The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis with Samantha Sweetwater

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them –  such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?  In this episode, Nate is joined by guide and author Samantha Sweetwater to explore how separation is at the root of the metacrisis and how nurturing interconnection, relationships, and ecological maturity act as foundational components for systems change. Samantha delves into the distinction between power of life and power over life, emphasizing the need for personal transformation that aligns with collective evolution. She also describes how we could shift our cultural focus from the hero's journey to a kinship journey through the practices of remembering, reconnection, and tending to collective emergence. How might we reimagine humanity's ecological role as that of stewards, rather than domination? Could focusing on reconnection, rather than separation, help us bridge the polarizing divides that currently prevent many of us from working together? And how might this work of remembering, which begins with ourselves, ripple out into stronger connections with our loved ones, communities, and ultimately to humanity and life as a whole?  (Conversation recorded on October 1st, 2025)    About Samantha Sweetwater: Samantha Sweetwater is a wisdom guide, author, and founder of One Life Circle—a ministry of remembering. She works at the fertile nexus where unraveling systems make way for emerging forms of kinship, leadership, and value. For over three decades, she has facilitated individuals and organizations across five continents through journeys of personal, cultural, ecological, and spiritual emergence. She mentors leaders in business, technology, and finance, helping them to navigate awakening, develop systemic wisdom, and align impact with regenerative futures. Founder of Dancing Freedom and Peacebody Japan, she sparked a global movement of embodied awakening and has trained hundreds of facilitators. She has also been a seed farmer—a practice that taught her the rigors of tending the real. She holds an MA in Wisdom Studies, a BA in Social Theory and Dance, and has been initiated into indigenous lineages of Africa, Latin America, and Turtle Island.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

underlying the crises of crises is the way in which we've structured our world according to the logic of separation or the idea that anything can be separated from anything else. We're in an epochal shift from the hero's journey as the primary narrative of personal development to what I call a kinship journey. The hero's journey begins when you realize that you need to understand yourself, which a lot of people's processes does begin there. And the kinship journey is a journey of recognizing that your life can't actually be meaningful if you don't find how you're part of the ecology in service to something larger than yourself. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how

energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I am rejoined by a ceremonial guide and educator Samantha Sweetwater to discuss her new book titled True Human, which offers a path for sensemaking through the turbulence of coming decades in hopes of fostering a future worth loving and fighting for. Samantha Sweetwater is a master facilitator, executive coach, and founder of One Life Circle, a ministry of remembering. For over three decades, Samantha has guided individuals and organizations across five continents through journeys of personal, cultural, ecological, and spiritual regeneration. In this episode, she explains why she sees the metacrisis as a spiritual opportunity

calling us to cultivate relational intelligence, as well as moral imagination. At the core of Samantha's work, and also at the core of this podcast work, is the idea that we will not be able to control or avoid the simplification ahead, but that we can cultivate our own ability to adapt and respond to the challenges we face. To this end, she offers spiritual practices and tools to nourish resilience and to heal trauma in order to move towards wholeness. Before we begin, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter, where you can read more of the system science underpinning our human predicament, and where my team and I share written content related to the Great Simplification. You can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome Samantha Sweetwater.

Samantha Sweetwater. Nice to see you. Nice to see you, too, Nate. It has been over a year since you were first on this podcast, where we covered topics of spirituality, relationality to nature, amongst many other things. But since then, and I've been following your progress as one of your friends, how much work you have put into a new book titled True Human, Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our in which you take a deep dive, a very deep dive into how humanity might navigate the metacrisis

and evolve into greater collective ecological maturity. As a podcast that centers heavily around themes in the metacrisis, maybe we can start by revisiting the definition of metacrisis for new metacrisis for new viewers and clarify kind of nuance surrounding the word for different guests. So to start, can you explain what you're referring to, what you're talking about when you say the metacrisis? A crisis of crisis is one way to simply describe what the metacrisis is. Another way to describe it simply is that it's a collection of compounding, mutually reinforcing crises that in some ways share generator functions. a generator function in all the constructs that separate us from a sense of shared reality.

So the way that I framed that in True Human is that underlying the crises of crises, the polycrisis, the many different fronts of political, social, economic, ecological, challenges that we face is the way in which we've structured our world according to, the logic of separation or the idea that anything can be separated from anything else. So that's how I see the metacrisis is as an inevitable result of a species separating itself from the Gaian processes that made it and believing that we can continue to do whatever we want in a way that isn't metabolically organized in relationship with the biosphere. So I have, as you're aware, many questions. I've not read your book yet, but you've sent me some excerpts and I've followed your thinking and the unfolding of your thinking. But before we get to the separation of humanity and the biosphere, under the umbrella of the metacrisis, we have separation with different crises as well. I was in New York City last week for Climate Week and the urgency and

worry and anxiety about ocean issues and potential current termination shock with climate. And the people there were very fluent and very concerned rightfully about these issues. But at the same time, our president, the president of this nation, said climate change is a hoax. There's many other people focused on potential nuclear war or poverty or genocide or ecocide or biodiversity or polarization. And it just seems like all these things are separate and disparate in our conversations. Do you have anything to say about that? In some ways they are. I mean, to respond to, you can't respond to them all at the same time. And so there's a, the fact that you can't respond to them all at the same time in any kind

of effective way doesn't mean that they're not connected. And I think people get very defended when someone comes and says, this is the thing. And then they were like, but this is the thing. And so you end up with more competition between who gets time, energy, attention, funding, where the larger circumference is that these are all things that all require response and they are all connected things. And we lack context to respond to them in an interconnected way that is intelligible. So that's kind of, I think it's important.

One of the things that listeners of this channel, I think, are becoming more nuanced in is there's a lot of ANs that need to be gently stitched together while validating where people are choosing to respond because no one can respond to all the things. So it's helpful to hold all of it in an ecology, in an ecology of response, and an ecology. of action, an ecology of issues, an ecology of processes, an ecology of people, and different kinds of intelligence and genius, all responding differently. So one of the core themes in our conversations and in your book, you just mentioned that humanity has somehow splintered and separated beyond the boundaries of what the earth can take. And separation is a big theme. Can you expand more on this idea? Sure. Yeah. I mean, separation is an idea that shows up in a lot of spiritual lineages, separation from source or separation from a sense of wholeness or a sense of oneness. And that's a very common spiritual theme is the gesture of reconnecting. And that reconnection can mean a lot of different things. It could simply mean like reconnecting with your own

body and a sense of belonging to the world. So on a neutral level, it's like, it's a dialogue, it's a construct that appears often in different paths, recognizing that there's some sense of severance that wants to be addressed. In true human, I frame five domains of separation. The first is, I think of as a very neutral domain, that on an evolution, level, we are a species who has sufficient complexity of neural function and of creative capacity. So we're as storytellers and technological creators to differentiate from the biosphere, to differentiate from the ecologies that made us, and attempt to develop a sense of self that is other than the biological ecological processes that were embedded within.

As far as we know, you know, and we don't, whales have bigger brains than us, dolphins have bigger brains than us. But as far as we know, there's no other species that has a construct of self that is distinct from biospheric process. So there are many animals. We're also an animal, but we know we're an animal and are at least conceptually we know our context in the broader ecosystem. Not only do, well, it's possible that other animals know that they're animals and they know, their context and their ecosystem. We really actually don't know. But what we do know is that we're the only ones who actively assert a separation from it. We're the ones who are like,

we're on the top of the pyramid and we do stuff to like, you know, we're coming out of thousands of years of religious discourse that says our role is to dominate the rest of creation. We're certainly the only organism that has done that. You mentioned there are five categories in your book. Yes. So the first one is what I think of as an evolutionary age that is both a process of Gaia itself. Like Gaia generated this creature who did this thing. So Gaia created a creature who created separation.

So in that sense, it's like an epoch of planetary development. It also is a phase of our development as organisms. So like the age of separation is an age of. age that can only be created by an organism who does what we do, which could happen on another planet too. So when did the age of separation start? You can map it on, I mean, many people have reviewed this on the podcast, Daniel Schmacher has reviewed it really beautifully, but there's distinct points of punctuation, one of which is the development of agriculture. The next is a development of fiat currency. The next is the development of religions that export the divine from

place, which is linked, of course, to cycles of genocide, slavery, and being, needing to leave one's home and carry one's spirituality or one's religion with you. So there's like rupture bound into that that's very interesting in terms of where we are on the planet right now. How much of this separation is just due to population size? I mean, in groups of a few hundred, separation was not possible because we were so linked to each other and the local ecosystem. It's certainly, I mean, it's certainly an aspect of it, population size, living in cities. These are all contributors that, you know, generally come after. And sequentially, if you look at the sequence of the development of these patterns, the larger that our populations

were, the more separate we would be. The more we live in urban environments, the more separate we would be, the more specialized we are in work, the more separate we can be. A little over 100 years ago, over 90% of people had their hands in their food, in growing food, and now it's like under 1% of the population. In the U.S., not in India. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But that's like, that's a huge shift of pattern tracking in terms of what we attend to. Well, I think a lot of young people, I saw a survey. I can't remember what it was, think their food comes from the pigly-wiggly or the Safeway or the grocery store without knowing the whole process that got it to the grocery store. Okay. So, um, categories. So that's, that's category.

one. One is an age, which you could say is culminating in the Anthropocene. And you could say that the only way beyond the Anthropocene is to an emergent age that was called the Ecozoic by Thomas Berry or the symbiosine. So in that sense, it's an age. And looking at it that way is interesting because it's a very non-dual way of looking at it. And then the next aspect of separation is like the stories that reify that. So a story that reifies it is manifest destiny or is a classic example of a story that reifies separation is that has validated all kinds of actions and continues to shape ideology.

Reifies and reinforces separation. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. You know, or the story that humans are at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, which is just a story that we made up. That's zone two. And then zone three is anything that reifies that structurally.

So a house with walls that don't breathe is an example. Or monocropping is an example where we have an idea that it's more efficient to grow a single crop than it is to grow a diversified system that feeds us and pollinators and other organisms. And, you know, there's great research to say we could feed far more people if we had acre large, like acre size farms that were highly diversified than we can in monocrop environments. But it requires a totally different mindset to build our food system in that way, for example. So those are any of the structures that align with the story. Okay.

Another example that's relevant is like the way we do climate science and put everything into the bucket of carbon management. Where, you know, what we are increasingly understanding is that at least we need to expand the metrics to include water and biodiversity if we want climate solutions that are at all meaningful. So that's another example of a separation mindset. is a single metric solution to a much more complex problem. What's the opposite of separation? Interdependence, interbeing as a like interior stance of feeling connectivity. So interdependence is like a fact of flows of communication or materials or energy. We're all stardust and we're genetically related to every other thing alive on this planet.

We are interconnected by definition. Yeah, I wouldn't be talking to you if we didn't have a complex communication system that was bound up in extracted energy. Like, all of that is interdependence. Interbeing is like an interior state where I know that you and I are stardust and are connected in consciousness. So is interbeing? Is that the intellectual version of co-regulation? I would say it's the by, psycho, social, spiritual state of mutual belonging,

the recognition that we share a reality. Is that a thing, interbeing? Is that a word that you coined, or is that a thing? I've never heard that before. It's a word that was first popularized

by Ticknacht Han. If we take that from a Buddhist context, it's the recognition that the awareness that flows through me is the same as the awareness that flows through you. And a bird and a dog and a dolphin and a tree? Yes. So I can understand the word for me to feel that.

Does it require that others also feel that so that I'm part of, so I can just feel that even if no one else feels it? That's right. I'm guessing that very few people feel that as a percentage of our population. I have a sense that more people feel it than we think. I have a strong sense that a lot of people feel it, but may not have words for it. Well, I think people, whether they understand this language or not, I think a lot of people deeply intuit that we are separate. We have separation ripped apart from our ancestral crucible, and they're going through the motions and longing and hungry for something.

and most of those somethings are simple, but they're not rewarded in our current culture. So please keep going with your zones of separation. Okay, so zone four is game theoretic. And that maps onto the creation of fiat currency and the sequential kind of the fact that we're embedded in a system currently measured by GDP that requires continuous growth.

And so that, that in and of itself is a structure of separation that's very particular because it shapes incentive and motivation and agency in a way that orientes us towards cutting ourselves from the interdependence and the inner being right like if if your rent if you have to you have to make an income that requires that you don't feel another person that that breaks inner being over and over and over again. If you, you know, we deal with it, the more you look at systemic interdependence, the more aware you are that you're breaking in or being with any given choice, like just filling your gas tank up. So it's an intro, looking at it in terms of game theoretics is really

useful and important. So can interbeing bend and not break, or does it literally break? And then it's broken and you can't get it back. Oh, that's such a good question. Wow, I love that question. I really feel that question. I think it bends over and over again and doesn't break. Even though it might feel like it's broken. But, well, it only doesn't, it breaks if you become immune to the, the subtle pain of the cuts in interdependence. Like, like, I think, I think where it breaks is where people, like,

like you can open to it and then you're going to feel grief. It's guaranteed. You're going to feel grief. You're going to feel remorse. You're going to feel guilt. You're going to feel complicity. Those are all uncomfortable feelings. Those are evidence that it's only bent, not broken. That's right. Those are morally intelligent feelings. They're actually beautiful feelings, right? They're important feelings. They're feelings that we think of as icky feelings, so we don't want to feel them. But they're actually really, really important feelings. Right. So one of the way, ways the interbeing bends but doesn't break is to actually stay open to the chains of interdependence and allow yourself to be in that tremulous, sometimes very edgy collection of feelings. And sometimes

you need to shut them down. You're like, I just need to like drive to California right now and enjoy myself. Like we can't not be complicit in a system we're all bound to. And so like, there's a higher integral way to hold that in a way that bends but doesn't break and is, and is yet kind of like a life practice. It's a practice to be in the opening and out, in opening an aperture to some of those feelings and attunements to chains of connectivity. And then also sometimes closing the aperture. So what is the fifth zone? So the fifth zone are ideologies of dominion.

This is the edgy zone. Patriarchy and racism, particularly, that are very similar structures of organizing power according to particular power hierarchies that block our sense of being in an ecology where we all belong in that ecology. Can 8 billion people with an average per capita throughput of what we have in 2025 all live in an ecology? I think we can. I think we, I think we, a friend said to me just recently, I'm hopeful, and he said it with this young Brazilian alternative economy designer. And I said, tell me more about that. And he said, it's an existential stance, meaning that it can't be possible if we don't hold that it might be. And I think there's a lot of ways in which we can look at history and say that it's impossible.

It's much easier to look at history and say it's impossible than to say that it's possible. It's much easier to look at income inequality and the increasing, you know, the hockey sticks of disparity and say it's impossible. but if we don't hold that it's possible, it won't be. And so the way I think of that increasingly is in the language of ecology, which tracks with neural difference. It tracks with different skills and different proclivities. And in the book, I talk about it as a sole ecology that speaks to how each one of us, each one of us brings a uniqueness to the world that no one else brings.

And in the gesture of recognition of the sole ecology is an invitation to the uniqueness that each person brings or the uniqueness that each culture brings. And also the fact that there's a lot of sameness to us. We're all human organisms. We all eat. We all drink. We all need shelter and we all need care from the cold and the heat. There's a lot of things. We all have mothers and fathers and babies.

So in an ecology, like every whale is, you know, every northern fin whale is a northern fin whale, but each northern fin wheel is also sings a unique song. And we, science increasingly knows that actually. That's, that's actually true. And so this is, this is the exact, it's an exact metaphor where ecology matches like a kind of a spiritual sensing. Why is it important that, that all of us are uniquely different and the northern fin whales sing different? songs. Oh. Because existence is a symphony, you know, it's not all just one unified field. If it were, why would we be doing any of this? Like the way that I see it, like there's an impulse towards like a singularity, a unity that's one part of the spiritual process.

But then there's a devotion to the. diversity that's another part. And what I love is that you don't have to be spiritual to find this extraordinary, right? You don't have to identify as spiritual to find awe in the differences. It's like the song of this bird in the way you and I have listened to song sparrows. Like they've shown up on our messages back and forth. And then you've given differentiation to other birds who have similar calls in your ecosystem and I absolutely adore that, right? Because it's like the care for the uniqueness of all these different energies, these different intelligences that are in communication with each other. And it's, and that's to me has a lot to do with

if we don't really know what reality is. We're arguing a lot about what reality is these days. But one thing that is obvious about what it is to be alive and embedded in the fabric of reality is to have a kind of a lens on your own experience participating in a whole bunch of unique experiences that generate learning and insight. And yeah, uniqueness is valuable because it's in the space between things that things learn and grow and evolve. Consider me persuaded. Not that I wasn't before, but I wanted you to unpack that. So how do these ideas on separation connect to the concepts of wholism and holons, which you write about in your book? So maybe you can please explain what these terms mean for the viewers that don't know. Sure. Well, wholeness as a concept, the physicist David Bowm wrote a book called Wholeness in the Impan. order. He wrote about wholeness as the implicate order of reality. But it's an idea that has helped a lot of people and many different spiritual communities to better understand the way they see reality, which is that there is an implicate, in other words, not always visible

wholeness to the cosmos and to reality. And this, this relate. to the Greek concept of cosmos, which essentially meant a totality that is essentially whole or an essentially harmonious. That was the Greek concept of reality, or cosmos specifically. And so Bohm mapped this into physics. And then that in the explicate, which also is the visible reality, we see parts. and those parts are both whole and they break and they get fractured and change and evolve. And there's a way that when you look through that lens, you can see that even the breaks and the tears and the traumas and the difficulty is actually part of that larger wholeness.

So this relates to the concept of intervening. It's not the same as the concept of interbeing, but it nourishes that concept of intervening. because there's a way that, and this is a common experience that people have either through deep meditation or through psychedelics or other altered states too, there's a contact with a felt sense that there's a larger wholeness holding everything and that like this can show up in your own experience that the trauma you had or the loss that you had or the heartbreak that you had is. is actually somehow part of that. And I wish this experience on everyone, honestly, because it gives you a new place to stand in terms of the gift of being alive. So that's a little bit on the concept of holism. And holism kind of comes out of that Bohemian concept. And then Holons is a concept that was created by Arthur Kossler. And it's the understanding that living systems

and also mechanical systems function in terms of nested parts and holes, nested part holes relationship. So a classic example is an atom is part of a molecule, is part of an organelle is part of a cell, is part of a muscle fiber, is part of my hand, is part of my body. So it's kind of like a biological, ecological, overlay on the Russian dolls concept. Yeah. And what's meaningful about it, as opposed to the Russian dolls,

is that there's, in Hollands, there's generally deep communication between the layers. And it's a natural hierarchy, not an imposed hierarchy. So it can be useful when thinking about power of any kind.

to recognize that without halonic structure, like the universe would be gray goo. Like, I wouldn't be talking to you. We wouldn't be human organisms with trillions of cells and trillions of non-human cells. Like all of those non-human cells are part of the halon of Nate. I have a question that is building the lower structures

of the holon that is Nate are pointing towards something. But I want to get to something else that's prominent in your book as a precursor. So a central point that you write about is the distinction between power of life compared to power over life. And I don't know that you've seen any of my new presentations in the past year or two,

but I often end with that green, black chessboard with the factories and the trees, with the questions power versus life, question mark. So can you explain the detail, the difference and the importance and the distinction between power of life and power over life. And why is that distinction important for understanding the state of our current relationship, humanities and humanity and the earth? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, this goes back to the domains of separation in a way. And power over life is usually oriented towards narrow goals. and very discrete objectives. And often, generally speaking, those objectives have nothing to do. They do not care for the externalized costs, whether they are physical, mental, emotional, ecological, of the narrow goal.

Right. So it's power to instrumentalize work or generate profit or get, get optionality basically. And then the power of life, the power of life is what's subtle about this and kind of ironic is the power of life is already here. It's the, it's me breathing in and out, you know,

it's the plant on my desk exhaling and us sharing breath. It is here all the time in the pulsation of our blood in the operation of our cognition and the fact that we're sharing a conversation that is mutually meaningful to us, that we live in a world that has, and we're as complex a creature to have generated a language

through the brilliance of all of these communications and interactions and processes over time. Like, that's all the power of life. We are experiencing and inhabiting it all the time. But we get very, very fixated on these narrow goal processes that we've decided are very important in our society. Well, is the power of life kind of to invite another metaphor or story, is the power of life kind of of like the tortoise and the power over life is like the hair?

Depends on how you parse the tortoise and the hair. Well, let me say it a different way. You say we. are disconnected and we are pursuing this economic goals of more and more stuff. I don't know that it's the we, and you know my work well enough to know that it's an economic superorganism that out-competed the tortoises of different cultures in the past. So it's not who we are. I don't know if you watched last week, frankly, on the psychopath's influence on the median versus the mean human. But by point is that we, most humans and other organisms could naturally

reside in the power of life, but were dropped into this prisoner's dilemma, as we mentioned earlier, where a certain fraction of narrow boundary, very separated, agents within the system over generations. This isn't just the last five years. We're continuing to unravel this thing that began 10,000, 12,000 years ago. So I'm, you know, this, this goes into the conversation of what some people have referred to as the maximum power principle, which is organisms and an ecosystem self-organized to access. power and power in ecology terms is useful energy gradient per unit time. And so we are nature

in many ways. And the aggregate of humanity is doing that via our laws and our economic structures and our technology. So in some ways, the grand arc of our lives, which presumably you write about in your book is the confluence of those two stories about to connect in a very, like, epic way, the power of life versus the power over life. Well, what are your thoughts on that? I want to put that, respond to your question with a question that I feel is a question that in the sole ecology, in the ecology of actors, that are all unique, that we all are a locus of time, energy, attention agency. We have to ask that question, what is the distinction between power over life and power of life and how can I participate in processes that bind power over life so that the power

of life wins the game? Right. Because in Daniel's words, existential tech multiplied, I'm forgetting the exact quote, but it is ultimately omniluse. Like we're at the moment in our capacity to generate of existentially fatal capacity, that if we don't bind power over life, if we don't find ways to bind power over life, it's going to be an all-lose game. Is that similar or related to binding the influence of Dark Triad and psychopath personalities in our current society? Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the domains that is of relevance in this inquiry, right? And I don't feel like I have perfect answers to that question. Nor are you expected to. But I think that there's very interesting things on the horizon. Like, what if we all just removed our attention from the, like if a huge group of people, a significant group of people,

removed their attention from the power games that are occurring. Like, wait, this is a movie that makes no sense. That feels right to me, but can you give an example? Like, what would that mean exactly for one of our viewers to stop giving attention to that movie? It's interesting. A good friend, a mutual friend, Leanna Galooly, just recently, she shared that during Climate Week, she and her boyfriend did a, they spent an afternoon starting conversations with 20-year-olds about this and also about their relationship with technology. And all of them had different ways

in which they had switched to light phones, we're not using social media, were... Light phones, what's that? A light phone, I, this is, I've not seen one yet, but a light phone is a phone that only does text and only does a few features, and it doesn't allow you to do all the things that smartphones do that are addictive. Oh, that's a thing. It's a thing. Wow. Okay, so I can see how that directionally would help. Yeah. It's the technology equivalent of giving up drinking or something like that. Yeah, even more, right? It's the, yes, absolutely. It's absolutely it's also the technological equivalent of establishing sovereignty over your time, your energy, your attention, and your dopamine, which is like a big deal. And we can all do things to

upgrade those things. Another that's happening like my partner and I had, we worked for a couple months to make this happen, but we now have all the phone numbers, all the names of all the people on our block and we had our first dinner party this last week. And it was amazing. We had, everyone was like, thank you for your initiative. We're so grateful. And there was like a combination of care for taking care of each other and building capacity for resilience. And then also just like, hey, this is more fun. And the next one is going to be a dance party with my Catholic neighbor DJing, who's totally awesome. And his family who all play music. bringing instruments. And it's just, these are ways in which we can migrate away from

the death and dystopia movie and nourish the conditions for all kinds of things. And like certainly resilience in any kind of great simplification scenario, but also just having better lives and better relationships with neighbors who then go out into the world and have are in better moods to build more relationships with the shopkeepers and all the other people. I think I said this I, this stat on the last talk, but the only difference between a peace society, a society that is warlike and a society that is peaceful is the instance of acts of reciprocity between people within that society. And so putting your focus on that, what is an active reciprocity? It could be an act of random kindness.

It could be consciously having your earphones off and starting conversations with people you interact with during the day. Because power over life, story, and hierarchy and structures above it, do not reward acts of reciprocity unless they are transactional in the economic system. That's right. That's important. That's important. Just seeing it is important.

Yeah, I think there's an opportunity on the horizon to recognize that the polarization dynamics that have captured our concept of politics are not what politics needs to be. Like in the original sense of the word, politics refers to the process of people coming together to listen to each other and hear. each other and do the things that make the larger, you know, make the world work. And there are the Iroquois Confederacy in the United States. It was a longstanding participatory democracy that was overseen by matriarchs and that had care for nature as its total commitment that underpins the foundation of American democracy. Like there's imprints that live in this land of versions of what it means to do politics together that are not innately two-party politics or polarization games.

Does scale have a role there? Like, you certainly could do that in a community where you live in California, but can you do it in a nation of 350 million people or 8 billion people? I think if I if I waved a magic wand and created a, a global system that worked for people, would have fiduciarity at different levels of scale in terms of what we were decision-making about. That fiduciarity could include the nation-state level, but wouldn't be primarily focused on it. It would be focused at a level of township and watershed or bioregion. And other levels of scale that include global manufacturing and the impacts on people in ecology.

that our cell phones are bound up in and that our food system is bound up in. And having had a little time to play on Audrey Tang's Polis system and on a couple other platforms, but that one's the main one I've had a little time with. I actually think increasingly that it's possible,

but we have to upregulate consensus. And I think it's a really, really hard problem, but I don't think it's an insoluble one. Well, I mean, that's what we're trying to do here is widen, widen the net of people talking and thinking along these lines. Yeah. I agree with much of what you're saying, as you know, but what is the theory of change that more people can have light phones instead of smartphones and start to see these behaviors and. steer towards wisdom? Or is it to embed and inculcate the seeds of some new post-great-simplification culture for coming generations? What is your hope with this book and this work?

The first and most foundational aspect of my theory of change is that we are at a moment that allows us to observe an emergent story about ourselves. So it's not just, so a lot of the stories we tell about what we are, who we are somewhat arbitrary. It's like the story that we're at the top of the evolutionary pyramid is actually an arbitrary story. It's based on some observations about the level of power that we have and the level of capacity we have. But actually, it's a pretty arbitrary story. But what is not arbitrary is that we are a very, very productive, very destructive. very creative species that is nested inside a biospheric process that we depend upon.

We are part of what you could call the circle or the web of life. We are part of the fabric of the biospheric process in a unique way and also in a way that is not that different than diatoms, which are also a very critical contributor to biosephys. or salmon that the Winam and Wintu saw as the most intelligent species on the planet because they knew how to bring the nutrients up to the rest of the watershed and they could go from freshwater to cold water so that Winnamun Wintu tribe saw the salmon as the most intelligent top of the pyramid species in all of creation. But it wasn't intelligence as much as it was that was the product of the

their neurochemistry from their ancestors that led to more nutrients for their offspring. So it wasn't a conscious choice. The Windham and Wintu understood that as intelligence. Okay. Part of my theory of change is that we are in a moment where we can re-contextualize ourselves in a very unique way. You know, having surpassed seven out of the nine planetary boundaries, having reached existential tech horizons in biotech, in nanotech, in the list goes long, in nuclear, we are at a moment where the very simple observation that we are a species inside a biosphereic process that we depend upon, that we are all a halon inside this larger halon, that we're all

or earlings, you can call it, or Gaian citizens. All by itself, that recognition, it is an emergent, I think of that as an emergent stage of social development. In the book, I talk about it as third-tier social evolution, of the collective recognition of a species across many different ecosystems and biomes, recognizing its custodial role inside a biosphereic process. So rather than the nest of you social species or the fire of our early ancestors, the larger context is the biosphere. And that there's a story we can tell about what we are as a species who has a custodial, has to have a caring relationship with local and planetary ecologies, is creates a context for everything else.

And so in that sense, my theory of change is grounded in a very simple story and an invitation to a perspective, to take a perspective that's like the perspective of the cathedral builder of like, why might I do anything? Well, because I'm part of a bigger process. And so from there, a whole bunch of other strategies and possible approaches is emerge. But that's the center point of where I'm coming from and what I want to bring into the collective discourse. So throughout the book, you explore the relationship between personal healing and, as you just mentioned, collective evolution during these times. And you write,

Here's a quote from your book, personal transformation is no longer just personal. None of us are here alone. What do you mean by that? One way to say another aspect of separation is hyper individualism. I can't say the word right now. Hyper individualism. Or the real emphasis on the individual is the unit of transformation and the unit of, and the unit of success that matters.

This was never true in most indigenous societies. It wasn't that your sovereignty, your individual agency and freedom didn't matter. It just wasn't the only thing that mattered. Yeah. And I like the way Dan Siegel talks about this. So Dan Siegel talks about a transfer me, a shift in how we think about personal development

from one that is very individually focused to one that's more pro-social and relational. And so he talks about a shift from me to me. And we is kind of a dorky word in a way, but it's like me, it's from just me to me, we. And the way I think about it is that we're in an epochal shift from the hero's journey as the primary journey narrative of personal development to what I call the kinship journey as the primary narrative of personal development. The hero's journey begins

when you realize that you need to understand yourself, which a lot of people's processes does begin there. But the kinship journey begins when you realize that disconnection is a problem. So that tracks with the fact that we have a crisis of addiction, It tracks with the fact that we have a crisis of loneliness. It tracks with climate anxiety.

It tracks with all the people who are really struggling with what's going on politically. All of those, it tracks with the executives I work with who come to me when they're like, oh my God, I'm participating in the end of the world. Help me. I need to figure out how to redo my value chains. And so all of those, it's like our collective. WTF is a crisis of disconnection. And so that's the doorway into a kinship journey.

And the kinship journey is a journey of recognizing that your life can't actually be meaningful if you don't find how you're part of the ecology in service to something larger than yourself. You know I agree with you. But let me play Medea's advocate. for the moment. If there are more and more people that are on the kinship journey and it feels right and it is right, those small percentage of humans that have narrow boundary goals that are still on the individual selfish in the multi-level selection, selfish versus cooperative journey, they'll just look at us like suckers.

And like how does the, you know, David Sloan, E.O. Wilson, comment about individualism out-competes other individuals within a group, but cooperative groups out-compete groups of selfish individuals. And this has happened in our histories, but now we're at a planetary scale. So I think what's at, stake is how do those people pursuing the kinship journey grow in size and scale and number and

interconnectedness and interbeing in their own practices in their own body and co-regulation and all the things. But how does that fit into this world where power measured by money and the fungibility of U.S. dollars and gold and silver and AI and military power, all that is happening apace. How do you see that unfolding and what is your vision? Big, big bite there. Big question. Well, I know that I contend that possibility in multiple domains. I know that I can tend it with my neighbors. I know that I can tend it in the network of communities that I'm part of nationally and globally. I know that I can put it forward as a proposition for a way to live life that actually makes sense. And I know that I can train people in an ecology of practices to help make that

clear to them. What I don't know, there's a lot of things I don't know, but I have no idea how this is going to play politically in our country in the next couple years or globally. I'm part of a project called Project Interdependence that's a project to launch a global, a national movement for the 250th anniversary of the United States, which is next 4th of July, this coming 4th of July, to support a national scale conversation about this. was I think we're going to need to find a lot of ways to, I don't think there's certainly not one way, but we're going to need to find a lot of ways. And I think fundamentally we're going to need to look at that in terms of the way the dream of America has become the dream of the world, which has then been co-opted into the fascist, like takeover of the world in a way. It's the hyper-individualism being the key to that occurring. I don't feel like I have a completely baked answer to, this, but underneath the emergence of fascism is a sense of insecurity, right? Like the reason, one of the, one of the simple ways to understand why all this is occurring is that people are

trying to figure out where their security is, lies. And so it seems to me that one of the, within, if I, if I think about the listeners to this podcast, I'm speaking already to an ecology of actors and ecology of strategies. There's people who listen. to this podcast who are working in many different domains. So it feels to me like one of the medicines is how do we tend a sense of security in the togetherness? And that that can happen through, that has to happen through many different memetic concepts. Like it has to happen through different domains in different scales, in different industries, through different languages. It can't happen in just one way. But it has to, we have to nourish a sense.

that the more safe and secure and sane path forward is the path that we take together. And we have to do that in many different ways. And we have to put ourselves behind it in real actions that are not transactional, that are relational and grounded in care. So, like, I'm trying to answer your question in a way that feels attuned to your viewers. And it feels to me like, like, the underlying opportunity is exactly where people are like trying to figure out where security lies. And in reality, there's greater security in the in the we than in the me.

So how that gets tended in different contexts is really different. Could I extrapolate that to given our circumstances leading with love and interconnectedness is going to be more useful than fear, which is something that I've come to recognize with some of the podcasts I have on here talking about termination shock and climate and the coral reefs and ocean acidification and nuclear war.

Am I really helping the world by understanding those things a little bit better, but creating sympathetic response of fight, flight, and all the neurochemistry and endocrine casketing, that create fear and insecurity, which then leads us to default to the hierarchies and the power structures that exist in our culture, which is kind of feeding the beast in a way.

Yeah. It's taken me three and a half years to understand and be able to articulate that sentence, but. Yes. And watching you calibrate that wisely with care has been a very beautiful thing. I've had good coaches. I think where we have to be careful in that conversation is it's really easy. There's a kind of truism that I think has been really weaponized,

which is the polarization of fear and love. And I think that that's also dangerous because there's a role for fear in the metabolic cycles. And I'm saying cycles plural because there will be many. It's not one. It's like a constant metabolic cycling. And there's a role for fear in sobriety and in honoring basic needs. You know, fear comes up in relationship to fundamental needs. It's important to honor that kind of fear, whether it's your own or another person's.

And fear can also be, you know, back to those morally important emotions. Fear can be one of those emotions that brings your attention to something that needs to be attended to and signals the level of sobriety you need to bring to it. That makes sense. So pay attention to the fear just don't wallow in it.

Yeah. And not only don't wallow in it, but if that is an epigenetic tendency that you have, which a lot of us do because of various personal and familial histories, it calls for, like,

in doing the trauma work, around it, around catastrophization, obsession, depression, all the things that come up in relationship to that fear, because the work is to show up as attuned as possible, but you can't do that when you're in a spiral of your own histories. So that segues into a section in your book where you offer relational practices to reconnect a human with their body, with nature, with the community. And if I recall correctly, you frame those practices as practices of remembering. Can you explain remembering and share more about why this is relevant to our situation and to the viewers? So I know that not everyone who listens to your

podcast even lives in any kind of spirituality domain, but there's a, there's a, there's a large conversation about awakening that is happening. It's a great conversation. It's a conversation about many things, but often it is a conversation about connecting with a sense of transcendent beauty, peace, truth, love. Remembering, on the other hand, is about the imminent. It's about what's in the world, what happens in the relationship. spaces that we share in relationship with myself and my own body, in relationship with my partner, in relationship with you, in relationship with my very local ecology of my home and my cat and my yard. Remembering is about refabricing, putting the body, the word literally

can be translated is put the body back together to put the members. Oh, I never thought about that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it's a word that, you know, you can think about it as a mental thing to remember is to remember an idea. But it's interesting because even memory in your brain is a retituing of connections. Anytime you remember something, you're actually putting the parts back together and remaking that connection physically in the brain. So the word remembering refers to putting the body back together.

And one of the ways I like holding the riddle. of Humpty Dumpty, all the King's forces and all the Kingsmen couldn't put Humpty together again. But could it be that all of the humans, just doing our best to be humans in relationship to each other and nature and the planet, might be able to put the parts together in the forward direction of, you know, remembering only happens in the present. This is true in the brain and it's true as spiritual practice. It's like the time is now and the place is here. You only get to tend the relationships that you actually have contact with in a given place and time. And so remembering refers to the practice of weaving the world together.

Or you could also say it's the practice of playing the infinite game. So like an act of remembering can include a deeply attuned conversation, attunement, is one of the principles of remembering. What is attunement? Is that the same as a full awareness? Or what is attunement? You used the word attunement earlier. So attunement, attune.

It's to tune with. And attunement generally starts with attuning to yourself, with a sense, a bodily, uh, affectual sense. of your own regulation. So you could be dysregulated and still be attuned to yourself. That usually begins a cycle of regulation. So then the next zone of attunement is to another person or a space.

You could attune, you could walk into, I could attune to the office that I'm in or attune. I could, you might, I could attune to the neighborhood I'm in. I just expanded my attention and kind of took a, feel of my neighborhood, I can tune back here. And you and I attuned before we started this conversation recording. So it's much easier to attune with a light phone than a smartphone, perhaps. Potentially, yes. Yes. And attunement can happen in haul-ons of scale. So I could attune, like I've been attempting to attune to your listeners during this call. That's an activity. attunement that's at the scale of who listens my own soft, you know, gentle felt sense of who are

the listeners of the Great Simplification. So attunement as a principle of remembering is a way in which we bodily deepen our interdependence and interbeing with other beings and fields and places that we're connected to. So related to the concepts you described earlier of wholism and holons, in the book you mentioned holotropic practices or practices that nurture experiences of wholeness. What is that about? Can you explain that? Yeah. It's like I said earlier, I wish that experience for everyone, an experience of wholeness. Yeah. So the word holotropic came from Stanislop Groff, who was the founder of Transpersonal Psychology and was one of the original great leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. And it's an amazing human being. And it refers to

moving towards wholeness. So it doesn't, it doesn't act. It was, that's an interesting distinction between wholeness, period, to moving towards a state of wholeness. So that also means that it doesn't fix it in time or in some kind of a transcendent perfected fixity. It's like even the word refers to the fact that the felt sense lives in a flow of experience or a flow of of a state or of a feeling. And holotropic practices include practices with psychedelics or what some people call antithogens or some people call holotropics. And sometimes people call antigenes holotropics because they tend to orient towards an

experience of wholeness. Holotropic breathwork is breathwork that opens a state of being connected. to more than yourself. And then also, and this is really cool, the science of awe shows us that the state of awe is all by itself holotropic. The brain state of being in psychedelics and the brain state of awe is approximately the same brain state. And so awe of any kind, whether that's awe in nature or awe in a spiritual experience or awe of birth or death, there's eight categories in the science of awe. Dacker Kettler calls the Eight Wonders of the World, awe in moral beauty, when you witness moral beauty, which is part of why your readers listen to this podcast because there's a lot of moral

beauty on show in your interviews. So the state of awe is a, it's a neuroplastic state that allows for more connections, for more complex and holotropic, holographic experience of yourself and your world and reality. And the tendency there is to have an insight into what Bohm called the Implicate Order of Reality. The wholeness that is actually holding even all the brokenness and messed up inness and, you know, chaos and gyres. It's like all of that is actually part of something that that is mischievous. curiously whole. And what's also interesting about those kinds of states is they push to the horizon of what in spirituality is often called the mystery. Like there can often be an attendant humility

because there's a recognition that the thing can't be grasped. It's like there's a felt sense that as soon as you try to grasp it, it's not quite the thing. That it's, the horizon of whatever that is is greater than what you can actually contain or fully mentally apprehend. And so those are also characteristics of holotropic states. It's also really good news that you can access them without psychedelics. If you don't want to engage with psychedelics, you can access those states through breathwork or fasting or even in little glimpses through everyday experiences of awe. So what is the role of psychedelics or can you speculate? on what the role of psychedelics is to this ecology of practice?

I'm both very enthusiastic about psychedelics, and I'm also cautious because, as Stan Groff said, psychedelics are a non-specific amplifier. So they tend to amplify whatever worldview or cultural context a person is coming in with. It's like pressing the turbo boost on your existing beliefs and structures? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah, so a classic kind of first gateway to anyone choosing to do psychedelics is what's called set and setting is it's really important to choose the setting well and then also to come in with an intention that is, I would say, that is oriented towards the well-being of life and not just towards a hyper-individualistic kind of narcissistic desire to have more power. So, but psychedelics are extraordinary because they also turbocharged healing processes. They allow us to access authenticity, honesty, deep memories that we might not otherwise access, a neurophysiological state of empathy that's much deeper often than we often access, often insights that are much deeper than we often access. And even, you know, in kind of a simple way, they can be like a wash cycle where you get out of dopamine fixation

and much deeper into oxytocin and a felt deep experience of empathy and compassion. I have a ton of questions on that. But I want to get back to your book. Maybe we'll do a roundtable and have you and others. on that topic because I'm curious. But I want to get to one of the chapters of your book, which I have a deep inquiry into, which is on what you refer to as the tending of collective emergence.

So can you first explain how you define collective emergence? And what does it mean for an individual human, someone viewing this show, to tend to that? I think the name of that chapter, speaks to a posture that no matter what, none of us is really in charge here. You know, there's a desire, I think anyone, and I can certainly fall into this category, anyone who really wants to participate in creating a better world can fall into the trap of a certain kind of fundamentalism or saviorism. And so the title of that chapter is,

is designed to kind of put us all, put anyone who takes this path in a stance of a farmer, a parent, a participant, a collaborator, a citizen. It's like the posture has to necessarily be one of some humility. But I also think that a little audacity is needed because it is a little audacious to say, I think that things could be different. And I'm going to do my part to do that. The paradox, of course, is not to impose one's own models, but to participate in a process that engages more than oneself in retissuing the social fabric or remembering our collaboration with the larger whole. So that chapter has two parts to it. One shares Joanna Macy's very, very basic, very elegant frame. for systems change. And there's three parts to this that anyone listening,

any one person might be playing one or multiple of these roles at any given time. It can also give clarity to your own choices around how you participate. One is stopping actions or engaging in processes

that slow the destruction of things that matter. So whether that's ocean trawling or ocean mining or deforestation or, you know, the list is endless PFS chemicals or plastic pollution or there's actions that are needed that stop or slow the degradation of human and more than human world and ecology. There's actions that create new systems and structures. So I call that new and ancient systems and structures. And that can include emergent technologies for better governance at scale, at fiduciary scales.

It could include new financial mechanisms for measuring flows of value that aren't fiat currency. It could include creating recycled furniture out of materials that would otherwise be trash. You know, it's like all of those are new. new and ancient systems and structures. And the third is new and ancient systems, stories, new and ancient ways of being and narrating our way forward. And so I would say the work that I'm doing is most primarily in this, in that category, is about tending the flame that is very much a continuum of Joanna Macy's work and Barbara Marks Hubbard's work. And there's a lot of grandmothers in there.

Dean Houston's work. Thomas Barry's work, Wendell Berry's work, the work of countless indigenous teachers and wisdom carriers, to tend a fabric of both story and praxis that nurtures our connection to life. So how does this collective emergence connect in your view to cultural evolution more broadly and what might you envision in coming decades? We're all creatures of culture. We're all like we're fish that's swimming culture and we're also creators of culture. And I think it can be easy to say, oh, I don't know what that means.

and then you realize that when you have a dinner party, you're setting up a culture. Like we all do it very naturally. You know, you set up a culture every time you welcome listeners to this podcast. And we participate in cultures when you go to Climate Week and you go to 20 different events and each different event has a slightly, it's a different cultural flavor. And on one level there's branding, but on another level there's like actually a real fabric of how, you're greeted and what happens in that space. So we're in this really interesting moment where

in some ways you could say that capitalism is eaten culture. It's eaten it alive. It's made spaces into brands. It's made relationships into transactional dynamics. And so we're at this very interesting moment where I like to work from an overarching definition that culture is that which tends humans relationships to each other, nature, and the relationship between technology and both us and nature. Culture has to tend the relationship, all of those relationships in all different directions. And we haven't really thought about culture as that for a long time. Like we've thought about culture as art museums and Dallas, you know. And so we're at a really interesting moment where I think it's good to go back to some kind of root principles.

What is culture? And how am I participating in it? So then the story about the light phone becomes a really interesting cultural story, which could become a thread of the emergence of mature relationships with technology. So this is a question I often consider. do you think that we're able to actively steer the evolution of culture? I don't know that we can steer is a problematic word. I would have used the steer a year ago. I think we can yeast it.

I think we can seed it. I think we can yeast it and need it for sure. I would say true human is an experiment in yeasting. I wouldn't say I have any glamour that I, any, idea that I can really steer, but I can definitely offer an ingredient that might change the way the whole recipe flows a little bit. And I also like Dave Snowden's kind of insight that we can steer complexity obliquely through microchanges at scale. And I think that's a really useful insight, is the insight that microchanges at scale make a bigger difference than big changes that

we think did something but don't really change behavior at scale. So for people that read your book and follow your wisdom, can you suggest some of those microchanges at scale that you could envision that land us at a better place collectively at some future period? For sure. Build relationships with your neighbors. Take responsibility for your relationship with technology. which also includes if you do engage with social media,

choosing to engage in ways that generate unlikely consensus and connection as opposed to polarization. I think there's going to be, there's beginning to be a horizon. I've been having conversations that are that basically start with. I'm neither a Democrat or a Republican. I'm, I live here. I care about all the, all of our kids. You've noticed that. Recently, people are starting conversations with that.

I'm starting conversations with that. And I'm starting to be met by that as well in a couple domains. And so I think there's opportunity in this, in America, to engage people as people who have shared needs and interests. I just came from Finland where that's definitely the case. very different value set in Finland. That's where I was when I lost my full wallet in a full shopping center, and an hour later, someone tracked me down and gave it to me unscathed. I don't know that that would have happened at the Mall of America.

People still send their kids by themselves on trains between cities in Finland. Yeah, so that gets to the remembering. Like, what have we loved? when you and I were growing up relative to today. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a movie where like the sucking sound is towards transactional dynamics. Then I'm participating in a world where more and more people are caring for art.

They're caring for community. They're caring for bioregionalism. They're taking the time to just have person-to-person conversations that aren't about getting anywhere. I'm also studying Nora Bateson's worm data, which I think is an incredible social technology that in a way just trains us to stop needing to get somewhere and actually just listen to each other. Like the skill of listening cannot be emphasized enough. Other things that I offer in that the chapter you just asked about is building a relationship with your local place that includes understanding the history of, of the ecology and the indigenous people in that place. I think I was thinking the other day,

there's a, like, there's an opportunity for citizen science to start to function in a totally different way. Like as so many people are losing their jobs, I get really curious about what kind of more citizen driven, more distributed pathways for research are going to emerge that also help us to re-instantiate place-based consciousness. And there's emergent technological mechanisms to help us do that. Like, there's kind of a little cosmic wink around our increasing satellite capacities and other kind of increasing data capacities to participate in these things. So I feel like we need to listen to the interstices of the remembering. And it's so not about me saying there's a way to do this. It's about saying the key.

key is in how we listen to processes of restoring the connectivity. And then the responses will be like millions and even billions of different responses. And that's what we want because that's humanity functioning more like participants in an ecology, which we are. So that's how I see the collective emergence is not as like a set of principles or as a framework, but as a again, a deep posture of I'm participating in the possibility of life, having more life, and participating in the infinite game of enabling play for future players. So you mentioned her earlier, but I know that you personally were heavily influenced by the work of Joanna Macy, who we both knew and who recently passed away.

So I'd like to make space in this episode for you to discuss some of her teachings, if you'd like. Are there any pieces of her work you'd like to specifically share that were especially impactful for you and your own path? I think, you know, in addition to that three, the Trinity that I already shared, the Shambala prophecy has been really a huge influence on me. I'm not familiar with that. I'll say it. I'll give a short form version. But this is an ancient prophecy that Joanna can. carried as a lineage carriage. I don't carry it as a lineage, so I just want to state that as I'm sharing. But she carried it and shared it many times and had shared it in an unbroken thousand-year lineage of a prophecy that there would be a time where there would be those who would

know themselves as Shambala warriors. They would know that the world that they were born into was out of alignment with life, and that it was made by the human mind and could be unmade by the human mind. And they would recognize themselves through that true heart that essentially knew that life is sacred and that the pathway of the Shambala warrior

is to unwind and remake the systems and structures and constructs that make our world. And that phrase, that it was monomaya, that it was made by the human mind and can be unmade by the human mind is one that, you know, anyone who's heard Joanna speak that. And it's very easy to access a recording on YouTube. You can't unhear that. And then the invitation is a deeper one than words because the invitation is embodied. The invitation is the stance of the person of the being who recognizes that we're actually free to respond.

We're actually here as embodied beings who can attune and who can commune and who can creatively reinstantiate reciprocal processes in how we do anything. that's that's that's that's always with me it will always be with me thank you thank you for sharing that we are have really just scratched the surface of your new forthcoming or just out by the time this podcast airs your book true human reimagining ourselves at the end of our world so you were first and last on this podcast 18 months ago has anything changed about your own worldview, a book aside for the moment? What's changed for you

and how you view our situation and our future and your own making sense of it? There's two things. One is, I feel like I've gotten more humble and more bold in the existential stance of hope. Humble because there's so many things I don't know or don't see or don't have answers to. I don't know if we're going to make it.

But bold because, and I really, this really came as a transmission from my friend Lucas, my Brazilian friend Lucas. It was just like, because joy is natural to our being and it is the thing that instantly shifts initial conditions. It's like the ingredient of existential hope of or as, you know, Wendell Berry said, be joyful though you have considered all the facts that shifts things around it and moves things, moves possibility. So there's that. And then I would also say that I'm more, even more sober than I already was around power over life and the questions

about what to do with that, which doesn't mean I have all the answers. But it does mean that I feel increasingly available to walk with both obvious bedfellows and strange bedfellows in care for life in a way of sobriety. It's going to take both. So in addition to going out and getting your book, True Human, what other closing words of advice or wisdom do you have for the viewers of this program? I want to say, trust your ability to relate with others. and becoming an excellent communicator is a life work. It's not something that happens overnight. It's something that happens through like study of your relationships.

And I am in that study and I see the increased outcomes of increased coherence and efficacy and embodiment of power as the power of life. And so I think what I want to say to listeners is to become a student to beautiful communication, to coherent communication, to effective communication, but not just effective. Effective has been purchased. And what's actually true is like a tuned, loving, kind, empowering communication, mutually empowering communication. and to keep studying it. It's a life work. And that to me is, and not just between humans,

but between humans and more than humans, between your own ecosystem, between the soil in your garden. Like to become that student is to validate life. The Buiti say, the Buiti, who are an indigenous people, the original people of Gabon, I'm initiated into the Buiti, tradition, they say, become a student to life. That's the whole, that's the whole lineage, be a

student to life. But what that also invites is to be a student to communication because, as Nora says, life is communication. And yeah, that's my invitation. Beautifully said, the sage in you was very clear on that. And as a closing question, I'm going to ask the nerd in you, because I know she exists. If you were to come back on the show in the future. And there was one topic that you are passionate about and articulate in that is relevant to humanity and the biosphere and our future. What is that one topic that you have a curiosity and would like to effectively communicate to others? Because I know there's probably like 15. There are 15. But I think the one that's really alive is around seeing humanity in

context of biosphereic process. I'm not sure what that would be called yet, but it would be such a delight to have that conversation with like David Sloan Wilson or another really, other really thoughtful ecologists, evolutionary biologists, someone like Daniel Schoctenberg or Luke Kemp, you know, and how that perspective could shift initial conditions. I think that would be incredibly interesting. Excellent. I love that line of inquiry. Samantha Sweetwater, new book, True Human, is out in fourth quarter here in 2025.

Thank you for your scholarship, your care, and your wisdom to be continued, my friend. Thank you, Nate. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. Additionally, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where we release written content and special announcements related to the Great Simplification.

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