The One You Feed - Can Radical Hope Save Us from Despair in a Fractured World? with Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

In this episode, Jamie Wheal explores the question of “Can radical hope save us from despair in a fractured world?” He argues that most of the feel-good positivity we are sold is useless when facing real crises, from climate collapse to meaninglessness. But there is a kind of hope that survives contact with brutal reality.Get Weekly Bites of Wisdom delivered to your inbox. Every Wednesday, you’ll receive a short, practical email that distills the big ideas from different episodes on topics like mental health, relationships, anxiety, and purpose – into bite-sized practices you can use right away. It’s free, takes about a minute to read. You’ll also receive a Weekend Podcast playlist every Friday to ensure you don’t miss an episode! Join now at oneyoufeed.net/newsletter.Key Takeaways:The internal and cultural struggle between hope and despair in the context of global crises.The concept of “radical hope” as a resilient form of hope amidst harsh realities.The inadequacy of typical positivity in addressing complex real-world problems.The need for a new “rational mysticism” suitable for the 21st century.The dangers of failing to establish a stable, shared sense of meaning in society.The critique of hyper-individualistic and consumer-driven culture in relation to existential risks.The historical evolution of existential risk narratives and their implications for modern society.The importance of community and connection in fostering healing and growth.The challenges of creating secular communities that provide meaningful structure and belonging.The potential for a revived Western rational mysticism to address contemporary spiritual needs and crises.If you enjoyed this conversation with Jamie Wheal, check out these other episodes:How to Overcome Cynicism and Embrace Hope with Jamil ZakiHuman Nature and Hope with Rutger BregmanFor full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Either we create a rational mysticism for the 21st century, or we end up with national mysticism and that's the Nazis, the Third Reich, right? That's Jews will not replace us, Charlottesville. That is a lot of hate-filled ethno-nationalism. So the bottom line is in that meaning crisis, if you don't create a rock in the middle of that ocean, everyone just goes whooshing past the moderate middle. And the first place they find community, the first place they get seen is in increasingly fundamentalist and extreme versions.

Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Today on The One You Feed, we're naming the wolves, the ones fighting inside us, and in our culture at large, hope versus despair. Jamie Wheal argues that most of the feel-good positivity we're sold is useless when facing real crises, from climate collapse to meaninglessness.

But there is a kind of hope that survives contact with brutal reality. We talk about his book, Recapture the Rapture, the loss of shared stories, and what it would mean to build a new, rational mysticism for our time. If you've felt the tension between giving up and giving your all, this conversation is for you. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grand View, the latest installment of the gripping Audible original

series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the grand view's shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in the supernatural thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Hi Jamie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing a whole bunch of things. We'll spend some time on your book that was called Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. We'll also be exploring

some of what you're doing on Substack with your homegrown humans. But before we get into all that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Hmm. Well, I mean, it's actually pretty tightly coupled because in some respects my thinking, research, writing, the trainings we do, kind of everything, and more and more so over time have been between the two wolves facing us right now, which I would propose, especially in the realm of existential risk, the polycrisis, culture wars, just the state of our world and the highly likely trajectory of our world is hope versus despair. And not just like whistling past the graveyard, hopium hope,

you know, kind of magical thinking. Right, right, the secret. I've got my post-it note affirmations that I'm going to live my hashtag best life no matter what happens to the rest of the world. But actually like legitimate what Jonathan Lear at the University of Chicago calls radical hope. And he actually came up with that concept from studying like 19th century Indian reservations. So literally after their lands were destroyed, they were removed from their territories, the hunting and indigenous lifestyles canned,

couldn't have been a worse possible time. And he's like, okay, radical hope isn't just optimism. And it's not just picking yourself up when you get knocked down. It is having hope for a future that you cannot see from here, but commit to nonetheless. So for me, being a sort of historical anthropologist and thinking in decades and centuries and millennia, not hot takes and tweets. The arc of where it appears we're going is quite likely that our best times, our most comfortable times are behind us and that we are quite likely going through some, for let me take your pick as to the explanations, the key factors that you

choose to map. But let's just say we're going in for a hard landing. And as Peter Zian, as a kind of a global strategist wrote in his recent book, it's the end of the world is just the beginning. He's like, first paragraph, he's like, things will never be cheaper, faster, quicker, more abundant, more comfortable, easier than they've been in our growing up. You're like, oof, okay. So how, if that's the case, do we not collapse into despair? Do we not give up hope? And so the idea of what does radical hope look like that actually can survive, sustain

contact with hard realities. Yeah. Right? Feels like really important inoculation. It feels like really important, like, to be able to share that and articulate that and not to give people, you know, I always think of like the realm of like super hipster,

vampire movies and shows, you know, like from True Blood on, right? They're all kind of like nod, nodding and winking to the old ones, the old horror movies. And they almost all have some moment where the vampire... Someone makes the sign of a cross or spritzes them with holy water or garlic. And they're like, wait, but those are old wives tales. That shit doesn't work on us. Right? And you kind of feel that way about our future, right? Like most of the inspo posting on TikTok and Instagram is wholly inadequate and not fit for purpose, right?

It's really good for bougie worried well people to slightly overcome their neuroses, but it's absolutely crap at how to eight to 10 billion humans navigate the incredibly complex polycrisis we're facing and not end up in mass tragedy. Yeah. Right? So yeah, I would say I'm zeroed in on which wolf we feed

and trying to figure out how do we actually come up with true valorizing, helpful, dignified responses to the totality of our current situation. Yep. The radical hope reminds me a little bit of, you've probably heard of it, the Stockdale paradox, Admiral James Stockdale. Oh, we use it. Yeah, yeah. 100%. Yeah, who came out and basically said you have to be able to both face the cold, hard, brutal facts of your current reality without losing hope that

you'll find a way through. And I think about hope in that way. I often think about horizons, right? And that we can't see beyond a horizon. And so the thing that we hope for, like you said, we may not be able to envision or we can't even envision yet. So if comfort and convenience and cheapness goes away, those are all problems from our current view,

but from a different view potentially, the loss of those things is not necessarily an awful thing. Yeah, it's just that it's sort of super incompatible with our hyper individualist, presentist consumer society. So it's like, I mean mine now, right? And I'm gonna pull a Karen and call the manager if I don't get what's coming to me. So I always think of like little Sally

in the Charlie Brown show, when she's doing like the Dear Santa, you know, she's like, I just want what's coming to me. I just want my fair share, you know? And you're like, our fair share might not be, might not feel so fair. Precisely compared to what we're used to. So you're putting yourself and talking about in a role of a futurist, you're looking at the tons of crisis that are coming our way, the collapse in meaning across religion and

institutions and government and media and all of that. I don't want to belabor this point particularly, but I am curious how you respond to people who would say, you know what, we've been predicting the end of the world since it started, right? Like these doomsday cries are nothing, and you're not predicting doomsday, but pretty bleakness, hard landing perhaps. How do you make sure that you're just not falling into that again? Yeah, no, look, there's a lot of like sort of intellectual or conceptual sand traps or minefields around this whole space

or crevasses, like if you're on a mountain, you have to be, and it's a glaciated terrain, you have to be aware of where's there's snow bridges, it all looks safe and it's not. And the way you do that is you put bamboo wands or sticks around the perimeter of your camp. You make sure that the space you're hanging out in is safe and no one's just gonna disappear 300 feet into the abyss.

So there's a lot of those. And just a quick clarification, I would never consider myself a futurist. I'd look ahead to see what's potentially going to happen, but futurists often has the connotation of I believe in techno utopian solutions. I don't, I'm actually like a brass tacks traditionalist. In fact, my entire next book is on making a case that

if we're going to survive and transition into a future that works for the majority of humans, it's not going to look like Elon Musk meets Star Trek at all. That's pie in the sky and incredibly high embedded energy. Takes a fuck ton of calories to do it and high technology. If we're gonna pull this off, it's gonna actually be Buckminster Fuller meets Swiss Family Robinson.

It's gonna be highly engineered, so ingenious humans, right? But very low embedded energy. So a lot more bamboo and thatch and like windmills, you know, like it's gonna be much simpler and lower tech. So just to make that point. Then to your point about, hey, and one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons ever is a guy with a long beard sitting on a sidewalk corner

with a sandwich board and he's waving his belt and he says, the end is nigh-ish. You know? And that is the mind fuck of our moment, right? You're like, wait, the wheels are still on the bus. I mean, everybody's talking about the wheels coming off the bus or us being off a cliff, but like, I can still play this game.

I can still get followers and likes. I can still go on vacations and go to the grocery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and you know, and for the most part, I mean, obviously COVID was a sort of scary shake-up, wake-up for people of loss of mobility, loss of incomes, government intersecting with private lives, all that kind of stuff, who's trustworthy, right?

Trustworthy information sources for me to follow. And I think all of that boils down to just this simple schizophrenia of our moment, which is things are getting exponentially better, all the new breakthroughs, all the new science,, you know, things are getting exponentially better, all the new breakthroughs, all the new science, all these things, things are getting exponentially worse, you know, melting ice caps and droughts and fires and, you know, and wars.

And you're like, well, which is it? And I just need to know. And you're sort of like, well, it's both. And that's not easily modelable. And that definitely doesn't, you know, submit to sound bites very elegantly. And people with different dogs in the fight, different agendas will be selling or peddling different versions of this

story. So you can go to Ted and be like, Steven Pinker, yay, everything's better. It's just under-reported. If it bleeds, it leads. Our news has a deliberate catastrophic bias. And then you can go to a different conference or read a paper and you're like, oh my God, like we're already past one and a half degrees and the Amazon is now a net negative on carbon sinks and like what the, right? Profoundly concerning. And so most of us can't handle that. And so between coming alive,

like I wanna live my best life and we're moving forward in a progressive, egalitarian, post-racial, multicultural society of inclusion and dignity for all, like that's our story, right? Or staying alive, holy fuck, do I have a second passport? Do I need to be out of fiat currencies and into crypto? And do I have a bunker like all the tech guys do?

That intersection of coming alive, high and to the right, infinite timelines, infinite resources, and infinite possibilities versus staying alive, finite timelines, dwindling resources and choices is where most of us are. So to your point about, hey, haven't we always been dooming and glooming the end of the world? There was a really cool paper that I found super duper useful on this in the MIT technology review. And it was based on a book. I think it's even called, I think it might be called Existential Risk, but anyways, it's in the tech review. And it was based on a book. I think it's even called, I think it might be called Existential Risk. But anyways, it's in the tech review. And it was

basically a survey of basically end of the world narratives for as long as we've been having them. And he broke it down into like four or five different eras. So he's like, you're absolutely right. People have from thousands of years ago, always been talking about the end of the world. But back then it was religious. So it was always God was going to come and change things, the Ragnarok or the Noah and the floods or whatever it might be. And it was totalizing. Like the entire universe would end or change or go into the next thing that's supposed to come after it. It's not until you get to the 18th century, and this is kind of so... I mean, you say it out loud, you're like, oh yeah, of course that makes sense. But it was the simultaneous discovery of dinosaur fossils

and Haley's Comet that together really induced, at least in Western European intellectual traditions, this kind of awareness of like, oh, wait, there's all these big ass bones and these creatures are clearly not still here running around. What's up with that? So something could have existed before that exists no more. That's interesting. And it's crazy to think that there was a time when people did not have that online. And then also Haley's Comet, wait a second, there's this crazy shooting star and we can run the calculations.

It's come around Newton, mathematics, three-body problems, all this kind of stuff. And it's come around before and it's gonna come around again and it's really close at one point and it could smash us and we could go the way of the dinosaurs. That was an entirely new concept. And funnily enough,

it prompts the first bit of was an entirely new concept. And funnily enough, it prompts the first bit of dystopian science fiction. In like 1801, this French guy writes a science fiction story about a future that doesn't exist. So again, new forms of novel creative literature about the last man, an existential crisis. And it bums him out so much, he ends up committing suicide, the poor bastard. Oh, when did the theory that the dinosaurs perished largely due to an asteroid come online? That's it. It's interesting that both dinosaurs and Haley's comet was what sort of triggered doomsday. And then as we go on, we find out like, well, that's kind of accurate. Yeah, they might be dance partners. Yeah, yeah, super fascinating. I think that's more of a 20th

century even post-World War II. So that's one huge inflection point. And the big difference was the religious apocalypses were always divinely inspired totalizing and was a complete phase shift in the universe. You then get to like World War II, and everybody's now seen Oppenheimer, so you're behold, I have become death destroyer of worlds. Oh shit, we could snuff ourselves, right? You get into Rachel Carson and Silent Spring and like,

we could actually be poisoning our planet and doing all these things. And the idea that we might snuff it, but life and the universe would go on, possibly in a degraded form, possibly in some other way, maybe it returns and recovers and is better, but either way we could get taken out by actions of our own doing, not divine intervention. That is new. And it's really critical to understand the sort of intellectual historiography because the classic thing is, ah, yeah, people have been saying that forever, right? The seventh day Adventist, right? The great disappointment in the 19th century where they all got up on their roofs to get beamed up to the mothership on the appointed evening and that it didn't happen. And they're like, fuck, okay, maybe it's like we got our math wrong. It's six months later. And then that didn't happen. And

most of the people were like, fuck this noise. This wasn't real. So that's legit. And then there's also the question of the motives and perspectives of anybody clanging those bells, right? Is someone looking to sell us their gold bullion, their bug out bags, their fucking iodine nuclear pill, what's that crazy bastard here in Austin? Infowars, Alex Jones, right? Are they flogging something based on making us afraid, or are there kind of level-headed, heartfelt, compassionate, technically,

and factually accurate assessments that aren't so overly biased or in the tank for one particular narrative that you can actually kind of trust this more or less as somewhere in the middle of truth claims? That's a really helpful reframing of that for me. That was actually surprisingly insightful. Not surprising that you're insightful. I could not believe something coherent came out of your mouth. I was really shocked. No, just I had not heard that framing of it before.

So I found it so helpful. I found it super useful when I read it too. I'm like, oh, okay, that tracks, that explains a lot. Yes, yes it does. There's a quote that you've used a lot of times that I thought we could jump into and it's an E.B. White quote. Do you wanna share it with us?

Sure, I mean, it's, I mean, A, E.B. White, right? The one who wrote Charlotte's Web. Yep. But he's, you know, and I just feel like it sums up that coming alive versus staying alive thing. Cause most people are like, well, I do wanna know what's happening, but I don't wanna get gripped and then fearful and reactive.

I wanna still embrace and love life, et cetera. How do we do this? How do we balance that schizophrenic crisscross of coming alive and staying alive? And he said, I wake up every morning torn between the desire to save the world and savor it. And then after further reflection, I realized that in fact the savoring must come first

because if there was nothing worth savoring, there would be nothing left to save. So, you know, in that respect, and of course you're playing to the base here because everyone's like, oh great, I still get to go to my yoga retreat in Bali. You know, I still get to do hashtag best life like, yay, thank you, EB White. So it can be a cop out if you're not careful.

Or it can be a, you know, a sort of dead poet society kind of call to action to live a heroic and joyful and courageous life. Yeah, I think part of that quote that I've heard you use before is that this makes it hard to plan the day, right? I think it's probably aiming to humor, right? Which it is funny. But I do think that those are two sort of extremes and and like you say I think for a lot of us it ends up somewhere far more pedestrian than either of those, right? We're not really saving the world, nor are we particularly savoring it. We are going through the day-to-day motions, which is part of life. But one of the questions I've thought about a long time, and this show has been an 11-year exploration

of several questions, but this is one of them, and it's related to exactly what you're saying, which is how do I both honor the natural, I think inbuilt human desire to grow, change, become better, improve the world, be compassionate, improve ourselves and improve the world and like it says there, appreciate the world exactly as it is. That tension, that dynamic I find incredibly animating. How do you think about — there's no simple answer to this, right? The answer is obviously some form of both. But what do you think about that? Meaning the sort of the clear-eyed look at reality and then us doing our level best to

kind of live our story and make the most of it all? Yeah. I mean, or even more prosaically, even if I take it down from world level to human level, right? I right now, you know, in many moments of my life and my day, I'm brought with a question of, do I find a way to be grateful and appreciate and embody and be here for this thing? Or should I change this thing? Like your job, is it good enough? And the question is, I just need to learn to get on fully on board, embody it? Or should I change it? Or spiritual practice, I'm doing meditation, and there's an inbuilt like desire

to be different, that's part of what's driving it. And yet the actual practice is calling for me to stop doing that. And I think as humans, we have both that are happening in very close proximity to each other. Yeah. I mean, look, I think the bottom line is that thinking in terms of either or binaries, which is arguably Aristotle to Descartes to Instagram, you know, is a very, very helpful model for certain specific things and completely flawed and inadequate

for a whole bunch of other stuff. And actually in this next book that I'm writing, I'm gonna sort of suggest that, that is the cause of much of our grief and angst and confusion, is that we're applying the wrong cognitive models. And so rather than it being, is it one thing or like, is it acceptance or is it raging against the dying of the light?

Should I go with the flow or rage, rage, rage? Which is it, you know, and the same thing for, you know, the same thing for relationships. Like I know that being in a long-term partnership is going to uncover all my shit. The only question is, is that the right person to go through all my shit with? I don't know. And I can't know unless I fully commit, but I don't want to fully commit if this is the wrong person, which is it.

So we are observers in our own experiment and we're affecting the outcomes by our choices. So in one respect, I think that, I mean, this is a little nerdy, but in the Eastern tradition, Daoism expresses, everyone is familiar with that yin yang symbol, right? And that idea that it is negative and positive, and then there's a little dot of the opposite

inside the other. So you're like, it is forever moving, mixing, and flowing. Alfred North Whitehead, right? The Western philosopher called it process philosophy, right? Which is the idea that, hey, there's not a fixed true and good, or bad, and false. It is the ebbing and flowing of life. We are in a process, we are becoming, we're not being. And so the idea that things come and things go,

things shift and things change, and to surf or ride those waves is actually the only thing you can do is to seek balance within the only constant of perpetual change. And unfolding is arguably a better thing than trying to cling to a specific rock and then being bummed where the waves of existence inevitably wash you off it. So that doesn't mean that you're just a piece of driftwood, it doesn't remove agency. So like, do I like my job? Should I quit my job? Should I go and become a fucking massage therapist or life coach? No, short answer is-

I wanna be a dog massage therapist in my next career. Yeah, exactly. It seems like a good job. Right, so I think that there is some growing up and decoupling again from this, I think we're mostly running some profoundly unhelpful scripts right now. And they are at odds with the fundamental root nature

of being and a lot of different cultures and societies are a little bit more fatalist than Western and American and Western European, you know, postmodern societies. And people may be like, oh, you guys don't hustle. You don't get to get things done. What's wrong with you? You know, you can hustle more and never be content and never be happy and have all this cool shit. Like our houses are big and our TVs and our phones. I mean, there

was just an article in the Atlantic, I think this morning, that millennials midlife crises are very different than the ones that have been happening before. And if you think about the story that they inherited from their baby boomer parents, it was you can have your cake and eat it too. You're special beyond any immediate accomplishment, the whole trophy generation thing. you're special beyond any immediate accomplishment, the whole trophy generation thing. You should follow your bliss and you should be rewarded outrageously for it. This is the entry level kids being like, I need 120K to support the lifestyle I want to live or that I've seen on the gram. So, you should give it to me, even though I'm doing fuck all for your company as far as value addition. And if it's not working out that way, it's because of, thank you, Gabor

Mate, it's because of trauma, you know, and trauma is my ADD and it's my addiction to caffeine and cocaine and nicotine and Adderall and it's trauma. And then what you're supposed to do at that point is go back and go on your journey to heal and process your trauma. And if you do all that, friends and neighbors, then you'll be back to the top of the slide and you'll be able to manifest the life you want. And basically they're getting into their forties and they're like, oh shit, I didn't settle down. I didn't commit to a life partner.

I've been swiping right. I've been playing the game. I didn't commit to a job or a career. Now I'm in some weird ass lifestyle influencer hell realm where I was promised I was supposed to have passive income and be living what Tim Ferriss told me was my four-hour work week, but that's gone thanks to Airbnb and Starlink, right? And so, you know, in some respects, we've all been sold a bill of goods. And the idea that it is obviously a combination of, you know, it's the serenity prayer, right? It's like, accept the things I can't change, change the things I can, smart enough to know

the difference. It's that dialectic. ["The Difference of Life"] That smart enough to know the difference, I think, is the real challenge, right? I think that's the art of living. It's an art, not a science, of living life. And I agree with you. I mean, I just did something with a company, they're called rebind.ai, and they basically

pair someone with a great book. And I did the Daode Qing, and I did 20 hours of commentary that you could go interact with and have a conversation with. And they do other great books. They've done a lot of philosophy, people like Margaret Atwood and John Banville. It's kind of a cool project. So I'm a big Tao fan and I'm a big fan of the Whitehead model of said slightly differently, less nouns, more verbs, Whitehead model of said slightly differently, less nouns, more verbs, you know, in the way life actually is, you know. Let's change direction just a little bit here. I want to try and summarize a little bit of your book and idea and then ask some questions

about it. And I'm going to let you correct my very short summary, which is basically meaning is disappearing all across the board. We're stuck in a place where we don't have meaning. People are turning to either fundamentalism or nihilism where they don't believe in anything. To use your river analogy, like we could often be surfing or riding the river sort of blind. We don't have any maps that actually work for us anymore. The maps we have don't make sense, and that there was some benefit in religion. It gave some meaning, it gave some structure, and that there might be ways to bring some of those good things back in very different forms, though, that would help us with this meaning crisis. Is that a

reasonable short summary? Yeah, sure. I mean, it says don't throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater. Yeah, yeah. You go on to talk a lot about peak experiences and different peak experiences as being part of that. And I get the idea that these more peak experiences, this more embodied alive feeling is a good thing to have just to have because it's, I mean, I think part of the point of life is to live it and this is a way of living it in a more heightened way. The piece that I had a hard time in my mind connecting the dots on was how does that lead to meaning? Does it, or is it just part of a broader meaning structure? Can you say more about the broader meaning structure that you're thinking?

Well, you start the book with the sort of core idea that one of the big challenges is we face a meaning crisis. With things like religion, you talk about the three elements that are important to have in there. Healing, inspiration, and connection. There we go. Healing, inspiration, and connection. Perfect. Okay. So, framed that way, it all sort of makes sense. I don't know. I didn't actually pull those exact words. So, explain a little bit more about those three things and how the world we're in today, finding those things for ourselves is a really valuable endeavor.

Yeah, so that's kind of leaning on my academic training as sort of a neuroanthropologist, right? Like how do we do this culture thing? And then also, why does it work or not work, right? So if there's a practice that has persisted for centuries to thousands of years, what's the mechanisms of action underneath it? Presumably it works and it works because it's also doing stuff in our bodies and brains. And if we both know that it's culturally significant,

there's a record of it, and you now understand the mechanism of action, like it's not just vaporware or superstition, now you can potentially build new things that still work going forward. And they could be better adaptive and more helpful. And so the argument I made in Recapture the Rapture was just, hey, the flywheel of human existence and culture is some version of ecstatic or peak states inspiration. So it's really important to know or to feel that there's something more capital and more to life than just the daily grind. Cause if anybody, if some, I mean, it's a legit question to ask.

It's why most emo kids get really sad, you know, or cynical or depressed. It's why there's diseases of despair. Like, fuck this, this grind, life's a bitch and then you die and all you're ever doing is Sisyphus pushing rocks uphill only to ever have them fall down. Fuck, this is not engaging.

I don't want it. So many people are like, no. So inspiration is like, hey, there are places, there are experiences. You can have peak experiences that where it all makes sense, even if it's just from moments to minutes, you're like, oh, wow. It's a beautiful concert where everyone's singing for the encore and you feel connected in a sea of humanity. It could be a sunrise or a sunset on a mountain. You're like, oh my God, I feel like I'm in a Nat Geo cover or something like that or play or movement or embodiment or romance and lovemaking or whatever it might be. Wine, women and song, sex, drugs and rock and roll, like all of it. It lets us get back to our burdens the next time we have to inevitably pick them up again

and feel just a little standing a little taller, you know, just with a little more spring in our step. So there's an important kind of relief of the burdens of life and affirmation that there is something worth striving or struggling for. I often think of it as like, let's just say you're on a multi-week backpacking slog with a big ass heavy pack. My metaphors are either historical or action sports, because that's just my life and background as a guide and other stuff. So I tend to trust the stuff I've actually felt. I'm like, oh, that's an analog for other things. So you're trudging through the swamps and you're bushwhacking through the forest and

it's dark and it's wet and you can't see shit. And then you climb up a nearby mountain and you're like, oh, wow, look, that's where we started and that's where we're heading. And I can even see there's that crazy little junction or crossroads. Now I've got perspective on what we're grinding out down in the flats with no visibility. So there's that, there's inspiration, there's something worth living for. There's perspective on my actual quotidian day to day.

And there's also often, and I don't know why this is, but there is often something that tends to accompany at peak experiences. I'm a golden god, almost famous. Like I am more than my desk bound, day to day beat down self. That's nice. But there's often also a printout sheet. Like here's where you're banged up broken. Here's where you're out of integrity. Here's your homework. Here's your shit to do when you get back down on the flats.

So there's often heightened perspective. This is the whole genre of psychedelic assisted therapies, all that kind of stuff. People are like, okay, if you get out of your normal waking consciousness, can you have a subject object shift and a perspective on me and my stories and my habits, behaviors in life that I don't normally have? And is that helpful in some way? So that leads you from inspiration, inevitably, to healing. And not only do I have a punch list of things to fix

and patch, but I also hopefully have some stoke. I have some enthusiasm left over from my peak experience. So I actually have increased motivation to maybe go and do some of those things I've been postponing. And then invariably, we don't do this in a closet, right? We do this as tribal primates in relationship to each other. And so the connection is essential. And what's interesting is that, you know, you can get into that flywheel via any one of the doors, but that all three seem to come online. So as an example, right? You know, AA comes in from healing. Like I've had

my rock bottom moment, my life's out of control and I'm hurting and harming myself and others I care about. And I can't keep doing this or I'll die." Right? That's everybody's more or less rock bottom. So they go into, so that's their catharsis moment. But then they find AA and they have their first meeting or something like that. And they're like, oh my gosh, I'm not alone in this, this human condition and suffering. And holy shit, they can hold me and my story and my shame and my habits, et cetera, et cetera. And then, and the sponsors and all that. Then invariably, what do they call it? They call it like the pink, the pink cloud. Yeah. I'm a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic. So I spent a lot of time in 12-step programs. So

carry on. I know exactly what you're talking about, but they call it a pink cloud. Pink cloud. So invariably they're like, oh my God, I'm not alone and this is possible. We can do this. And I don't have to be alone in my burdens. So that's one example, right? Another would be like, oh, you come in straight from a peak experience. You have your own accidental mystical experience and you find a spiritual community of practice.

And then you actually go and do the rest of your work. Or I go to Burning Man, I'm like, oh my gosh. And now I find my people, et cetera, et cetera. Like take your pick, right? So you can come in through being wounded and broken, and now I find my people, et cetera, et cetera. Like take your pick, right? So you can come in through being wounded and broken open, and then you find your people and then you do your healing. You can come in through the peak experience and then you're inspired to do your work

and you find a community to practice. This is just the flywheel of our life. And as a result, you can kind of troubleshoot, well, how's my life and how's our culture? Take your pick, the elevation you assess, and is anything missing? Am I lighter on one thing versus another? And so to your point about the rise or return of religion, it's arguably because religion just as a social technology, nevermind it's like theological truth claims, right? A lot of studies have shown that it doesn't matter who you believe in. It could be Buddha, it could be Vishnu, it could be Jesus, it could be Allah. Right? That matters

less than that you believe and that you believe and observe in a community of practice and that the people who do that around the world are healthier, wealthier, and happier than the people who don't. Right? So you're like, okay, that is social technology worth being respectful of, not just dismissive. Like the new atheist, like, oh, that's all superstitious, claptrap, that's all just tops down, opiate of the masses, thought control,

by dysfunctional, power hungry priests and bishops. Like actually, no, there's a there there. And can we help it be healthy and pro-social versus regress us back to ethno-tribalism, which it seems like is kind of where it's going these days. Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow?

Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday I send weekly Bites of Wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show, things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose, into bite-sized practices you can use the same day. It's free, it takes about a minute to read, and thousands already swear by it. If you'd like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join

us at OneUFeed.net slash newsletter. That's OneUFeed.net slash newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. What I find fascinating and interesting is how I think lots of people recognize that they want this thing that you're describing here. They don't have an obvious entry point. They don't stumble into Burning Man and feel at home. Life never gets bad enough to stumble into a 12-step program. And I think you've spent time trying to build communities of people that come together and do something that provides some of these frameworks. I've certainly spent, you know, years through some of my programs building that. And it still seems even though there's a ton of people who seem to need

it and want it, it doesn't seem like anything really gets off the ground too much in that area. In which area in particular? In that area of bringing together a community of people who don't have a common necessarily religious belief, but want those benefits. They want the community, they want the healing, they want the inspiration. They recognize, I want a church without God, in essence.

I see the benefits of it. But we don't see those emerging on any sort of mass scale yet. Yeah, no, it's, what's his bucket? He won the Nobel Prize for his behavioral economic nudge. Kahneman? That's not Kahneman, but anyway, you can- Oh, Thaler?

Yeah, yeah, Richard Thaler. Right, so behavioral econ had its moment, the Freakonomics guys, all that kind of stuff in the 2010s on, and that's when Obama was doing all kinds of government paternalism, like let's put the salads in the front of the cafeteria lines and people will do more. And you know, like all that kind of stuff.

And then it kind of got debunked. There was like, that sounded great at Ted and at a few, you know, pop psych bestsellers. But the reality is, is we are just complex and messy and confounding. And we're just not really subject to easy manipulations. We will put it in the ditch just to put it in the ditch. You know, this is a little bit like BF Skinner,

like back in the sixties, right? Like behaviorism, you know, and the whole idea of like that whole generation attempted to parent their kids with behaviorist models. Psychology doesn't matter. Like that was, you know, Skinner, like it's irrelevant what you actually think and feel, right? Treat your kids like Pavlovian lab rats

and reward them and penalize them. And they end up just sweeping shit under, literally sweeping shit under the carpet to get their cookie for their chores so they can go outside. Everyone, we just game whatever system we're in. Yep. Right? So the simplest answer about what you're saying of like non-denominational, low doctrine, quasi-religiosity, not working, I completely agree with you.

That's prompted this last six months study of American churches that we've just done. I've been writing about on Substack because I was like, all right, what's working and what's not? And paradoxically, the big tent, spiritual but not religious, everyone has their own conception of the divine, you do you, the world's religions are all true, they all have their wisdom, we should source widely and inclusively, et cetera, et cetera. And none of this should be hard, difficult,

challenging, confronting, or ask anything other than you, other than soothing you and helping you feel better. That shit is not getting any traction. And what is getting traction, but interestingly, fascinatingly, is the sort of existential kink. There's a huge movement towards old school, pre Vatican, you know, pre, what is it called?

Vatican, Vatican II. So like that last convention, right? Like late sixties when they stopped doing the mass in Latin and it kind of tried to go more liberal in the Catholic church. There's this huge movement to like old school smells and bells and even like millennial women wearing veils. They're getting off on the Latin mass.

They want the high church and ritual. There's a huge boom in Eastern orthodoxy as well, including this bizarre hybridization. There was an interesting article in Texas Monthly about the ortho bros in Texas who are basically like God, guns and guts Confederates, like roided out MMA, like Rogan podcaster bros piling in to Eastern Orthodox churches. JD Vance, right, was a recent convert to Opus Dei, like the bad guys in the Da Vinci Code

is Opus Dei, like the bad guys in the Da Vinci Code is Opus Dei. That's a real Spanish secret society, arch, basically fascist neo-Nazi Catholics who have been at war, where you know, were completely opposed to Pope Francis and have got $6 million of funding. They have a lobbyist office on K Street, you know, in DC. Like these guys are pulling strings.

And there's something that a recent journalist articulated as the cradle versus the converts clash right now in this whole pull towards super traditional religions, which is that the newcomers are often typically male, although in the case of the Catholic stuff, there's also women involved, but it's skewing male, although in the case of like the Catholic stuff, there's also women involved, but it's skewing male, young male, so sort of 18 to 40. And these guys are getting radicalized online to this whole kind of like near reactionary. If you've seen the memes like Deos Vult, like the crusader ideas, like God wills it, they're setting up like clash of civilization stuff and basically rebooting the crusades. And then they're coming into these communities of practice where the cradles, the people who've been born and raised in ether and orthodoxy or Catholicism are

like, we believe that our popes and bishops, they're infallible and they have direct line and they are the spokespeople mouthpieces of God. Full stop. That's linchpin. And the converts who have been getting radicalized online to these kind of like cosplay, larping medieval versions are coming in and being like, who are you snowflake cucks? You guys are soft selling. We've been radicalized to the craziest old school versions possible. And again, like fantasy land on lines. And they're now trying to like bend and push these traditional churches to become even more traditional.

It's fascinating. I'm curious your thoughts about how, like what you just said, the spiritual but not religious group that wants to come together and build a community that everybody gets along and it all goes well and all the things that you described not working. Do you believe that it can't work? That fundamentalism is the only model that works? Or what are people who are trying to create something sane missing? Yeah, I mean, I think and I actually I just gave a version of this talk for the first time. I tend not to speak super publicly about these things all the time,

but it was at a conference at the University of Exeter in England, and it was over Easter weekend. So Exeter has a very famous medieval cathedral. It's always like, I was like, all right, like if I'm gonna do it, I should do it this weekend, you know, right here. On making the argument for a revival

of a sort of Western rational mysticism and taking both the Lucidian mysteries in the Greek tradition. So from Socrates to Plato and the Lucidian mysteries, they're kind of psychedelic initiations, taking that plus sort of first century Gnostic Christianian. Can we dust that shit off? Can we articulate a clear rational mysticism where you don't have to just bite the bullet and just accept some crazy ass make-believe story from 2000 years ago or you don't get to play? Can we do that? Because in our absence, either we get that right, either we create a rational mysticism

for the 21st century, or we end up with national mysticism. And that's the Nazis, the Third Reich. That's Jews will not replace us, Charlottesville. That is a lot of hate-filled ethno-nationalism. So the bottom line is in that meaning crisis, if you don't create a rock in the middle of that ocean, everyone just goes whooshing past the moderate middle. And the first place they find community,

the first place they get seen is in increasingly fundamentalist and extreme versions. So my sense is, is that that's what needs to happen. It just isn't particularly happening. So it's not that we need to, or have to go to fundamentalism. It's just that no one is articulating the middle and that one of the best, I mean,

not only do like Unitarians, they're getting their clocks clean method. Yeah, because you go to Unitarian. I mean, I love them as people, but I, not only do like Unitarians, they're getting their clocks clean, method. Yeah, because you go to Unitarian, I mean, I love them as people, but I go and I'm like, I have no idea what we believe in here. Like I have no idea what's actually happening here. Totally, and there's not enough structure to the container to have a clear identity.

So I mean, you know, the old info marketer thing is there's riches in niches, right? So like specialize and focus on your people. And when you're all things to everyone, you know, the old info marketer thing is there's riches in niches, right? So like specialize and focus on your people. And when you're all things to everyone, you're nothing to anyone. And a classic example to me is there's a group called Sunday Assembly and they started in England, right? You familiar with those guys?

I'm familiar, yeah. And they did well, but it doesn't seem like they stayed doing well. No, and so basically, and this was a bunch of recovering Anglicans, which is relatively untraumatic. I mean, Anglicans were post-Henry VIII, they were about as weak-sauce, just sort of observing the thing as possible.

But nonetheless, they left the church as kids, but they're like, we still miss it. What we miss is we miss the hymns, we miss the community, and we miss the cucumber sandwiches. That was their kind of bit. Great, so that's healing inspiration and connection. So we miss the inspiration of singing

and being in a beautiful building and stained glass and all that. We miss some version of like, I'm a sinner, but I can do better and here's some inspiring stories. And we miss the connection, the cucumber sandwiches in the church basement. So they attempted to reboot it without doctrine. And their songs, and it was really funny

because I was like, I just checked back in. I had met with their founders a few years ago in London, and I just checked back in like six months ago, and be like, how are these guys doing? I thought they were kind of dwindling. They had a big press and lots of buzz, and then it kind of was eroding. And I was like, all right, what's going on there?

And then I saw their song list, because very nicely they have a sort of, an open source toolkit. Like, hey, you can do Sunday assembly like things wherever you are. Here's our songs. Here's our piece. You know, here's how we do it. You can go knock yourself out and try yourself. And I saw their songs and it was like, journey, don't stop believing. And like monkeys, the monkeys, I'm a believer. And you're like, oh guys, that's so horrendously cringe. And I kind of felt like, oh, that's it.

These guys are doing the monkeys. Everyone really is holding out for the Beatles. And you need deep and profound art. And the other element that I was tracking, and I'll share it with you and you can tell me if it makes sense, which is, what is this whole turn towards orthodoxy? Why are people, it's existential kink.

It's sort of like, I want to submit, right? Like I am tired. And what's her face? She wrote Strange Rights. She's got a triple barrel name. It'll come to me in a second. She writes for the New York Times as well, but she wrote about spiritual kink.

And her point was that millennials in particular, just as a cohort, who have been raised on this hyper individualist narcissistic view of life and reality and meaning are fucking exhausted. They're just tired. None of it worked. The cacao, the combo, the ayahuasca, the Trunt, the conchi festivals,

the IFS internal family systems, my trauma, none of it's worked. I'm still stuck in this human condition and it was all supposed to be about me and my hashtag best life and for fuck's sake, polyamory. Like none of it has worked. And so- To tell me what to do?

Yes. Yeah. And so there is a yearning for submission. Can I just set aside me having to steer and navigate all of this for myself in this hyper-individualistic, neoliberal marketplace of meaning? Can I just give up and can I be told what to do? And then there is also on a higher level. So submission is the base psychological level.

But then I think there's a higher yearning which is surrender. Can I experience awe and surrender to a force, to a consciousness, to whatever it might be that is bigger and vaster and wiser than me? And can I experience that I-Thou relationship, right, in a way that helps soothe the absolute mental schizophrenic clusterfuck of trying to make sense of our current moment? Yeah. I mean, I think that you see these different things. I love what you said about the, you

know, it hasn't worked for them the Millennials. I don't Millennials I don't think it's just that I think lots of people I mean, I know a lot of our audience is like I've done all that shit Right, you know and I'm still I'm still sort of me and you have a great story in in this book about how Despite lots of healing lots of peak experiences, all this stuff. In many ways, that little kindergartner who used to boss people around is still in there and is part of what's happening. So I think that on one hand, a lot of this is, as you're saying, there is a certain surrender. When I think about what religions give or gave, I've thought of it through slightly different words, but was like a view, like what does all this actually mean? What the hell is going on around here?

Some sort of practice, something to do, and then community, right? And I think that what a lot of these disjointed things that we're talking about give you one of those things. You know psychedelics give you a view although it's not necessarily a fully constructed view or IFS gives you a view. Here's the way here's why I'm the way I am. There's a view it doesn't seem like anybody is doing a great job and myself included in trying of putting these various pieces together in a way that there's enough meat on the bone, that there's something you can grab onto that people who are hyper individualistic will do. And I think that's the other thing is that there are probably some people who are turning away from the hyper individualistic, but I think for so many of us, it's so hard to get away from the base comfort that our phones and our TVs and our stuff give us that sort of just don't add a lot of value but are kind

of comfortable to then go into community where something is asked of me, where something is demanded of me, where I'm going to have to encounter people I don't like. And being willing to do that seems to also be a modern hurl. Oh yeah. No, we're fucked. I mean, right? Like again, like part of this church survey.

So I hadn't been in churches for decades, went to kind of half a dozen interesting ones and different ones in Austin. And one of the for decades, went to kind of a half a dozen interesting ones and different ones in Austin. And one of the first ones we went to was based on Father Thomas Merton, so kind of a Catholic mystic, contemplative, contemporary guy, really neat, writes great stuff, and Gojjif, so sort of this kind of mystical spiritual Christianity. So I was like, all right, that seems like an interesting place to start. They had a big kind of octagonal geodesic dome chapel. This was kind of clearly a seventies, eighties

era baby boomer build. And they were sort of navigating their way into this next chapter. And I remember looking around and just kind of getting a pulse check. How does it feel? What are they up to? How formal is their liturgy? How are they smuggling in Gojive? Because that's some heretical shit, you know, to most mainline Christians, right? I was just fascinated. And then I was like, oh my gosh, how many of the conchee, conspirituality, big dumb hat crowd, right?

This sort of is the placeholders for contemporary spirituality, right? Online and elsewhere. How many of them could even make it in the front door of this and just be a humble, anonymous congregant bowing down to a shared higher purpose? They'd be coming in with their phones like, here's me,

here's I am, I'm thinking of my updates and my tweets, what does this do for me? Like I want to say something, give me the mic, I'm gonna over explain when I get my chance to testify. And you're like, oh my God, we actually have to strip and undo so much buggy programming and conditioning to just put ourselves back in the realm of humble, not main character syndrome, just congregate and participant in submission to a tradition that is bigger, longer, older, deeper than my personal truth.

And is your belief that Western mysticism is the right answer because that's what we are culturally steeped in? Because there's lots of Buddhist sanghas around that I've been a Zen practitioner for years. So you know, there are communities there. They're not big communities generally. They're smaller communities, but they seem to function, but they do stay in a certain realm. And I know in your book, you talked about how for you, you explored all these other religious ideas, but something about the Western Christian tradition felt like the ideas there were so culturally embedded that

they made more sense to you. In no way would I argue that something in the, like I'm not a Western chauvinist, right? I'm not making the case that like Tom Holland did in his book, Dominion. He's that Cambridge PhD, he's got a very popular history podcast, right? And Dominion was his book on, hey, many, many of the things from like representative democracy to human rights to like a thousand pieces of this to care for the poor, social service is actually deeply Christian, even and especially in the Western secular societies

that have let go of the requirements for faith, right? So that was his book. It came out a few years ago. Jordan Peterson, Barry Weiss, lots of people along that realm have been taking that as CC, suck it monkeys, proof positive, Christianity's best, and when we have this, we have Muslim immigration into Europe

and Elon's talking about the West has a suicidal empathy and all these things. It's setting up culture war, clash of civilizations kind of stuff, right? So I'm not saying that, but what I would say is that if you're just, the hour is late and the stakes are high and we're almost out of bullets,

then look around and see what we've already got. Because what we've already got is going to be quicker, faster, cheaper, and arguably more potent or effective than starting from scratch with something that a bunch of postmodern galaxy brains cook up out of thin air. It's the classic product market fit and most of entrepreneurial success is timing. It's far easier to dust off something that exists, remind people of its value and spin it back again, then it is to spend all the dollars and all the marketing to bend people over for your solution in search of a problem.

Right? And so you're saying that you think there's a lot of people who sometime in the not too distant past were Christian adjacent. Yeah. And culturally they understood. And these are not the people who hate Christianity, you know, or have this like, because there's a whole group of people who feel like they've been like, you know, that it was the cause of so much pain and trouble in their lives that like they're allergic.

You're saying there's a big group of people who are non-allergic, who at least understand, and we do understand, right? We could talk about Cain and Abel, or we could talk about Pillars of Salt, or we could use 100 cultural phrases that we all understand that are coming from a particular place. Yeah, absolutely. That is the cultural baggage of the Western tradition, as are the Greeks and Romans, as is Shakespeare, et cetera. There's a bunch of stuff there. And a huge chunk of what we take as the Christian

story is actually these weird mashups over time. Like if you go- Precisely. I mean, it's like Christ's nativity, like Christmas day, there's the little star of Bethlehem and there's a manger and there's wise men and there's shepherds. And none of that actually ever happened in the Bible. Like different gospels tell different fragments of that story and that it all got bundled together into like inflatable fucking nativity scenes at Costco. Which are wonderful by the way. I don't know why you'd want to run those down.

Super classy, especially when they deflate. But the point being is just that there's a massive, deeply resonant from Leonard Cohen to Bob Dylan to, you name it, right? Songs, art, literature, poetry, unpacking these stories. So that's one thing, just a utilitarian practical argument. Cheaper, faster, quicker to use what we start with what we got. And there's also a place where like Kurt Vonnegut

did his grad work at the University of Chicago on narrative structure and the shape of stories. And he's like, stories have different shapes. There's up then down, down then up, up then down then up, like, you know, boy meets girl, you know, like man in a hole, like he maps them. He's like, and the coolest one ever is the Cinderella story, which is starts out terrible, gets awesome, you know,

dancing with the prince, stroke of midnight, then precipitously terrible, stagecoach turns into a pumpkin, all is lost until fits the shoe, happiest ever after. And then he says as a sidebar, he's like, actually in that Cinderella story, that's the most resonant one we've got, but it also maps one-to-one with the New Testament. So I tell that whole setup in my last book to then make the case that like, well, the atomic bulletin of scientists say we're 90 seconds to midnight. We're in our own Cinderella story. And what happens next as far as a potential crash to the worst ever?

Looks like it's some version of that is likely to happen. The question is, is what's our happily ever after? And if we situate ourselves in that story, can we both brace for impact, understand what's coming and not be completely spun out or lost in it, and then also keep reading for that happily ever after back to the beginning with the wolf you feed, radical hope. Right? So that was the case. I did not also then say, hey, by the way, it's the New Testament, right? Because I didn't want to be the Jesus guy, right? So I was like, all right, but by the way, it is also the New Testament, right? So the New Testament is East of Eden,

you know, Eve and the apples, the worst ever, Noah and the flood, Tower of Babel, Exodus and prison, Benton Egypt, all the shitty shit till, oh, hey, high point, little star of Bethlehem, right? He's come to save us all. Oh no, terrible, good Friday. And then yay, Easter Sunday, roll back the stone. We're all saved. So you're like, oh shit. So the fact that our current existential predicament happens to map the Cinderella story, which is more deeply based on the New Testament Christian tradition, just leaves us saying, not that it's better or more accurate or true than Buddhism or Sufism or Hinduism or anything. It's just to say, hey, in our current moment, this idea of being humiliated,

lost, broken down and betrayed and somehow bearing witness and then being redeemed through the worst possible situations ever, that might, just might be speaking to us in a way that is uniquely and especially timely. And if we can pass it cleanly, like artistically, creatively, ethically, historically, if we can do that, well, does that provide a story that can get us to feeding that wolf of radical hope a little more? Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, How will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection

and links to former guests who can guide you, even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Purpose and Habit Change. Feed your good wolf at oneufeed.net slash newsletter. Again, oneufeed.net slash newsletter. Well that's a beautiful place to wrap up. You stuck the landing there. You and I are going to continue for a few minutes in a post-show conversation where I want to talk a little bit more about Leonard Cohen, actually, because I can talk about him forever. And then I want to talk about a little phrase of your seek

novelty, make art help out, which I think is a great little framework. So listeners, if you'd like access to that, you can go to whenufeed.net slash join, become part of our community, and also support the show, which we would much appreciate. Jamie, thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for listening to the a real pleasure. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time.

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