The School of Greatness - How to Find Meaning in a World of Chaos w/Jamie Wheal (Part 1) EP 1099

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

“Our humanity lies at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity.”Today's guest is Jamie Wheal, who is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated Stealing Fire. He’s the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance. The conversation was so interesting that it's split into two parts. Make sure to look out for part 2!In this first episode Lewis and Jamie discuss how to find meaning in your life, the different arcs we all go through in life, how to have faith and deal with uncertainty, and so much more!For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1099Check out his website: www.flowgenomeproject.comCheck out his new book: Recapture the RaptureThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod

This is episode number 1099 with Jamie Wheel. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

Marcus Aurelius said, When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love. And Carl Jung said, Who looks outside dreams. Who looks inside awakens. My guest today is Jamie Wheel, who is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-nominated Stealing Fire. He's the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance.

And he's written a new book called Recapture the Rapture, rethinking God, sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Minds. And our conversation was so fascinating that I decided to split it in two parts. So make sure you check out for part two coming in a few days. And in this first episode, we discuss how to find meaning in your life today, the different arcs we go through in life, how to have faith and deal with uncertainty, the difference between the meaning of life throughout history and where we're currently headed, and so much more.

If you're enjoying this fascinating conversation, make sure to share it with someone that you think would be inspired as well. And a quick reminder, if this is your first time here, welcome. So glad you're here. Click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or Spotify right now to stay up to date on the latest and greatest. And please leave us a rating and review with the most fascinating part of this interview over on Apple Podcasts when you're done. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Jamie Wheel.

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Very excited about our guest, Jamie Wheal is in the house. My man, good to see you, brother. Very excited about this. You've got an amazing new book out that is going to transform lives and blow people's minds called Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. Why have we lost our minds in the first place? I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons, and they're all happening at once. So basically, the world has gone exponential exponential and it is both getting exponentially better. So if you think of Steven Pinker, if you think of inspirational TED talks, you can be like, hey, literacy is up,

poverty is down, war is down, health is, all these things are trending in the right direction. And you can honestly and authentically feel like this is the best of times. And then you open the paper and you see wildfires and floods and pandemics and social unrest and protest. And you think, oh, my God, this is the worst of times. And toggling back and forth between that is crazy making. And because they're both exponential, it's damn near impossible to figure out exactly where we reside. Right. And it's almost as if there's sort of two arcs to life. I mean, I experienced this. I don't know if you do, but the difference, in fact, E.B. White, right? The guy who wrote Charlotte's Web, that old kid's book. He has this beautiful quote where he says, I wake up in the morning

torn between savoring the world and saving it and that can make it hard to plan my days. Ooh. Right? And then he says, and then I realized in fact that the savoring has to come first. The savoring? Yes, the savoring because if I didn't have a world to savor then there would be nothing worth saving. Right. The challenge is it seems like a lot of people are in this, the world is ending, although it seems like with the media, the world is ending, how do I fix everything or save something? As opposed to, how do I enjoy what I have right now?

Yeah. And that's the whole, you know, totally in the power of now, people say, oh my gosh, being in time with causation, like what's happened in the past, what's happening what's happening next that's super stressful or we get off knocked off our center so just be here now Rob does too right like and you're like yeah kind of like being present super important but we are we are time traveling space monkeys we have the ability to conceptualize past, present, future.

And at a minimum, because we're 17 degrees off the axis of the sun, unless you're at the equator, we have seasons. So that forced us to be thinking there's times of famine and there's times of feast. There's times of abundant photons from our nearest star and not so abundant chlorophyll and metabolism. So we have to plan. abundant chlorophyll and metabolism. So we have to plan, right? So if you just go cross-eyed and Zen about it, it's inadequate to deal with leaning times arrow, right? But if then if you forget to be present, right, then there's nothing to save it. So what do we need? Both? Yeah. I mean, no, no surprise, right? But, but it's not,

it's not a beige middle, right? That's unsatisfying. It's much more like, you know, Hegel, right? The German philosopher. It's a dialectic. It's forever back and forth between the guardrails. And how do we dynamically steer based on what on earth is in front of us? What are we paying attention to and what needs to get done? So like hyperthermic people don't make very good poets, right?

So you're like, okay, I might want to put on a jacket. I might want to rub two sticks together and get a fire going. Now I can have access to greater creativity or expense. So, you know, it feels like to boil all that down, there's the sort of coming alive arc, right? Which is what we were all raised on. Anyone go up to be president or an astronaut and sort of hashtag best life. Right? We all deserve to be healed, whole and healthy. We deserve to travel the world. We deserve to have unique experiences. We deserve to have amazing soulmate twin flame relationships, a whole bit. Right? And the entire baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, we were all raised on that.

Right? And it's beautiful, uplifting and inspiring. It's always been partial and not everybody's even had access to that promise, but it's beautiful, uplifting, and inspiring. It's always been partial, and not everybody's even had access to that promise. But it's pretty awesome. And that's about expanding infinite time frames and expansion of possibility. So if you were at a picnic at the beach, you'd be like, okay, what do we pack? What's going to be the most amazing lunch ever? What blanket do we take? Where do we lay it out for the nicest view?

That's the coming alive arc. But then there is also, and again, most folks through human history have had to wrestle with this. It's just the bubble kid, the bubble generations. After World War II until lately, like say 2008, so boomers, Xers, and millennials, who we really grew up in this historical anomaly in the developed West. It's never been nicer. All war was externalized. Massive insane upward upticks of consumerism, standards of living, education, cheap debt, you name it.

All that great stuff. And we're experiencing the intersection of the staying alive arc. And the staying alive arc is the exact opposite. It starts high and goes down across the chart. And that's about the diminishing of timeframes and resources and options. Meaning we don't need to work as hard to stay alive. Well, no, no, no. Like triage, like, oh, sh**. So staying alive is your picnic at the beach.

You're like, wait a second, all the ocean's getting sucked out to sea. Wait, why are all the animals fleeing to higher ground? Like, what's that phone warning going on in my phone? Oh, sh**, it's a tsunami. Now what do we do with our day at the beach? So the coming alive arc and the staying alive arc are like intersecting right about now. And you can lie in bed. I mean, I've had this experience.

I've had this experience like three or four times. So the world is ending and the world is the best it could ever be at the same time. And what do I do with my day? How do I plan my day? So I'll be lying in bed and I'll be like, oh my gosh, that's such a phenomenal travel idea. We'd like to go do something amazing, an adventure to plan, an entrepreneurial idea, a creative project.

You're like, yay. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. So inspired. And we're in a pandemic. I know. Oh, shit. Do we even get to?

Right. Do we even get to? Or should we be doing canned goods and should I be researching getting solar panels on our roof? Or should we be f***ing off to Costa Rica because the wheels are coming off Austin? We've been without power for two weeks. That's crazy. So that, right? It's like Chinatown, like that Jack Nicholson thing with Faye Noe. She's my mother. She's my sister. She's my mother. She's my sister. It's that schizophrenic toggling between what is the frame or the lens that explains the data i'm experiencing and gives me clarified direction to act right and so that's a meaning crisis we're lacking meaning well we have lost the the handrails or the the trusted institutions right so we've had a collapse in both benign

authority like secular so academic institutions religion corporate well those that's divine authority so we've got we've got benign authority on the side of like everything from your doctor your friendly white-coated family doctor is the one who got your cousin hooked on OxyContin and has your little son, Billy, pinballing off the walls on high industrial strength amphetamines for his entire life. Or Adderall or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and Jordan Peterson, and maybe, you know, maybe your nervous spouse who's been pole-axed by benzos like Klonopin. And you're like, wait, and that's called iatrogenic illness. And The Lancet just published a study saying something like 21 million people worldwide suffer from iatrogenic illness,

which is just fancy for your doctor fucked up and didn't admit it. So you're like, okay, so we can't trust those guys. Academia. Academia with the Ivy League admissions scandals, peer review crisis, replication crisis in social sciences. So you're like, oh, that stuff's not so trustworthy. What about the captains of industry, McKinsey and Goldman?

You listen to the big short, and you're like, oh, whoops, Goldman was selling credit default swaps out the front door and hedging it in the back door. They were totally implicated in the 1MDB Singapore scandal. McKinsey was fined for partnering with Jacob Zuma in South Africa and siphoning $7 billion out of the South African treasury and potentially collapsing Mandela's entire post-apartheid project.

They just got clipped a month ago for conspiring with Purdue Pharma to help sell more OxyContin after it was already determined to be completely addictive and underpinning the opioid crisis. So you're like, wait, this is where the best and brightest from all the IVs go to get their internships, to go play the game. And that's hollow. And they got the political side of things. Politics, WHO, CDC, all these things. So you, so, and there's no more, even Walter Cronkite or BBC radio. It used to be like, okay, world's crazy out there.

Vietnam War, civil rights, whatever. What's the trusted source? 7, 7 p.m. We all sit down and literally a sane, rational voice of reason, who's a neutral arbiter of all things good, true and beautiful, will sit down and tell us

what's what. That's gone. Even snubs and fact-checking sites have become politicized. You go to the journals of record like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. They've become increasingly partisan editors, op-eds, boards, and readers. And no one recognizes or respects

any information coming from out of those. So that's always been a shorthand for what is considered consensus. So that's just been boom. And at the same time, we've had the collapse in organized religion. So Pew Research Foundation, I think it was in 2015, but it's only been continuing, which was the rise of the nuns, so like N-O-N-E-S, the none of the aboves, fastest growing and now for the first time ever, largest religious affiliation in North America. So it used to be you would always anchor off loosely or tightly some family of faith, some family of origin, belief system, and authority structure.

And now it's none is what people are saying. N-O-N-E's, right? And so now, you know, and you've got the sexual abuse scandals, you've got a thousand and one things undermining all of that, right? So what we're seeing is, as we've seen this collapse of the roof of shared meaning, we're in a vacuum and we're getting fundamentalism on one side, and we're getting nihilism on the other side. Nihilism is? Like, I believe in nothing. So like Tyler Doden in Fight Club.

Yeah, yeah. Right? Like, we're the middle children of history, man. You know, our great war is a spiritual war. We were told we were going to get to grow up to be presidents and rock stars, and we're not, and we're pissed. So screw it all. So screw it all. So screw it all. Make it our own game, yeah. You know, one in three, one in three millennials surveyed within the last couple of years believes that actually military rule would be preferable to democracy.

Right? Is that because they're seeking order or structure or some type of leadership? I mean, there was a great piece in The Atlantic, and it was basically saying, look, this generation, they commit fewer crimes. They have less premarital sex. They drink less, potty less. They do all the bad things less. They go to college in historic rates.

They have historic amounts of student debt. They've done everything right, and they've been handed this steaming shit bag of society and ecology and he said so no wonder the kids want to say burn it all down so you're like okay so that's that's the lie of the land and and at the same time you know back to the picnic on the beach during the tsunami thing our spidey senses are all a tingle. Everybody knows that business as usual, and not just the old narratives, but the old structures, are cracking. And as a result, on a sort of primal animal level, everybody's hopped up and wound up about what do we do now. And so the question is, you would think or hope, like, okay, and we were talking about this earlier, right?

Like in times of great crisis, we rally in whether this is FDR and the only thing we have to fear is fear itself or you have Winston Churchill and never, ever, ever give up and keep calm and carry on. And in the beginning of COVID, right? People started trotting those out. Like, is this gonna be another one of those? And you're like, yeah, maybe no. Ooh, people started trotting those out. Is this going to be

another one of those? And you're like, yeah, maybe no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Not at all. So at a time when a meta-crisis, meaning it's not just one thing. It's everything. It's economic. it's political, it's geopolitical, it's ecological. Health. Right. It's all of the things, all at once, intersecting, overlapping, and catalyzing. Oh, man. Right? It's a lot. It's a lot of trauma that's being built up in every human being around the world.

It's an awful lot. And I actually, funnily enough, it was Tim Ferriss that inspired this. He had put out in one of his newsletters a TED Talk that he said made him cry. Right. And I was like, oh, great. Let me check it out. Like, it moved the fellow. I'm curious, too.

And it was that, I think his name is Sam Berners. He's a little bald-headed kid who had a congenital condition from birth. And he basically knew he wasn't long for this world. And then he gave this totally bad, and he was all of like 65 pounds soaking wet but he became a Boy Scout he wanted to play in the marching band he told bad puns and made hip-hop jokes and I mean just an awesome just one of those testaments to life through tragedy mm-hmm right and and I watched that like four days before I had to give a talk at a futures conference in Austin.

And I just tore up my speech and I was like, okay. And this was right when there had been some of those really, you know, like the UN reports for 2020 are saying, hey, we've got 10 years, folks. Otherwise, this is a wheels off situation. Right. So I really thought long and hard about it and tried to come up with a 15 minute talk that addressed this. Right. And where's the, where's, where's the path for courage?

Where's the path for hope? All this stuff. Gave the talk. And it was the opener. It was the opening keynote. And it went over like a lead balloon. It was, this was all crypto psychedelic blockchain. Right, right, right.

Future, future, future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like. Going out of space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, like pitching the conference. It's like, this is it. If Ted and Burning Man had a baby. Sure, sure. And I'm like, well, future, future, future, yay. Going in outer space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like pitching the conference, it's like this is it, if Ted and Burning Man had a baby.

And I'm like, well, okay. If Ted and Burning Man had a baby, then you're the people that, we need to have this conversation, right? And one of the founders came up to me as soon as I got off stage and he just hissed at me. He's like, you don't give a f***, do you?

No, he did not. He absolutely did. And they stiffed me, which was really, really funny. Like I've never had that happen in my life and I spent an entire week building a complete not this wasn't like a pull it off the shelf stump sure sure you could give me and it was completely from the heart to try and adjust all this Wow so I went home in the fetal position when was this 2020

yeah no why so so I was like what did I do wrong? How did I f*** this up so badly? And it occurred to me, I was like, oh, I just totally misjudged three things. Why did I get this allergic reaction from an audience that would otherwise should have been primed for this conversation? And it was, first was cognitive complexity. Pretty much what we've just been talking about. Exponential everything in different directions. Because what we're missing is exponential meaning you know you've got exponential quantum computing you've got exponential current cryptocurrencies you've got exponential learning with khan academy and distributed online exponential transportation with uber copters we've got exponential biology with crisper and you know everything is exponential

except how to make sense of it all so i was like okay so our capacity to hold multiple competing and conflicting ideas simultaneously without crashing our mental browser or shitting the bed right right so like that's one thing right and basically you know you can you can address that with a sort of fairly tidy thing which is like a triangle of like a post-conventional metaphysics. So like, how could we all just kind of upload? Because I mean, short answer is get educated, right? Like good old fashioned Plato and Socrates 101, like learn how to learn, learn how to think. But we don't all have time for that, right? So if you have a little triangle where you're like, okay,

Pascal's wager, Occam's razor, and Bayesian probability. So you're like, Pascal's Wager, Occam's Razor, and Bayesian Probability. So you're like, Pascal's Wager is basically, you know, he famously said, better to believe in God in case he's real, right, than to not, than to be an atheist and get doomed to hell forever if I'm wrong. So moral is better at least conceive of the inconceivable just in case, right? So better to conceive of the inconceivable. Is there a global cabal of satanist pedophiles running the world i don't know it seems a long shot but maybe let me at least keep an eye on that um are we possibly at the end of the anthropocene era and this is the extinction of humanoids on

this on this on this little earth form maybe you might want to keep tabs on that um is this the unraveling of the nation state perhaps is this the collapse of global economy perhaps there's all sorts of things that it would be better for me to at least keep tabs on be aware of yeah and to be out and to be arrogantly dismissive right so that's step one once you've let that in the gate so you've conceived of some of the inconceivables then you got occam's razor which is the simplest solution is usually the best right so rather than, once again, global conspiracies of satanic pedophiles, you might just say, hey, maybe the system is bankrupt and we've been getting lied to. And maybe there are systemic structures and maybe there's a bunch of different cabals or small

groups conspiring, but they always slam into each other, cancel each other out, do it. But the idea of some sinister centralized thing, potentially unlikely. Right. Or we're all, or there's going to be UFO contact or, you know, and I just did a bunch of psychedelics. I'm not convinced that, you know, the Galactic Federation is going to come and land and fix everything. The Occam's Razor explanation is, I was on drugs that night. Right? So let's hold that one first and foremost, like before we go leaping to conclusions.

So Occam's razor is always just don't get into excessively Baroque or complex or self-indulgent explanations, which require connecting 17 dots to Sunday. Let's bust it all down and say the whizzy wig, what you see is what you get is always a very high bar to go beyond. Yeah, that's two. Right, that's two. And then the foundation is Bayesian probability, right?

And Bayesian probability is just to say, hey, nothing worse than false certainty in a complex situation. So map your equation of all the bits and pieces that might be contributing, and then basically delay. It's a little bit like Tai Tai Chi or martial arts where you like You know you put out a foot But you don't wait it because if you put all your weight on your front foot then your opponent can see Right and take you to the ground. So the idea is like I'm gonna put my foot there

But I can also pick my foot up right so Bayesian probability is saying pay attention to all the variables and Constantly update them with the latest, most trustworthy information you have, and delay making binding decisions for as long as possible. Right. Get it peer tested, you know, all that stuff. So that's the first one. Do we have the cognitive complexity to hold it without overwhelming our emotions, our nervous systems, and our sense making, and screen of death, right? Rainbow wheel of death, like just crashing our browser so and because if we if it crashes we tend to get bored we get irritated or we just say that's all too much to think about so i'm just

going with this one and then we ignore a whole lot of reality and potential impacts the next one is is um are we willing to kill our sacred cows? Meaning what? So our sacred cows, right, I mean it comes from India, but the idea of like you can't touch those ones because they're holy, right? And so, and we just talked about a few, right? If I believe that, you know,

and this is like Francis Fukuyama, like back in 1989, he wrote that book, The End of History and the Lost Man, because it was basically the fall of the Berlin Wall. And there was that kind of moment from like, fall of the Berlin Wall, I guess that was 91. I think he might've written this in 89. But like, so right around that era, we won the Cold War, yay, right?

McDonald's and democracy for everyone. And free markets and democracy are the pinnacle of human civilizational attainment. And they're a steady state. Like this is it. This is the top of the hill. We've got here. We've arrived.

History has literally ended. Now we're just scaling, improvising, tweaking perfection. And that worked right up until you could say, you even have the invasions of Iraq, the Arab Spring, that idea of we're going to topple all the despots and the bad guys and the dictators and then citizenship and democracy will arise in their place. Like, whoops, that idea of like, we're going to topple all the despots and the bad guys and the dictators, and then, you know,

citizenship and democracy will arise in their place. Like, whoops, well, that didn't quite happen. You know, and now we have all these ideas of what we took as sacrosanct, right, is now up for grabs. I mean, even in this last election cycle, there were a number of conservative politicians starting to tweet, hey, by the way, reminder, this is not a democracy. This is a republic. You know, like softening the ground for like voting suppression and things like that.

You're like, whoa. Like, what? And how did something like a global pandemic, which was supposed to, you know, we would naturally expect a globally coordinated response and for sure a national effort, not factionalizing states and pitting different political governors against each other and like, you guys can rot but we're going to look after our people. Like mind blowing stuff. Things that go, you know, we're a democracy and we're talking about actively suppressing votes, not gerrymandering and the kind of backroom deals that have always happened, but like saying the quiet parts out loud and you're like, wait a second, what's that about?

Or the fact that the earth is forever bountiful we might actually run it out we're at peak sand right peak sand peak sand like that whole notion of go pound sand right literally like china has built more in the last three years than the united states concrete has poured more concrete in the last three years than the united states did in the entire 20th century shut Shut up. I'm not. And they're having to import sand from Saudi Arabia. And they're also mining sand in India to ship to China. We are running out of construction sand in the world. So you're like, oh, wow. So there's so many things. And then even just take, you know, not like this was our father's generation, but the whole, you know, 20 years in a gold watch.

I pick a company, I put my head down, I work my way up the ladder, and then I get a retirement and a pension. Well that got blown up with the privatize everything and do your 401k. Now you just do your dollar cost averaging and you match your matching funds and you save and you've invested in mutual funds

because no one can plan the stock market and don't get freaked in ups and downs because it always comes back over time, right? That whole story. And now you've got baby boomers that are just simply shit out of luck and having to work convenience store jobs for the extra spending money and health insurance. One in three millennials has a side hustle just to make things, you know, so like the American dream of home ownership. Well, that's gone. We're doing Airbnbs now. Car ownership.'s gone we're doing airbnbs now car ownership no we're doing ubers and scooters you know um marriage no we're doing tinder and right right hookup culture and

bumble like like all of these things have been externalized and outsourced right so on the global systemic where there's all sorts of things that we took as sacrosanct our sacred candles and on the personal like what did i think my life was going to entail? That we're having to take long, hard looks at. And it's that whole, you know, hundred year, you know, like the hundred year, thousand year flood, 10 year flood kind of thing, floods and fires, right?

For a long time, you're like, oh sweet, well we're at the thousand year flood plain. We're bulletproof. You know, except that, right, we've been having hundredyear weather events several times a decade lately. So you're like, oh, shit. OK. And Churchill said it nicely. He said, plans are worthless, but planning is priceless. So that notion of having some estimation, like our old rulers or yardsticks are kind of getting blown out of the water. We're experiencing

accelerating change. You know, the word unprecedented gets used so often these days. Unseasonable, unprecedented, you know, there are all these things. And you're like, yep, that's now enough. We have to come up with new adjectives or new yardsticks. But having some sense of what do we think is coming gives us, and based on what has happened in the past right that's what foresters do for fires that's right civil engineers we don't know what's coming now no but we we can

run back to the planning is priceless uh-huh it's a little bit like like choose your own apocalypse like mad max libs right so like fill in the blanks as you choose to give yourself a story. To plan and prepare. That matches your model of reality. Interesting. And at least then you're not in fibrillation. What are you planning for? Well, I mean... What's your apocalypse? Well, my personal sense is

if you run like the cold game theory analysis, you know, just kind of like almost like, like not even homo economicus, but like homo machiavellus, like what the fuck happens if everybody's acting out of self-interest and we just kind of do the things we seem to continue doing?

Then there's an awful lot of trend lines that don't pencil out happily right now. If we're all competing against each other, going after our own, trying to take what's ours mentality. And, you know, collapsing into factionalism and tribalism and all of those things. Not to just mention the pigs and the python,

like the things that even if we all had an Ebenezer Scrooge night tonight, we go to sleep and we have our ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and we wake up, you know, like Paul on the road to Damascus. I've seen the light and we all promise to change and do everything right from here on. It's still going to get catastrophically worse before it could get better. Why? Well, just because there's a lot of

inertia in our systems, right? And it's going to take decades plus to flush through all that. So like I said, even if we suddenly became some cross between Stephen Hawking and Mother Teresa and Elon Musk tomorrow and throw in the Dalai Lama while we're at it, right? If we just became that collectively and we did everything right, we are still going to have a hard landing.

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the question is just, is it an inferno? Do we lose the the landing gear? Right, or do we end up you know in a belly slide on the grass and how many people get off, right? So you're like, okay, so that my sense is hard saying not knowing

like it is too complex to know for sure and I mean my backgrounds and like mountain guiding and and Will this medicine and that kind of stuff so I always just think super and guiding and wilderness medicine and that kind of stuff. So I always just think super literally. Like if you're in the mountains and you can sleep warm and dry, so like you've got a sleeping bag that's protected from the elements, you can suffer a lot during the day and you can recover. If you have adequate food, if you have a fuel source. Clean drinking water.

Clean drinking water, navigation, so like maps and compass, and medical, right? If you have those things, then like the Seattle Mountaineers have a bumper sticker that says, your worst nightmare is my vacation. Right? So you can go push it, and you can engage, you can climb into the pain cave,

you can have the Sufferfest, and it can actually be really enjoyable. And you can even choose high, hard objectives that are totally optional. Like let's go climb that wild, crazy thing just to see if we can because it looks beautiful and treacherous, right? You can actually take on additional challenge. But lose your water filter, break your stove, watch your sleeping bag roll down a ravine into a river and disappear, and then suddenly you're in cascading triage to like, oh, we now have to beat a retreat to the trailhead and get back to civilization. So we just saw this in Austin.

There was this freak snowstorm, the entire Texas grid overloaded and was literally four minutes and 35 seconds from a meltdown crash that would have taken like over a month to rebuild. It was that close. And at the same time, virtually nobody has alternate or backup heat sources. It's all electric because they barely ever need it. And then that and then all the pipes froze. And then we also had a collapse in sanitized water. So there was boil water notices.

There was pipe. Some people straight up didn't have any. The whole thing. And you're like, oh, you know, who was it? There's a fellow at the UN

that said this beautifully, which was, we're only ever five missed meals from total anarchy. Right? Like a day and a half. Yeah. If you don't eat for a day and a half,

you're like, you're not thinking clearly. You're freaking out. You're stealing. You're freaking beating people up. And the doodly-doodly-doo neighborly shit. No, it's just like, I'm going to go on break-in and take some food. Yeah. Wow.

So my sense is, is like, what is... How did Texas handle it from your perspective? Well, I mean... People coming together and saying... Some folks did. Some folks did. Come stay here. Yeah.

I think, I think, and I think it's important to celebrate and spotlight those things, right? Because we obviously need more of that. And there was toughness, right? There's the same things that we see in stable systems of imbalance. There's absolutely the notion of environmental racism, which is simply that folks, dispossessed, disempowered communities are almost always getting the shortest end of the stick when it comes to where the trash dump is, where the Superfund site is, who has Flint, Michigan, drinking water, you name it, and then throw in crises and the interruption of services and then the restoration

of services. And then that also gets laid over exactly those same patterns and dynamics. So there are folks that, you know, pissed off to nice locations on private planes or, you know, or a Chicago or whatever, right? And that happens to people with mobility, people with disposable income, people with advanced intel or information and news. All those things help.

So the question is is how do we how do we rally ourselves together and I think for anybody that considers themselves Eve like some form of a leader for your family in your household for your community all these kind of things there's kind of a sliding scale right if I can look after myself and that's you know biohacking peak performance if I can sleep rest myself, and that's, you know, biohacking, peak performance, if I can sleep, rest, nutrition, mindset, all those things, and I've got enough gas in my tank left over, then I can be a loving and engaging member of my family. But if I don't have those things. If I don't, if I have a concussion or I have, you know, a diabetic blood sugar crash or I have a depressive episode or some mental health challenge or an addiction,

then boom, I'm decompensated and I'm back to having to deal with me first. But let's say I get me sorted, then my severe concern can expand to my family. Let's say my family is more or less thriving and happy, then I've got more left over. I can start caring for my community, caring for my country, caring for the world. And that is a sliding scale based on basically stability and access to energy and resources. So again, I could be a leader of the world and get hit on the head with a hammer and I'm back to self-care.

And it also has an expansion of concern and timeframe, which is I get hit on the head with a hammer, it's me now. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters except for healing the pain. Yeah, except for cracking my skull, right? If I'm in a plane crash with my family, it's me and mine now, right? If we are slightly better off than that,

we're now on the desert island, it's me and mine now and next, right? And you can see an expansion of how many people I care for over what kind of a time frame, immediate versus longer term. All the way to, like Bodhisattva, everyone, everywhere, every when. Right, and you're not only just caring for humans now,

but maybe all sentient beings now. You're maybe not even caring for all sentient beings now, you're caring for everyone that's ever been and everyone that's ever gonna. Leaving the place better than you found it. Well, yeah. And a lot of ethicists talk about that, like the idea between what's an existential crisis for humanity versus just a really, really sh** road ahead. Because their point is… What's the difference?

It's pretty academic for us because my sense is that the only thing that actually matters as far as human choices is my generation and my kids' generation. After that, it's academic. But ethicists will say, hey, an extinction event of humanity doesn't just mean everybody on Earth snuffs it. It means that every other human that is yet to be born but was going to be has snuffed it. Interesting.

So you get this aggregate cost when you terminate a species line through a keyhole event. Right. And that's inconceivably exponentially bigger as far as the loss. So my sense would be is can we first look after ourselves and our families so that, like put our houses in order so that we can then come back to the front lines and be helpful? How do we do that if we don't have a meaning anymore, if we don't trust authorities, trust the organized religions or politics or corporations? If that's all fractured and

broken now, how do we find meaning of why we're even here? Yeah. I mean, you know, obviously that, that answer is, that's unique for everybody, right? It has to be. And any tops down answers, no matter how good they sound at the beginning, almost always devolve into some form of fascism over time. So a question is, hey, if we are, meaning 1.0, we can call that traditional religion, offered salvation, here's the story of how you get to heaven, but at the price of exclusion. It was those who believed were saved, those who didn't weren't. So it was kind of a harsh approach, but it was fair. We're going

to lay our cards on the table exactly how we're going to play this game. Do this and you're saved, don't do this, and you're not saved. You're stuck. You are not in the tree of trust. Right, right, right. And then meaning 2.0, which we could say is sort of like the French Enlightenment on modern liberalism, civil rights, civil liberties, private property, markets, that whole thing, said, hmm, that whole salvation game, that's problematic. That's led to holy wars, all inquisitions, all of this, and superstition and all this bad stuff. So we're not going to do that. We're going to do inclusion. Everybody gets to play this game, at least in theory. At the cost of salvation, separation of church and state,

and Nietzsche's sort of God is dead. And that hasn't worked out too well either. Because an awful lot of people have correctly said, well, because the story was sort of like, wait your turn, play by the rules and your turn will come, we promise, right? And you're getting a lot of frustration and understandable even rage at the imbalances of that game. Like we were sold a bill of goods. And in fact, Joseph Stiglitz, who's, you know, he was World Bank, UN economic advisor, all sorts of incredibly high up positions. I mean, he basically just called the entire shell game.

He's like, it's been 40 years and the results are in. Neoliberalism and democracy have broken. And the benefits have accrued asymmetrically to those at the top. And in the last year, we've seen all sorts of things about what kind of recession are we in because of quarantine? Is it going to be a U-shaped or a V-shaped or a K-shaped, right? And a K-shaped just means the top 1% are now trillion and gazillionaires and everybody else is hosed. And I mean, to get to put this like really, to put a point on it, this blew my mind. I had written the first chapter of this book 18 months ago. And I had a paragraph and it said, when 68 people on the planet.

Are richer than. Hold as much wealth as the bottom half, the bottom four billion. That's crazy. 68 people could all fit on a bus, one bus. They have more money than half of the. Yes, than half of the world's population. And like, and just to note that,, that sort of asymmetrical accumulation of resources, energy credits,

like natural resources, it occurs in no living system anywhere, ever. Now, that was 18 months ago, just before we went to press. If you just go back and fact check, the number- How many is it now? It's 27. They can fit in a stretch limo. Oh my gosh 27 have 27 money and more resources than the bottom four billion four billion people in the four billion people now that that that just should break our hearts does that excite you to share so what

possibilities you could create potentially for yourself? Or should that break our hearts? I mean, well, in some respects, I mean, this is the other thing. I think the era of like, I think a good thing for us to think of is that physics trumps metaphysics all day long. So whether you're a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, free-market-y guy,

whether you're somebody who's all about particular neo-Marxist theories or interpretations, whether you're somebody who's all about particular neo-Marxist theories or interpretations, whether you're some new age consciousness, it's sort of going to be like, guys, I think it's time. At the poker table, it's a call. It's like, lay your cards down, because we're about to see what happens. And it won't be talking heads getting to spin their take, right? There's going to be a lot of surprised faces going, oh, okay, I guess this happened or this is happening. So whether that's climate alarmists or denialists, like we're going to see.

Whether that's social, whether it's nationalism is the best thing or globalism, like we're going to see. Whether these markets are stable or inflationary or deflationary or efficient or totally inefficient. And there's tons of rent seeking and capture. And we're dealing in late stage capitalism is a total sham compared to the ideal of a free market. We'll see. So there's all sorts of things in the coming few decades we're simply just going to experience physically. It's the whole sort of- Physics. Mike Tyson, right?

Like, everybody's got a plan to get hit. You get punched in the face. Yeah, right? We're about to take some shots. We've been taking shots, right? Yeah, well, I mean, and I would even say that,

you know, weirdly, because a number of people have sort of approached me over the last six months and been like, oh, dude, this is, you know, this isn't right like you called it. This is all happening

exactly as you said. And I'm like, no, no. Actually, this was a total surprise. In fact, I haven't, just to my own sanity and not to be a total buzzkill at parties, I took, I wasn't even deeply monitoring global pandemic risk. I mean, you knew kind of there's these,

like favelas in Sao Paulo and crazy Uber slums in Africa and Lagos and Shanghai, and that those were going to be hotbed incubators of the next wild pathogen. But you didn't think it was going to be globally this soon. I mean, you can only wrap your head around so many wild ass things and still be sociable. You're like, this is going to crumble and this is going to crumble in the next decade, but not this and everything else. So this to me was a total flyer.

And the crazy thing is that it actually has nothing to do with the underlying structural conditions that are still the blaring red alarm. Right. Gosh, man.

So this is merely a dress rehearsal, mid-level, totally manageable thing. We're f***ing up terribly. Right, right. Meanwhile... Everything else is falling apart.

Yeah. Yeah. So the questions are, is... Do you think this is a good thing that's happened this soon and not delayed suffering and pain? Is it good that we're seeing this now, the pandemic? I mean, obviously, it's not good when people are dying and suffering and things are happening. But in the overall scheme of the world and healing and awareness and reinventing ourselves. Is this necessary? Yeah. I mean, and those kind of comforting just so narratives, right? Don't worry,

cupcake, it's all going to be okay because here's the bigger plan or story, right? Everything happens for a reason, those kinds of things. I have a hard time sinking my teeth into those. And I, because I just, I mean, how on earth do we know? And I think in some respects, I guess, if I had to kind of define how I might look at things, it's a little bit more like a transcendental existentialism, right? So the existentialism part is life is utterly meaningless, right? You know, Camus said it famously in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus. He said the only serious question is whether or not to commit suicide.

Right? So you actually have to stare into the screaming abyss. You have to be like, okay, strip it all out. Right? Jack Nicholson and a few good men. You want the truth, you can't handle the truth. Right? You've got to actually go stare into the screaming abyss and understand that we are just monkeys with clothes on a little rock next to an irrelevant generic star circling around.

Floating in infinite space. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's horrifying. Right? You know, and, and, there are these moments of sublime grace, beauty, and potentiality. And we are the existential mayflies of this universe with opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortexes. And we're here for like eight or nine decades on a good run like to fight and to grieve and to build and create and destroy and to be alive and like holy we're alive and so and that part like holding

and cherishing that part at the same time as holding the profound grief which by the way is the third leg of the stool we talked about too, which was complexity, sacred cows. And then as we do this, where this is actually the appropriate point of this conversation, which is once we've stared into the screaming abyss and we realize that we've just been whistling past the graveyard, right? It's kind of scary, so I'm going to whistle a little song and hopefully that keeps whatever's really big and scary away. Like, really? Like, what does that do? Right? It's a little bit like all the True Blood movies and all the hit vampire movies where someone invariably, like,

spritzes them with holy water or makes a crucifix. And they're like, are you kidding? Like, you believe that old wise tale? Like, no, no, no. We're way hipper than that. Yeah. Right?

So, like, our monsters, I think, are actually far stronger than our superstitious warning. Yeah, you got to get to the heart to kill us. Yeah. Right, and so the question is, how do we learn to weep, not whimper? Right, we're so, like whether it's trigger warning.

What's the difference? Well, the difference is like, is fibrillation, versus, like eustress versus distress, right? So like, you know, most people think when difference is like, is fibrillation versus like eustress versus distress, right? So like, you know, most people think when they see like, you know, whatever, Grey's Anatomy or things like that, right? Or ER or house, right? The idea of like paddles, I mean, clear, right? Those things, that's to start somebody's heart.

It's not. It's actually to stop someone's heart. Because what's happening in those situations is ventricular fibrillation, which means their heart is in a spasm, which will kill them, right? And so what they're doing is they're zapping it to flatline it so that then the brain impulses and stop back up and resets, right? And we are in ventricular fibrillation,

psychologically, socially, politically. We're all experiencing micro PTSD. And you look on Twitter, you look on social feeds, you look at the amount of bad faith inflammation. We're just looking for excuses, dying for excuses to misread someone's intent, take it wildly out of context and just unload rage. Why? And it's just because our nervous systems are in fibrillation, right? So that's the whimpering, That's the whining. We're collapsing into these who can play the victim card.

The most. And there's been an interesting study, and I haven't gone back to look at the actual paper, but a friend just told me this yesterday, which is there's a correlation between playing victimhood identities, like seeking that mindset, and dark triad narcissistic Machiavellian sociopathic personality types. So now you've got bad actors going, help, help, I'm being oppressed, right? Simply because it's a highly effective power play right types. So now you've got bad actors going, help, help, I'm being oppressed, right? Simply because it's a highly effective power play right now. And then you have legitimately huge populations

that are being victimized by conditions in life that absolutely need infinite care, compassion, and support. They're not getting it because we're in this fibrillated state. So the weep, don't whimper, is open our hearts to the wounds of the world and feel it mmm right because it connects us to ourselves it connects us to each other and it connects us to our courage and our purpose and then get the back up right and let's do our part right we're

here for a reason let's figure it out yeah let's figure out what this is what's I mean what should we be having faith in? Should we have faith? That's such a good question and such a good word. And is it blind faith? Is it just, well, this is what our grandparents told our parents, and this is what the book says, and this is what our God says, or whatever, so we just trust it blindly?

Yeah, I mean, I think those days are gone, right? I mean, we're just, we are, there's such a spike in cynicism. And there's a collapse in benign and divine authority. So we can't really kind of go back and dust them off and reboot them and prop them back up again. We've kind of seen that they're like, you know, Potemkin villages, like back in the Stalinist days, where they would take people driving through Moscow and then they would literally do almost like theater stage sets, those were called, to look like they were really robust and thriving. So we kind of have seen that a lot, institutions that we took to be solid and timeless are

Potemkin villages. Right. We're seeing how the sausage is made and everything. Yeah. And it's thoroughly disappointing. villages. Right. We're seeing how the sausage is made and everything. Yeah. And it's thoroughly disappointing. In fact, I mean, I think there would be an amazing kumbaya situation if you took alt-right conspiracy theorists and far-left conspiracy theorists and you said, hey, guys, let's just

get together. Because the diagnosis of the problem is 90% aligned. It's you can't trust elite institutions. We've been being fed a bill of goods. All media and messaging is massaged and positioned, and we're supposed to just take it. There's a sort of dual-layer system of politics and power and really, you know, this is Noam Chomsky's critique from way back when, right? But, I mean, it comes from both sides. All those things, and the common man is getting a bill of goods.

You know, fill it in. I mean, Bernie in 2016 and Trump in 2016, their analysis of what was wrong with America was, yeah, it was at least 80% identical. Now, their prescription as to what we ought to do, who's to blame and what we should do next about it, those go very differently. Right. playing field is, I just think it's helpful. And it also clears away the noise and the clutter, because it's like that last 10% is the whole ballgame as to who's to blame and what should we do now, right? And that's where you have to get, that's where you really have to slow the tape. And what do we believe in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where you have to get very, very specific, because I mean, you know, an example that I can't get out of my head, it just seems to be such a strong one. It's like Charlie Manson. Like I watched that there was a documentary in like 1973. It was all original footage. It wasn't like a CBS, like after school special with actors. And, you know, and it's idyllic. It's naked, blonde haired hippies, like smoking weed by the waterfalls in Topanga and like hanging out and doing the whole thing. Right. And like oh my gosh and then you hear them interviewed and and again 90 of what they had to say they said

hey you've come out of the 50s the Eisenhower industrial complex you're trying to please your parents you don't even know who you are you need to get clear on what your purpose is what your sexuality is what your joy is what you're like yes yes check check check check check and then up is down down is up you're like kind of interesting they're tripping maybe we'll give it that we'll give them that one and then life is death and death is life, wow, maybe on a kind of like super zen point of view, perhaps and then like, oh, then kill the pigs and then oh wait, that part, right?

And so we're seeing that with anti-vaxx conspiracies, we're seeing that with QAnon, we're seeing that with new age, like we're all gonna vibrate up to the next density and leave behind this earth form or all the other, the chubby people who don't eat arowans and whole foods. Right, that whole thing you're seeing, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow the tape right there.

Because like, you can have psychedelic fascism, you can have ethno-nationalism, you can have, there's all sorts of pathological places these go, right? And if you're not aware of the philosophical and ethical implications baked into what all sounds reasonable at 100,000 feet, but you actually start trying to put them on the ground and you're like, oh man, those don't go to happy places. So to your point about faith, right? How do we create a meaning 3.0?

Yes. Right? That takes the promise of salvation, because without salvation, people who grew up as nuns, people who grew up as atheists, people who grew up unchurched, right?

And no any. Yes, and no any, not habits, have succumbed to diseases of despair, depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide. Because they don't have a greater purpose. That's the staring into the screaming abyss. If you've got no rope to pull you back. Did you say disease of despair? Diseases of despair, yeah.

No hope. And WHO has shared in the last couple of years, more people on this earth kill themselves than die of all wars and natural disasters combined every year. No way. So think about our news feeds. All we see is war and natural disasters. Now just disappear that all and just say the silent epidemic is people saying, I cannot make sense of being alive on this earth. So why be here?

I'm going to die. Yeah. Yeah, which is one more breaking of our heart. But the thing about heartbreak and actually facing our grief is it categorically makes us stronger and connects us to our courage. And so like Tonglen is a Tibetan practice of meditation that's specifically about this, right?

And Pema Chodron, who's a Tibetan nun and Buddhist teacher, lays it out. She's like, you know, most meditations, like think happy thoughts, say a mantra, try to get to stillness, try to get to emptiness, something along those lines. Gratitude. Yeah, happy things, right?

Yeah. Tonglen's the exact opposite. And it's like start with like actually picturing every picture of the suck like literally imagine the black tar the smoke that they're pain your grief your angst your jealousy your you know your your resentment your neurosis and then inhale it like literally visualize it as tar or smoke inhale, and then exhale light, love, compassion. And then when you can do that for yourself and you actually, this is an imaginal exercise, right? So it works as you cultivate that muscle. It's not some misto thing. It's a thought experiment that you can build those

muscles to do better. Then you can expand it to everyone in your family, everyone in your community and everyone in the world. So you can actually play with that. And then over time, that does something, back to the idea of steering into the skid and racing cars. If you steer away from the skid, you spin out. If you steer into the skid, you have dynamic balance. So you're like, oh, now we take our suffering as raw material for our compassion.

And Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple and a bunch of other things, has been a friend and student of Pema Chodron's. And she said this beautiful line in one of her books. She says, my heart's been broken open so many times now. It just swings open wide like a suitcase. And that's what I mean about the learn to weep, not whimper. Learn to feel.

Yes, learn to feel it all. And Martin- Don't block it and don't be whimpering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Martin Prechtel, who's a powerful Mayan shaman poet teacher from the Mayan tradition, he says, "'Grief is praise, right?

"'We only, it is love's way to honor what it misses.'" Phew. Right? And our buddy, Zach Stein, who is a Harvard-trained psychologist and educational theorist, he's, I mean, the number of times I bring this up, it's obviously has haunted me, right? But he said, we are perhaps entering an era where billions watch while millions die. This era right now, this time. Yeah, like this 21st century.

And so you think about that, and televised and live. I mean, think about George Floyd, right? That ricocheted around the world in an asymmetrical way. There've been all sorts of events like that all over the place, all the time. Something happened and it broke our collective brains and hearts. And if you think about even about the languaging, like I can't breathe.

It was so profoundly and vulnerably human. And the rage that it prompted was that. It was the anguished cry of humanity saying, no, enough is enough and there's infinite complexities and realities and analysis to unpack around that that event those protests all those things but just at that core human level right it's it's profound and and part of that is it used to just be if something happened you heard about it through scuttlebutt in your neighborhood or your village.

And that was our world. That was the only information we had. Now it's just that you turn on the phone, every moment you see another tragedy. Yeah. And I read something, probably the most psychoactive thing I've read in the last six months was something in the MIT Reader.

And it was this wild timeline of humanity's awareness of our own mortality, basically. And it was sort of going all the way back to the Greeks and ancient Hebrews and all this kind of stuff. And it was saying, look, sure, there were end of times mythologies always baked in. But that was kind of literally lights out, beam up to the mothership, some complete transformation of reality. lights out, like beam up to the mothership, some complete transformation of reality. But it wasn't until like literally the 1700s, the 1800s, like the discovery of Halley's Comet. And then the fact like, oh my gosh, that's a comet. And then like, wait a second, that could come really close to earth. And then like, holy shit, are we going to actually get hit by a comet? And then paleontology and like, wait, there's dinosaurs and evolutionary theory.

And like, we're not the first ones to be here and these guys aren't here anymore and what's that about? And like holy smokes, the idea that humans could go away and that life in some other form could continue without us. Crazy. We've only had this for like, wrapped our heads around it briefly for like the last few hundred years.

And in fact, speaking of like that Francis Fukuyama book, The End of History and the Last Man, there was the first dystopian science fiction novel, years and and in fact they're speaking of like that that francis fukuyama book the end of history and the last man there was the first dystopian science fiction novel was written in 1804 by a french guy called the last man and it was a it was a sci-fi story about a future with the extinction of humanity and that poor buster committed suicide oh my gosh right so you're like you're like holy and now you got greta thunberg right youberg. You have a generation coming up who are like post-2008. They weren't raised with unicorns and rainbows. And they're like student debt and loans and financial crashes and unemployment and ecological catastrophe.

And they're like, you were pissed. And how dare you? Right? And so this awareness, there's a sort of sense, it's a little like Neo and the Matrix. It's like, yes, you know it's like yes you can learn kung fu and you can fly but you're also in a vat of goo and the machines are coming right so so let's give you a hug and a high five welcome home right right you get a weekend to bask in your newfound identity and possibility and then mond morning, show up to work. We're needed. We're all needed.

Right. So how do we get back to this place of when we realize all these things are breaking down around us, these beliefs, these ideals, these foundations, what our parents told us was true, whatever it might be, how do we begin to start to understand what our own faith is, what we should believe in, what we should hold on to if there's nothing solid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the beautiful thing is that the answers are all around us. They really, truly are.

In fact, one of my favorite pieces to write in this book was talking about, because basically he's saying, look, if we're going to rebuild meaning 3.0, how can we take the best of organized religion

and the best of the modern liberal experiment and put them together? Science, ancient wisdom. Yeah, everything. And inclusion. Inclusion and salvation. And is that even possible? Right?

And so clearly, a single top-down version, contraindicated. We've seen Stalinism, Maoism, fascism. We've seen all the hisms, schisms, and they don't work very well. They always end up, basically,

whenever the ends of a utopian ideal are heaven on earth or off it, then the means are always justified. So you always end up with bad things happening. Because you can always justify it against the ideal. So let's not do that. Let's do decentralized, open source, let a thousand fires burn, and 900 of them will go out in the storm, but 100 will catch. And then we'll see, and we can pass the light, pass the torches, right? And so one of the simplest things is that, A, dust off all the wisdom traditions. There's

thousands of years of accumulated brilliance, insight, and artistry. But even in the American tradition, and if you take America, because we seem to be kind of, I don't know what we're doing, but we're sort of doing it on behalf of humanity right now, right? Like the grief, the rage, the conflicts, the discussions, everything that is happening here

is sort of in some form rippling out through the world or being echoed by similar movements. So race, class, gender, politics, nationality, ecology, all the things, right? And the American tradition has always been this crazy hodgepodge of international experience. You know, you've got Chinese laborers building the railroads and irish folks coming in and west african folks coming in and western europeans southern europeans all these things and and every you know and and indigenous folks and all this you know and spaniards coming up and like and smashing and crashing into each other and somewhere in that created like

gospel jazz blues folk right um into you know hip-hop into all of these things this this living songbook and in those songs those redemption songs right is it's always the same story right it's it's it's i've been down so long right i'm broke open and it seems like up to me right that was a 1920s blue song drake covered it nancy sinatra and the doors covered it Right? I'm broke open. And it seems like up to me. That was a 1920s blues song. Drake covered it. Nancy Sinatra and the Doors covered it. Right? You're like that sense of going down the road feeling bad.

Right? Right? And I'm singing it. And in fact, that becomes a triumphant celebration. Acknowledging it. Talking about it. Being aware of it. Like Beyonce. I mean, the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has had the Church of Beyonce on Wednesday nights. And they literally get together and they use Beyonce songs as hymns and liturgy and it is straight the f*** up praise music. Wow.

Right? It's like Aretha Franklin like dust it off. And like Beyonce's mom is like Creole, Chineserican-american french like all she's probably got like half a dozen lineages and she grew up in a houston baptist church and then she's singing this stuff and like dolly parton like singing like at the oscars she was singing this it was for that movie trans america which was all about lgbtq folks right and she was singing this song like we've all been crucified and they nailed Jesus to a tree, but when I'm born again, you're going to see a change in me. And you're like, okay. So you hear it.

And Stanley Crouch of the Lincoln Jazz Center, the idea that jazz, blues, all of these traditions are actually this heretical, hermetic, mystic spirituality that is unique to America. Because it was all freaks and misfits who came here. The Protestant church and the Catholic church, they wouldn't have signed off on half the shit that ended up in America as these wild ass hairball experiments.

And we created this defiant liturgy, right? This living hidden scripture in our concerts, in our songbooks, right? In our protests, in our marches, of like we're here and life hurts and we rise up singing. And you know that, you know it's powerful because those are the songs that people hold up lighters for. Those are the songs, like Lady Gaga, right?

Like Born This Way, these are the testify lady gaga right like like born this way these are these are the testify songs give you chill songs they give you chills and they give you chills like even that chumba wumba like way back when like i get knocked down but i get it's gonna keep me down you've got these drunken drunken scots yeah right so so that you you know that like going down into the mud of our shared suffering that and that's back to the weeping not whimpering right and then and then and then somewhere in that feeling the pulse right feeling the beat like feeling the chorus and then you're like oh we are here and then it becomes that sort of i am spoticus moment right where you're like okay we

are all dead men walking. No one gets out of here alive. Right? So how do we do this? It's the, oh, captain, my captain, and dead poets, right? We're going to get expelled for doing what we're about to do. Right. Our love outweighs our fear.

Wow. So that sense of, like, we all love those moments. We love Leonidas, right? You you know at thermopylae we love we love those those those calls to arms and courage tank man in tenement square some dude wearing like having two shopping bags in his hands he wasn't prepped for that shit he just ends up being like no this stands in front of a phalanx of tanks and says, enough is enough. Crazy. Good dude got disappeared. We've never heard from him again, and he's never been tracked again. Really?

There was like four people in matching clothes that came and, and so either that was good, guys, or highly likely it wasn't, right? But that triggered something. And Nancy Keenan at Harvard Business School, she wrote, we shared a stage at MIT a year ago and she's she's a firecracker and she wrote this amazing book called forged in crisis and And it just changed how I think of this stuff. She it was Abraham Lincoln Dietrich von Bonhoeffer who was the the pastor who tried to assassinate Hitler Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring which kicked off the environmental movement. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist. And one other.

And the thing that was crazy about their stories, including the Emancipation Proclamation, right? Every single... Oh, and Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. And the key was that at the moments that are in Wikipedia, in the moments that we hear about in school, they had no f***ing idea what they were doing. Like the Emancipation Proclamation was a Doug Flutie like final huck at the buzzer. It was desperate and he had no idea that it was going to work or become the tide of history. And so you realize, but she writes, she's like, when people act from that spot,

with courage, but with a desperate courage type of... Yeah, a complete, like no certified male saying this all works out, Sonny, but you got to do it anyway. He says it sends shockwaves through the world. Right, so we've talked about all the exponential curves, doing all the exponential things, and how overwhelming that can be, and also fundamentally how scary,

how much uncertainty, how much fear, how much risk there is in the world as we face it. But the flip side is nobody promised us a rose garden. Have you watched Game of Thrones? I mean, yes, they made that up, but life has been cheap for an awfully long time. Red in tooth and claw and nasty, brutish and short. Has it ever been thus, right?

So can we step out of being deconditioned zoo animals? Can we step back into the bigger arc of history? Can we sack the up with courage and access soul force? And that's what Martin Luther King, he said that in that I Have a Dream speech, is when we can rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. And most people, that's how they know it. That's that was the moment that that concept Came up on the stage, but he actually had borrowed that twice over so it wasn't even his words or concepts it was this fellow this African American mystic named Howard Thurman and

he was a mentor to the civil rights movement, but he was so kind of like in his Jaw love grew and he didn't actually ever like march with pickets, but he advised all those guys. Wow. And all of them carried his books with them, like day to day, like literally in their satchels kind of thing. But he went to visit Gandhi in 1935. So he was the first interfaith African American ambassador to go to India ever.

Wow. Because think about this. I mean, 1935 is not that after Reconstruction, right? I mean, you've still got living former slaves. You know, this is fresh times. And so he goes there and he meets with Gandhi and Gandhi shares with him this notion of nonviolence, which they called Satyagraha.

And it basically means alignment with truth, right? And that that is unbreakable. What is the truth? Well, but truth, integrity, right action, humanity, dignity, all those things. And so Thurman came home and he's like, okay, that's the Sanskrit.

That's a mouthful. No one in this country is going to understand that. I'll tell you what, let's rebrand this. We'll call it Soulforce. Because up until then, civil disobedience was just a tactic in the civil rights movement. They're like, let's not get our heads bashed in, and let's not needlessly antagonize folks with guns and batons and dogs. We stay alive.

That's what it was. After that, civil disobedience became the central philosophical pillar of nonviolent protest around the world. And that's soul force. and that's soul force. And Erica Chenoweth at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, she's done this study that's been restated a thousand times, which is that when she studied from, I think, like 1950 to maybe 2010, I forget quite what her time brackets were,

but basically late 20th century into early 21st century, civil rights movements that have been successful, that Eastern Europe, Asia, United States, everywhere else, that it required about three and a half percent of the population. That's it. Three and a half percent of the population to actually make these phase shifts that then can create this catalytic event, which is beautiful and inspiring, right? And that's certainly where Extinction Rebellion and a lot of other social and environmental protest movements have taken inspiration lately. There's also kind of a critique of that where you're like, hey, you know, it's one thing to be like, I insist on riding in the front of the bus and the bus has four inflated tires and gas in the tank to get your destination. Right. That's one move. Right. We're saying, hey, there is this civil experiment.

We're saying, hey, there is this civil experiment. We've been locked or blocked out of it, and we are politely asking for our opportunity to get on board. But it's another thing to be like, hey, we are sailing off a cliff in that there bus, and we have to transform it chitty-chitty-bang-bang style into a helicopter before we crash. That's kind of where we are. So it's like complex intersectional metacrisis.

And the bus itself of like prosperous, stable, civil society is not necessarily persisting. So the Eric Acena was 3.5% is that honking great asterisk of like TBD if this holds up. But the other thing is like we're nowhere near 3.5%. Right. So let's get there. And we'll take stock.

Right? We'll take stock once we do. And that sense, so you asked about faith. And we've been playing with grief. And we've been talking about courage. Right? And our buddy, actually, Andrew Huberman, he's a professor. Love this guy.

Yeah, right? Love it. Rock star and so curious. And then also comes up with ingenious experiments to then validate stuff that you would otherwise just be spitballing about, right? And he told me, it was fascinating because he told me the story of this research as it was happening. And then last year, he actually finally published it in the journal Nature, which was this story on courage in mice. And they wanted to see,

they wanted to see what happens basically when we're terrified and what's going on in our brain. Right? And you know, everybody has heard of fight or flight, right? But just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's correct. So it's actually, there's flight or freeze. There's that network. And then there's the stand and fight network.

So technically, it's a salience-reducing network, meaning like, don't look at me. I'm going to make myself small or get out of dodge. Or a salience-enhancing network, which is like, you want a piece of me? It's like yelling at the bear or something that's coming at you as opposed to like getting the fetal position. Yeah. And it all goes through the thalamus in the brain, right? And what they found was is when they stimulated this very specific region, right,

that it stimulated a salience-enhancing response associated with courage. So 98% of mice, when faced with the shadow of a hawk, which is what they do in the lab, they just torment these poor mice. Here comes shadow. Here comes dinner. A snake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then 98% of them piss off and hide under the nearest thing. And then only 2%

actually thump their tails, but they do it once they're under shelter. So it's kind of a little bit of a chihuahua move, right? Not very ballsy. So then they stimulate the courage center and then they stand shut up thump their tails and say bring it no it's like bruce lee they do this bite you yeah yeah but it gets it gets even better than that right so so andrew being the compassionate dude he's like he's like man am i just pushing their buttons and sending them to their doom that doesn they have choice? Do they have choice? And so given the choice between food, sex, and having that stimulated,

they choose having courage stimulated over food and sex, and humans do too. So like we would rather be brave, we would rather feel brave than get laid. Why? Because it is essential. And the final the final just like amazing but you can't make this up the name of that Center is called the

nucleus reunions so in Latin that means the seed of our reunion it's how we come together mmm is our courage it's poetry you can't mean we couldn't have planned that well, Andrew discovered it. So we we want to feel courage over pleasure over looming threat right like the reason that 300 Harry Potter dead poets Thelma and Louise right being like fuck this right? We're gonna send it no Right the reason those movement even Rogue one you could tell like I hadn't watched Rogue one yet And it got really strong reviews and people people were like, okay, this is kind of money. This is a solid, solid addition to the Star Wars franchise.

You're like, what's going on here? Like there's a thing here. I don't know what it is, but there was some gravitas to it. And you're like, oh, it's because they die at the end, right? And in fact, there's a guy, Matthew, gosh, Matthew Polly or Pollard, I think. He was basically like Tim Ferriss before Tim was. So he was at Princeton in the early 90s, and he decided to kind of like game his system.

He had grown up watching Saturday morning kung fu movies, so he was desperate to go and become a Shaolin monk. So he punched into China long before there were any Westerners, right? So super, super early. Interesting. Finds his way to the Shaolin temple. Classic thing. In the rain.

Gets shut out. Has to sit on the porch. Finally gets invited in. They adopt him. Blah, blah, blah. And then he gets a bunch of VHS tapes shipped over with Rambo and Schwarzenegger movies. So it's like, rickety old TV. Plug in the VHS.

And he's like, I'm going to show you our hero movies. And they watch them all night on Saturday night. Binge watch them. And then he finishes like, so what did you think? And they looked at him with funny faces. And they're like, well, Matthew, man, what's the deal? He goes, I thought you said these were your hero movies. And he's like, yeah, these are action heroes.

They're absolutely amazing. He's like, no, no, no. They all live. They all live. No one dies. No one dies for the cause. In all of our hero stories, right? And you have to die.

Really? Yes. Right? And so that notion of consumerism and rational individualism and all the isms and the stories and the specifics of, you know, 20th century, 21st century Western culture have been you can have your cake and eat it. You don't have to make tradeoffs. The fairytale ending. Yeah. You do deserve your best life.

There is no ambiguity or complexity to this thing. And it's happily ever after always for everyone or at least for the good guys. Right? complexity to this thing and it's happily ever after always for everyone or at least for the good guys right versus the the notion and and my friend and and business partner uh kirk cronin is a former dev group commander said a modern version of this he said whenever they were going down range into combat they planned to come home in a body bag shut up well of course right it's not surprising but he said you know i had written my letters oh my god i established my will i had i had figured out my trust for my children so that they were good through 21 or through their marriages like i had i had it all done prepared for the worst so that and he never lost a man so that i could go out there fully wow so it's the samurai notion of meditating on a thousand ways to die so that you're not distracted on the battlefield. Right. And so that notion, we are terrified of

death. Right. We punch ourselves full of plastic surgery, dyes and fillers. Right. To the point of creating caricatures of youth and beauty in ways that you just, you know, that are heartbreaking. You're like, gosh, just allow yourself to be an elder. Allow yourself to have the dignity and the appreciation and the respect. We ship our grandparents off to nursing homes to be cared for by anonymous hourly wage workers and pumped full of drugs so they don't make a fuss.

We are obsessed with youth and beauty and all of the things, but don't acquaint ourselves with our mortality. And it's that contrast that actually gives us back our dignity. You know, it's sort of like our humanity feels like it's at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity. Say it again. Our humanity lies at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity. Say it again. Our humanity lies at the intersection

of our mortality and our divinity. And when we can balance those two dialectics, right, then we have a chance to be, you know, what you could sort of call

a homegrown human. Like, I'm no longer trying to get off this ride. I'm no longer trying to transcend it. I'm not looking for my next sound bath or cacao ceremony

or medicine ceremony. I'm not hop-bopping around to catch the next big thing. Nor am I collapsed in despair. It's much more like Jimmy Stewart in A Wonderful Life, right? It's that moment of like, oh, holy. I am blessed with the opportunity to live out the rest of my precious life with full agency, completely committed and fearless. I'm here. Welcome. Click the subscribe button of an Apple podcast right now or on Spotify or wherever you're listening to podcasts. And if you enjoyed this first episode, this first part, please leave us a rating and review of the part you enjoyed the most about this.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And also, if you want inspirational messages sent to your phone every single week from me, some motivation, inspiration, and other goodies as well, then text the word podcast right now to 614-350-3960. And I want to leave you with this quote from Deepak Chopra, who said, when you make a choice, you change the future. And today you have an opportunity to choose, choose a new thought, a new idea,

a new action towards a greater life for yourself. You get to choose every moment you have that choice. I'm so grateful that you chose to be here today. I hope you gained value today. Please come back for part two because it will blow your mind. And if no one has told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved,

you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.