The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Jamie Wheal: "Neuro-anthropology and Culture Architecture"

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

On this episode, we meet with Executive Director of the Flow Genome Project, Jamie Wheal. Jamie discusses the evolutionary importance of music as a coping mechanism, how the United States' university system fails to prepare students for the crises of the coming decades, and how to find hope in this time of tumult.  About Jamie Wheal: Jamie Wheal is the Executive Director of Flow Genome Project. His work ranges from Fortune 500 companies, leading business schools, Young Presidents' Organization (YPO), to Red Bull and its stable of world-class athletes. He combines a background in expeditionary leadership, wilderness medicine and surf rescue, with over a decade advising high-growth companies on strategy, execution and leadership. He is a sought-after speaker, presenting to diverse and high-performing communities such as YPO, Summit Series, MaiTai Global, TEDx, and the Advertising Research Foundation. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/13-jamie-wheal

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today we talk with my friend Jamie Wheel. Jamie is a leading expert on the neurosomatics of ultimate human performance and in that role is the executive director of the Flow Genome Project. Jamie is also an author, educator, and Backwoods Expeditionary Leadership Coach, helping humans

live up to their potential in this transitional time. Jamie and I talk about the evolutionary importance of music as a coping man. mechanism, how our current university system in the USA is failing and doesn't prepare students for the coming decades, and how to find hope during this time of tumult. Jamie is quite a character and a super good person. I hope you enjoy this week's wide-ranging conversation. Jamie, my friend, how are you? Doing well, man.

So you don't know this story, but the first time that I heard of your name was when I was writing a college textbook for my Reality 101 class about the interconnection of money and energy and climate change. And I wanted to call it stealing fire because it meant that we're stealing fire from future generations. And I googled it. And then your name came up and I was like, oh, crap, that book has already been written. But it turns out that book was not about climate change and money and debt and borrowing

from the future, but about something quite different. I have both your books. They are quite marked up, Stealing Fire, and Recapture the Rapture. Maybe just to kick off here, you could give a very short summary of those two books and why did you write the second one and maybe just a bit of reflection. And I have a ton of stuff I want to talk to you about as we've been talking recently on the phone. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, for me, stealing fire was just looking to kind of you know, validate the underground, you know, multi-thousand-year game of cat and mouse between Prometheans, you know, the folks that were sort of literally stealing the fire of civilization consciousness predominantly through non-ordinary states. So all the way back to the Lucinian

mysteries in Greece, all the way forwards through the 60s and wacky projects like MK Ultra all the way to the contemporary psychedelic Renaissance, the evolution of Burning Man, the neuroscience revolution, all of these kind of things. And really just kind of a love letter to that underground story that has sort of underpinned so much of civilization and its development, but has often been kind of pushed to the margins as either the realm of, you know, decadence, hedonism, you know, marginal culture, etc. And just to say, hey, look, this is actually happening. And this, you know, the writing of that was 2015, 2016, it was prior to Michael Pollens, how to change your mind. And it was kind of, you know, sort of just legitimating and validating the role that a broad

spectrum of non-ordinary states can play in seeding culture and civilization. And then recapture the rapture was effectively, you know, so stealing fire was sort of building a bridge from consensus reality on one side of the river, sort of mainstream muggledom, to a sort of more, slightly more interesting, more dynamic and more volatile and problematic culture on the other side. The thesis there was to say, hey, this is always a back and forth between the rebels, the lightbringers, the ones pushing the envelope, and then the kind of, you know, the Prometheans and the priests. They were the ones, whether they were wearing black casics or literally men in black suits, like the institutional authority looking to kind of shut that stuff

down. And the thesis at the end of stealing fire was, hey, our only hope is to open source these, to use Eliati's term from back in the day, techniques of ecstasy. If we can open source these tools, then all humans have access to them, and then they can't get shut down by institutional authority. And then so, you know, once we're across that river and we're into that domain, then recapture the rapture was the idea of like, okay, what does it look like to start mapping some of that high ground? What does consciousness and culture look like as we progress from integrating non-ordinary in peak states into our way of thinking, seeing, being, innovating, connecting, collaborating. And so that was very much a sense of, oh, you know, the hours late and the stakes are high. And, you know, we're in a tight spot. So, you know, it really does behoove us to

figure out ways to address the meaning crisis that we are finding ourselves in. And what might sort of almost like the equivalent of blockchain for consciousness and culture, what is an open source framework that people could use to create a kind of decentralized bottoms up, you know, series of social and cultural movements that give us the inspiration and the healing and the collaboration in order to kind of rally and do the things that we must in the coming decades. So I found Recapture the Rapture fascinating because it covered a lot of the topics that I write about from a wildly different perspective. And like I said, I have, other than Jonathan Heights, the righteous mind, I don't remember a book I had marked up as much as yours. You use very colorful

and descriptive prose. And I've copied a bunch of quotes that I'm going to read from your book. Starting with the first topic I'd like to jam with you about a little bit, you've described yourself to me as an environmental anthropologist looking at human history used to teach college like I do. There's a quote in your book, culture is upstream of politics, but biology is upstream of them both. Can you describe that a little bit? Because I happen to agree. Sure. I mean, that was, you know, culture's upstream of politics was Andrew Brightbot of Brightbot, news, fame, infamy. That was his original assessment. And Steve Bannon picked that up and kind of ran with it. I was basically saying, you know, if you want to win politically, you have to fight the

culture wars proactively, right? And then there's just that sense of, you know, particularly in the last century, but, you know, obviously origins kind of back with Descartes and, you know, the rest of the Enlightenment folks, we sort of have been on this multi-century project to separate ourselves from our animal natures, right? That is just, it's all about codependent. We have kind of broken our heritage as monkeys with clothes. We have infinite agency and choice and all of these kind of things. And I think that might be overstating the case and that there is an awful lot about our lives and how we function as tribal primates that is as basic and as genetically encoded and imprinted as any other animal in the animal kingdom. And you can take examples from politics and tribalism to the role of oxytocin, not just as a trust and cuddle molecule, but as an ethnocentric, tribal bonding one to all of the song and dance around sexuality, reproduction, mate selection, all of these kinds of things.

You can just kind of take a look at how we operate. And I'm actually staggered and humbled by how little is, you know, arguably and uniquely human and not governed by remarkably predictable primate encoding. Yeah, I happen to agree, and that's the longest and to the students' most favorite part of the course is the evolutionary psychology angle of steep discount rates, status, keeping up with the Joneses, addiction, hypernormal stimuli, cognitive biases, belief systems, versus individual behavior, in group, out group, I sees cultural evolution, all those things are central to the predicament we face.

I go so far as to say we don't so much face an environmental or energy or economic problem as much as we face a mismatch of human stone age minds in a modern culture. And so I think what you wrote about there makes a ton of sense. There's a couple quotes that I'll cue up for you. Doped up on dopamine, we feel better, but behave worse. Too much dopamine results in apophenia, which is that we perceive patterns and meaning and otherwise unconnected events and facts. And then when chronic stress due to social status loss, economic hardship, et cetera, we

We have low serotonin levels, which results in a higher focus on the present and a revenge sort of spite sort of behavior. So it becomes a positive feedback loop in a bad way. So is the response at the core level culture-wide or starting with individuals to build up our serotonin levels or to defer the second marshmallow and reduce the prevalence of dopamine in our lives or from someone who's looked at peak flow and physiology and. neuropsychology, what is your conclusions about that? Yeah, well, I mean, like, I think whether you're talking to Robert Sapolsky or Lisa Feldman

Barrett or Andrew Huberman or any of our other kind of friends and colleagues who are just geniuses and deeply studied in this space, the under-satisfying answer is it's complicated and it depends. You know, so rather than saying we need to exclusively monolithically upregulate one thing or suppress or down-regulate another, it's much more all things in balance. and range. So it's less, I mean, for sure, what is the word for it? Slot machine? Olympic capitalism. I forget who coined that concept. I've never heard that. Yeah, right? Just that idea of just pushing our monkey buttons in our slot machine reward centers. Well, Sapolsky,

Sapolsky says that the unexpected reward is what drives our behavior, that if you maximize the uncertainty of the next event, whether a girlfriend will say yes or whether you'll get the 777, that that is what our dopamine is at its maximum when the uncertainty is at 50%. Limbic capitalism. Yeah, he calls that the magic of maybe, right? You get like a 400x boost versus just a sure thing reward. And I think the simplest thing is to just, is to acknowledge that our neurotransmitters and endocrine balances, back to us having, you know, the classic E.O. Wilson, you know, Paleolithic brains are

out of whack, and they're not just out of whack because we sit inside and we don't get sunlight, and we don't move enough in reading processed foods. They're out of whack because our entire lives and digital-based interactions are all hyper-optimized via the kind of BJ fogg school of behavioral habit manipulation, et cetera. Well, so as an anthropologist, I know this is impossible to answer, but what's your speculation? Of course, dopamine is required for motivation and action in animals. But as a percentage of our daily routines as an average American versus 200 years ago, 500 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, dopamine has got to be a much larger

portion of the neurotransmitter portfolio. And how much is that due to culture? How much is it due to technology and how much is due to marketing? Yes, it's a complex answer. But I feel like we are so sucked into the dopamine vortex right now. And I think, you know, if we could have a better balance to neurotransmitter portfolio with oxytocin, serotonin and others, we would have a better cultural chance. But do you have any opinions on that? Yeah, well, actually, I'm reading a book right now.

Anna Lemke is at the Stanford Addiction Center. and she's just written a book recently called Dopamine Nation. And she takes kind of an interesting look at kind of all of those things. And fundamentally, I mean, if you go back to Sapolsky's original work and that kind of stuff, too, like the idea is it's less that dopamine is a reward or feel good chemical. That's often kind of how it gets represented in popular culture than it is more a sort of salience enhancing and novelty encouraging neurochemical. So salience just means it's relevant.

Like you'll get a shot of dopamine if you hit the hot stove or you step over a wrap. You know, so it's not simply the pleasure button, but it is the fucking A, remember this. This is really important. This can make you or break you. But we get that fucking A. This is important 24-7. Exactly. And Lemke's research where she kind of gets into the cycles is it's really kind of interesting.

Like if you, you know, the classic kind of rat with the cocaine lever sort of experiment, but, you know, with humans as well, which is you will be at a baseline of dopaminergic release. then when you spy or get a cue, the sort of Pavlovian conditioning of a reward that's coming, then your dopamine level actually drops until you get it. So it actually creates this instant kind of hunger or pang or deficit to kind of close the deal and get your reward. And so there's all these micro adjustments. And then when people end up in addictive behavioral loops, their dopamine ends up flatlining. So it's almost like a, like, you know, I need my car.

coffee in the morning to wake me up. And it's like, no, you don't. What you are is you're addicted to caffeine and you need your, you need your shot of coffee in the morning to return to baseline. And we're doing the same thing with dopamine. So when we are over-indexed on dopamine saturation, we end up less satisfied, more anxious, and more cravings just to return to baselines. And it can take up to a month of abstinence from whatever the overstimulation is to get back to kind of a homeostatic baseline where natural things naturally intrigue us, stimulate us, and prompt us to seek more constructive novelty versus just kind of maintaining the sickness by seeking out the next thing. I've made videos and materials calling that phenomenon, the wanting is stronger than

the having. And ultimately, we are turning a hundred billion barrel of oil equivalence per year into micro leaders of dopamine with not a lot to show for it. So, okay, decentralization, top down versus bottom up. I know you have thoughts on this. To me, it seems there are a ton of trends pointing to decentralization. And therefore, a bottom up approach to our cultural transition is essential. But I would argue or offer that all those trends are subservient to the mega trend or the mega thing that's holding everything together, which is our financial system and geopolitical agreements, which argue for the need to bend and not break on the decentralization theme. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I mean, this is not the same answer as for dopamine and serotonin, which is, it's complicated and it depends, you know, and it's basically the idea of some form of civic, localized, resilient community is absolutely essential and has massively atrophied. So from the kind of whole bowling alone to, you know, Vivek Murthy's, you know, I think it's Together is the name of his book. You know, like we are isolated, fragmented consumers living in suburbs that don't know our next door neighbors, that, etc., etc. And so 100%, that is an atrophied skill set and capacity that we need to massively boost. And on the other hand, no man is an island and everything's a multinational corporation at this point. So like we can't ignore tops down major coordinated policy decisions, legislation, distributions and allocations of capital, trade agreements, military agreements, etc. That all has to happen too because the era of colonialism was the long litany of indigenous

folks, back to the landers, you name it, who all tried to either were always outside the system and then eventually got steamrolled captured, subjugated by that system, or attempted to leave the system, the 60s back to the land movement or anything else, and kind of couldn't. And if you really, you know, if you really take a long arc of it, then you kind of go back to everybody from the desert, Assenes, getting hunted down, you know, by the Romans to the Cathars and the Spanish Inquisition, you know, like, it's actually kind of, it's, it's a high risk prospect to be a thumb in the eye of Soron, like Soron's eye, especially now with everything from Google Earth and satellites to heat-seeking imagery, like, you'll be found. There's no.

hiding anymore. So it's sort of on the one hand, we have to kind of do this intentionally regressive move of back to local healthy tribalism. And on the other hand, we can't ignore the politics of empire. Well, that's what I've done is created a barbell strategy on the one hand to advance policy, which is educating politicians and leaders about the decisions and macro interventions we're going to need in the coming decade and on the other end, educate and inspire young people and maybe a broader general public towards a different sort of cultural trajectory. And so let's get to that. The heart of your book, the latest book, Recapture the Rapture, is about ethical cult building.

I'm going to start with two quotes. One from Martin Luther King in your book. If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation. This means we must develop a world perspective. And then your quote, culty cults demand subjugation to the guru. Ethical cults seek to enhance the sovereignty of the individual while increasing the intelligence of the collective. So I have a lot of thoughts on this because that is what I think needs to happen in your book preceding that. You talk about the meaning crisis, that religion theology doesn't play the role that it has the last few centuries.

Neoliberalism is waning in its ability to provide an outlet for everyone that's the markets and institutions, even the academy. I kind of call that religion and economic growth, because I think economic growth is waning. So what is the thing that will potentially give us meaning? And I know this is complex and nuanced, but how can we create a movement of authentic behavior change in service of the greater good that provides meaning to people? Yeah. I mean, and just to kind of build on that earlier, Breitbot riff, you know, like the sort of

the old saying of like nature of whores a vacuum. So does culture. And in the midst of this meaning crisis, where we have had the erosion of organized traditional religions, but we've also had the erosion of belief in neoliberalism. I mean, I think there was a recent essay in the Atlantic by a Columbia business school professor saying, hey, man, even my business school students are like seriously critiquing capitalism. And these are the guys that are coming and going from McKinsey and Goldman and everywhere else. I'm like, fuck, like, that's a bit of a bellwether, right? So into that vacuum of like, who are we? Why are we? What is the good, the true and the beautiful? Who's the other or the enemy to be triumphed over or the adversary? Right. I mean, these are just the basic plot points of kind of culture architecture.

What we're seeing is obviously the rise in all sorts of toxic and pathological options, you know, including, you know, populism, you know, all the isms. and schisms. So my senses is that if we're really saying, hey, humans in general need to as rapidly and efficiently as possible mend our trauma to get to the point where we're not just reacting and smacking each other back and forth. So let's kind of kind of discharge the incredibly tightly wound nature and reactivity that we're currently in. And if we are in fact, to remember the better angels of our nature, some form of inspiration and some form of deference to a higher good, so that we can bond together in higher trust, higher, you know, more altruistic, more effective collaboration, you know, you're basically looking at sort of

nothing shy of a church 3.0, right? I mean, what is it, what does it look like for us to create rituals and techniques of ecstasy, batch forgiveness, right, which is, I think, has always been a key part of almost any religious faith service and forgiveness. Batch forgiveness? What is that? Yeah, batch. Well, so, you know, if you think of trauma, right, which is kind of all the rage as a topic these days, I mean, Bessel van der Kolk's body keeps the score has kind of, you know, just kind of

popped back onto the bestseller lists after, you know, years of being published and that kind of thing. Everybody is all about triggers and traumas and, you know, feelings and this and that, which is broadly healthily until it's not, right? And you can, you know, super roughly divide trauma into two different categories. One is kind of macro trauma, like an adverse life event like a broken bone, right, or the psychosocial equivalent of that. A specific moment in time, it happened, and you spend periods of time after recovering and you're never quite back to normal. But then there's also micro trauma, which is us sitting in our desks, us freaking out during COVID, us getting into flame wars on social media, right? All the little tiny things. And there's nothing specific. So this is less I broke my bone than it is. I've been sitting in a chair for three years and now my back's fucked. Right. So it's that kind of micro trauma. And we are experiencing boatloads of both. And I think teasing those

apart so that, because we don't have the time to all sit in a circle passing a talking stick, to hash out every single one of our real or imagined slights or places we feel hard done by, etc. So one of the interesting things that, for some reason, spacing on Dunbar's first name. Robin. Okay, Robin Dunbar. So of the Dunbar number at Oxford, right, he has done studies with the San Bushman and the Kalahari and has found that they engage in trans-Dun.

or ecstatic collective celebration, more often, not less often, during times of social stress and strife. So they literally use it as kind of batch forgiveness. They use it as a groove and reconciliation committee instead of a truth and reconciliation committee. They're like, let's get our yaya's out. Let's draw, let's get ourselves into a non-ordinary trance state. Let's do it together. And then afterwards, the things that we're getting on my nerves about, you just aren't so much and we can flush our collective nervous systems and psyches from them.

So that feels super duper important and absolutely explicitly missing right now from our social discourse. If you wrote about batch forgiveness in your book, I must have missed it. But when you said it, I thought you were going to say like confession or something like that. But music and trance and drums is something that I thought was. was really, I don't know a lot about that anthropologically, although Jonathan Haidt, who I know writes in his book, The Righteous Mind, that one of the few ways to switch to the hive mind in humans

is, one is being in nature, another is raves and deep music with a bass beat and another is psychedelics. But I guess what you're saying is that those yayas or the drum beat, trance collective experience, maybe that suppressed or released dopamine and replaced it with something oxytocin or some more bonding thing. How central is music as a coping mechanism to the micro and macro traumas? music either just listening to music or music in a group setting where you're listening to something loud and thumpy, etc. I know very little about this, but it feels right to me. But how would that be conserved is another thing I don't understand evolutionarily? Meaning conserved, meaning just passed on from generation to generation? Yep. I mean, not culturally, but genetically

if we respond to a deep, I went to one rave once in Montreal and it was amazing. Like I felt ecstasy almost just, I didn't do drugs or anything. I had a couple beers, but it was just 500 people in this Montreal bar bouncing to this music. I've never quite felt anything like that before. Well, I mean, look, I think there's actually some interesting chicken and egg conversations there because like Daniel Leviton, who's at McGill, has written, this is your brain on music. and it's a fascinating study, you know, one of his core thesis is music actually predates language that, you know, the earliest bone flutes are something like 50,000 years old, and that, you know,

obviously, percussive instruments predated those by however meaningful chunk of time that was, and that quite possibly we were almost using that before we're using our palate and vocal chords to communicate sophisticated language. And if you look at, you know, Ghanaian, West African rhythms and things like that, the call and response, the literal kind of quote, unquote, jungle drums, where they were literally communicating war, peace, birth, celebration, gathering points, danger, you know, all of those things via music, both over distance, but also in the intimate settings like around the campfire, there is a profound, I mean, everybody's got a heartbeat. Like we are literally, we all grew in the womb listening to the

wum, wum, my God, I never thought of that. Well, I mean, literally in that and that bow dittily beat like the dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. But that's called the heartbeat of Africa. And it's literally the precursor to the Rolling Stones, you know, not doing not fade away, all the way to the Grateful Dead, not doing it, all the way to, you know, every bit of EDM you've ever heard. So rather than thinking of it as us, we're innovating a new social technology and there's an app for it, it's much more sort of psycho-archology. We're just unearthing something that not only goes, predates language and arguably was one of the engines of emerging

hominid culture and communication and coordination. It let us stay up at night toward our predators. It let us coordinate for hunts. It let us engage in mating rituals and all these things, right? But it actually goes to almost kind of brainstem. And again, limbic patterning in our system. So the deepest rhythms are trance inducing because they kind of go straight into the brain and they discombobululate via syncopation and polyrhythm. Right. And it's why Voodoon has such funky ass beats because the point is that you cannot listen to them with your executive function prefrontal cortex beta wave activity. It just drags you into alpha and theta. And, you know, as George Clinton in Parliament, Funkadelic, you know, once said you to free your mind and your ass will follow.

Voodoon I've never heard of. George Clinton, the song about Atomic Dog or whatever, that I remember. So do your knowledge about music and what you just described, does that change personally how you use or listen or engage with music in your own life, especially as someone who's working full time on the metacrisis and trying to build communitas and a movement on these things. It's got to be a lot of stress in your life because we're exposed to these things 24-7. Well, like as Alice Walker said, she titled a collection of her poem, she said, Hard Times Call for Furious Dancing. And that's 100% true, right? I mean, Basically, the more grief and trauma and conflict and uncertainty that we are trying to process,

the more essential, truly cathartic, reboot the nervous system peak states are. So the obvious one that we're everybody's familiar with is orgasm, right? You have that kind of, you know, whatever, I forget this four Kinsey stages, but there's sort of pre-something arousal, climax, and then whatever the refractory period is, right? And so that energetic, like, neurological experience of flatline to arousal to peak release, defrag, reboot is non-negotiable for us processing all that accumulated micro-PTSD. And even, you know, with enough of a neurological and neurochemical saturated state, also to go back and actually maybe excavate and or mend some of the deeper wounds, some of the matter. macro PTSD. And that's, you know, that's MAPS's work with MDMA therapy and veterans and PTSD and those kind of things. If you put yourself in these neurological states where you're saturated with safety,

security, and belonging, then you can actually take some of those traumatized memories off your shelf, rework them, reformat them, overwrite them, as it were, in therapeutic dialogue and that kind of thing. And then you put them back on the shelf and they're different memories now. So it does feel essential. Like it's a part of our kind of psychosocial hygiene of how do we keep on keeping on without just getting ground down by the stressors of our world. So I listen to music a lot and just thinking about it. The last time I danced like with people was probably 20 years ago at a Midwest wedding. I did like the white guy dance. But I dance all the time by myself with my dogs. I just cranked the music and I kind of boogie around and with the dogs dance with me. And maybe I'm doing that

not because, hey, that would be fun, but maybe I'm subconsciously doing that to de-stress and heal a little. I don't know. I hadn't thought about it, but I do that a lot. Oh, well, actually, we've done an expedition course in the Utah canyons at the end of October and then flew straight to L.A. to go to the deaden company. So this is John Mayer playing guitar with those guys at the Hollywood Bowl. So it was at their Halloween shows. And I took a dear friend and former CL Team 6th commander with me. And this was his first show. He'd only ever gone to like a couple of you two shows like back in the day, you know, probably before Annapolis. Like that was it. All he'd seen was completely scripted big stadium show twice with one band. So for him to get a taste

of a Grateful Dead show was very different. And he looked over at me and he's like, oh, you're dancing your ass off. And I was like, dude, you don't dance because you feel great. And this is a celebration, you dance to work the kinks out. Like it's literally you allow the music sonically, acoustically, to move through you, you know, at high volume, high fidelity. And you let those sound waves work out the kinks. And for him, I mean, I just said it because that just feels like what everybody does at those shows. Like that's part of that ecstatic, psychedelic, collective ritual that has emerged over 50 years of that subculture. But for him, that was a revelation. He's like, oh, you mean you don't have to feel awesome and then dance.

You can actually dance to feel awesome. And so that is a super helpful reverse. That would be a learning experience for me too. And I'm just wondering people dance and listen to music because they like it. But is there any, I have no idea, is there any musical therapy for trauma? Oh, hugely. Really? Okay.

Oh, massively. That's not only a thing, and there's for sure just straight up music and movement trauma specialists, but even very explicitly, there's currently a huge upgrade to the sonic components to psychedelic therapies, because for a long time, it was, I don't know, when this was formed, I suppose it was in the 60s and then continued in the underground, which was like, you put on your headphones, you lie on a couch, you listen to classical music, or maybe you listen to the classical music, or maybe you listen to the, something vaguely world music-y, you know, with gongs and chimes. And they're like, I think the music, you know, music is the wallpaper of our minds. And so it absolutely shaped. It becomes a carrier way for any interior subjective experience. And now in the last 18 to 24 months, there's been a huge uptick in, well, wait a second, this is so central. We should update the therapeutic playlists for any of the MDMA or psilocybin therapies. at Johns Hopkins and Imperial University and all of these places because they're 100% realizing

the centrality of it to the patient's experience. So getting back to something serious, not that music isn't serious, but this is really why I reached out to you or why I asked Daniel to introduce us. So in my materials, and I had sent you my book, but I don't expect that you've read it, but in there we talk about the agenda of the gene, that the gene is not. not our friend, but that we don't have to live by the dictates of what our great grandcestors bekeithed us on all this Stone Age mind in a modern culture. It's very similar to what I think you did a podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman talked about transcending our evolved wiring into behaving as different humans. And it's what you call.

You called your own podcast, homegrown humans. And it all is revolving around this idea that we're the first, I mean, I'll paraphrase the way that I think about it, we're the first generation of our species to be able to understand the metacrisis, how everything fits together, energy, economy, anthropology, neuroscience, debt, climate change, biodiversity, individual versus collective behavior, all of it. And so here's how I think about ethical cult building. You have these binary questions. Did you take the red pill or not?

The red pill being, do you understand or can you squint and see how all this stuff fits together and that we are in an unbelievable pickle culturally from economic, ecological, trust, political, all kinds of negative risks are on our doorstep? Do you understand those things generally? Then the next question is, do you have wider boundary, empathy, and ethics? In other words, once you learn about how dire our situation is, do you go to buy guns and knives and canned goods and just try to defend your own castle? Or do you have a wider boundary code of ethics that you care about your community, other

species, other people that come after us? And then the third thing, which is why I'm so attracted to your work is can you change your neurophysiology, your psychology to be a better human while taking all this stuff on board, being able to defer the second marshmallow, defer gratification. I think you use the words, clean up your own house in order to be able to help the greater good. I think that's spot on. And to be honest, I'm not sure that I have cleaned up my own house because I'm so busy doing this sort of stuff on the macro interventions, which is why I lean on you because you seem to have a lot of this figured out because you're a wilderness guide and kite surfer and you lead outward bound sorts of things,

that that's the core part missing. Like I teach my students all of the science on how this stuff fits together. But at the end, there's this how do we transcend our cultural cul-de-sac of how we behave into something deeper and more aligned with the future. So what do you think about all that? Well, that's the shoemaker's children, you know, having their shoes, right? That's always the challenge of being called with a mission that sometimes feels bigger or more important than self-care. That's how, I mean, just to be blunt, that is how I've felt the last year or two is the mission is bigger than my own self-care.

And I know it's a marathon, not a sprint. So I have to reread the last chapter of your book and go hang out with you in Arizona more because it is a balance. You have to be kind to yourself. But expand on that a little bit. You had another term coming alive as opposed to staying alive, I think you say. Yeah. I mean, look, I think all of this are fingers in the dike, right? That the amount of disruption and challenge, you know, throughout human history, but also, you know, our turn in the barrel is, you know, better than anybody's.

best laid plans. And that's where, you know, what we were talking about with music, not just the actual sonic, you know, or acoustic factors of it, but the community aspect of it is, is we cannot do this by ourselves. And despite having a passion, you know, built my life around access to wild places and gravity sports and sharing those times with people I love and having access to regular celebratory music and all those things, I get dropped to my knees on. a regular basis, you know, as recently as two days ago, you know, I'm driving to town to get an extension cord because there's going to be a hard freeze and we have to protect some things from freezing. And I am just in the pit of gloom being like, fuck me, man. This is all a bit

much. In fact, I just finished reading that Vaclav Smil, Grand Transictions book, you know, right? And there had been one or two other, you know, articles coming across my desk at the time. That were just, you know, extra specially triply bleak and, you know, and not just the bleak. because you could have, we could have, you can always have found somebody, some doomsayer, you know, for the last decades, they've always, they've never been on a short supply, but now the number of mainstream folks that are saying those things, right? So my sense is, is that part of the beauty of music is the idea of community and shared suffering. And that in the community of shared suffering, we actually end up with a shot at redemption.

And there are multiple, multiple times. where, you know, I, and I think this experience isn't unique, have been dropped to our knees and actually undone. Like, I don't have any more capacity for me to pick myself up off the ground. And that's when the most profound and beautiful thing happens, whether it's the musician, right, or the songwriter, or, you know, or the band or the audience, or it's all of them together, pulses with this energy of our redemption songs. And there you are, covered in snot,

you know, absolutely despondent on your knees, unable to take another step. And the collective power, the collective dignity, the collective joy, the collective testimony of like,

yes, this too. And we're dancing anyway. That becomes essential. So to me, like, we cannot do this alone. And that's not just a platitude. It's actually,

it's logistics. We can't, all replicate the tools, capacities, and resources we need, but we can't, you know, both external and internal material, you know, like solar and wells and food and tool bonds and makerspaces and that kind of stuff, but also psychological. Like, we're all going to get dropped to our knees through this process. And I always think of like transatlantic sailing races, right? Something like that is a metaphor, right? The idea is like, you don't all have to stay awake all the time. You take turns taking watch through stormy seas. And all you need is one person at the

wheel while everyone else can recover. And then we take turns. And that to me feels super, super important because when you talked about that coming alive and staying alive, right, that was a riff on E.B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web. I have that quote from your book written down. I rise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. Yeah, which is totally does. And I didn't, I didn't mention the next sentence, which is even better because he's like, then I realized in fact that the savering must come first. Because if there was nothing to save worth savering, there would be nothing to save. And to me, that's the kind of, that's the beautiful, okay,

let's pick ourselves back up. Because, you know, we are, as you know, even the very nature of your courses that you're teaching, right? Are mindbenders. never really able, no humans ever have been able to kind of lay out all those factors of existence in quite that explicit way, the sort of objectified classifications, categories, quantified analysis, interdependencies, complexity math, you know, and to say, this is the whole enchilada, you know, of energy and food and population and economics and, you know, carrying capacities and this and that. We haven't been able to do that. And at the same time, that very same whiz-bang techno-industrial civil society that has created the very conditions

that led to, you know, the personal growth explosion, you know, the me generation, the human development, all of these things that lets us wake up to the highest potentials of ourselves, the coming alive, right? And, you know, and gay rights and women's rights and trans rights and increasing egalitarianism and, you know, and even animal rights and all these things is to say, yes, yay, yay, yay, you know, goodness, truth, and beauty for all of us forever, at the same time, we are being rudely reacquainted with the staying alive arc, especially in the developed West, right? I mean, other chunks of the world have never had the luxury of not being acquainted with this,

right? But for us, for the first time in a while, at least half a century, maybe, you know, 75 years or more, really since the conclusion of World War II, we've been in a consumer-padded cocoon. of an anomalous Pax Americana. And so the staying alive part is like, wait, I just woke up to all my limitless potentials and all the potentials of a society where we can all live our hashtag best life. And at the same time, we're realizing I'm getting the fucking bill that's coming due for a civilization that might be massively overextended and about to go tits up.

And that's schizophrenic back and forth between I'm overwhelmed with gratitude and joy an infinite possibility versus I'm terrified staring in the windshield of what's coming at us at light speed. That's a kind of dislocation that I think most of us are struggling with on a daily basis. I completely agree. And let me offer a little one or two anecdotes there. You brought it my class and the interdisciplinary synthesis. And it took me 20 years to put that together.

The reason I think it works is because we have. 25 students in a circle and they're hearing all this mind-bending stuff, but they're processing it as a tribe that spends 100 hours together during three or four months. Just the fact talking to someone else that understands and cares about these things and has somewhat of a plan, that is, I can feel it. My cortisol is declining. And, you know, I have a natural. human response to community, even though you're six states south of me. And so I do think somehow if we're able to scale that, I have this chat group that I put together six or seven years ago with 38 systems ecologists, well-known people.

And so we, I don't have anyone really locally to talk about these things. So I've found my tribe on the internet, kind of. But ultimately, that's kind of a non-star. because ultimately locally is going to be where things really matter. But my question to you, and maybe you could offer some information on what you're trying to do right now, is how do we take this wide boundary empathy that we're at a cultural transition and we need to help with a recognition of the facts or even somewhat fluency in what's going on? and this homegrown humans transcend, get your house in order, coming alive sort of neurophysiology.

How do you package that together and scale it so that it's not just one community in Texas that's living that way, but maybe there's 3,000 communities that are starting to change how they think. Because this is all makes sense to us. But meanwhile, the S&P 500 is at all-time highs and all these cryptocurrency, Metaverse, memes and various other, as you refer to, rapture ideologies make it sound like the story we're telling is kind of fringe and not real. It will become real pretty quick to a lot of people, but it may happen seven years from now without any warning. How do we get the Communitas scaled before that? Is it possible? What are your hopes? What are you working on in that direction?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, And again, this is that Vachlov's meal assessment. He's like, okay, let's just see how we're doing so far on the whole, you know, decovenization thing. You know, here's where it was in Paris and before and here's where we are now. And we're like at 1.3% if max sort of improvement net, like there's been a whole bunch of growth and there's been a whole bunch of expansion in renewables and this and that. But it's been outpaced by more, more, you know, more fossil fuel burn and this and that. It's like, so this is actually how we're doing, you know, not the next product launch or the next thing. So if you basically just realize, okay, we are highly efficient, which basically means stubborn and lazy.

So we do not change unless we absolutely positively, positively triple absolutely have to. So that appears to be what we're doing right now. Except for people that understand our message and understand that we will not change as a culture, that gives them a little bit of cognitive emotional boost to change individually ahead of time. I mean, you know, my unfiltered, not like what's my talking point to like, you know, close a, close a keynote with. But my unfiltered senses actually weren't in for a world of hurt. And it's the kind of this, the Pompeii effect. You know, and Pompeii always haunted me as a kid because you'd see those pictures and you'd be like, why the fuck didn't you get out of town? Like that thing was blowing for weeks. That said that, that I think some truly global collective awakening is probably slim-ons, unless there's some deus ex machina kind of thing, you know, like second-come. raptures, UFOs, whatever, unless there's something we cannot predict from here, it's unlikely via our own collective intelligence to just be a light switch that all just suddenly happens and we get the kumbaya bug.

So what it means is I think the simplest, I'm not the simplest, but the most honest thing that I could offer is if this generation starts thinking, like a meditation of we are the, We are the generation of the arc. We are building, you know, like a time capsule, like the one they found under that Robert Ely statue, right? We are literally building time capsules of consciousness and culture that we are dedicating to our future generations not yet born. And that we start expanding our sense of who we are. Because if I am just me, the biographic me, who grew up in the Paxamericana, condition. to be a rational, egotistical consumer identity.

Right? Like I am me, I can do anything I want, I can live and be and hang with anybody I want. I can make my life constantly again and again and again. I can put it up on social media and anything I want I can buy. And everything I buy has the salvific promise of curing my dandruff or my chronic halitosis or granting me success status, whatever it would be. right, that is a wickedly fragile and dysfunctional self-sense. And if instead we go back to some form of seven-generation, no, consciousness, like literally

three generations behind me, like who was my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather? They got that torch to me. And three generations ahead of me, who are my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren that I am living on behalf of, right? That actually buffers our psychological distress. And there's been lots of studies where they've done psychological studies of children who are aware of their generations. And if they're aware of three or more generations,

they're less prone to anxiety and depression in middle school and high school. They have higher SAT scores. They have higher college attendance and graduation rates, better bounce back from adverse life events, all these things. So it's not just kind of nice lip service. You know, it's that sense of no, oh, if it's just me pinballing through the universe as a fragment, as an atomized self, we're going to get smoked. But if we can expand and buffer who I am and on whose behalf am I suffering or thriving, then we have the capacity to do the thing that every displaced people have always done, whether it's the Ajcanazi or the Roma or the Kurds, you know, or the Uyghurs or the Tibetans, like any. people who have gone through intergenerational dislocation and oppression, right, have always

naturally done that, right? I might not get to the promised land, but I keep on walking in the hopes that my children might. And that to me feels like, so basically getting out of a chronic awareness of just like, it's me now, and every itch I have to scratch. In fact, there was a New York Times article that embodied this totally. It was basically that everybody is basically an irritated Karen looking to call the manager on civilization right now. You know? And you realize, oh, there's nobody on the other end of that phone anymore. And we better get over ourselves and get into, we're doing this for the long game,

even if I don't get my instant gratification out of it. I read this the other day. Denmark is the happiest country on earth. But they dug into that a little bit. And there's half of the questionnaire that they do on the World Value Survey or something like that is about your community and your health and how secure you feel and various physical things. But the other half is your expectations and how do these things meet your expectations? And it turns out that Denmark has among the lowest expectations in the world. So they're meeting them.

So they're just kind of, they don't smile a lot. They're kind of, not depressed, but they go around in their lot in life a little bit curmudgeonly. Therefore, their expectations are easily met, which makes them happy. And this goes full circle back to the Limbic capitalism and Sapolsky an unexpected reward is if we, I mean, I've already grieved for the future that our culture expects. And therefore, what I think is going to happen in the future is much different than the average person. So I've already lowered my expectations, which means I can find a joy and, wow, things are better than I expected,

even though most people will think what I'm predicting is, or expecting is depressing or a world of hurt, as you say. So I'm just wondering if lowering your expectations generally is a helpful thing, or does that cause you to have less dopamine and stay in your base? and watch Netflix over and over. I'm always most comfortable with managing dialectics versus assigning, you know, like putting all the weight on one side or the other of a polarity, right? So the dialectic is, you know, back to, you know, Admiral Jim Stockdale, right? And that Stockdale paradox that was popularized decades ago, but that idea of it's not lowly expectations, so then you're never disappointed it because then you will just end up

in a depressed, non-agentic state. And we actually need to be fully rallied, right? Nor is it to be a Pollyanna. And Jim Stockdale, for anybody that hasn't heard this before, was the highest-ranking P.O.W. in Vietnam. And so he presided over the camps, but he also, for nine years, was in for the most beatings and the most, you know, sort of singled out attention. And he realized over time that the pessimists in the P.O.W. camps died, which is not surprising because they were depressed and lost their will to live. But he said the optimist died almost as often. And that was because they set, some Pollyanna escape, like the boys will be home for Christmas or July the 4th or whatever

it would be as their hope. And when the hope proved, you know, fragile or falsified, then they collapsed. And so his point, the paradox of the Stockdale paradox is you have to be ruthlessly realistic about present realities. Which is why I'm teaching my course. I mean, we can maybe skip to your getting your house in order and coming alive without understanding any of the problems. But I think we really have to see the map and the road ahead of us and then come alive. And I totally agree with you. Too much pessimism, too much optimism are both going to be problematic. We need to open our eyes, see the path, roll up our sleeves and start to live differently. What are you doing professionally now? And what are your hopes and dreams for the next

few years with your efforts to shift society on a better path? Well, I mean, we're just doing our best to lead leaders. So in the sense that we, you know, the folks that have been drawn to our work and do trainings, whether it's digital trainings or in-person, you know, adventure trainings or whatever it would be with us. When you say our, what do you mean by that? So the Flow genome project is the organization. Kurt Cronin is that Team 6, former retired commander, who is our executive director. And then, you know, the rest of the folks in our organization. And, you know, our commitment is attempting to, you know, fundamentally be on the front end of research and training of, you know, transformational leadership and to do it in a really clean way. So think of sort of like basically Navy SEALs buds for the apocalypse.

Like how do you get people with these psychological tools and communication skills that work? how do you give people the lived experiences of resiliency coordination, challenge, but also celebration, you know, also culture and support. It's not agro. It's not like tough mutters and Spartan races, like, but we do do fun, intense, embodied things. And then hopefully helping that propagate and helping each of those people going back and then standing up or reinvigorating the communities that they're a part of. Because I think, you know, it's the Wendell Berry thing where, you know, he says that beautiful phrase, like, be joyful, though you have considered all the facts. And so our organization is a tenth of the size of what it could be if we were just peddling the bliss codes for people, you know, you're blowing their minds.

And they are there in the book. They're featured as a death rebirth protocol. And it is the most humbling, awe-inspiring, accessible ways to, shoot the moon and initiate ourselves and each other into what arguably was always the domain of the esoteric traditions like the Lucinian mysteries. But you can't give that to people who are wanting the joy on this side of complexity. They're just wanting the pretty lights. They're wanting the dopamine high. They're wanting the instant gratification. You kind of have to drag them through the considering all the facts, the tragedy. And then and only then is, you know, are we sort of effectively

worthy, right, of holding that much joy because it's tempered and balanced by the stakes and our commitment to our fellow man, fellow humans, the least of our brothers and sisters. And so much of the personal growth, self-help biohacking space is all pre-tragic. It's, I want mine now, and I've been raised in condition to believe I can have anything I want. And then the, so everything works out for me. And then you get dragged into the tragic phase, which is happening with social justice, it's happening with the art right, which is this, I got sold a bill of goods, and then nothing works out. And you get tons of demagogues, right, rallying people facing that tragic phase. And they're like, we'll go back to the pre-tragic,

right? You deserve what you want. We deserve what you want. And it's their fault we don't have it. So you get this nosing into the tragic and then being led by demagogues back into a false pre-tragic. And what we really need is we need the transformation. of leaders like the Mandela's and the Gandhi's and the Kings, right, who said, hey, this is what it is. It's always been this way. We're not going to lie to you. But there is dignity. There is hope.

There is possibility on the other side of that. And that's the post-tragic radical hope. That's the satchagraha that Gandhi talked about. That's the soul force that MLK talked about. And to me, you can get there by talking about it, but only kind of. and arguably, and the whole reason I wrote Recapture the Rapture, was like, here's the cheat codes to initiate ourselves and each other into being a twice-born human. The dying before you die, you know, like I am absolved of any delusions that it's happily ever after. I know the stakes.

And I choose this life with all of its complexity, with all of its tragedy, with all of its uncertainty, to be a light unto others. and if we can do that, then, you know, then we have a chance. So if your recapture the rapture book had the cheat codes on just how to be joyful, it might have done as well as your first book, Stealing Fire. But you had all the heavy stuff before that on meaning and, you know, cultural triage and everything. And a lot of people do not want to hear about what's coming. because it's too painful.

And so I think that that recent movie, don't look up, kind of probably validated some of your reaction to the second book, not selling as many copies as the first one, because people don't, don't want to hear this. They want feel good things. But not everyone. There are a lot of people that are the walking worried that know something is horribly wrong in our culture. They want an explanation for that.

And they want something to do. And they want trustworthy. right, they want somebody who still has their head on straight to guide them through the crevasses, right, and the rock fall, because right now there's this arising of rapture ideologies, and whether that's antivax or QAnon or New World Order and the Davos Great Reset or some unholy mixing and matching of all three plus some others, you know, you end up with people who are showing up of like, oh, I was just like you, I was a sheeple, I was a basic, I was a muggle, then I got red-pilled or did my own research or fill in the blank. And now I'm here to tell you

what's really going on and who the bad guy is and whether that's Fauci or Gates or Biden or, you know, whomever. And those aren't safe either, but more and more people are being drawn to them simply because they are acknowledging something's terribly wrong and nothing is as it seems. So voices of sanity who can guide through high-consequence terrain feel more needed than ever. Well, I think I'm a voice of sanity, but I've spent 20 years understanding the problems, and I don't know the answers still. I know the directions of the answers. We're going to have to use less material throughput in coming decades, possibly significantly

less. We're going to have to replace some of our technological fancy gadgets with real social interaction and community. We're going to have to spend more time in nature, you know, those sorts of things. But what you just said reminded me of a dinner conversation I had two years ago with three mid-60-year-old kind of friends locally. And they'd watch my Earth Day talk and they're like, Nate, we have spent our whole life oblivious to this.

And now we have 10 or 15 years left. Tell us what to do. We want to do something of meaning. We want to do the right thing with how much time we have left. And we feel like our entire life up until this moment has been wasted. One was a real estate developer. One did software. And I was driving home and I was thinking, God, that was so profound.

I don't know exactly what to tell them. But I wonder how many millions of people there are around the country that are feeling that exact same thing. What can I do relative to the magnitude of the risks that we face that will give me meaning? And so that's why this whole conversation is coalescing around that. And we're probably running out of bandwidth and time here today. But do you have a couple, three recommendations for listeners that anyone listening to this podcast is certainly quite fluent in the Metacrisis and the human predicament?

But from your perspective, what advice would you give an individual or a member of a community to get started on a couple three things down this path towards meaning, towards coming alive, towards getting your house in order, et cetera. Well, I mean, I think the first is get your house in order, quite literally. Like, because if you are following conversations like this, you are probably already in the leading one to 10% of your family, your community, your neighborhood, whatever it would be, just trying to wrap your head around this stuff, which means if you are, then you're going to have people looking to you for what to do next.

And that becomes, that becomes schizophrenic as well. If you're on the front lines of fighting the good fight, and no matter what stake you put in the ground, you've decided it's odd. So I'm going to do parades and puppets or I'm going to write songs and poems or whatever, you know, or you've decided it's policy. It doesn't matter. You can take your pick of a thousand different potential solutions. Your attentions are going to become increasingly divided if you're unsure about food, clothing, shelter, safety, security for your family and the people you love. So the, and many, many good-hearted people, especially on the progressive side of things, but less and less so. I mean, it's eroding on both sides now is, well, I wouldn't want to do that kind of stuff because that would make me a nut, hatch, duck dynasty prepper.

And you're like, so I'm not going to be those guys, so I'm not going to do anything. So I'm going to double down on some metasystemic global Hail Mary or nothing. And that's not sustainable. So I would say, do the 80-20, what is the 20% of the things that you absolutely should do just as a self-reliant human for your home, for your water, for your power, for your food supply, for your neighborhood connections, all that kind of stuff. Go do that now post-haste, you know, without apology and without fear that you need to strap on a tinfoil hat. Go do that because that's what a reliable, responsible person does to not be another victim and to actually be available to be on the front lines to help. Once you've done that, then come back to the

front lines and put your stake in the ground. What is yours to do? And it all needs to get done. so there's no panic there. And where is the intersection of your talent and your trauma? Where do you feel the wound of the world? Most acutely. It could be animal rights. It could be childcare and education. It could be sexual abuse and family violence.

It could be environment. It could be, again, it could be policy. Where do you feel it? Like, this is wrong. And I know it's wrong because I've actually had that wounding. And then where's your talent? Where do you have the ability to do something other than just be one more body in the street? And if there is a place where you're going to be one more body in the street.

And if there is a place where those things overlap, that's where you will find passion with your purpose. So ultimately, once you've put your house in order and you've found that then overlap, you know, basically seek novelty, make art, and help out. So the seek novelty is like, how do we avoid the black dog of doom, despair, and oppression? Well, we are wired to seek novelty. So go and find that, which is new. It could be sunrises and sunsets and shooting stars and full moons. It could be trees in bloom. It could be a puppy playing. It could be a new country or a new relationship

or a new conversation, new music. Novelty is easy and it's abundant, but we just get in ruts. So seek it because we'll feel better. Make art. Do anything that rails against the second law of thermodynamics and just organizes matter slightly into slightly more good, slightly more true, slightly more beautiful. Like to say we were here. We existed. And whether that's a garden or a sculpture or a song, you know, or a business startup, you know, or raising a family, like make art. And then if you've got seeking novelty and making art roughly figured out, then help out, share the fruits of either of those things with anybody that's still struggling, finding them. And this is how we keep on keeping on. I love it. I found a quote this morning that I'm putting in an essay of

mine, and I just think it's appropriate. So I'm going to read it here. This is from Steve Jobs. commencement speech, believe it or not. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life.

And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll be able to do. know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. For the past 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life, what I want to do,

what I'm about to do today. And whatever the answer has been, no, for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something, which is your coming alive. Yeah, because I mean, A, yeah, I know, neat, like super cool, super inspiring. And, you know, absolutely circa 2000 Steve Jobs, right? Think different, you know, and for a graduation speech. And to play the devil's advocate on that is like, fucking hell, man. That was the last 75 years. If we didn't figure that shit out then, we're not going to get another crack at it.

We've never had a period of such stability and obscene abundance ever before or again, likely, unless we get it with cold fusion or, you know, or something else amazing. because Carol Dweck, you know, everybody knows her Stanford professor, wrote the book on mindsets, fixed mindset and growth mindsets. And, you know, and everybody's like, of course I'm a growth mindset, you know, and all those silly, close-minded people are fixed mindsets. But then she wrote a piece in the Atlantic four or five years ago on particularly millennials showing up with a very strong sense of fixed mindsets towards their work and towards their relationships. And the insidious way that the fixed mind set showed up in those is, I expect my company, I expect my job to fulfill my everything.

And I expect myself to get out of bed absolutely fired up every day no matter what. And if work is ever a drudgery, it's the company's fault, right, for not being inspiring enough, right, to smooth it all out for me. And the same thing with romantic partners. I expect you to be my absolute one and all and everything and help me along my path to self-actualization. And David Brooks wrote about this, how marriage has continued to raise the bar and what you expect of partners and all these kind of things. And in some respects, it's like, suck it up, fat kids. The party's over. And, and And what we actually need is not these beautiful, airy, fairy, what's my inner purpose? And is it being fulfilled 24-7?

It's expedition behavior. And expedition behavior comes out of the National Outdoor Leadership School, the kind of outward bound, the sort of McKinsey of mountaineering and guiding. And E.B, as they call it, expedition behavior is, how well do you hang in the shit? What happens when you're cold and hungry, or it's dark and it's late, or you're on sketchy terrain? And are you pitching shelters and are you cooking food and are you looking out for yourself? and are you looking out for your groupmates? And how do you handle conflict and how do you handle adversity?

So I would say there's going to be a huge focusing into not how clever are we, not how many followers do we have on Instagram and not are we getting in touch with our inner dolphins and life purpose. But just what is our expedition behavior going through volatile and uncertain terrain together and how well can we hang? Because we both know a bunch of really smart people that decoher at the slightest interruption to their lives and their surroundings, right? In which case, like, I don't care how many decimals you can calculate pi 2 in your head, bro. You're a basket case and dead

weight going up over this mountain pass, right? So I think expedition behavior, can we actually not decoher, do we get stronger when things get harder? And can we source from deep wells, deep reservoirs of resilience, optimism, and care and concern for each other, I think that trumps everything else in the fancy waistcoats existential scholasticism category. That was profound. I will offer that I spent 45 minutes this morning corraling my 17 chickens into the inner shed because it's going to be 18 below zero. And had I not done that, they would have frozen to that tonight.

So that was a miniature farm expedition behavior. So last question. How can we, maybe you or I, but just we as a culture, potentially change the education system so that young people can be aware of the science of how everything fits together, but also have skills like you say EB expedition behavior, both psychological, physical resilience, maybe be a MacGyver of various things. be generalist as opposed to the reductionist kind of teaching young people trivia that mattered the last 40 years sort of thing and not preparing young people for the future that you and I foresee.

Do you have any insights into changing the education system or applying your leadership training that you're working on towards young people? and I know you have a personal history with Montessori type of school and philosophy. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, yeah, goillions, right? So, I mean, I most recently helped the Acton Business School, the MBA School that's here based in Austin. It was founded by a friend and mentor, Jeff Sandifer, who was on the Harvard Business School Board, a Harvard Business School alum. And he sought to recreate the HBS classrooms in Austin, but do it for a purely entrepreneurial.

focused degree. And he built it around the hero's journey. It's the one that Jordan Peterson identified as the only graduate curriculum that he would sort of support or endorse. And he, and the founders asked, you know, asked our organization to help design some of their kind of boot camps and trainings for those folks. And on the other hand, we've done stuff down in high school levels all the way down to, you know, three to five year olds in Montessori when our kids, when our own kids were down at that age. So we've kind of paid attention to progressive and alternative education from Montessori to Waldo, to Reggio Emilia, to Sudbury schools, and, you know, the kind of whole spectrum. And for a long, long, long time, it was absolutely

capped by college admissions. So you could be as progressive and innovative as you wanted in preschool and even in elementary school. And most, you know, high, high functioning families would be willing to play along, particularly if the advocacy was biked by a mom who wanted the, you know, their little creative spirit to, you know, not get crushed by industrial schooling and a disconnected dad who didn't give a shit and would struck the checks, you know, gross cliches there, but there it goes. And then by the time you get to like eighth grade, you're getting increasing pressure on, but what's the ROI? What's the outcome? Are they still going to get into Princeton or Harvard or whatever? And then by the time you get into high school alternative programs, 90% of them

became last chance schools, not first hope schools. So you ended up with a degraded student population that actually could never deliver on the vision because they'd been, they were damaged goods. they had been rattling around all sorts of different experiences. Now, one thing, I mean, it's a bunch of things that COVID has done, but the last two years has effectively compressed most horizon lines, and this is true for the metaverse and all these movements of remote work and, you know, virtual presencing and all these kind of things. It's basically taken 2030 and just shoved it into our faces.

And so that compression of a decade of change, just out of necessity, one of those things is the absolute bottom has dropped up. the value proposition of high ticket college education. And so many, you know, like, you mean, you suckered us to pay 50,000 bucks for tuition, and we got on campus for seven or eight days, and you went remote on us, you know, and now you're, no one's getting the refund, and this could be Khan Academy or YouTube, you know, like, that emperor has no clothes moment. I don't think that higher ed comes back from it. You will still have the Ivy Leagues. You will still have the, you know, and the Stanford's and the handful of,

of schools that will be beyond reproach with huge endowments and impeccable global reputations, but the middle is just going to be utterly hollowed out. And I think with it, more and more otherwise mainstream parents are going to be willing and even interested in not going into six-figure debt for undergraduate pieces of paper that are clearly worthless. So where are all those people in the middle going to go who are 17, 18, 19, 20? Well, exactly. So that said, that was the rate limiter. There was an absolute cap on how innovative you could get, you know, ages 10 to 18 if it still all came down to SATs and competitive college admissions.

But now that that is potentially cracking and you're at a stage where, I mean, if I could, you know, it's a weird irony that our own children both have gone through or are going through four year college educations after homeschooling, after Montessor and everything else, because we were completely willing to be like, look, we'll stake you 250K for your young adult entrepreneurial stuff. Like, consider us the family bank and let's not have you go to college. And for different reasons, athletics and other stuff, they wanted to go. But I think that kind of a thing, once you have that, which is instead of college tuition,

consider staking entrepreneurial ventures, consider, you know, helping your children set up, if that's even a possibility for you with, you know, income levels and that kind of stuff, consider it. And then once you do that, you're much more into the kind of school of life stuff, which is much more like that act in business school, which is a one-year MBA intensive, and they literally have to go door-to-door and sell stuff. They have to learn stuff. Maria Montessori's adolescent education was called Erdkinder, Earth Child, and it was a working farm, including farm stalls for farmers' markets and all these kind of things. And I think that that whole notion of I need to memorize the periodic table or learn abstract calculus,

which is a vestige of like post-sputnik science fear in America. Like a lot of that, you know, or trigonometry because of the surveying boom in the 19th century of the American West. Like vestigial relics of our curriculum will get changed. And we don't know where food comes from. Yeah. Or the trees that are outside the window of the classroom. I'm in studying biology. Like so I think that there will be.

And again, compression of 2030 to right now, the ripping the band-aid off the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, value proposition of mid-tier college education and the replacement of give me life skills and give me, I mean, a bunch of infirm marketers are skipping college now and they're millionaires by their mid-20s. So, you know, there's been lots of cracks in this foundation of higher ed. And I think as the whole thing comes down, it's going to create a lot more space for pragmatic training, fundamentally vocational training, which used to have a bad rap, but it actually becomes very important. Jamie, so appreciative of your time. Do you have any final thoughts or words of

advice to our listeners? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest is what is the capacity for radical hope? Like, that is essential. And it's not whistling past the graveyard hope. It's not thinking that, you know, crossing our fingers and that whether it's a vaccine or whether it's, you know, a Bitcoin spike or whatever it would be that we're hoping is going to save it or solve it. probably isn't. One of our colleagues at Burners Without Borders has talked about the idea of the long disaster. We're in the long disaster. It's a knock-on concatenation of events that really won't end, from weather events to political events to epidemiology to macroeconomy and ecology. So let's wrap our heads around. This is a long disaster. And let's find the radical hope, the durable hope,

That is something to believe in. That is in a future we can't see from here. And let's do this not just for ourselves, but on behalf of our children and our children's children. And source from a place of resilience and durability and service. I believe in friendship, nature, dogs, learning, and sharing. And I have some other beliefs too. But I deeply care about the future. I know you do as well.

and thank you for all your work. And to be continued, I'm sure, my friend. Absolutely, man. Great to chat. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit ThegreatSimplification.com for more information on future releases.