment of just where we all are right now into what is a much bigger, longer story of 100,000 years. I'll let you get a little clean in you. They're not a sponsor. I do love them dearly. Yerba Mate, little organic goodies in there. 160 mgs of caffeine.

That's what I love about it. I also love that Yerba is like a different caffeine for me than coffee for whatever reason i think i think it's coffee matine in it as well right yeah so like that's my that's always my midday if i'm gonna do something midday um i love the frame especially coming out of you know i i was a huge bobby supporter we had him here at the farm we just did our tour of the farm you get to see where we got to do the sweat lodge with chase iron eyes and Ken Conti and so many great people. Del big tree was in there.

I could feel the wave of potential, you know, and, and I think Aub and Ben Stewart just did a great documentary. We'll link to in the show notes called land of the free, which basically shows, you know, for over the course of 45 minutes,

Bobby's trajectory going after Trump, going after Biden, going after the administration's after Biden, going after the administration's getting shunned out the way Bernie Sanders did from the DNC and then saying, all right, fuck it. I'm still a I'm still a Democrat. I'm still a liberal, but I'm going to run as an independent. And then because of the lack of availability of even being able to get on stage and be able to put his points across, but you know, people for people that have been following him and read the real Anthony Fauci or any of these things and follow children's health

defense, like he has diehard supporters built in. And then, hey, this guy, Trump, who really isn't on the right, you know, but it is the face of the right, he's saying, come to my party, let's do this. Right. And like that became the make America healthy again, alliance and um so many it's funny because like half the people who hadn't really followed bobby but liked what he was saying and maybe followed bobby because of a celebrity or somebody they know on on instagram talking about him they were like no fuck that i'm not i'm not going there you know like he's he's with the misogynist he's with an x y and z i'm out of here but for the people who loved bobby i mean i saw it as a way possibly the only the smartest way forward because even if he was in if he somehow

made it in as president i don't think he'd have the pull that he has right now considering the presidency the house the senate and all all the ways that that swung so far to the right so i think there is a lot of hope there but But I mean, I've got, you know, friends on all sides of it. I've got buddies that won't talk to me, you know, from, from Portland, you know, because they assume that I'm a conservative. And I'm just I've just I think like most people, Elon put a great meme out where it showed a stick figure, you know, in 2020 2000, you know, slightly on the left, and then that that the line moves underneath them, you know, slightly on the left. And then that, that the line moves underneath them, you know, and all of a sudden he's, you know, slightly to the right in 2016 and they're like, you know, name calling,

you know, as the left continues to move further and further left until he's finally, he's just stayed in the same spot though the whole time, but the lines move so far left until, you know, the guy, the guy who was standing next to is now like bigot. And then he's all of a sudden far, right. It's a, it's an interesting, it's interesting thing. I,

for a long time have felt, and I, and it's, it's hard to, because for a minute there, I would love just as anybody to go down the rabbit hole with psychedelics and come back out and be like, fuck.

Yeah. I connected to source and this and that, but through 2020 and this and that, but like I come back from 2020 and i'm like i can't go in there i can't make sense of fucking 3d right now why would i go in there right now i can't i can't make sense of 3d reality and up is down it was bizarro world yeah right and so so i really just want to stamp a point on that because people who think they've got it figured out tend to be a little bit more tribal for the most part. Right. If you, if you're certain that Trump's a bad guy, if you're certain,

you know, that, that whatever the case is, um, you probably have a team, you know, where, you know, you're blue, or you know, you're red, or, you know, what is right and what is wrong. And so much of that has been up in the fucking air over the last eight years that it's, it's, it's hard to tell. Yeah. That's, you know, I should have neglected to put the period at the end of the sentence on the setup. We are experiencing ridiculous amounts,

very confusing amounts of symbol switching. So everything is flip-flopping. And where does that lead us, right? Because we get a sense, right? There's that great definition of eschatosthesia. And eschatosthesia is just a sense of the impending eschaton or the end of time. So it shows up in like hyperspace dictionary,

which is all about like DMT trips and various other stuff. And eschatesthesia is a recurring experience that people have in high tryptamine states. They're like, oh, fuck. There's a big wave on the horizon. Like there's a closeout set coming, right? And I can feel it slash see it right now. And eschatesthesia is I think what we're all experiencing.

All of our spidey senses are like the water's getting sucked out to sea, the crickets have all stopped, the animals are heading to higher ground. What is on the horizon? And my sense is, is that, you know, that eschaton isn't going to be the singularity, right? It's not going to be neat and tidy. It's not going to be like, yay, we suddenly have artificial general intelligence and hit the button on chat GPT and upload your consciousness, and now we're silicon eternal beings. It won't be that. And nor will it be the empire is defeated by the Rebel Alliance or that Neo solves the machines or that Harry defeats Voldemort.

It'll be like Voldemort was the good guy. Snape was the good guy all along. Fucking mind blown. Who knows, right? And what we're seeing is not the singularityity but the inter-twingularity all the archetypes and all the memes and all the stories are getting sucked down the drainpipe of time and space right and they're smashing and crashing and blending into each other so what we end up with is just this meme soup and who who i was rooting for right the good guys and the bad guys, which flag I was flying,

which uniform I was wearing, to your point about tribal identities, gets absolutely timed upside down. And I think the greatest psyop of all right now is that everybody's red pill moment is itself a psyop. So you've been hijacked, you've been inceptive if you think that you have actually unplugged from the matrix and you're no longer inceptive, right? And ultimately, like the great sorting hat at the end of time, right, isn't going to care which flag we were flying, isn't going to care whose uniform or what side we thought we were on. It's love or fear. And that's the way I'm trying to orient with relationships, right? Because as you said, right, we have lots of people we have water under the bridge with. We've lived life beside. And we're coming to different conclusions about which way to cast a ballot right now. But many of us are actually on

team good guy rooting for the same outcome, which is a healthy, happy, peaceful world for us and our children. Now the question of how far do we extend that, do we extend it to all the people in the global south, do we extend it to people who don't believe the same, worship the same altars as us, etc., etc., those are some important gradations. But fundamentally, if you're on Team Human, if you're coming from a place of love and defensive life, can we orient around that and not get distracted by politicized parties that are just pushing our buttons and trying to manipulate us into one side or another? Because, you know, to your point about like the RFK stuff, right? And this has happened on both sides, right? Which is, I think many people

became profoundly disillusioned about quote-unquote big pharma during covid right for understandable reasons right the pfizer plays all that kind of stuff the fauci connections that the gain of function research a thousand and one things that if you put them together you're like holy fuck these guys you know throw in throw in oxycontin and purdue pharma and throw in throw in oempic. And you're like, Jesus, they are just manipulating us to pump us full of drugs that cure the side effects from the last drugs. And the last drug could be high fructose corn syrup, right? But, you know, here's the Ozempic or here's Perdu Farmer actually coming up with anti-narcotic stuff after flogging Oxy. You know, like mind bending shit, right?

So you're like, oh, you know, like mind bending shit, right? So you're like, oh, the, you know, the scales have fallen from my eyes. I was blind, but now I see big farmers, the big time baddies. And that threw a lot of people more rightward, right? But the same thing happened in 2020 with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. It's like, I just read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. My mind is blown. George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree and slavery. And you're like, yeah, fucking do your homework, right? Do your goddamn homework. And so there's that great phrase, there is no fervor like the newly converted, right? And you could also say there's no paranoia

like those recently red-pilled, right? And that sense of people then over-indexing, right, into good guys and bad guys, kind of seeing shadows, you know, like behind every door, that kind of thing. It's just sort of like, yeah, realize the actual nature of reality and the actual nature of civilization and the actual dynamics of power. And if you have those things, you know, if you have a more or less working roadmap of those things, then you're less likely to be shocked, outraged, flabbergasted, surprised, or manipulatable, right?

In what is the actual lie of the land and how do we do this civilization thing, which kind of now, you know, potentially brings us to the doorstep of like, all right, what is a, for me, at least my sense is, you know, kind of orienting off that Nietzsche quote, where he's like, he who has a why can endure almost any how. And the why as to what are we facing in this next century is arguably, you know, a world that bears only passing resemblance to the world we were born and raised in. The 20th century, the Pax Americana, the American peace that we just swam in from the end of World War II until lately, take your pick, when that went tits up. And so all of our reference points won't work for what we're going into. And many people are experiencing confusion despair anxiety

right despondency you take a look at our gen z generation right and if any of you have if anybody has tweens to teens to college age kids and many of them right they're getting their new sources in different ways they they grew up post 08 post 2016 so they they never had the rosy rosy happy days version of this shit they're like this place is fucked and you guys and you get you know you baby boomers gave us in you know a steaming dumpster fire to inherit so like you know they're they're actually seeing things potentially i mean there's plenty of distortions in tiktok and instagram but they are they in some some ways are seeing more clearly, because they're not having to shed that old mythic, epic, triumphalist narrative of the American story or the Western story, whatever it would be. And many of them are like,

there's diseases of despair, there's suicidal ideation, there's a complete lack of faith or belief in having children and families of their own, right? There's a complete lack of faith or belief in having children and families of their own, right? There's a sense of this world is smoked and there's no fixing it. So we have to endure, right, a world where there's not just narrative collapse happening, but there's all sorts of real world nitty-gritty things going on. And whether that's Sudan, you know, like sub-Saharan Africa is barely getting any press in the West right now. And it is on fire. And there's new genocides. And there's crazy environmental ecological catastrophes. There's all sorts of things happening in sub-Saharan Africa. And then throw in what's definitely in our news feeds of Gaza, Lebanon,

Iran to Ukraine, right? To say nothing of subcontinent of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and floods and whatever, whatever and wherever's next. And that sense of, okay, we've got to screw our courage to the sticking point. We've got to somehow maintain our compassion for our fellow humans at a time when it is oh so tempting and there's plenty of demagogues banging the drum to crank up the drawbridges, build fences, electrify them, and keep out the dirty others, right? And keep enough prosperity, can't crash our economies, that would be a no-no, and our ingenuity to hopefully figure out what the fuck do we do now, right, from a place of techno-industrial sophistication and capacity, because we're going to need it. It's the old Einstein thing, right,

if the third world war is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones, right, we can't innovate our way out of late-stage capitalism with sticks and stones, right? We can't innovate our way out of late stage capitalism with sticks and stones, right? There's going to have to be some hybridized solution of, you know, high tech, high engineering, low embedded energy solutions that work for the bottom of 4 billion, or we end up with a population crash, right? That is a, well, I mean, A, just objectively tragic, but also a psychic scar we barely recover from. Yeah, that would take eons too. I mean, think of the population having that you discuss, you know, with the psychedelic conference is very real. Also, the no country for men, you know, or the Clive Owen movie.

I don't know if I got the title right, but where people just are infertile. You know, like you combine those things, right? If there is disaster, if there's just an ongoing lack of paying attention to the bottom four billion and there are no solutions made and it just we go halved there and then people also can't get pregnant you know like that that i remember i forget i was talking about it but just in china alone the the the population of the elderly in so many countries that have a great population is very high. And so that percentage drop off is coming. So who's building the next generation, right? Well, the demographic

impact, basically the faster your country modernized in the 19th or 20th centuries means the steeper your demographic cliff is now. So basically slow, relatively easy ramp ups like England took about four generations to industrialize. This was the whole steam engines to looms and mills and all that kind of stuff, right? All that, you know, and so it was a relatively slow ramp up because they were figuring shit out as they went along. Germany took about three generations. Japan took only one or two. All the Asian tigers, right? So the Taiwan, South Korea, all those places, which were basically just built overnight after World War ii right um those guys have crazy sharp demographic cliffs because basically the

entire country almost overnight effectively half a generation right went from agrarian peasant farmers doing whatever to massive urban concentrations industrialization and of course what happens when you move off farms have better access to medical care literacy economic stability you don't have eight babies you have two or three right and so so those cliffs are infinitely sharper but the reality of when people have this conversation elon's obviously been a big booster of like we're actually in population decline not not growth we need to have more babies And he's doing his level best on a personal level. Slinging that baby batter left and right. So, you know, the question is, you know, from Twitter, you can't fucking sort this out. It's far too complicated. Because I think a more accurate answer is not, we have too many or we don't have enough, right? Because the other hand

is like, you know, we're eight, potentially cresting at 10 billion, you know, in the next few decades, although those numbers are kind of dynamic and in flux. They're definitely getting revised, in many cases, downwards. Like, maybe we're not going to actually crest there. But you're like, we've got a whole lot of people, more than we've ever had in human history. And to the point that you were just alluding to, which is since the early 70s until now, we have doubled the human population from 4 billion to 8 billion. And all four extra billion that we got was the green agricultural revolution. So not green like solar panels and Teslas, but green like, you know, glyphosate, basically round up GMO seeds, giant combine harvesters, refrigeration

trucking. So very fossil fuel intensive, right? Both in the fertilizer generation and pesticides, but also in the whole mechanization of getting it done. So half of our world's population would not exist were it not for that crazy fossil fuel supported industrial agriculture. So you're like, oh, shit. So we've got people in a highly complex system, right? Which is modern day global supply chain connected, you know, economies and societies, right? And just on the level of material physics, right? Complex dissipative structure.

Dissipative just means it goes away, right? So a complex structure that's dissipative needs ever increasing inputsreasing inputs of energy to keep it going, otherwise it collapses. So a human is a complex dissipative structure. Don't give me enough glucose to my brain and water, and I'm dead. I'm just compost in a week, right? Or maybe a little bit longer, right? So we're complex dissipative structures, and that's what allows our mind to be far more interesting than the sum total of our compostable nutrients right our meat suits right but also civilization and so we happen to have

created this incredibly complex eight billion human organ super organism with sticking straws in the ground and setting a hundred million dollars a hundred million years of buried starlight on fire the carbon boom hydrocarbons and we know there's not an infinite supply we know we're actually getting increasingly to the bottom of that barrel like quite literally and and while america in the last 10 years has experienced you know i mean i was just driving through you know driving back into back into Austin from being in Colorado and seeing like $2.50 gallons of gas. And I'm like, holy shit. And I just remember this from like boats, you know, like how much does it take to fill up the boat to go surf? Right. And, and, and, you know, I, that was 10 years ago,

there was $2.50 gallons of gas. There was also $4 gallons of gas. I remember that there was some expensive, it was almost up to eight in some places in California for a minute there. There was some expensive days on the water. And you're like, okay, so people, if they're not paying attention, could just be like, oh yeah, suck it monkeys. Like America, USA, energy independence, whatever. And you're like, no, no, no. That was fracking.

Right. And that went from peak oil or people were calling peak oil at like 2008, right around then. Like, we're actually at the end, it's going to be energy crisis, it'll be like OPEC in the 70s, whatever. And then it didn't. And everyone's like, ah, see, those were just chicken littles. Those were people crying wolf. And it didn't happen. But actually what happened is we just started doing incredibly hard to get fuel deposits that we couldn't have got to in the past or weren't economically viable. They're still not economically viable. And that's the era of tight oil.

And it's a massively degraded quality of energy from what we used to just get when it was Beverly Hillbillies and they were just gushers and you could just, you know, and that was like that hundred to one return on investment. Now we're dropping to like 30 to 20. And at some point, it's not that we will suck up all the hydrocarbons underground. They just simply won't be economically feasible to extract. If you've got to spend more than a dollar to get a dollar, and more accurately, it's spend more than a calorie to get a calorie of just energy, then it ceases to be viable. So that's happening regardless of which political party you're on. Trump came to power this time being like, drill, baby, drill. That's what I'm going to do day one is I'm going to release all this stuff. happening regardless of which political party you're on, right?

Trump came to power this time being like, drill, baby, drill. That's what I'm going to do day one is I'm going to release all this stuff. You know, he promised in the spring, I think, down in Mar-a-Lago, promised the collection of Exxon execs and CEOs like, hey, give me a billion bucks for my campaign. I'll write whatever legislation you want, right? Even Exxon weirdly now is like, actually, don't back out of the Paris Accords. We kind of like this game we're playing and can actually work it to our maximum advantage as we go but regardless of the politics this is back to us as people we know that that hydrocarbon energy source tapers out slash crashes within our century within the lifetime of our children right and there aren't

any more rabbits to pull out of that particular hat. So we're going to need to be making a transition to fundamentally, like it's the best shit ever. I know people, especially liberals, anybody who's concerned about environment, et cetera, et cetera, would be like, oh, fossil fuels are terrible. Those assholes in Texas driving trucks, fuck them. Meanwhile, they're flying all around the world to their conchie festivals. Never mind.

I think basically upper middle class liberals, bi-coastal, have a carbon footprint that far exceeds your average person in Kansas, regardless of what car you're driving, right? But nonetheless, right, you could be like, okay, how on earth do we maintain this incredibly complex dissipative structure that is Western civilization, right, with the population load we're currently having, and somehow managing a transition to massively less bang for buck energy sources without crashing our economy, which will create political mayhem, probably wars, wars and other forms of kinetic conflict, and a massive crash in standards of living, ability to innovate, educational pathways, etc, etc. Because for perspective, 2008, the Great Recession was a 5% drop in GDP, just 5%. And right now, just not to nerd out, but like our GDP is like north of 95% correlated with our energy spend.

So the more energy we burn, the richer we are. And we haven't figured out a way to decouple that significantly or convincingly yet right so for all of human history how much we set on fire how much carbon we burn is directly connected with how wealthy we are and you said the five percent of 2008 compare that to the great depression was 30 yeah 30 percent drop in gd and the great depression right all those black and white photos of those long-faced women with their kids in the Dust Bowl, the Okies going to California, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, like that whole fucking thing. Including fascism in Europe, the rise of Nazism and Italian fascism, all of that, right? Coming out of a 30% drop, which was also Dust Bowl, an ecological crisis, right?

We took metal plows, scraped the tall and short grass prairies from all of that amazing sod and biomass put in mono crops and then we had years of drought and all the dust picked up and blew all the way to hawaii oops right that was since the last ice age all of those nutrients right just gone because of an ecological dip against a market system. So to go back to the original point here, which was too many people are not enough people, and how the fuck do we navigate this, is basically a question of there are, actually I just sent this to my kids, it was a total dad text, but it was basically a really cool map of the world's population, so this 8 billion people. And it basically was different color codes, And it was all of North America, all of South America,

and most of Western Europe, I think even including Russia, that's 2 billion people. And then it was like sub-Saharan Africa, or actually just the continent of Africa, 2 billion people. China, 2 billion people. And then just this little rinky-dink subcontinent of India 2 billion people and you're like, oh shit how are we going to do this? and what we're having is far too many people

basically if you could TLDR what Elon's been tweeting about for the last several years it's too many kids being born in refugee camps not enough kids going to Montessori school, right? Because especially if you add in the effective accelerationists, right, of which, you know, I would say Elon is adjacent to that, Marc Andreessen and a bunch of those guys in Silicon Valley are like, fucking pin it, like get every electron, even Eric Schmidt, right,

the former CEO of Google has recently gone on the record being like, ah, fuck environmental stuff. Get to artificial general intelligence as fast as possible. It'll fix it for us. So you've got that whole thing. Marc Andreessen wrote that techno-optimist manifesto, I guess, last year or the year before now, which was like anybody that's getting in the way of unbridled massive acceleration, right, that's the effect of acceleration this bit, towards artificial general intelligence and whatever gee whiz spacefaring species we're going to be next, thanks Elon, right, is basically has the blood of trillions of future unborn humans on their hands, right, and they're cucks as well, like, right, there was some kind of funny flex on sort of this,

you know, muscular techno-optimism, which is funny coming from those nerds who never got laid in high school. I think there's a connection there, actually, between the sociopathic tendencies of techno-billionaires and whether or not they got laid in high school. All right, y'all, another quick break to tell you about Lucy.co. Lucy is one of our longest-running show sponsors.

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eight or nine figures in their bank accounts and had smoking hot women hanging around them. And they're like, wait, what am I? Who am I? I think I'm gonna get on testosterone. I think I'm gonna have, you know, like, it's the most hilarious thing. But it's also deeply disturbing, because they're often crypto or not, or overt misogynist. And what they really need, I think, is like badass, strong women by their side. And a boy a man-child with too much power and imbalanced with his relationship to basically badass wise feminine whether that's in a grandmother form or a soulmate partner form whatever taking or all of the above missing that

they are prone to petulance and grandiosity and that tends not to work out well for the rest of us yeah yeah i would say too i just think of the um there are you know pitfalls you know this better than anybody perhaps but pitfalls in the psychedelic you know third wave of if you lack the intention care and reverence and you know somebody who's been made their life of the medicine you know and you go to the amazon and you go on your pilgrimage and the last people we sat with at Zoltara were a couple in their 50s and they had been serving medicine for 30 years.

That's what they did. They had babies. The wife was only serving for 15 years because she was a stay-at-home mom for the first 15 years and then she started traveling with her husband. There's a deep connection in ayahuasca itself to mother and to the earth. And, and they held that beautifully, you know, in relationship being a tell like that

was his fucking perfect counterpart, yin and yang, and they would sing together, you know, it was just like, this is this is a fucking incredible experience. Flip the coin. There's people, you know, at microdosing the right amount of l and doing this and that and just feeding themselves everything they they're doubling down on everything they thought to be true right and so i think that that can you know in the in the absence of what you're talking about this this acknowledgement of the divine feminine and the the pairing of of uh that supreme lover mother energy that can hold the masculine and also say yes to it but curate it in a way that's that's beneficial for all you know minus that you do see like just

the fucking the head doubles in size every fucking journey and it's and it's a it's a tough one you know well some of that i think is is the absence it's just the johnny come lately's rights, right? And I didn't realize this because this just was not our experience coming up, right? I mean, I was exposed to psychedelics in college, kind of had beautiful experiences in nature, beautiful experiences at live music events. organic no middleman introduction and therefore just because of the the dumb luck of that never engaged or animated a an adult identity that was exclusively socially defined so had had these wild ass you know profoundly to us, baptisms and initiations, which left us, you know, and it was makes, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless we could do it culturally, because it meant a whole lot of loneliness, a whole lot of wandering around, a whole lot of sense of like, wait, the instruction manual we're trying to live our life by, which is like, can we stay in the light? Can we stay aligned to the things that we've been shown didn't seem to make any sense to anyone else and you know there was trade-offs on career education friends social

groups it was a profoundly lonely and confusing path to have to walk it was like basically just being dropped into a dark night of the soul because no one around you is is singing out of the same hymn book so with those cautions in mind, it was like, but nonetheless, every step we took was our own fumbling, fallible, profoundly human, vulnerable steps towards trying to walk that path. But if you have folks that have spent their entire 20s, maybe even their entire 30s, pursuing sex, money, power, fame, ego, gratification, and then they do psychedelics, and they do psychedelics outside of any lineage tradition outside of deference to any master or mentor who's like yeah now shut the fuck up

chop some wood carry some water you're not all that special cupcake anything along those helpful lines of just you know um perspectival bitch slap and they instead take all of that unearned wisdom and then just jack it straight into the same egoic identity seeking gratification, ratification that they have been on. You end up with Instagram shamans. You end up with big dumb fuckwits. You end up with exactly what we're seeing in the spiritual marketplace these days, which is an entire generation of millennials who have come to this late. I mean, even the number of people who have come to Burning Man who are in like the infomarketer life coach space, they weren't part of any underground culture of which Burning Man grew, right?

Whether that's urban, you know, like Oakland warehouse welders, whether it's cacophony society, whether it's San Francisco Grateful Dead folks, whether it's early tech, you know, homebrew computer, tinkerers and hackers and shit, none of that. Just Oh, wow, there's a signal. There's a social signal over there. Let me go like a hungry ghost to put on the sexy, sexy and take the pictures and do the drugs and do the thing. And now I've been and I get to fucking punch that little ticket and look at me. And you're like, Oh, for fuck's sake, we're done for. Right? Because you can make a case. And, you know, just to use as an example,

not to go on a Burning Man rant, but like to use it as an anthropological example. I think you can make a case that it is the largest psychosocial transformation engine ever assembled on planet Earth. This side of Kumbh Mela in india which is like you know once a decade or so and it's like 100 million people but it's you know it's it's organic and old school so like hat tip to those guys but shy of that you know you have this entire city it's basically a

giant interactive hive mind sigil you know like you've got this Mayan calendar layout of a city with this man at the focal point. And then beyond the man, you have the temple. And then bounding the whole thing is a pentagon slash pentagram, right? With the point at the point of the man in the temple connecting all those dots holding this whole fucking thing together, right? Bounded by mountains to the east and the west, right? And rising and setting suns and moons. And then everybody hooks down, hyper psychoactives, gets sexy, does everything possible to juice up a primate nervous system, right?

And not surprisingly, you get wild ass, you get a very coherent field, right? You get high uptick in synchronicities, coincidences, all the things that people describe happening at events like that. And then, of course, you just fucking set the whole thing off with pyrotechnics, et cetera, et cetera. And wouldn't you know it, that seems to, like having 80,000 little tripping tribal monkeys in one place all on the same thing, seems to,

and again, now I'm completely off the reservation, kids, so if you want to just, you know, mark the gate here, we'll come back to it which is you know my experience i think a lot of people's experience is that sometime between wednesday thursday friday night when things start really popping off there will be a moment if you're fortunate um where somewhere around like 1 to 2 a.m you look around and there's so many art cars and there's so much shit going off that you've now lost all bearings you can't even tell tell where the Black Rock City is. It's just all just lights and movement and everything else. And there's almost just these little like atom bombs. You're like, fuck, what is happening? Like there are almost like portals or stargates just spontaneously

opening up in this desert all around you. And you can slip into them, right? And you can find yourself at a party. You can find yourself in an arca with the dots there's there are magic non-ordinary non-linear time events right out of the deep now like kairos portals basically that seem to open up and you're like fucking hell and then if you're really lucky you get spat out to the trash fence you don't even know whether you're human who's your name was whatever you're like down in the dirt you don't care you're like an organism reconstituting yourself from the primordial soup that used to be this lake a billion years ago and then the sun comes up and you're like oh my gosh what is that i think i can see this and you start wandering back and then the temple is the first thing you see and you know it's the furthest thing out there it used to be

the furthest point you've ever been to but now now you've been to the trash fence. And now the temple feels like fucking home. It's like terra firma. And what do you experience there at sunrise? You experience humans weeping, grieving, praying, right? And it's the most beautiful reorientation to this existence you could possibly hope for. And yet it's still far enough from town. If you're still wigging, it's manageable, right? You can hang out there and you can deal and then you walk back or bike back and you re-enter the city of humans and you're born again

and now that shit's on Instagram am I fucking real now the art that used to break me open and delight me and surprise me with it's humanity with it's playfulness, with its mind fuckability is now just a backdrop like angel wings

on a fucking downtown Austin wall. And now we have swapped figure for ground again. And what used to be the most hands-down largest transformation engine on the planet, aka this ritual, has now become the trappings and baubles

of my spiritually bypassed egoic identity with just a sprinkling of lysergic fairy dust for the extra shimmer. And when that happens, when you've got people down in the rainforest on their phones, like

Blair Witch style, ugly crying after their fucking, you know, after their experience. Oh, hi, fam. How are you? You know, I just realized, I mean, I know I'm supposed to be on social media fast. And I told you all I wasn't going to be caught, but I just have to do this one. And here I am. And then click on the links in the comment below.

And you're like, oh, fuck. Right. So that to me is a thing. And I don't, and it's why I can't see, like that's the psychosocial element of our current psychedelic renaissance, which is captured before it even gets out into transformative potential. And then you obviously have the market economics.

You have the big pharma, venture capital, other stuff. But it's just fundamentally, is there a signal coming out of, I mean, we kind of went down this particular pathway in the conversation, but is there a signal coming out of a psychedelic renaissance that can potentially initiate humans into a both higher or deeper and or more humble or wiser way of being in relationship to the cosmos, nature, whatever it would be, and self and each other. Can we do that? And my sense is, is that not in this time round, like this, this one has, is fully stitched up and captured and corrupted. And that doesn't mean that each of us can't have wonderful meaningful experiences within it, but it does mean that as a movement it is clearly going towards egoic gratification,

and that could be profits, that could be, you know, or it could be, you know, look at me, I'm a golden god, any and all of those, but fundamentally reinforcing the pathological structures of the very system we're trying to escape has actually sneaked out in front of it and is stitching those up. Because if you just took, like I said, the reason I took the moment to sort of, you know, lay out the description of Burning Man, it's just like, there's no fucking manual for this.

Like, that's the other thing. You start seeing those portals blossoming just from the sheer concentration of like psychic energy and human activity and the focused sacred geometry of the place, et cetera. All right, this is a postmodern ritual, right? This isn't of any particular tradition, nor did this thing come from any tops down. Larry Hobby did not dictate how this is taking shape, right? This is just hive mind organizing itself to perform upon itself, right? An enacted ritual that nobody knew in advance would do the things it might do.

And yet that's been fucking captured by the gram. So you're like, all right, we're going to need a bigger boat. We need more dynamite. And I think we're out of dynamite, right? I mean, where do you go after 5-MeO? There is no place else. We're out of bulletsite, right? I mean, where do you go after 5-MeO? There is no place else. We're out of bullets. Yeah, that is, I'll just say that's, in my opinion, the best description of Burning Man I've ever heard. That was fucking phenomenal. It made me miss it in a way, and not,

because, you know, you had a great article on Substack and the photo of, you know, the super hot babes, you know, with the dorks out in front of that awesome helicopter you're just like yeah then there's that you know and it that's not going to ruin my experience but uh it's such a big part of it you know we're we did a couple of our events down in tulum years ago and there was a point you know abed gone back and he's like you guys it's going to break your heart and i was like what he goes tulum is like Daytona. It's like Fort Lauderdale. And I was like, no. We're just got out.

And it's a big party place. And the cartels are in there with all the shit drugs. And sorry if you're in Tulum and disagree. So I don't know if that's forever the case, you know, where you're going to create something beautiful. And then at a certain point, it just goes a little too far. You know, like, I don't know if that, if that's the inevitability of all things.

Well, this is, this is actually beautiful. Cause this is a long and winding road back to at least one of the questions I'm trying to answer in this next book that I'm researching, which, you know, you saw that, that lecture on that talk, which is what the fuck humans, right? If something as beautiful as take your pig, we were just discussing, you know, a transformational festival, but there's plenty of other examples of, you know, Tulum, a beautiful natural place, you know, et cetera. If we keep ruining everything, that's the whole, you know, that's the, that's the tweet or the

hashtag. This is why we can't have nice things. Is that real? Is that true? Do we, do we not deserve nice things? Do we always ruin the beauty? Do you always try and chop it up and sell it or suck it dry or become addicted to it or whatever it is like, and those, those questions, right? There there's, there's, there's a bunch of them. I mean, really probably three or four that to me, if we go back to our sad adolescent kid and they're bummed out and despondent as to the world you know like fundamentally why is there so much suffering in the world right that feels like one right i'm scrolling my news feed i'm seeing all of this like why can't we get along can't we be nice to each other can't we live in harmony why is there sure yeah yeah why is there so much

suffering um and another one is is there a point in this? Like, is this going someplace we're on a path to better, right? Fundamentally, like if you want to get nerdy, it's time and arrow is going high into the right, right? And there is a happy days to come, right? Or is it a circle? Is it Ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail? And we're just cycles of creation and destruction. Cycles of creation and destruction. And there is no there there. We just happen to be on one of the rides. We're in the fourth age.

We're in the Kali Yuga. We're in the whatever it would be. The fourth turning, right? Which has political implications, right? And actually, if we don't like where you are now, the point is just to accelerate the destruction. Because burn it all fucking down is actually where we should be on a cycle if this cycle is in decay or corruption, right? And that is where Steve Bannon is, right?

That is where all the acceleration is. Funnily enough, the tech accelerations are actually more on the we're going high into the right. We are destined to become a non-human interplanetary species. So whether that's Sam Altman being like, we're just bootloaders for artificial intelligence, whether that's Elon on Mars, whatever it would be, right? So those have huge implications. And kind of a subset of that is, have we overshot the mark? So is the way forwards faster, like the accelerationists would say?

Or did we take a wrong turn someplace in human civilization and culture and we need to get back to yeah rightness and alignment so that goes back you know as long as humans have been developing shit we've been looking back over our shoulders going ah we missed it and you can see that in the ancient greece you can see that in the romans you can for sure as shit see it in like 18th century on Europeans, the whole creation of the noble savage with Rousseau and all of that, which was, we've become busy, we've got cities, we've got beggars, we've got, you know, wars, we've got all this stuff. Did we miss it? The child in the state of nature, let's go back to Eden, of course, the colonization of the Americas became this giant mindfuck experiment of like, oh, look at them, they're living in a state of nature,

and that's groovy, and then we do it, and how do we learn from them? So like that kind of retrospective romanticism of like, there's a time in the past, it was better. Everything was good. We missed the signpost. Right. And we went down a place we need to backtrack from Jared Diamond, right. He wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, famously said agriculture was our worst mistake. Yuval Harari doubled down on that, right? It was like, hey, hunter-gatherers, and this goes back to Marshall Sahlins back in the 60s, actually, which inspired much of the back-to-the-line movement of the hippies, which was actually hunter-gatherers had better nutrition, they were 10 centimeters taller,

they had more egalitarian structures, they had less warfare, they only spent a third of their waking hours in work, the rest of their time was in art, craft, culture, ritual, bullshitting around a fire if you were one of the dudes in between hunts, right? All that kind of stuff. So why did we end up in, you know, cramped, muddy, oppressive, taxed, poor nutrition, high warfare, you know, farms and cities, you know, et cetera, et cetera. We did a wrong turn, right? Or is it our phones?

And social media was the place we need to wind back to 2008 like everybody's always playing the wayback machine game to where we think that was so those are i think profoundly important questions to have thought about and wrestled with right it you know why is there suffering right is there a point or is it you know does yeah times arrow or circle is our way forwards faster or do we need to go back to the future right and then fundamentally back to this you know why can't we have nice things slash the capture of the psychedelic renaissance or the capture of the burning man experience or whatever it would be, which is what's, what's our fucking problem, right? Like, why do, why do we shit on everything that's amazing?

Why do we consume it until it's gone? Why is the story of the giving tree a fucking fable we have, right? Like that's a perverse tale, right? And, and I don't know the way out of this one. I really, really don't know the way out of this one. I really, really don't. Other than additional cycles of creation and destruction, which is the concept of obligate adaptation, right? And obligate adaptations is just the changes

that you are obligated to make, right? You don't have to, but you're obligated to. And if you don't, you either get erased from the chessboard, you get out-competed. Well, actually, fundamentally that. You just get, you lose. or a thinker or anybody in the creative space. Like me doing me is actually how I've made a career or a living. But I don't, but I look at TikTok and I look at Instagram and I think that there's shallow, you know, empty soulless places. And I'd like to focus on my art or my work, my scholarship, whatever it might be. And you're like, okay, you know, great, great. You don't have to.

But on the other hand, Andrew Huberman is getting a quarter mil of fucking speech, right? And you're toiling away and, you know, trying to create a peer-reviewed hand, Andrew Huberman is getting a quarter mil of fucking speech, right? And you're toiling away and trying to create a peer-reviewed paper no one's going to fucking read. Good luck with that, right? So, or a musician, right? If you don't have a social media presence, right? Or you're an author

and the first thing that people ask is not what's the quality of your idea or can you even write? It's what's your fucking social following? Because we're going to pump out your book through those channels to sell to your people, which you have to bring with you.

And if you bring those people with you, I mean, you could look at Jake Paul fighting Tyson, right? How many lifelong martial artists, and we actually, there were plenty on that undercard, that were technically geniuses, right? Courageously, like, willing to take, I mean, fighting with full heart and full warrior spirit and they are you know psychos on the show from the kid who has 70 million followers yeah to your point the first fight on the main card had a guy with two he was two and two and but he had 150 million followers on all of his social platforms oh wow and he fought a guy that was 7-0 and just got pieced up it was they were little guys i want to say like 135 um he was from brazil so he had 150 million followers and that's literally what they put you know like when you show the three

things that the guy's good at you know like how many knockouts or whatever they put 150 million followers that's why this guy's having the fight right now you know massive in brazil he was like he needs a shirt that says i'm big in brazil but i'm kind of a big deal in Brazil. He needs a shirt that says, I'm big in Brazil. I'm kind of a big deal in Rio. That's a huge point. Yeah, it's a huge point. Yeah, and everyone's got their hands around a contemporary example,

or AI, right? Not AI as a flask, the obvious one where, what, a year ago, 18 months ago, Elon and Sam and a bunch of people signed that document. Like, we should slow down AI research till we figure out what the fuck this is going to do. And everyone's like, I'll sign

it, I'll sign it. And then no one even remotely followed it for a week. Because they're like, if China gets here first, it's game over. And basically, the argument is, wouldn't you rather have some round eyes, right, with a US cap table and cap table and paying taxes, win, then those guys. That's it. That's fundamentally the pitch to the U.S. government, right? And no one is backing off the arms race because whoever gets there first cleans the table, right? So, you know, go back to farming and hunting. So for a few hundred thousand years, we were hunting and gathering, maybe some early, early pastoralism where we kind of semi-domestic domestication things like you've been doing goats and sheep and whatever right but max max that right so the overwhelming 90 plus of all human civilization right has been or even

wind it back what we'll come back to that one wind it back to fucking chimps and bonobos you know you're in you're in you're in congo you know, 100,000 or 200,000 years ago. And, you know, early hominins are like, hey, we've got these interesting pelvises. We've got these big toes. We can balance. I think we're going to hop down out of these trees. We're going to go wander over to that savannah, see what that's all about. You guys want to come?

And the bonobos are diddling each other like, no, we're good. You know, the chimps are here to fuck each other. We're going to stay together and lick each other's giblets. The chimps are like murdering each other like, no, we're good. You know, the chimps are weird. We're going to stay together and lick each other's giblets. The chimps are like murdering each other like, no, we're good. Right? And we went wandering off. Right? We put our cousins in zoos now. Right? That was an obligate adaptation

to go bipedal and come down out of the tree. Didn't have to. Right? You were supremely adapted to what was before. And then now get to the hunter-gatherers and they're like, hey, you know, whatever, end of lost ice age so 11 12 000 years ago um climate miraculously stabilizes right before that it was plus or minus 10 degrees celsius every decade so you had to moat you had to be mobile you had to go with the climate suited your clothes right um and then just boop flat lines plus or minus one degree for 10,000 years. So if anyone's ever wondering like, gee whiz, I wonder why civilization kicked off when it did.

That is a massive, massive part of why. And so let's just say, you know, that people are like, hey, things seem to be chilling out around here a little bit. We've gone from like going where the climate suits our clothes to kind of maybe getting a sense of like we could start planting more of the things we like to eat. We don't have to go run around chasing them or we can start defending against bugs and pests and varmints and i think we're just going to post up here and the hunter-gatherers are like well you know what we've got an egalitarian society i've got tons of free time i'm healthy fit and strong we're badass warriors we hunt our you know our totem animals like we're good man we are fucking good and then you know and then what happened well agricultural societies

no matter how you know you've got hierarchies? Well, agricultural societies, no matter how, you know, you've got hierarchies, you've got priests, you've got taxes, you've got rulers, you've got disease, you've got all, you know, poverty, you've got all those things. But A, you could make it, you didn't get wiped out once every five or 10 years when there was a famine, famine, because of grain storage and food. B, you could support 10 to 100 times the population density on a given square mile of land. So now even if you have badass hunter-gatherer warriors, right, now you're having to defeat 10 or 100 soldiers. And also we have grain stores, so we've stored energy from the sun. We can now consume that energy at a time other than the lifespan of that plant before it rots, right?

We've bent time, right? So now we can eat in the winter what grew in the summer, right? And that's a huge fucking move, right? Without refrigeration, without smoking was about the only thing those guys had. Smoking and salting, that kind of thing. And now we can deploy a hundred soldiers against your one badass warrior. So even if you said, hey, no no we've got a better life we're sticking to our own at some point you get defeated and consumed right and so we see that again and

again and again at every cusp i mean couldn't we in 1970 1975 have been like hey four billion folks that seems pretty good let's harness all this crazy extra energy right from hydrocarbons and let's build a utopia right universal basic income take your pick right like like like plenty and let's be ingenious about how we farm and grow let's let you know what is that current policy there's some catchy thing at the un about a third of the world setting aside a third of the world's natural resources or wildlife preserves right it maybe it's project 2030 that is that's agenda 2030 well a project agenda depending on who you're where you're reading it yeah that they want to set aside a third of all of nature so yeah you know on a on a uh lake travis a third of that

you would not be able to go on they would fucking wall it off from humans a third of even a third of our land right here we wouldn't be able to use. We couldn't do it for farming. We couldn't do shit with it. But wait, is that actually, I would have thought that would have been on intact landscapes like BLM forest service, stuff like that. The way I read it. And of course this could have been more Doomer shit, you know, but, but, um, the way that I read it, it was a third of everything, including personal property, mountains,

that kind of thing. So a third of everything humans don't touch which is interesting you know i've had a um briefly a friend of mine told me you know the only people that say don't touch the forest are you know woke white people indigenous people would do controlled burns and all sorts of shit year after year to help manage what things look like you know the rotation of animals coming in to manage the pasture and the grassland that would, like we talked about on the tour, bison rubbing their shoulders up against stuff, cows doing the same thing, deer eating saplings

that make sure the big trees stay big and up and out and that allows for grassland in between, right? Exactly. So that's super interesting, right? Because I mean, now we're on another tangent. So just everybody's keeping track of the trunks of this tree. No, no, no no it's all fun um because growing up in england in the new forest so i kind of grew up in literally what used to be the royal hunting grounds we were talking about that with the red deer and that kind of stuff and it's right near stonehenge and that kind of neck of the woods

and you know the royal the new forest was royal forest and it had been tended and managed since the since william of iron since the norman invasion and before right and it had been tended and managed since William of Arran, since the Norman invasion and before. And it wasn't just a free-for-all. The people who lived there, A, there was royal mandates on what you could and couldn't hunt, what you could and couldn't cut. But there was a whole series of prescriptions of how they managed the different trees. And there were some that if you cut that would then create shoots and be massively more productive if they did it, and then how many of those we were allowed to take for stoves, for fencing, for farming, for lumber, whatever, right, fire.

So there was a whole intact ecological management system baked into the economy and the polity, like the rules, the government, the enforcement. And so that worked for centuries, for millennia. And the same thing even in, like there's a great book about Northern New Mexican, like Hispanic sheep farming and ranching.

It's called Enchantment and Exploitation. It's a very cool sort of environmental history. But it describes how the Hispanic communities, and again, these are on top of, right? Pueblos, Utes, various other indigenous folks that have been there all along, so this is one layer of conquest on top of, right, other things that have happened, but they were there, and if one guy, you know, rancher, like herder, got too big for his britches, started overgrazing the commons, right, he, the first thing that would happen is he'd get, he'd get hazed. His friends would be like,

oh yeah, a little, you know, el gordito. Hey buddy, you're going to get a little too big for your britches. They're taking a little bit more of what is ours or what is shared than you ought to, right? Stop that. And then maybe if it got worse, maybe it was aunties and grandmothers. Maybe they'd start hazing him. Maybe there'd be an intervention. Maybe he'd get his ass beat, right? There was a sense of social shame to maintain equilibrium in our relationship to the commons, right? But then what happened is you had a bunch of New York-funded ranchers. This is like if you've ever heard of the range wars, right? The range wars in the American West, right?

Where cowboys were against that. It was fundamental. In fact, it even shows up in Yellowstone. Well, not Yellowstone. What's the 1921? The one with Harrison Ford in it. That has an example of sheep against cows, and it's the Irish guys against the cows, but the cows are the good guys in the Yellowstone story. But fundamentally, it was that sheep could graze, they didn't have the ranching. You had Eastern Capital backing guys who were going to grow huge amounts of beef, going to barbwire everything in. We're going to create parcels and packages, not based on ecosystems, but based on lots and square descriptions of

otherwise natural environments. Put all that shit on chains, refrigerated cars to Chicago, meat packers, Chicago bulls, right? All of that into Eastern Capital. And you had what Marx called a metabolic rift. And a metabolic rift is where you take an ecosystem, the way it works together in a closed loop, right? So everything that is born, lives, and dies there goes back into the loop, the system, right? And you start just siphoning out all the products, right?

All the energy, which starts with photosynthesis and then metallium, gets siphoned off someplace else. And sometimes that siphon has a fucking giant suction cup, and it's extracting everything. This is the beaver getting killed for felt hats in London and Paris, and the Iroquois suddenly hunting out all their shit, and then going across to the Great Lakes and hunting out all their shit, because they're like, hey, there's a market-based system now, and that's metabolic rift. So without checks and balances, so now we are in a metabolically rifted global macro economy right so corn farmers in kansas aren't growing and composting the corn

and feeding their community they're siphoning it off into corn syrup and soda machines and all sorts of thousand things with a thousand different complexities which means that there is going to be no checks and balances like the sheep herder communities had, where they're like, hey, you're getting a little greedy. Hey, you're starting to deplete the commons. We need to bring this back into order in the new forest. Hey, don't chop down the big old trees, right? Just make use of the shoots that grow and replenish, right? So just to make a and this is why this is why our symbol switching that we talked about in the beginning is so problematic right now because you were just describing oh you know whatever we want to call it project 2030 somebody can google this we don't

have a rogan jamie to do our real-time stuff but like whatever that one is the setting aside of 30 percent of wild lands around the world that That is actually a very sane intention, right? Application could be massively problematic, almost certainly will be. And anytime, it's that old Bob Marley tune, them belly full but we hungry, a hungry man is an angry man, right? You're never gonna get people to,

and you see this with bushmeat in the Congo, DNC, right, any of those places, DRC. You see that in Africa right now. People are like hunting monkeys, hunting other things because they're hungry. And they're like, oh, don't you understand? You know, tourists will take pictures of these and we should do safaris and ecotourism. And you're like, yeah, yeah, maybe. But right now we need something in the pot.

And so that is those symbols. And 15-minute cities is another example, right, that has been weaponized and politicized. And again, bureaucrats can fuck anything up, right? So it's not to defend what are currently the equivalent of the DMV. You know, like no one likes going to the DMV, right? That's a shite experience all around.

But is there a need to, given a global macro economy that is just siphoning out resources out of all of these ecosystems, and fundamentally, we are still metabolic life forms that require an ecosystem to support us, full stop.

It doesn't matter how much time we spend online, right? And Peter Diamandis has talked about the virtualization of stuff, of like, my phone ate my Rolodex and it ate my camera and it ate my GPS, and it did,

but you can't eat it, right? So until that shit happens, right? Until I can fucking go on Farmville and fill my belly, right? We are still metabolically bound. And as long as there's metabolic rift into giant macroeconomic systems with a very handful of people

profiting asymmetrically from all that, right? We will need some intervention to restore us back to something resembling sustainable equilibrium you're doing that on the farm yeah right so so all of this comes back to this is this was our tangent we just we just went down for metabolic rifts and the notion of project 2030 but it's fundamentally was the why can't we have nice things and obligate adaptations? And the obligate adaptation of capitalism, right, is fundamentally that it has been the most efficient way to organize capital plus labor plus natural resources.

So it's just, it has out-competed everything else. It's not to say, that's not a value judgment of like, yay, capitalism. It's just to say it fucking won. Why did it win? And I don't know if, have you seen that Darren Aronofsky documentary,

The Territory? It's all about like... No, I love Aronofsky's work. Yeah, he's super good. The Territory? The Territory. And it was, it premiered at South by

a couple of years ago, but it's basically, you know, nominally one of the last uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. And the Territory is literally their remaining homeland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, because it was all about Bolsonaro's settlers.

And the weird thing is all the white, so back to symbols and stories, this is fucking crazy. They interviewed and they shot it during COVID. So it was actually self-shot by the tribes. They took the young chief who was only like 30 years old and he'd been sort of promoted very, very early, but he was social media savvy and they gave them you know they didn't want to infect anybody and do all that kind of stuff so it was kind of like arm's length like here's the cameras here's how to use them shoot your side of the story but then they also shot the white settlers and the white settlers are hungry they're poor they're aspirational but they were 100 like ronald reagan american west gunslingers like like it was they were rebooting

the mythologies and the justifications of Western American expansion for Brazil in 2022. It was nuts. Like, those engines aren't using the land. We've got to improve it. Improved land is higher value than left intact land. And all the stories, chapter and verse, from 19th century Western American Manifest Destiny expansion just jacked over to right now in the Amazon.

Crazy. expansion just jacked over to right now in the amazon crazy but then the thing that really haunted me was a you know other than when they were dressed up in their traditional ceremonial garb for not photo ops but to document a ceremony and that kind of thing they were wearing you know it was the classic uh goodwill slash thrift store you know shirts. They were wearing like Hurley, Nike, O'Neal. You're like, oh, fuck this beast, right? This giant, eyeless, soulless beast of global capitalism. Is there nowhere it doesn't touch? Is there nowhere it doesn't creep? And then that sort of forced me. I was like, okay, well, and nobody in the film, neither the tribe nor the settlers, understandable on the settlers point, none of them

thought that their territory, the subject of the movie, was going to persist. They were all like, this is inevitable. We are just being eaten a bite at a time. Damn. And you're like, that is heartbreaking. I mean, if you saw that Robert De Niro movie, The Mission, did you ever see that?

Fuck, it's so good. It's like literally Spanish conquistadors. It's the classic. It's a little bit like The Lost Samurai or any of those movies, but Robert De Niro's character goes and he's with Guarani back in the day, right? So like 1600, something like that. And he befriends them and then the rest of the Spaniards come. I think he might even be a Jesuit, but like the rest of the Spaniards come and he ends up fighting on the side of the Guarani, right? It's got a Peter Gabriel soundtrack. It is epic, like super badass quality film, but gutting. It's one of those movies where you're like, yay for the first third. And then you're like weeping into your, you know, into your teacup by the end. But you know, that was 400 years ago. And this Aronofsky documentary is just the same

exact cast of characters with the same exact plot, just on the last chunk of the Amazon instead of the first chunk. And you're like, all right, so what is that about, right? What is that about? And you can make a case that the obligate adaptations, right, where you don't have to, but if you don't, someone else will, right, is the ratchet of civilization. It is the engine by which we move forwards, whether we want to or not. And Donald Hoffman, who I think is at UC, it's not SD, it might be UC Irvine, has created a very interesting,

he did some research like with, with, you know, basically mathematical models, computational models on determining that evolutionary fitness, right? Beats truth or the whole picture. So there are, there are situations where like, imagine like someone's just done a bunch of acid and you're like,

all right, I'm high on truth. We are all, we're all, we're all just light dressed up as matter. There is only love that the universe is unfolding according to its implicate plan everything is perfect nothing needs changing and i can't get a job to save my fucking life right but the instagram influencer

who's lying through their teeth right but who's all about sexy and preening and and let me capture people with promising them how to get laid or get paid i'll do that right and fitness beats the living shit out of the poor bastard who's still trying to put the pieces back together after his truth bomb. Right? And you can see that a thousand different ways. You know, any time any anthropologist or any well-meaning undergrad is like, oh, I think that this indigenous culture, this traditional culture, this non-Western, non-modern culture has got something beautiful, profound, meaningful that we've lost or missed. And I want to go back to that. You're like, oh, fitness beats truth. As often as not. In fact, sometimes having more perspective on what's actually real or actually true, good or beautiful is actually a handicap, right? Compared to just being adapted for getting

laid, getting paid, right? And, you know, I mean, that rhymes, so it's catchy, but like fundamentally sexual fitness and reproduction, right, and anything else, whether that's a fancy car, a nice watch, going to the right club, whatever that might be, any of those strategies, and getting paid. Can I harvest energy credits, right? Can I have a high EROI, energy return on investment, and can I play that game? And of course, if it's sexual reproduction plus excess harvesting of energy credits, that makes total sense.

Versus let me stay here and map infinity to the ninth decimal place, right? So you're like, okay, so this whole notion or concept of obligate adaptations yielding to fitness beating truth means those who adapt to the obligation and become more fit beat every single time that which is good, true, and beautiful. So how do we unwind those or prevent those or pump the brakes or do anything else other than just feel like, Jesus, this thing's inevitable.

So like take this election and take what we began with, right? Which was the, you know, the sort of roughly three buckets of potential Trump voters, which was MAGA diehards, low information voters, just kind of picking one they're familiar with or feel comfortable with.

And then the other third, which I think was a major part of the swing this time, which was anti-regime folks. And there was enough of those folks. And they weren't low information. They actually thought about a lot of things. They read books, listened to podcasts, were following things online. I mean, if you asked at least the folks that I know, right, that made that decision, it was considered whether or not you agreed with the math, right? They had done their numbers, right? And so you're like, all right, what are we choosing? And you could make a case that enough people concluded that there was a

clearer and more present danger from continuing on the path we're on than rolling the dice on this kind of this rando, you know, Trump fella, right? Who's pretty much promised to break things and we kind of believe him right then just resetting the etch-a-sketch and seeing what we can draw anew right and that's when you get into like okay so we have definitely like as far as like people talk about timelines you know like bullshit new age quantum wannabe stuff we're on we jump timelines well we fucking jump timelines right very deliberately which was we went from neoliberal status quo right which i think you know even uh harris's uh you know promoters who wouldn't have really argued with that she would basically it was stay the course business as close to usual as we can swing it kind of promise, which clearly

did not land as much as reset the Etch-a-Sketch. We need to blow up that old system and start again. And you're like, okay, that's a high novelty path versus high predictability. We've chosen novelty. So we're all going to run this experiment now. And for the next four years, eight years, 10 years, whatever it's going to be, we are running the high novelty factor. It's a little bit like if you've ever done AI image generators, and there's usually a sliding scale of like how wild and wacky, like, do you want me to do exactly what you told me to do? Or do you want me to mix it up a bit and surprise you, right? There's a slider on a lot of those AI image generators. And we've just taken the slider and crammed it to the right we're like fuck it let's just see right and let's let's flip all of our symbols up is down down is up right let's see what happens and if you were like okay obligate adaptation fitness beast truth why do we why

can't we have nice things right all of that you're like okay we are in a little bit of a you know it's like that balinese monkey trap situation of like the monkey puts his hand in the trap right and grabs the fruit and he because he won't let go of the fruit, he can't get his hand out. That's the Balinese monkey trap. So we're all in a Balinese monkey trap of highly complex civilizational obligate adaptations. We won't, we can't let go of the thing that would free us, right? So I think many people are intuiting, fuck it, let's blow this up. That is our way out. Because any of this incrementalism, any of this fucking trying to steer the aircraft carrier

isn't working, hasn't worked, and we don't trust the captain and the bridge in the first place. Right? So this is, and I'll pause after this because this is plenty to riff on, but this is a concept from physics because that whole notion of

are we going someplace beautiful or are we all someplace beautiful or are we all just composted in the wood chipper of history right it's why everybody's geeked on Rome fall of Rome these days right all that kind of stuff people are suspecting right and if you pan all the way back it gets to hey second law of thermodynamics there's nothing but entropy like everything ends in entropy and everything ends up in disorganized chaos, right? And if you subscribe to that, then honestly, where are we going? If we're just going over the falls, right? Then you can lead to nihilism. It can lead to just all becoming jokers like bucket. Let's just blow shit up. Let's just see what happens. It can lead to hedonism. I'm just going to have a blast and

get my dick sucked while I can, right? Like there's a, there's a bunch of different responses to entropy comes for all of us in the end, right? But something really interesting about the role of entropy and complexity is that, and this is Ilya Prigogine's work, he's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and Stuart Kaufman, and a bunch of other super smart folks, which is, weirdly, when there is an energy gradient, meaning there's high energy in one place and low energy in another place, right? The fastest way to reduce that gradient, right? Because Aristotle said nature abhors a vacuum, right? Which is another way of saying nature hates gradients. It's always wanting to close them, right? So if you've got a bunch of water behind a seawall, it wants nothing more than to break

that seawall and come rushing in, right? If you've got a bunch of dry timber in a forest, it wants to burn that shit to the ground and accelerate the carbon cycle, right? Like nature hates gradients. But weirdly, when you have a huge gradient of high energy to low energy or entropy, right? The fastest way for nature to resolve that is with emergent complexity. So if you've got a bathtub full of water, right? And it wants to drain, so you've got energy high, up high in a bathtub, and it wants to go out the basement drain, right? And it wants to drain. So you've got energy high, up high in a bathtub, and it wants to go out the basement drain, right? That's a high gradient, gravity and all the weight of that water against wanting to flow downhill. What does it do? It organizes into a whirlpool. That is the fastest way. Here's, you've got this emergent complex dissipator structure, this beautiful organized whirlpool as the fastest way to take all of that energy from up high and get it down low as cleanly

as possible. If you have a, you know a crazy thunderstorm, you talked about the tornadoes in Kansas, right? When you have a massive warm front smashing into a cold front, right? And all this energy, it's crazy high pressure to low pressure gradient. What is the fastest way for it to get to neutral and even? A tornado, right? And civilization is the same. So in some respects, you can make a case that beyond all of our monkey mind, scheming and strategizing and anything else, we are agents of nature, right? As complex dissipator structures to take the energy of the universe and take it down to, right? Entropy in the end the end. Which means that the more energy, the more complex and energy hogging, energy consuming,

like look at China. China slung more concrete in three years in this last decade than the US had in its entire life from the 19th and 20th centuries, including the building of New York, like three fucking years. That's a shit pile of energy. That's a lot of energy burned off.

The 8 billion humans that have been here. We only had our first billion in 1820, right? We're cresting, you know, 10 in the next century. Like that's a lot of food. That's a lot of cars. That's a lot of smokestacks. That's a lot of cement, concrete, steel, plastics. Like we have been an agent of the universe

dissipating energy and, you know, into entropy by burning as much of it as we can fucking find anywhere. So we're clever chaos monkeys. And you can make a case that this election, if you put it inside that puzzle, is, oh, we've just chosen to up the novelty and the acceleration of entropy. Because we've chosen that that versus increased stability, which also kind of explains our obligate adaptation. Like, why can't we stop? One is enough enough. And in some respects, you can make that case that, like, we can't because we are bound to be generating as much entropy as we possibly can. So that feels like a runaway railroad car. I don't know how we stop it other than this instinct on our path.

We have to blow up the fucking tracks. That's so good. So good. Dude, I'm glad you geeked on it because that's the stuff that I can't help but wonder about. I can't help but wonder about it either, but I love listening to guys like yourself, you know, break that down and explain it.

And I think the framing, you know, because I like geeking out on information as much as anybody, you know, and I love following people, and you've turned me on to some great people, and I think it's, well, I got my dog here. It's, let this guy out. You go to your bed, buddy. To your point on, you know, when you see this, this end of the road, you know, that it can

lead to nihilism, anarchism, it can lead to bliss junkies. It can lead to all these different reactions to the holy shit where we're going to fuck it. The Titanic's going to sink. You know, I think that that's in part the birth of the farm right that's like okay should i see light at the end of the tunnel this doesn't look good how do i take care of my family how do i take care of my friends let's fucking organize in a way where we can at least feed ourselves and keep ourselves cool in a texas

summer and do the things that are necessary there. And so I have a great respect for fear, which I didn't have before, you know, because it can light a fire. It lit a fire into my ass where this was something I would picture in retirement, not at 42 with young kids, like having them grow up in this situation. And it's been a fucking huge blessing. And Tucker Max, you know, he once said, you know, I love it for, I love him for saying this. He's like, we could be wrong. If this is smooth sailing ship for the next 10, 20 years, did we make a mistake by raising our kids outdoors? Did we make a mistake by teaching them survival skills and how to feel just an animal? Did we make a mistake by doing a regenerative

farm and, and, you know, healing the soil and the earth and making all ecosystems flourish? Like, no, none of those things are mistakes. So I lean on that. And I just wonder, you know, are there ways in which, when I think about regenerative agriculture, it benefits everything within the system, right? The totality of the sacred hoop prevails in a system that's regenerative. Are there ways in which we can organize society where there is a win-win for everything involved you know and like can can we

have a regenerative to society for lack of a better term yeah and what does that look like you know yeah i mean you know and by the way i mean mine and my partner julie's experience growing up was always trying to live simply and self-sustainably so that was outdoor guiding wilderness medicine etc etc so very much aligned you know and geeked on permaculture, natural building, all of those things. And that's always been our advice in the last five, five years in particular, five to 10, where this has become increasingly on other people's radar. It's like, look, we're not recommending right now that you do anything that we weren't recommending 25 years ago. It's awesome. It's super fun. Learn to sail, learn the stars, learn the sun, build stuff with your

hands like grow things out of the ground like like that is the best education you could possibly offer your kids other than being a deconditioned zoo animal getting shuttled around in a minivan glued to a fucking screen as a babysitter like what the fuck that that's not a high bar kids right so let's just reclaim some of just being an earthbound, homegrown human and treat that as meaningful life, amazing education. And yes, for sure, an optional fallback plan of heightened resilience. But like that is, it might suddenly get jacked at the top of your list. But as far as the reasons why, it's at the bottom of the list. Right. at the bottom of the list, right? So as far as are there ways forward

where we can thread the needle, navigate a keyhole event, whatever, my sense is in theory we could. Like I think that the super short answer is we could, but we ain't. And that's the thing that breaks my heart the most about our current culture war slash political discourse is that utter contempt for the other's point of view is baked into everybody's position right now. So it's sneering, it's snide, it's condescending, it's judging, it's trolling.

It's a thousand things that you're like, oh, well, how on earth could we? We didn't used to be this way. And I don't mean that in just some generic, nostalgic way. I mean, these days, you know, for anybody that was saying, oh, you know, the 1619 Project, BLM, post-George Floyd stuff of America is this super crazy racist country. And, you know, and police blew on black violence and all that kind of stuff. If you looked at the demographics, like we've never been more egalitarian, even as recently as like the 90s. Parents were interviewed were like, you know, very high, like above 50%, I think. I would not be cool with a child of mine marrying someone of a different race, etc, etc. At this point, it's like down into the teens, I think it's below 20%, you know, but marrying somebody of the other political parties through the roof right now. The same with the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, once you were appointed for life, there was this kind of nobility to being a Supreme Court justice. And people voted in alignment with the party that nominated them as political position, I think under 60% of the time. And now

it's like north of 75%. So maybe not actually a much bigger gap. I think now it's in the 90s. So like, if you put me in office, I'm your stooge, and I will bend the scales of justice. So you're like, we are seeing far more of this fragmentation and sort of weaponization of the other. And the thing that breaks my heart is, is that, you know, take immigration, right, which is now, I mean, it is what is bending all of Western Europe to the right in this most recent sting of elections in Austria, in Germany, in France, in Italy, Greece, all of these places which have been center, center progressive coalition governments with France, whatever it would be, right?

And then throw in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, you know, like just fundamentally war-torn regions that the U.S. and NATO have had hands in in the last 20 years and stirring up, if nothing else, right? Now coming home to roost, quite literally, and breaking open societies, right? My sense is of the migrant crisis and, you know, what we're talking about in the U.S. has actually been shamelessly weaponized by the right, right? In the sense that it has been used, but they're not wrong, they're just early. Like we are going to experience in the coming decades,

10X the migrant crises that we're currently experiencing. And if anybody's seen some of those studies on like temperature bans in the world and what is happening as we go up a 10th of a degree, a 10th of a degree in average ambient annual temperatures kind of stuff, you are basically dispossessing hundreds of millions of people each click with where is no longer habitable. Like our well ran dry, our crops are burnt, we have to be on the move, whatever that would be. And so we are entering a century

where loving thy neighbor, where three cups of tea and welcoming the stranger, like those are going to be real and profound practices. And at the same time, just to give full credence to the issue, to be concerned about immigration doesn't make you a fucking racist, right? Because that's what the left has been doing.

It's like, oh, you're being, you know, all those things. It's like, no, actually, how do you have open societies with semi-permeable borders, not just wide open gates, but semi-permeable, there's asylum, there's applications, there's whatever. And at the same time, have a society that is open, free, liberal, has social safety nets, meaning our tax dollars go to support the least, you know, et cetera, with schools, vouchers, funding, Medicare, whatever it would be. And

we're no longer a melting pot. We're a lumpy fucking stew, meaning you sequester with your people. You don't actually value the same things we do. You might have wildly misogynistic rules. You might have a greater tolerance for violence. You might have, you're coming out of refugee camps and war-torn regions. You might be importing organized crime. You know, what was happening in Scandinavia with lots of bombings and lots of other things happening that the progressive European media just simply wasn't covering. But it's like, oh, crime, what was happening in Scandinavia with lots of bombings and lots of other things happening that the progressive European media just simply wasn't covering. But it's like, oh, no, look, you've got war-torn young men from Somalia, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. What the fuck do you

expect them to do when they're dumped in a foreign city, don't know the language, don't know the food, don't know the customs, and there is a feudal lord or chieftain slash mob boss, right? And we're seeing, you know, so the same things happen. And then how do you stay open as a society when your own people are economically challenged, when they're, you know, even if it's just perception, let alone reality, of my hard-earned tax dollars are going to support those brown people who speak funny, talk funny, worship different gods, etc., etc., and or might be actively violent or scary. Like those are massive, very real challenges and issues. And immigration around the world right now is arguably the pivot point around the entire recalibration of ethno-nationalist right-wing government, which is crank up the drawbridges. There's not enough to go around.

And me and mine first. And I will be your fearless leader and I will let you know who we are. And I will do that by defining who they are. And so that is a brutal reality. I just feel like those are the conversations we need our smartest people on. Those are the conversations we need, you know,

collaboration between think tanks, collaboration between political parties. Like, all right, is America trying to lead the world right now? Or are we cranking up our drawbridges, right? Is there enough to go around if we share? I mean, this is the same with the farm. What's your role on strangers? Do you help your neighbors? Do you help your neighbors until there's too many of your neighbors?

Do you turn away people? Do you, you know, do you set up a Hare Krishna soup kitchen? Like, right? Like these are all the questions, micro and macro, that we have to and need to be pondering. And that's also, you know, I was just on Jordan Peterson's podcast, right?

Oh, yeah. Like a month ago. And that was a question, because he was, I think it may be even coming out right now. He's got a question because he was, I think it may be even coming out right now. He's got a new book coming out, which is

We Who Wrestle With God, right? And it's a series of Bible stories. But really, really interestingly, it's all Old Testament Bible stories, right? It's Job, it's Cain and Abel, it's Adam and Eve, it's, you know, it's OG shit.

And in those stories, right? Yahweh is a vengeful and wrathful patriarchal desert God. Kids are fucking up or he's fucking with them, right? Like in the case of Job, and he's delivering the beat down, right? And I did ask him, I was like, look, mate, why? Like, I just wanted to, you know, sort of steel man Jordan's position in the world, right? Because there's plenty of folks in the center to left who feel like he's become a sort of alt-right troll etc etc right and i was like look okay i'm willing to just grant you benefit the doubt you're trying to bring through christ consciousness in the world let's just start with that and that you see a giant vacuum in western secular society you

see that erosion of morals and care and concern if If you just leave people to power or comfort, they're going to do horrible, terrible things, aka Stalin, you know, his kind of normal bogeyman of Marxism and that kind of stuff. Great. So you're saying we need to have a more, we were riffing on Nietzsche, right? The whole notion of God is dead, but the rest of the paragraph in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the book it comes from, is be careful when you kill your gods, because when you kill your gods, you kill the entire social order and morality that goes with your god don't just think people are nice right they're actually nice because jesus said to be nice and they are afraid of burning in hell if they're not nice so there's connections right so let's say that that's his you know one of his main points is we need to bring back faith reverenceence, deference, because otherwise, left to our own devices,

we're shitty little monkeys, right? It's a quick summary of a bunch of his riffs. But then the question is, hey, buddy, why are you writing a book on the Old Testament, wrathful God, not Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, right? Because the Sermon on the Mount, the whole evolution of Christian ethics is a reason, like we still talk about and riff on Jesus. He did the Sermon on the Mount, the whole evolution of Christian ethics is a reason. Like we still talk about and riff on Jesus.

He did the Sermon on the Mount. It's one of his lecture series on his online university. Yeah. Does it inside and out? And it's beautiful, right? It's turn the other cheek. It's love thy enemy. It's blessed are the meek.

And that stuff was radical, right? It's coming out of Hammurabi, an eye for an eye, right? And might makes right. There's a reason that like both Jesus for an eye, right? And might makes right. There's a reason that like both Jesus's Christian ethics, right? That idea of like, it's all upside down, back to symbol switching, right? It used to be might makes right. It used to be revenge, right? It used to be eye for eye. It was all of these things. And Jesus is actually saying, hey, no, I washed the feet of the lepers. I hang out with the prostitutes, nevermind the Pharisees, right? Money changes in the temple, boom, right? And love thy enemy, right? And turn the other cheek and all of these mind-fucked

things that no one had said before. That's a huge part of the Jesus meme and why we still riff on it all the way to King Arthur, right? What is the archetypal message of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? It is that might doesn't make right. Right makes might. Like righteousness affords just power. That's why the table is round. We're going to do away with dominator hierarchies, right? We're going to have an egalitarian ethics and values-based system. So you could see that as the great Western legacy, right? Which is 100% worth preserving. But you could make a case that right now, evangelicalism, at least in the US, is no longer a transformative and radical spiritual movement. It is a weaponized ethno-nationalist political identity. And that is massively fucking problematic, right? Compared to we need a great awakening.

We need a third great awakening. I'm all, let's just for simple, for ease and momentum, let's make it one based on the re-centering of Christ consciousness, right? Because we've got plenty to build with, right? Plenty of inertia, all of our riffs, all of our cultural references,

all of our songs, right? We know this shit this so let's dust that off and reboot it but let's reboot the sermon on the mount let's not reboot a petty vengeful desert god right because we're going to need to turn the other cheek we're going to need to love that love our neighbors we're going to need to be humble and potentially make do with less. Blessed are the meek and the humble and the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God. So can we get to that as fast as possible and let that orient, you know, I mean, again, many conservatives now, they're weirdly winding back the clock on what was always one of the sort of relatively under-hillers of the American experiment, which was freedom of religion. Like, I guess taken for granted, you know? But

whether that's Rhode Island, whether that's Maryland tolerance of religion, it's like, hey, we're not going to back a Catholic king or a Protestant queen, right? We're not going to slander or suppress. We're going to allow all of these to exist. That is potentially at risk right now with a rewriting of American history that this was always a Christian nation. I think what they're getting at is we had a morality, folks, and when you leave it to everybody choosing their own adventure, you end up with whingy, selfish, petty humans. That sucks. That's the God is dead Nietzsche thing. But can we reinstitute a lowercase Catholic, meaning like big tent, everybody gets to worship, right? Version of

an American spiritual revival that isn't ethno-nationalist. It's not about the color of my skin, right? But it is about the highest and best values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that can remind us of the better angels of our nature, even when and if we don't want to. And the tug of tribalism, the tug of us versus theming, the tug of othering the other and beating the shit out of them and feeling better about ourselves, the tug of all those things is only going to be increasing in these coming decades. And if we allow demagogues and petty politicians to weaponize those dynamics and point us at each other in hatred and contempt, then we're done before we even start. Versus if we reclaim the city on the hill and we're like, all right, this is the American experiment. We are blessed to be stewards of it for this generation.

And what does that mean for us to be that shining beacon to everyone in the world? The goodness, truth, and beauty, that fairness, that protecting the weak from the powerful, right? And that stewarding this amazing, I mean, you know, beautiful Turtle Island, this fucking continent we're on, right, being stewards of this place, just as, right? And again, there was a Rolling Stone article

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And remember kingsboo10 at checkout. So they're like, okay, so I'm reading the Bible. We're supposed to be stewards of this garden that God gave us. That seems like a profound responsibility and inheritance. What do we do with this? And he went to, well, A, was getting none of that in his politicized, I think he was probably in the South, maybe in Georgia or somewhere at church, you know, rolling coal and big ass trucks and fuck that and drill baby drill. And he's like, wait, this is bizarre. Cause he went to Africa and there were all these Pentecostals and evangelical young people. It was like a youth gathering, college kids, high school kids. And they're like, what the fuck is up with you

American Christians? How the hell did like being in the back pocket of the oil and gas industries come with loving Jesus? Because where we are, it makes total sense that the church would be active stewards of this sacred and holy land

that the good creator gave us. So can we just snip some of the wires that I think have been crossed in the last few decades? And can we re-click these? Because fundamentally, like who wins with climate denialism? And like, oh, this is all just

Klaus Schwab and the New World Order. And this is all just a way to fucking take our fucking, you know, take our liberties. And you're like, yeah, well, who wins? Who wins as the fucking execs of oil and gas and anybody holding

fucking majors portfolios? Who loses? Everybody who's got fucking forever chemicals in their wells and their kids are sideways. And meanwhile, and our earth is cooking. We lose collectively. And every time we get weaponized on one side or the other, it's like, that's what I mean about anybody who thinks they've taken the red pill and thinks that everybody else is

hijacked by the PSYOP. That in itself is a master PSYOP. And who's actually winning? If you really want to end disillusioning ourselves at a rate we can handle and Black Lives Matter, not reading Howard Zinn and, you know, people, you know, people in post COVID being like, I'm all anti-vaxxers. Holy shit, Big Pharma's a thing.

You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it goes all the way down and around folks, right? And let's remember that that is a question of power and profit. And those are actually fairly traceable. You know, there's like 70 people on the planet that control almost all of the oil and gas distributions. Like many of them are in executive roles at big multinationals and that kind of stuff. But you're like, that's just 70 fucking people. How many people are holding?

What is it? The main tech billionaires own something like more than 40% of millennials collectively, like just as a generation of humans. Like the asymmetry of energy and power is such that when we are, because I mean, look at all of the tech guys who backed Trump. Very few of them were philosophically or even personally aligned with the guy. They're like, this is fucking pennies on the dollar. Let's just buy his votes and legislation.

And then we're going to do what we're going to do. And when you take where we're going with AI, when you take where we're going with social media surveillance, when you're taking, you know, you realize, oh, this is happening regardless of which fucking party is in power. And if anything, all they did was just take the governors and the wheels off. Because in the so-called attack of the deep state, right, you're actually, you're not getting rid of the swamp.

You're not getting rid of the people that bought and paid for the politicians. Who you're getting rid of is a bunch of fucking middle manager bureaucrats, a good chunk of which were actually decent-hearted people who dedicated their careers to civil service. I mean, granted, I hate the DMV as well, right? There's a thousand and one fucking things wrong with bureaucracies. But, you know, it's the same with saying that, you know, COVID vaccines were all a hoax, but you also dismiss every single frontline ER doc, every single nurse who was working. There's a ton of good humans doing their

level best in these places and spaces. And in the, you know, in the tech oligarchs buying Trump's ear for legislation, I would make a case that it is indistinguishable from the oil and gas execs buying Trump's ear. And all they want is to just gut the regulations that regular citizens would actually probably benefit from. By being told that the bad guy, the bogeyman, is on the other side of the fence, give us your votes and we'll be looking after you. We are hurtling towards a hyper-surveillance state. We are hurtling towards AI gutting out,

just finishing the cleanup job of what NAFTA and globalization did to the working class is now coming for white-collar folks. And we will be a sterile right microbiome crippled you know high processed food fed right bunch of wally tubby cunts in barker loungers with oculus rift glass goggles on pushing our button for our next fucking kayfabe wwe pseudo politician to lead us like that's where we're going regardless of which lever we pulled in our recent election and anybody that thinks

otherwise i would humbly submit is also psyopt right and and what we actually need to do is meet each other face to face connect with each other heart to heart, affirm that we are, in fact, on team human, right? And create movements, big and small, from how we raise our kids, you know, in couples and families to communities to the food we're growing to maintaining connections and networks of people that can actually do what we've always done, which is check people's heart, check people's voice, check people's's you know the the look in their eyes and their smile break bread together fucking recreate reconnect and not be sold down the fucking river right by the oligarchs of late stage capitalism i love it brother i think that's right that that went beyond my answering the question that was fucking phenomenal i felt that for a while that um you know the the wwe analogy is priceless because i remember you know a lot of people a lot of people growing up in the 80s and the whole comedian era uh felt you know santa-ed when they found out that pro wrestling was fake.

I was like, of course it's fucking fake. Where I got Santa Claus was that the feuds weren't real. So Iron Sheik and Sergeant Slaughter are having a beer backstage right after the match. And that's what fucking politics is. You know what I'm saying? The Uniparty is they don't give a fuck if the left or the right gets in. These guys are having a beer backstage

when it's all done. And I love that analogy in looking at it and the recentering of orientating ourselves. Where's the North Star? It has to be back to Team Human. It has to be back to love. It has to be back to the things that we know will move the bar. Where do I get real food from? Paul checked at a great little YouTube series on, on virtual reality. You know, and he said like, you can't, if you, if, if, if you don't feed your puppy on your cell phone, it might get sick, but nothing actually happens. Right. You don't feed.

If I don't feed my dog right here, Guapo, he's going to be barking at me soon, you know, and he will die if i don't give him enough food you know the land also must be fed in all the different ways there are very real things that we can do that have a benefit to all things and i think if we reorient to reorient ourselves to that and the why right which is love it is human connection it is our our it's the best part of being alive. You know, like let's hold those best pieces and what is absolutely necessary as our obligation. Yeah, I mean, none of it is super duper complicated.

You know, I mean, it's the things that any grandma would tell you has to be intuitively obvious to any generations in the past, which is, um, have a rainy day fund, you know, like saving good times. It's the Ant and the Grosshopper, right? Saving good times for potential bad times. Um, reuse things, don't waste stuff, you know, um, honor, you know, honor your maker, honor the seasons, seasons. Give thanks when you break bread. Leave things better than you found them. Say you're sorry.

This stuff does not need some therapy talk. Breakdown of when do we finally digest all of our ancestral traumas. And when have I figured out my attachment strategy. And what fucking love language is mine. Fuck all of it. It's all just fiddling while rome burns and it's just mass and and it's all couched in this hyper consumptive hyper individualistic neoliberal market machine, that has never met a good idea, it can't productize, you know, versus just unplugging and going from, you know, fundamentally forever trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain, basically, which is what the promise is of that hyper individualist like you can be the best you

living your best life with all the things and never experience any suffering, pain, anxiety, poverty, whatever it would be. You can have everything you want. I mean, what wisdom tradition anywhere ever had some enlightened fucker sitting under a tree or nailed up to one? Have the fucking download. You can have your cake and eat it too, kids, right? When has that ever existed ever existed? Buddhist Four Noble Truths. Number one, life is suffering. Jesus, life's a bitch and then you die. Maybe not, if you're down with me. Everything has been, the Stoics, you name it.

Every tradition has been like, wow, there is this impossible human condition. None of us get out of here alive. Now what? none of us get out of here alive right now what and most traditions have some version of be a good person to the best of your ability before the worms get your body and back to fitness beats truth that doesn't stop me scrolling on instagram right but it should right and and if we could if we can just come back to that. I mean, yeah, honestly, I would love to see a Church 3.0. You know, just what is the Tony Robbins, Joel Osteen killer, right? And that is full-bodied worship, healing, celebration, and reaffirmation.

And like I said, I mean, just for efficiency, if nothing else, because the hour's late, right? And the tide is high, right? Of just being like, all right, but we're going with the Nazarene because the archetype of the Christ is fucking solid and, you know, has informed the last 2,000 years of Western Civ. So rather than starting from scratch, it's just cheaper and quicker to go there. Plus, that notion of sacrifice, death, and resurrection, right, feels like it's kind of apropos for a moment. There's that sense of, like, what is Buddha? Buddha's just like, I'm a trust fund prince, right? I'm going to think about it for a while, and boom, peace out to the mothership.

Follow me, right? It's not a religion. It's a technology, right? That's great i mean hat tip to sedata but right not necessarily um as profoundly human and more right that whole notion of um the nazarene and the and the puzzle of was he man was he god right and the you know depending on your your uh denomination he was both and that was the point but he died on the cross mortal had to be he did right i mean he didn't he didn't pull any superpowers he didn't get to levitate off he didn't he calls out to his father cricket no answer right he calls out to his friends they

betray him they fall asleep or they deny him he even then has to just finish the job and say to his own mother, you have no son, right? Like I have to cut every single tie in connection to any support, any sucker, any healing, right? And I have to do this alone. And then he's like, I don't want to, right? And the people that praised me last week on Palm Sunday are now mocking me and baying for my blood. It's perfect. It is the most humiliating, totalizing, alienating, ass-kicking any human could ever experience. And he's like, see, if I can do it and keep the faith, if I can do it and keep my head up and say it is accomplished. What is he accomplishing? Those are his last words.

It is accomplished. And it's arguably that it is bridging heaven and earth. It is bridging the mortal and the immortal, right? That our humanity is at that intersection, right? On the cross of sacred time and clock time between our divinity and our humanity. And be like, all right, can the cross of sacred time and clock time between our divinity and our humanity. And be like, all right, can we do that? Can we play that game? And weirdly, Peter Thiel is all about René Girard. René Girard was this French philosopher he taught at Stanford.

If anybody saw The White Lotus, he was the one who talked about Girardian mimetic desire. We want what other people have, right? That was his whole, that was one of his riffs. But his other was this notion of Jesus as sacred sacrificial lamb. And the idea that humans always scapegoated other people. That's what we've done, right? We're doing this right now with building walls and others and migrants and this and that, right? Or even just people on different political parties. We're way into the othering right now.

But Girard was like, look, this is a necessary psychotechnology. Basically, there's tribal tension. We get agitated. We get irritated. It's just not working. And what do we do? And this goes back to the old Hebrews. You literally take a goat. You ritually project all the sins of the tribe onto the goat. And you fucking slit its throat and sacrifice it. That's the scapegoat, right? And then we're good because the goat took it and took the hit for us. And his point was that Jesus did this so well in such an over-the-top, can't-miss-it fashion, right? That he broke history or changed history or freed us up from having to keep doing that shitty little game to each other. And that he is an example of what does it mean to take the hit and keep your heart open.

Forgive them for they know not what they do. And can we do that? Can we practice forgiveness? Because I think we're going to need a whole bunch more of it. And back to the beginning of our slide, which was Nietzsche's, he who has a why can endure almost any how. My working assumption is that our how, what's coming in the next decades, is going to be rough and tumble and not nearly as nice, cheap, and easy as what we have lived through.

That could lead us, especially if we're questioning the big questions, is there a point to have, you know, why is there suffering? Do we deserve this? Do we get what's coming? Is the way forwards or backwards, right? And how do we have hope, right? The why needs to be something along the lines of we've been gifted with this human experience. You might even go as far as saying we've been gifted with Judeo-Christian Western democratic civilization, right? Whatever we think is worth, worthy of protecting. And you could also cite ultra-nonsense we'd be gifted

with the ability to initiate ourselves and each other into higher and more expansive states of our place in the universe and everything so the how is can we keep those fires burning through rain and sleet and snow and dark at night right can we be can we be the gnostic mailman for the future and can we carry that light through even if the good times may be more or less in our in our own rearview mirror for our lifetimes right and rather than collapsing into despondency and despair because i'm not getting mine instantly as we've been conditioned as consumer monkeys to just want and expect, or I call the manager, I pull a Karen, right? Fuck that, right? Much more, much more Moses, right? All right. 40 days, 40 nights, 40 years to get to the land of milk and honey. We're doing this for our children's children. And that's a whole different energy bank. That's a whole different source of nobility, courage, perseverance,

willingness to tolerate, to being in the pain cave. If we're like, oh no, this is for my children's children. What happens to me is immaterial. The only, it's binary. Either I put one foot in front of the other or I stop. I give up. If I don't give up and I pass the torch, we've won. Eventually.

Maybe not in my lifetime but all its binary relentless forward progress towards the city on the hill fuck yeah brother beautiful

I'm not going to take any more of your time this has been incredible when is your when is this book do you have an idea of when the date might be or are you still

let's think where are we now we are I mean I am pregnant with it and ready to just turn off my phone and write everything possible and i think actually that um where i am this basically we this working title is how we begin to remember novelty complexity in the future of humanity and my current thing which i'm this is like an edge

for me but i think it feels right is that I think I'm rather than just doing it as like an anthropologist and just trusting everyone gives a shit which is my default just nerding out Spectrum Boy is to actually write it as a dialogue between

an old professor who's in hospital with a broken thigh and a young boy 20 20 something boy who has let himself fall off a rock climb like a suicidal move and it's a series of conversations so think kind of like if you ever read good or escher and bach that douglas hofstadter book about time space theory and everything else where it's an it's a dialogue between Achilles and the tortoise, which also Lewis Carroll did, or Plato's dialogues, right? It was one of those back and forths, but fundamentally from a professor at Princeton who has studied all this stuff and a young boy who doesn't see the point

in the fucking future. I love that. Yeah. I love that you're gonna that you take it that way too because recapture the rapture was fucking incredible and just on a tear since my wife got into smut books she she she's loved like the uh what is it bro thorny thorny glass something like that one of these fucking books with phase and and you know fantasy shit and and then obviously there's some sex and stuff. And that's been great for me in particular. And I was like, I wish, because I love the Dune series. I was like, I wish there was a fucking series that I could just chew on and love.

And so she found Brandon Sanderson and he's doing his fifth thousand page book in the Stormlight Archive. And I've been flying through those and flying through the Red Rising books I was telling you about. But there is, I have such a, 99% of these books are all non-fiction you know and like there's so much that i've packed into my brain on optimization and longevity and all the other fucking things that that that i want

to know personally and then i can share that with others yeah yeah but i've loved the way fiction lands and um i think there's there's deeper, you know, almost akin to Jesus and speaking of parables, right? There's pieces that you can only grasp from the story that you can't just write down, you know, that, that land in a way that hits hits the heart as well as the head. So I'm really excited that you're going to take it that way. It's going to be incredible. Yeah. Stoked. Beautiful brother. Well, we'll link to show notes, uh, website, all that good good stuff do you have any events that you're bringing people to that you'd

want to promote well if folks are into skiing ski mountaineering leadership we're doing a flow in snow in crested butte uh probably early uh march we're just locking in the dates with uh some backcountry cat skiing up near our cabin as well as some everything from digging snow caves and how to survive and like winter arctic warfare survival kind cabin, as well as everything from digging snow caves and how to survive in winter Arctic warfare survival kind of stuff, as well as ripping backcountry skiing, and then also all of its applications to leadership. And then we definitely do our online trainings. I think we're going to do, actually coming into 25,

a version of basically kind of what we've been discussing here, which would be like prep stirring, like how to prepare for a future we can't see from here without losing your cool. So not tinfoil hat and like IED bunkers, but much more like what is the state of the world? How do we make sense of that state of the world? And then what's the balance

between what's happening globally, what's happening socially, and then what's happening personally for me and mine? So how do we do that? How do we basically recalibrate our set of tools so that we're not toggling between, you know, fun and experience-seeking and total despair or overwhelm? What's a solid middle spot we can lead ourselves and others through?

I love that. And that's flowgenomeproject.com? Cool. We'll link to that. We'll link to, if your podcast is out with Jordan Peterson, I want to check that out. I'll link to that as well. I uh if your podcast is out with jordan peterson i'll check that out i'll link to that as well i love you brother it's a pleasure i love every one of our walks we get to do and i'm always thinking it'd be you know you've been on the podcast multiple times but i'm all every time we finish a walk i'm like well we should be fucking recorded that

because there's just every time i i spend uh a couple hours with you it really fills me up and and uh and i love it man i love you brother i love you the way your mind works in your heart so thank you for being on the podcast well if nothing else mate i mean i hope that uh any of your audience if we can just kind of feel the pulse of like a friendship like this one right and i said this to some of my friends you know the day after the election i was like i know you're on team human i love you no matter what right and if that's true for anybody listening and you have those folks and right now you might feel

slight distance or slight confusion, just make a commitment to yourself and them to close those gaps and reaffirm the heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye stuff because that's how we do this together. Beautiful brother. Yeah.