The Taproot Podcast - Science, Bureaucracy, Oil and Odyssey at the end of Empire Part 2

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Oil is a psychological event, and nobody experienced it as one. For ten thousand years, every household chose nightly between eating its oil and burning it for light. Petroleum ended the choice, and this episode is about what winning did to us. Part two of the Parachute Problem finishes Nolan's Odyssey first: the Sea Peoples as the empire's own veterans, Odysseus bringing Troy's tactics home, Athena's amnesia as national dissociation, the war with no ledger. Then the substance: what crude oil actually is, why America has not built a major refinery since 1977, oil and light as interchangeable words in scripture, Christ as an oil word, the 1973 embargo and the inward turn, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as an unconscious dug into salt, Carbon Democracy, and the question nobody will ask: are we going into a dark age. The Bronze Age left the answer baked into clay, and the only thing that crossed the last dark age was a poem carried between people. Free resources: gettherapybirmingham.com. Support the show with code TAPROOT at Hardy Nutritionals.   oil psychology, petroculture, peak oil, why no new refineries, oil refinery shortage, US refinery 1977, crude oil explained, sweet vs sour crude, 1973 oil embargo, Strategic Petroleum Reserve salt caverns, Carbon Democracy Timothy Mitchell, Bronze Age collapse, Sea Peoples, Odyssey ending explained, Christopher Nolan Odyssey analysis, xenia law of Zeus, Linear B, dark age, Great Endarkenment, energy unconscious, Bataille expenditure, empty self psychology, Jungian psychology, oil and light Bible, Taproot Therapy  

Hey guys, it's Joel, and this is part two of Empire, Oil, and the Odyssey, which is a jumping off, you know, continuing from the psychohistory series that we just did talking about how these bureaucracies are sort of a part of psychology at a micro level in the individual, but also a macro level in the society. And so I'm not just picking on academic psychology and the cold machine, you know, of the bureaucracy around academic psychology and psychology research. I think a lot of that silliness is not just something that psychologists do. It's something that is an academic researchers do. It's just something that's kind of a human thing. But one thing that I wanted to say before we get into part two, because I forgot from last time, I'd written it down and then I started talking and talked over it. Somebody wrote an email and said, why if the FDA presented this in 2024, this rejection of accepting the MDMA study is moving forward?

Why is it in the news in 2026, which is a good question? Um, the reason is that, uh, Trump signed basically an executive order saying that they needed to expedite that and do it faster. Um, and Biden did a similar thing with psilocybin when Biden was in office because this is one of the cheaper things that they can do when you want to be like, oh, we're in a mental health crisis. Like I really like the poor people that are traumatized or I really like the troops that are traumatized in the VA and like it's not working. Um, generally like one of the fastest things that you can do is tell somebody that there's like a miracle drug on the horizon that is coming. You know, like I don't know how much good faith you want to ascribe to

any of these things, even if they're doing something that, like, I don't think Trump is doing this for the, or Biden is doing this for the reason that I was saying that the FDA should have in the first episode. I think it's a similar thing that, you know, what Biden did with psilocybin was said, I'm going to put a whole bunch of money forward for research into psilocybin so that a private company can get it and and patent it, some form that we know is, uh, you know, there's not a lot of liability around and can pass regulations and that because this is some miracle drug that needs to happen on horizon. Um, generally like I'm kind of suspect of that stuff because what happens with the things like especially psilocybin is they say, okay, uh, this is a naturally occurring

thing that we can't really patent. So in order for a private company to care enough to, uh, do anything with it, they would have to find some way to package it to where it is patentable, which generally means you like mix it with a salt. And then you say like when this thing is mixed with baking soda, you know, and you know, IV saline, it all of a sudden is its own drug and then we can patent it. And so now this company will do it. And another thing that they do is something called like a Rasmur or a polymorph, if you remember chemistry, which is really silly. It's a really silly part of how the U.S. allows drug companies to patent drugs. It basically means you have the exact same molecule, but it's a slightly different shape.

So if you remember chemistry, like unless something's like a fat or a fairly complicated molecule, it doesn't really matter as long as you've got the same amount of atoms of the same type, what shape it's in. So like, for example, you might have something that is a molecule or it's an atom that can bind to something in five different spots. well, if you have the same amount of things binding to it, like if you have two things bound to it, it doesn't really matter where they attach. As long as they're on one of those five spots

for a simple molecule that might do something with dopamine, it's the same thing. And so a different shape of the same molecule is called a Rasmer. Like one of the things nexium, like prylaseum is basically one, the L shape of the nexium rasmor of which there are three. I think. Maybe there's two. I don't really remember. It's been a long time since my psychoform classes.

But anyway, it's a silly thing where what happens generally when the government does this, like what Biden did is gave a bunch of money to private companies to research psilocybin. But if they did patent something, which they haven't yet, and they got it through trials, which they haven't yet, they would own it. And then it would just become really expensive again because all of that taxpayer money that's like your money and my money would just go to the bottom line of a company that now owns this thing. It can charge whatever they want for it. Doesn't seem like a great system. Also, what Trump's doing is just telling the FDA to, like, expedite the process and make it go through faster so that they can research MDMA.

But what's kind of silly about that is, like, that isn't saying what the problem is with the system. And then that, like, it should be different. It's just being like, I'm going to kind of put my hand on the scale because we need something to happen here. So anyway, people ask about why this 2024 study was relevant in 26. I meant to say it and I completely forgot to do it. One of the things is kind of funny, more on this later, sorry,

a big aside at the beginning, but Biden sent when he was elected this packet to clinics with, when you do your, when you have to like do a bunch of paperwork for the center for like mental health, like every year you get these big packs from these different organizations. And he sent a thing that was like, I want there to be a new PTSD treatments. I want there to be new drug treatments that are like cheap and good and healthy.

And we're going to like award money and you need to submit the this information. And I was like, I'm really sure that this is not going to include the thing that I just patented. That more information on this later, but we have a book and a patent and we kind of found this new brain pathway that does different things. Some people may know more about it than others than listen to the show, but there hadn't been anything on the show about it yet. And he was like, I'll see if this works. And you needed like a million dollars to even begin to proceed with this thing where he was being like, we're willing to look at grassroots. Anyone? No, this is a game that you were not allowed to play. And that's kind of how it works. And so, you know, I don't think that it was really like a good faith move by Trump or Biden.

I think it was them saying, what is the thing that I can do to make mental health care look like I care about it while pissing off the least people who are wealthy. And if you throw a whole lot of money at a drug company to own a private patent, you don't piss anyone off. When you start saying like, hey, maybe we should regulate insurance or have like Medicaid for all or something, then you tend to start making people scared. So it's not, or when you say, let's change the way we do research or let's look at research that might actually reflect science, those would be political actions. You know, these things, not so much. But anyway, that's why it's back in the news. So going back to this sort of synthesis of oil empire and bureaucracy.

You know, like, one of the things that is really interesting to me, it sort of changed the way that I read ancient texts, especially the Old Testament, like the Bible, is there was a professor who told me when I was in comparative religion school that basically like when you're in the Bronze Age and you're wandering around in the desert, the most valuable research,

you can have, like one of them that is perishable. It's not like an imperishable resource like gold or like a, you know, a cool like sword or something. So I'm going to metal would be oil or fat, which is the same thing, oil and fat. You've used fat just to render oil, whether you're getting it from an olive or you're getting it from like mutton or something. And you have to choose basically because it does go bad eventually. Do I want the calories from this? Like do I want to eat it to like have my army march across the desert? Or do I want to want to. to turn it into light. If I turn it into light, then I can get work done when it's dark.

I can have security at night. I can do these different things. And that so much of the Old Testament is like written with that calculus of like, and so like there's a lot of Psalms in the Bible. There's a lot of descriptions of God, especially in the Old Testament, where they're like, heaven or God is like so good that you can have light and you can have food at the same time. You don't have to pick. You get to have light and you get to have food.

And if you're not from this time, like that's a kind of calculus that you're maybe just not hearing, you know, in the text. But it would be the way that somebody from this age was thinking because it was a calculus that they were running all the time. Do I want calories out of this or do I want extra labor hours, you know, protection? and, you know, a ton of, you know, going back to the Odyssey. Like when you're reading the Odyssey, this isn't necessarily in the Christopher Nolan movie because there's an age gap between Athena and Odysseus. So it'd be kind of weird maybe. But one of the things that is like a big signal of wealth is that somebody is coated in

oil, that their hair is oily and that is specifically in the Odyssey, olive oil, that their skin is like greasy and light reflecting and beautiful. And like every time in the epic point before Odysseus goes somewhere, and Athena's like, wait, wait, wait, I want them to know that you're like a trustworthy, cool guy. I don't want them to think you're a crazy guy that's been homeless on the ocean. Let me rub you down with oil right fast. And then Athena gets all this oil and she rubs Odysseus down right before he meets people

who he needs to impress, like right before he goes back home. And so that the last episode, like I ended it with that idea from the Odyssey. that, you know, everyone, Odysseus says, you know, verbatim at the end of the movie, you know, basically everyone who can write is about to die. Like, we're going into a dark age. And I think Christopher Nolan is making that movie because he kind of thinks that we're going into a dark age. Maybe not for the reasons that I do, but, you know, there's enough parody that we both see that happening. And so he says, you know, Odysseus says, this story will only survive if people sing it. It'll be an oral story. It's, you know, him playing with the historicity of the,

the text that he's adapting. And, you know, that that is true. Like in if you look at like, I don't know, 1,300, 300 BC, there's this, you know, Eastern Mediterranean, like, world. And it just completely goes down. You have all of these droughts and weather patterns and empire's collapsing and refugees coming. You know, Egypt gets invaded by all these people just showing up to the point where they can't continue their empire because it just becomes too porous. You had a whole other empire move on top of the land that your empire was on. And it breaks things. You have like the Mycenaeans, the Greeks, and you have the Hittite kingdom. I know collapse is about the same time. But all that's like part of the Bronze Age collapse. One of the things that

you see like an Egyptian text at this time is like pictures of people with like weird stuff on boats that you normally wouldn't have on boats. You could identify like is that a worship or is that like, you know, a grain barge or is just like a trader who's going somewhere. And you see people that have like buildings and furniture and all this stuff on boats because an entire empire is like invading Egypt, you know, by by sea and by water. And it destabilizes everything. So, uh, when you know, a lot of a lot of that they talk about the sea peoples in the Christopher Nolan movie. The sea peoples are coming. And there's these raiders, you know, that the Egyptians carve a bunch of this stuff. And they show that all these people were coming by sea. Now, the Hittites, the people were

coming by land into their kingdom. But, you know, the best guess is that there was not really this huge outside enemy, that it was like the system just being put to the test where it couldn't absorb the amount of migration that was going to happen. And a lot of these, people were moving from, you know, what essentially is like Europe into this other area because there's this drought and this famine. But in the Odyssey movie that Christopher Nolan does, he basically says, you know, Odysseus wandering at sea and creating all of this chaos and creating all of this, you know, violence while he's trying to get back home is the sea peoples that the people in Greece are afraid of. So he's kind of playing with this idea that like maybe the empire ends when the

front of the empire comes home. When you start treating the people at home the same way that the empire used to always treat the people out there. And this sort of, you know, Greek empire or the imperial coalition that's just conquered Troy in the Iliad is not going to survive those veterans coming home in the Odyssey, even if it takes them 10 years to get back. You know, the violence that an empire sends out to the periphery comes back and then lands on its core that's not really a theme in the original odyssey it can be read out of it it is the way that christopher nolan is reading it because of the point that he's trying to make um because no one even though it's not really set up that well in that movie um because there's only like one scene of odysseus burning down a village it's implied that odysseus has been sort of killing a whole lot of people

to stay alive and get back home. And then he's been seen as this Viking raider that even though it's one guy, his homeland is becoming unstable based on the fear that he's causing in the periphery by the time he gets back home. And I kind of have issues with Nolan as a director because he's amazing.

Like there's a shot in the Elliott, I mean, there's a shot in the Odyssey where it's the shot of Penelope looking through the loom that she's weaving on. And there's this large format, you know, IMAX lens, that just turns that fabric in front of her into this,

this cream that colors her face and the color's perfect. And it's probably my favorite shot in any movie ever. So it's like no one will do things like that. But then also like when it comes to action, he can't really direct action. The Batman movies, everyone will get mad at me because they'll be like, those are action movies. No, they're not.

There's very little action in that. You know, it's like the language of heists. It's the language of film noir. It's a language of detective movies. there's only like three or four action scenes in those movies and they're not very good. You know, like a giant airplane being grabbed by another airplane out of the sky and Batman. That's not really action. Like, you know, like that's a different genre that he's using to do this.

And then he also, he writes theme and tone beautifully. Like he writes things in movies that you can't really normally say because people would be like, you're just saying like the theme out loud. But for some reason when he writes that, it works. you know like an interstellar when they're like maybe quantum physics is like a force that ripples throughout the universe but also like love could be a force like that too you're like man this dialogue shouldn't work and it kind of does what he can't write is dialogue when he's not writing theme and tone so i i i anyway i i see those as problems but one of the reasons why the movie is so

beautiful it really works is that he does theme and tone in a complex and nuanced way that works really, really well. So that theme of the Bronze Age collapse being something that everyone could see coming and no one could prevent. And also it was kind of the fault of the people doing it. I think is something that Nolan is trying to, you know, indict us right now so that we see what, what is happening to our culture. And, you know, a lot of this stuff is self-evident. We can see these bureaucracies. We know how they work. We know how dumb they are. And we're still really not able to push back against them or change. So the last episode I said when several episodes I've said that I think that we're kind of moving into this like epic of just dissociation as a nation. And the poem,

the Odyssey, that's what Nolan is taking out of it accurately. The ending of the Odyssey is this giant national dissociation by a god, the epic, not the movie, where, Athena comes down and says the civil war that's happening in Ithaca where all of the nobles are killing each other the only way this is ever going to work is if I basically erase all of their minds and you have this like little

dreamlike ending where it goes back to the way it was before and even though Odysseus has been gone for 10 years now he's back with Penelope and you know the right trajectory of the heir to the throne has been with Telemachus has been restored

but that is by wiping the minds of all these people, basically having them forget the violence that the power vacuum made them happen. And then we have all of these epic poems after the Odyssey where Odysseus is like not a nice guy, where the violence of the work doesn't go away, where it keeps coming back home. And Nolan actually references some of that stuff a little bit, more so than I thought. I didn't, I thought he was just going to kind of take the poem and then do something that he wanted to do with it. But he does write things where this thing is in conversation with like the history of the fall of the Bronze Age, like the real history of the people that made it. And at the same time, the extended sort of fictional history of all of the little epic poems that were before the Odyssey, you know, or in the middle of the Odyssey and the L.A.N.

Or after them, you know, like Odysseus has another son with Cersi. We don't have that poem, but Talogynus or telegamous, my Greek is not great. but he basically he comes home he has a son with sercy and that son eventually comes back to itica and there is a bloody reckoning and you know there are it's part of a bigger story even though not all of that survives we know it by other people talking about it and no one like compresses that whole moral world of the poem into this idea of the law of zeus which is an oversimplification but it's a movie like i'll allow it and he says you know the the in the the real Greek tradition, that would be what you call zinia, you know, this guest friendship,

the guest host relationship, you know, the duty to feed the stranger before you ask his name. You don't know if he's a noble or if he's a impoverished beggar because he may be a god in disguise. And you may be punished for not, you know, feeding him. You know, in the Bronze Age, that wasn't manners. It was international order. It was the people who do this are Greek, their order, they are chaos, and the people who don't do that, who might just kill you because you believe in a different God, that's chaos. That is the edges of the empire. That is the darkness. And we are the light. So when you start to

have that moral order crumble, when you start to have those rules and norms and things break down, you're bringing the darkness into the light. You're bringing the chaos into the center of the empire. And so much of these plays were written to remind people that they had to do this. You know, culture is picking the works of art that reflect the rules that it knows are the most necessary. And the Odyssey is kind of the one that it picked. It survived. You know, the other people who don't do the law of Zeus, who don't do the guest host relationship, they're the edge of the map. They're they're monsters. You know, the Cyclops eats his guests. You know, the Amazon's are sometimes useful in mythology, but really they're kind of the scary

group that may not play ball with us when they show up or the Ethiopians, you know. The Searcy turns people into animals. She is better than human. She's given these gifts by the gods, but the monsters are just monsters. He does a line that I like a lot. When Odysseus is trying to go a different way, and he's trying to go further west than he's supposed to go.

The people say, if you go there, you will not like what you see. And they're letting him know he's kind of leaving the world, the center of the world. And, you know, the point walks you through all of those things. And you do feel, you know, the movie works because you feel like you left the map. You left the real world. And you're in this place of kind of monsters and Odysseus is trying to get home. If you can just get home, then he'll be able to back in the center of the empire.

And the realization and the climax of the end of the movie is that I brought the chaos home. I created it. I brought it here. And because we made compromises with the law of Zeus, we've actually. destroyed what home was and there's no home to go back to anymore. But how much of this kind of breakdown of these things sounds familiar? Like, just current events, man, like we used to fight, even if they were evil, even if they were bad, you know?

Wars used to be fought for things like land or like ports or money or like self-interest. And, you know, they were greedy, monstrous things that, you know, American history has done. that you know the history of every country you know probably has done but you could read the ledger and you could kind of see what the blood was for like what the empire was buying there was a logic to it even if it was immoral or it was against your morality you look at something like what's going on in the strait of Hormuz it costs an empire and there's nothing in return like we're not doing that for a material reward which is a weird feeling because even if I disagreed with wars that were happening in the past. Like, they were still happening because of a reason that I understood

or a reason that people could, could infer, even if they disagreed with it. You look at this, and it's almost like denial, denial that an old imperial egoic structure is breaking down. It's not even a war for resources. It feels more like theater, performed so that the empire can keep trying to believe something or assert something that it must not feel as true if it needs to assert it because that's how insecurity works. And, you know, we've talked about, you know, like the parachute problem in the last episode, like the idea of the insecurity of these organizations that can't admit that the emperor has no clothes. I'm trying to bring these things together. I tried to write this essay on the Odyssey. I tried to write this essay on like the post

recent, you know, bureaucracy in what the psycho history of American mythology is doing the psychology right now because it's harder to be pragmatic and political as you creep up on the future of a series like that. You know, not everyone, there's not a lot of Henry Ford fans out there. You get closer to the 80s and 90s, people start to get mad. And then also just about the nature of of like empire and oil itself. Like just as a practical thing. And they kind of became this collection of notes that hopefully I can land the plane on this talk, you know, going through it because they all sort of seemed like they were

saying the same thing to me. You know, Jane Brock's is the person who I told you that thing about the professor. It came from, you know, a really long time ago that she was the one who wrote the book. I think it's called Illumination. I don't remember. It has a light bulb on the cover. I read it in like 2004. But her book has this place where, you know, she's talking about how there's this deep, like, hunger for light for oil, uh, that, uh, she's the one that was talking about the Bronze Age things are being like, you have to either do oil as food or, uh, calories or calories or calories are light, basically. Um, and she, but she talks about, you know, like the, the whole like fleets scouring the planet for whales, you know, in the British Empire.

they were they were getting oil like it was this it was the source of oil that became this enormous national project an economic project that you to find you know this enormous period until there was a replacement and like so much of like the old testament there's this goodness of god is oil over and over that oil makes faces bright that the anointing um of a you know the head with a cup of oil, God is this material excess of oil, basically, is just a connection that these guys make over and over again. You know, Exodus, the temple, they tell the lamp to burn the beaten olive oil continuously. Like, there's all these signs of excess. I'm going to keep talking about how important oil was in the Bronze Age. But, you know, this idea of this substance that is sort of like

the point and the fuel of empire, but also this, this thing that we know we can never have enough of, because it is the fuel for all of our ambitions and how that is kind of an interesting idea. I was thinking about George Batai. He's writing in the 30s and in the, I think the 40s too, and he says that the defining problem of civilization is not scarcity. The defining problem is surplus. You know, every society produces more than it needs. And the excess has to go somewhere.

And, you know, how people burn off excess is actually the real thing. That's the thing that you can know about who they are, not what's scarce, what they do with surplus. And so, you know, he's pretty dense. But one of the things he's saying is that there's this sacrifice where the festival, the cathedral, the gold hammered into the ceiling, you know, nobody profits from that. So useless spending is how a culture actually touches the sacred because it's the one that the act and the sacred being like its highest ideal there, not actually, you know, not literally something holy, but you know, it could be trying to do that. But it's the one act that stands outside of the ledger. And if you look at what we're doing

with the surplus that we have right now, the surplus that is running out with things like AI, with things like the investments that we're making at the expense of other investments. That is a very scary God that we are reaching for, you know, in a secular way. This is a metaphor. But what is how America uses its excess. What does that say about who we are? You know, Alan Stokel, he carried this idea that Batai sort of plays with. when he says that we never really stopped making the great useless expenditure.

We just sort of changed the altar because Batai is writing about analyzing the past. And he says, you know, the commute is the sacrifice now. It's the eight lane interchangeable, you know, lanes on the highway. That all is what you're using basically ancient sunlight, you know, stuck in the oil, fossil fuels that you're pulling out of the ground. that's how you're unlocking that energy. That's what you're doing with that. Oil is this religion, petroleum,

is this religion of the modern age in what we actually practice, despite what we say. And the urge to spend gloriously didn't disappear. It just got rerouted through the tank of the fuel tank of the car, and we forgot that it was worship. But we view cars and transportation

as such an indispensable part of our independent identity. And, you know, that going back to the Odyssey, that jars in the Odyssey too. In book 19, the night before Odysseus takes back the hall, he and his son move all the weapons out of the great room to ambush the suitors, and Athena walks ahead of him, holding this golden lamp, and it fills the hall with light so strange that Talamicus says that a god must be in the house. And that's the only mention of a lamp in Homer. There's not really lamps.

There's torches everywhere. There's hearths everywhere. but the oil lamp appears once, you know, in 24 books of that book. And when that light is sacred and it's held by a god, she's like sort of giving them permission to do this tricksy thing with the suitors. But she's allowing them to break the law of the gods a little bit and sort of lighting their path with this like weird light. And like America's relationship to oil is so weird because like it's like an easy joke

that people will be like, oh, that's just capitalism or like it's a war for oil. oil people have said not just about this word. I mean, I've been hearing that since I was in middle school about anything that we did. But then nobody really feels like there's, it just, it feels like something you say, not really a reality that you're interacting with. I mean, I remember like in 2012, I was watching the Mitt Romney and Barack Obama debate. And, you know, they always like the Republicans have to be like, I like oil. We could get all this free oil if we just did these things. And then the Democrats have to be like, we have to balance. you know, the economy, but also the environment and also the poor, whatever they're pretending to be moderate about in that cycle. And like Romney said that if he was president, he would, we would be oil independent in like two years or something. Then America would basically just make all of its own oil and it wouldn't need to import all this oil anymore. And I was like watching that. I was like, that's crazy. Like, people don't understand how these things work. Like,

crude oil is not just like this thing where you're like, okay, I found it. It's black goop. Let me throw it in the still. Like it's, I'm going to make whiskey and then the still bubbles and then gasoline drips out. Now I have petroleum gas. Like crude oil is not just one substance. Like a barrel of crude oil is this tangle of carbon chains of different lengths that thousands of kinds of molecules all mixed together. And the length of the chain decides what molecule it actually is. So the short chains are gases. And then the middle length chains are like good stuff that you actually want, which is kerosene and diesel. And then the really long chains, the energy is like stored.

Well, in the gases, it's stored too excessively. The medium chains is the good stuff where you can actually kind of transport it and have this moderation. And then the really long chains are like complicated waxes and oils that are like too hard. to get the energy out of because you'd have to invest too much energy in it to release the energy that's there like petroleum jelly or something or a lot of the things that cheap candles are made of that you're not really supposed to breathe in by bees well x candles guys um but all of that is in this one barrel another thing a lot of people don't know this but oil is not dinosaur bones oil is algae like 99% of the oil that you burn when you drive your car that was actually algae because

all the stuff that's been alive in the planet like we see the little picture of the bronzed or not bronzes we see the little picture of the um paleozoic you know burns and the swamp and you think all that stuff died and it got squished down but like all of that stuff is actually a teeny tiny fraction of the majority of life that's been on this planet the majority of the life that's been on this planet that's been cooked down into oil is from algae and the The energy that's storing is sunlight. When you get in your car and you drive, you were getting the sunlight from four million years ago,

and you were getting the energy that something stored that got through this weird trick about how chemicals work, smushed into these long chains, only the middle of which is useful for you as a car driver, and then hidden under the ground and then pushed up by a salt dome, and then unlocked by a certain kind of refinery. I'm getting back to Romney and Obama, I promise. I'm going to land the plane.

But that's what you're doing is you're taking the energy that that plant stored from sunlight. Like in the 80s or the 70s, there was actually like this project where just try and get oil, corn oil, like out of corn and then take the majority of the energy that distilling it is ethanol and then mixing those together and then mixing it with petroleum, which is what we do now to try and make like fake oil as we use corn. It's like really not efficient. And so the biologists basically in the 70s were like, well, if this stuff's algae anyway, and it just takes a really long time, there's this kind of algae that has basically like an oil bloom

where it like it makes a whole bunch of oil. And so instead of getting like a million years of it, what if we just got it like selectively bred, you know, if we just like, you know, did, you know, plant husbandry and got our Mendel, you know, punant squares and we kept the kind of algae that like produces a lot of oil and then we just grew it in giant swimming pools and then harvested in it and then we could just make synthetic oil which there was a pretty good you know they selectively bred it which takes a long time and then when Reagan came in that seemed like it was too green for him it seemed like it was basically sustainable energy even though the result is still gasoline so he cut all the research and they threw out all of the they threw out all of

the like different algae that they'd been breeding for 10 years and then froze some of it until like the 90s and then through the rest away. And we lost that whole chain of thing. Point being, there are different grades of oil. Okay. And you need different refineries to unlock the complexity of each one of those grades. This is getting back to the Mitt Romney stuff. Oil refineries are not interchangeable at all.

They're actually about a billion dollars different most of the time. One of the reason why we don't build. complex refineries in America is because we will probably be out of oil as a planet by the time anyone who wants to spend that money could recoup any of that investment. You know, each refinery is built for one particular type of crude oil. So light or heavy is the mix of chain lengths and sweet and sour is the amount of sulfur in the oil. Sour crude poisons the wrong kind of equipment, breaks the refinery and then costs you

$3 billion and you have to rebuild your whole refinery because you didn't have your engineer do the right thing. So the Gulf Coast refineries, which are the most sophisticated refineries on earth, or the complex refineries on earth, they were tooled up in the 70s and the 80s to eat heavy sour crude from Mexico, Venezuela, and the Gulf states. Because that was what was for sale. So that's why we built them. And then fracking happened. And so it's lightning outside. I don't know if y'all can hear that, but it may be a little loud.

So when fracking happened, the shale fields turned out to produce the opposite thing. We never thought we could get light sweet crude here. And then it turned out we had all this light sweet crude. So that's the great kind of oil that we actually want because sour crude has so much sulfur that it builds like really good diesel fuel and really good asphalt. But it doesn't, it's very hard to turn it into petroleum that you would put in your car engine. So America ships all of its own light sweet crude oil to simple refiner. overseas in which takes a lot of oil in Europe and then it sends all of it back here and the Middle East and then it sends it all back here to actually be used and so the energy independence

was never about whose ground the oil was under there's an entire machine that you really shouldn't say anything about oil like Mitt Romney did if you don't understand like I'm watching him say this in college and everyone's watching and he's like yeah if I'm president going to be oil independent in two years. And it's like, dude, assuming that you had $7 trillion lying around to build these things, because you're, you're, you're not going to be socializing and it's got to be somebody else's money, then where are you going to put them? And they take like seven years to build. What are you talking about? Like the fact that we could be oil independent in two years is just an insane statement. And it proves that you can just say stuff like this,

because nobody knows how anything's work. And the world that we live in is so complicated. that we can just say genuinely stupid shit from pretty high levels of power all the time. So again, not just picking on the bureaucracy that I talked about in the psycho history series. This is the whole thing. These things you could Google, you could crack a book. Anyone could pick them up and look at it. And just most of what everyone who's running the world says, I'm not saying that I could do a better job,

but I'm just saying that that's how complicated this stuff is. We're speaking in such simplifications about them all the time, whether we want to or not. just like the evidence-based practice in psychology, we are just talking in oversimplifications because they're too complicated. So we can either pick good faith, oversimplifications, or bad faith oversimplifications, but you're still stuck oversimplifying. And the machines that we built, right, they weren't finished like in 1997. We expanded the old ones, we passed them, and then we keep running them, these refineries to make all this oil.

And everyone in the industry knows that new refineries are needed. But if you built them, and building them would save the industry. But we don't build them because building one would admit what a new refinery would admit, which means that the capability was allowed to die. The trades are gone. The country that built the last one no longer exists. We probably don't have the ability to build these things. We don't have the infrastructure, even if you had somebody that said, okay, fine.

I don't want to return on an investment. I just want to make a future-proof infrastructure. Like, we're going to spend $7 trillion, building seven, you know, building three or four of these refineries that we need. You probably do not have the domestic knowledge to do it anymore. Christopher Nolan is taking that idea because he's really angry about IMAX projectors, not being able to project his movie and the state. of cinema and sitting with that emotional energy and packaging it in the Odyssey to talk about the death of the Bronze Age. You know, the IMAX projectors we talked about before,

like, they're crazy machines. And I talked about this in the first part, but the person who made those machines, the CEO of the company that made those machines said, we don't have blueprints, we don't have knowledge. And even if we did, we don't have the ability to do it. The machine shops that made one little part that was just catching a spindle on the piece of film for the thing that held it down so that it didn't break was a whole alloy component that engineers knew about all the engineers that designed it are dead or they have dementia all of the engineers who could have gotten that information from them when they were younger didn't because the energy industry was going digital and we didn't preserve the knowledge it's lost and even if we had

the blueprints and we knew what the alley was and we knew how to manufacture each little tiny part on the machine the supply chain's got. I can't afford to go make somebody build a factory just to make this widget that goes here in this machine. Like it's that he's trying to communicate how complicated this thing and how much the world has changed in really not that much time. This is what the CEO of IMAX was saying when people were livid that they could not see this movie in 70 millimeter. Why are there only 40 theaters in the U.S. that are showing it in 70 millimeter? The McWayton Center in Birmingham, where I live, they used to have a 70 millimeter your machine. When I was a kid, and I went to Colorado when I saw this thing. I went to IMAX

in Birmingham. I saw this thing. It was these platters of film that are enormous, you know, to make a platter of film to show like a science movie that's, you know, 20, 30 minutes, you probably spend about five to six, seven thousand dollars to print a three-hour movie like the Odyssey and then ship it. You spend about $35,000. But they're huge. And that was normal when I was 16 when I was 21. They were still around. Then all of a sudden, the world changes really quickly and this stuff is gone. And Christopher Nolan is kind of saying, I'm an artist, I need these tools to make art. And that's why he's reaching these cameras have to have a vacuum built into them to keep the film flat because it is too big to go that fast across the thing. I mean,

you see pictures of them. They're giant. Like filming with this thing that he did is stupid. It takes 15, it can keep film in it for about 12 minutes before it runs out and you have to cut. So you can't film for 40 minutes and take the best cuts. You have to change out a canister of film, which takes forever every 12 minutes that you're filming this movie. And I think him reaching for the biggest, most absurd, most affecting extreme tool is him kind of reaching for this lost art in this way that he realizes he couldn't do it in probably five years from now.

Um, you know, you're filming on a type of film that only 40 theaters in the country can even show people. You can't even show them what you made. And I, I think that he's saying, you know, this culture is getting blinded. You know, you can never observe the same person treated and untreated one timeline each and you cannot observe the same civilization. Same way that I'm talking about with patients, how like once you touch something, it changes. You can't really observe the same civilization both ways any more than you can observe the same person. There's no control group planet. There's no untreated copy of civilization to run beneath this one.

You know, like he can't make a business case for it. He can only make an artistic case for this feels right. This feels good. And he's grieving the same thing. I feel this director, even though I have problems sometimes with this director, who's brilliant like in his movies. I'm feeling this director grieving the same thing that I'm talking about in that series. And so it kind of coalesced in my head into this talk. So I think that that is one of the things that Nolan is saying with the movie that I'm also saying and that, you know, some of the

infrastructure of our world when we look at what this war for oil when we say that, what does that actually mean, you know, about Iran? I think that these things are all sort of reaching in the same direction. To pull these things back together, I think that Christopher Nolan is reaching for kind of the same argument that I'm reaching for in the psycho history series, but from a different direction, you know, his beef is with these movies and our culture around art. And mine is with the relationship basically of psychotherapy to art. And I think that when you're looking at our relationship to oil, to surplus, to scarcity around, you know, a complex metaphor like war and oil and empire, we're all hitting the same wall where we know what is self-evidently true,

and the bureaucracy has trapped everyone from doing anything about it. And so our only choice is to maybe get angry for a little while, but then that still doesn't change anything. So we dissociate. We lose knowledge. We forget what we know. you know that all of these you know maybe with more of a business interest but no one has to get to be the biggest director in the entire world with the most power over any studio and this triple super

relationship with Warner brothers till he can just come in and say I know that this is right even if the spreadsheet says it's wrong I'm filming on this giant thing it's going to cost tons of money we're not using any CGI we're doing all in camera in facts I'm doing effects we're doing effects, we're doing this insane thing. You know, my industry is, you know, is demanding these double-blind trials for things that are patently silly. And this whole culture is moving into, I don't want to be too morbid, but a decline in the way that we used to make meaning, which doesn't mean that there's not another way to do it.

But we're clinging to these ways of making meaning and having knowledge and having information that really don't work anymore. Like, we have to have new ones. And going back to oil, oil is the closest thing to free energy that has ever existed. That's why it's so precious to, you know, our ability to have an empire, anyone's ability to have an economy that is growing, that needs to grow bigger every a year, you know, that can't just sort of exist in equilibrium that has to get bigger and bigger every year,

which is what our entire economic system is built. on millions of years of sunlight, you know, are collected in it, you know, and then it's, it has to become dense enough in some place because a big, you know, carcic dome of salt pushes all the little oil lines together into a big pool when the salt bubbles up and hits the surface. And then we have to make it stable enough to ship everywhere by playing with its chemistry, doing alchemy on it. You know, in every previous empire, it ran on the caloric output of the body, which is why every previous empire ran on some form of coerced flesh, you know, slaves or taxes or professional classes forcing you into a certain job.

This one got run on buried sunlight, which is what makes it kind of an anomaly. It's what makes a lot of the comparisons to ancient empires not work perfectly in America. I mean, one, there's infinite land. it's just bigger container than a lot of these things had. We're just now hitting the limits of some of that. And then two, you have petroleum, which just changes the math. You know, you can try and make a historic equivalent to Rome or Greece or something or the British Empire, but petroleum changes the game quite a bit.

But oil's not just your fuel, right? Because it's your food. It's fertilizer. It's the actual nitrogen in the actual wheat that we grow and eat, which is why food prices are probably. going to go up a lot if we can't get the straight of hormones to stay open. It's plastic. It's the connective tissue of every, you know, object that you will touch today through plastic and rubber and all the synthetic stuff that we get from it. You know, you brush your teeth with a toothbrush

made of oil. There's like all of these things that if we had to make them out of like wood or non-petroleum plastic, things will look very different. It would be very hard to do. But that's why, you know, some scholars sort of call this epoch of human nature, the vampirose. We're just sort of a vampire that is draining this blood of, you know, the living, this old living thing to keep this undead thing moving that we know will break eventually. When the petro subject, you know, drains the blood of the earth, the liquefied ancient dead to keep this synthetic life running that we know is finite. We know is limited. We know that when it's gone, the world will not. be able to look anything like it looks now or civilization will not be able to look anything like

it is now. But we're not trying to find an alternative. And we'll never find one that's a perfect one-to-one alternative. We will find another system that is very complicated that will have an alternative to being predominantly dependent on oil. We're not trying. You know, that isn't even really a metaphor. There are, you know, petrochemical traces and human bloodstreams now and microplastics. And, you know, that our relationship to us, this stuff is like fused into us. But it is surplus that's doing that. It's having free energy. It's having free stuff.

Because when you have scarcity, you have to do long-term planning. You know, when you have surplus, you don't. You know, scarcity forced every household in the past to decide what mattered past tonight. Do I want light or do I want food? And deciding what matters past tonight is the entire operation that we, that is an essential ingredient of meaning making because you're after thinking, you're having to think about what matters after the moment you're in and ultimately after you, which is a skill that we've lost. You know, like a healthy psyche is able to look out after its own death.

See after the things that just affect it. And an unhealthy psyche cannot do that. It can not conceive of a world where it is not the center of the universe, where it is not order and everything else is not chaos. You know, people used to break ground on cathedrals that they knew that they would never finish. In the medieval period, they're like, yeah, you know, maybe in 200 years this thing will be done. We can't conceive of doing something that takes 20 minutes now. And that's a huge collective shift brought about by our relationship to this energy

that is the cheapest form of labor that we've ever found. You know, grandfathers used to plant oak forests for the roof beams. Sorry, the thunder's really loud out there. I don't know if you can hear that, but there's that story that I think it's probably apocryphal or from something. I've heard it from like 20 different people when I was a kid, but people talk about the guy going to Britain, and he says, oh, there's such beautiful wood panels in this library

that your grandfather built. It's so sad that there aren't trees big enough to replace these now. If they were ever lost to fire or rot, you know, we would, it's just so sad to think of these being lost. And the guy pulls the curtains forward and said, that is why my great-grandfather planted this grove of trees so that when they rot, I can replace them or whatever. I don't know if it's really true, but I had a lot of like history teachers and people tell me that, you know, either that was what kids today couldn't do and the old people could do

or that that was the difference in the British and the American mindset or whatever. I don't know the origin of it, but. I heard it a lot of times. But, you know, that need to think about a choice, a sacrifice in either direction. Oil ended that choice. It ended that reason to think about sacrifice. But the result wasn't that we created infinite meaning. It was the death of the machine that made meaning when we had that surplus.

Because oil made consumption faster than reflection. And it collapsed the distance between wanting, and having. And meaning is a process that runs in that gap. And we paved the gap. You know, a mind that has never has to defer losses. It loses the ability to defer. It loses the ability to not get what it wants at all times, at any time. And this is the mechanism of every addiction that I've ever treated when I treat addiction. It's the space between urge and gratification collapses until the machinery of weighting atrophies and the future stops being real. And the future stops being real to someone. Only the thing that I'm feeling right now is real.

An oil sped up consumption until we became addicted, unable to invest in meaning or permanence, unable to build for the future, unable to see past our own lifetimes. Stone meant that for a thousand years we had to live in this building that we built out of stone because it took so long to build them like those cathedrals. You know, and then there's glass and it's slightly more, it's still nice, but it's slightly easier to replace. And then there's plastic. And it's strongest on the first day that it's made. It's going to be broken in two weeks.

And that changes the psychology of a culture. We are eating the light. You know, the wealthiest people who have ever lived. And we don't really know what we're living for anymore. Philip Cushman is a psychologist. And, you know, he writes a lot about the empty self and, you know, post-war American stuff. And he says that, like, really post-war America, when you strip it of the traditional

community, the religious permanence, and the continuity between generations, where somebody knows, this is my generation's project, and we will try our best at it, and then we will hand it off to the next generation to do their project. It will be different than mine. He says, when you get rid of all that, which we sort of have, you're just trying to sort of, like, grow something in this vacuum. And the only way that you can do that is by consuming things. You have to just give people lots of stuff to purchase as a product because they're not really able to do anything that means anything.

And so, well, my preference must be the ultimate, you know, meaning. You know, goods and experiences and therapy. Therapy as a product is a bad thing. You know, the consuming, the act of consumption builds this self that lasts about as long as the purpose. which is an addiction. You know, petroleum is this ideal operating system for that empty cell. And probably some of the finance capital that goes along with petroleum. You know, it makes the consuming feel fast enough and cheap enough that the vacuum never has to be felt for very long, the vacuum of not having meaning. We never have to sit with it long enough to say,

what do we want to change? Because we can go out and get quick fixes for meaning so fast. you know, Lauren Bellerant, she has this idea, cruel optimism. She says that, you know, being attached to the exact thing that is blocking or flourishing is this interesting, you know, way of thinking about addiction. You know, and energy scholars say crude optimism, that we hold on to oil as this guarantee of this good life while foreclosing the future of the good life, But while getting rid of the future, the good life was supposed to happen in. We know what happens to the American mind when the fuel gets pinched because, you know, it's already happened before.

Like in 73, the oil embargo where the Arab producers shut the tap over, you know, the Qapur war. And the first time since the frontier closed, the American material world said no to this new relationship that we had. consumption came down. There's gas lines around the block. And like the thing that made, if you didn't live through it, which I didn't live through it, but if you, if you're wondering what history is like, somebody telling you like, yeah, we had to wait in line to get gas, that was not what made the oil embargo scary. It made every project in America because they all were dependent on oil be tenuous. It made everybody wonder if everything about the economy could and would continue to work like it ever always had. And then the, you know,

William Barger went away and we forgot that we ever felt like that, but we did feel that way. And there's a whole generation where people weren't allowed to have stuff. They weren't allowed to consume as much. And people are very bad at, you know, well, not bad at it, like it's a bad thing, but people are very resilient. They're bad at saying, I don't have personal power. So what people did is they went inward and you got all of these kind of spiritual revolution stuff. You get Star Wars, you get introspection, and some of it's silly in navel gazing.

But, you know, the 70s makes sense in that light. It was this human potential movement and psychotherapy explode. You know, those, the EST simulars that I talked about, like the gurus and cults and Jonestown and astrology, and like all of that was a result of people not being able to buy the things that they had been buying in the 50s and the 60s at that pace or the same type of stuff. things did get slightly more permanent, like in the way that they were designed for a minute, and then that immediately went away in the 80s and everything became disposable again. But, you know, after the embargo, Congress ordered the strategic petroleum reserve, you know,

and they said we're going to have this, you know, giant like pile, basically, of oil so that if there's ever a problem again, you know, we'll be able to be a little bit more resilient. in. And what's interesting is the way that you store oil like that is salt. When oil forms, there's like a giant dome of salt that pushes up. And like oil is just in these like thin little layers, like pieces of paper. Or like imagine if you have like a, I don't know, like a really long tube full of, you know, a little sandwich baggy, you know, full of a tiny bit of water. And there's like no water in it, but if you get your finger and you squish the sandwich bag, you can push all the water down to one of the corners. So these oil pockets that get mined or tapped or whatever,

I don't know what you call it pumped out, they're right next to these giant like pillars of salt. They come rising up from the deep earth because the salt is the thing that pushes the little sleeves of oil together to make those pockets. So it's convenient that they're right close to each other. because you need the giant salt pocket in order to store the oil that you're pumping out of the ground. It'd be really expensive to build like a tank big enough to hold all this stuff. So outside of a refinery, we don't. Like a lot of time, we get these salt domes and we hollow them out. And there's an interesting kind of political story in Timothy Mitchell's book,

Carbon Democracy. And he says that coal accidentally built mass democracy. because he says that coal is like really heavy and concentrated and so it moves through choke points. So you have like, you know, the railhead and the place where it's being mined and then you have the docks and then you have the minute those choke points. And those are all choke points where like any group, if they have enough power can just be like, no, the coal does not go past here. And when that stops, it shuts the whole system down. So everybody involved in the process, like from the minor to, you know, the dock. worker to the driver that has to, you know, get the thing to your house. In that system,

all of that labor has a lot of power because if they stop doing stuff, then your whole system stops. But the switch to oil appealed to people running things a lot more than coal because oil flows around workers. You can just build a pipeline. You don't really need all these people touching it. And so the rich person just gets to keep all the power to keep it flowing. even if people don't like the way the economy is working, they can't really stop it. And so the incentives are sort of sitting in the physics that oil is liquid and it's lighter and it's denser energetically than coal. You don't need as much labor. And so Mitchell says that, you know, before the 1930s, the word economy meant careful management.

It meant frugality. It meant, you know, husbanding what you had. And in the oil age, it was redefined as this thing that was this autonomous sphere, of infinite existential growth. And that is this myth. And I'm not saying that it isn't real. I'm calling it a myth because it is the operating logic of the system that we are running the world on right now in a way that may or may not be true. There's this idea of exponential growth that is this fantasy that only pencils out, you know, while cheap petroleum pours in without limit.

you know, democracy got downgraded to match this practice of collective struggle to this technocratic management of the economy and citizens got re-engineered as consumers whose main civic duty is to keep the fuel and the money moving. And so under the old economy, you are all sort of touching as labor, the movement and the process of getting coal from one place to the next. But in the new economy, you're not. Your job is to be buying things and consuming them because that is what makes you valuable is that you are not ever going to be self-sufficient. You're not ever going to be you're not ever going to have enough. You have to be buying all the time. And so again, to wrap things up, you know, the question that nobody on the news is asking, are we going into a dark age?

Elijah Milgram, I've mentioned it a long time ago, not for a while, but the great endarkenedment. He has this idea that the enlightenment, he has this idea that the enlightenment, when it happens, and science is like coming back, you know, into mainstream culture and changing technology and changing art and changing society. He says, the enlightenment ran on a promise that you could use your own understanding. And the fine print was that one person, person's understanding could at least in principle, you know, check this argument. One person's like understanding could, could see how the whole system worked through science. That was the

gift that science brought us when we got rid of some of the religious superstition and the Enlightenment and moved more to a scientific paradigm. You know, the Western history scholars would tell you. But what he says is that we're hyper-special. now. So every specialty is speaking its own dialect and nobody can audit the reasoning in the lab next door. Like, I'm telling psychotherapist something about the way the psychotherapy works that they may not know and that is their profession because they're not a researcher. They're clinical. Even within the silo, there are silos. And because all of this information is so cut up and nobody has access to all of it, there's too much fine print.

And so all the knowledge has to just be this trust in an institution. At the exact moment that our institutions are telling us, don't trust them. Don't trust us. Directly or indirectly, most people are getting that message. And so like the FDA hearing from that last episode, this is the beginning of a dark age where people don't have enough information to understand how anything works.

Even the people that are very smart and very educated, because they only understand how one part of the elephant that they are touching. They only understand that part. And the antidote to that would just be to trust the system. But the system is also going away or revealing itself to not really have all of the answers. And so what Elijah Milgram is saying is that knowledge is going to splinter now into dialects that nobody can speak most of. maybe more than one of. And there will be capabilities that it just stops being anyone's job to keep.

Like how to make an IMAX, moving, something that was made, you know, rolling off assembly lines when I was a kid. Now, if we turned millions of dollars to it, we could not make it happen again.

And, you know, people are not going to realize that this is happening for a while. The whole society stays lit and there's, you know, every screen is still glowing. But there's no shared light where, we can really check if there is like a,

maybe losing this metaphor, but like there's not a way that we can see if we're all sort of reading the same text anymore. Like people will just get an LLM to explain something to them and then think that they understand it. Maybe they have some kind of understanding of it. But there's less of like a source of this information that is centralized. The silos will get even smaller.

And so the Dark Age doesn't just, happen in one night and it doesn't really feel like a night you know it arrives like a long afternoon that nobody really names and the silence is all around you and you're asking whether the empire is ending at the same time that there's all these things on the news and the empire's defenses exist and it's doing this performance that's saying that it isn't and so you never really get a clear answer And so, like, if I don't think it's an easy or a simple question, like, are you going into basically another dark age? But you do see knowledge splintering and you see it going into different dialects that nobody seems to be speaking the same of anymore. And you see the major infrastructure capabilities for society becoming something that it seems like everyone says, well, that's not my job to keep up.

And that's a scary thing. We've not really had this little light in a long time, even though we have a whole lot of food. And, you know, like the dark age doesn't really just happen overnight. It arrives over a really long period where people are wondering and there's a lot of silence, what is happening. And there's a lot of performativity happening culturally. You know, but going back to the. beginning of this series. Like a number is a description of a thing. It is not a thing. You can run a company by a number, but that doesn't mean that the company is good just because

the number is good. You can run a society based on a number. You can run therapy based on a number. That doesn't mean that those things are good, even though that the number is good, because the number is a description, and you may be describing something extremely poorly. You know, the Bronze Age left us, the oldest version of a description of people looking back at a time that they sort of remember that they came from and they wanted to hold on to, but they didn't know how to literally, how to historically talk about it anymore. And the Odyssey is them trying to do that when they don't even really have clay tablets. They only have oral tradition. It's a mythology about their past that is kind of sort of halfway true, just like Nolan's film, when it comes to theme and tone

and soul, but not really in the details. It doesn't look like the trading empire that got wiped out by the Mycenaeans to stop this choke point during a drought. And those details didn't have a giant wooden horse. But the story is largely a true story of a people trying to remember in the best way that they knew how and preserve in the best way that they knew how the parts of themselves that they wanted to remember. You know, my own field is still inside of all of these things. It's still connected to them. A lot of therapy right now treats, you know, dread and depression and the compulsive consuming going on as these individual malfunctions as something that like you need to fix as an individual and maybe you have some responsibility. But these are connections.

to a larger narrative, a larger thing that we have to confront. If we're going to make meaning, even if we can't change it, I do think that we have to notice it to have clarity about where all this stuff's coming from. We adjust people until they can keep communicating and then we call that treatment. I'm sorry, not communicating, commuting. If you can just keep going to work, if you can keep working and functioning in this thing, you're well. My argument is, You also should have some clarity over how this thing works and how to have more control over your life, even if that clarity brings you temporarily pain, even if it takes away a kind of naivety that you used to have. Even if it takes away a numbness that you used to have, it is your responsibility to confront the dissociation that everybody is feeling enough to react to this world with clarity.

I think that that is part of what psychology is, and maybe some people would disagree with me. But sometimes just noticing and seeing and hearing these things that you can't see, unsee and you can't unhear, is the mechanism of action. And I don't think my profession can admit that because its whole apparatus is still built on subtracting everything other than the one thing that created change.

But sometimes it's that simple. Before you have the diagnosis, when you say, I feel this way, me saying and noticing that already has started to change how it is that I feel. And when I say I feel this way because, or I feel this way for a long time, I didn't notice how long I felt this way. That is the beginning of a change process that can't be studied because it can't be undone. And we can't control for before that awareness was brought up because we can't measure what I was feeling before I said that I was feeling that way. I'm like naming the defense mechanism is sometimes the treatment.

And, you know, the culture can't always admit that because its defenses exist to prevent its authority from coming into question. But a lot of authority is being called into question now. So, you know, the cure for maybe the micro and the macro is the same. I think we should demythologize a lot of the mythology that we have right now. And I'm a Jungian therapist. I like mythology. But there's a lot of people who think that the reason that you play with mythology is a Jungian therapist is so that you can like, I don't know, attain enlightenment from studying myths.

No, it's so that you recognize these stories as ultimately your own and ultimately kind of serious, silly and ultimately kind of malleable and able to be deconstructed and able to be reconstructed. Because, yeah, this stuff's going on. and there's one person, you know, in the therapy room. But the empire is made out of people. And, you know, all of these people, it takes to make a story as complicated as the things that I'm describing here.

And when you tell a story, well, I'll end with this. Another way of saying that, that is maybe a clearer way of saying it, is that you are part of a story and you are telling yourself a story, whether or not you know it. One of the freedoms that we have as a culture is to see these stories for what they are, inside and outside. We don't always really get to have a lot of change

over how they end. The freedom isn't seeing them for what they are. And even if that doesn't change anything material, I think that there is a freedom in that helps change something, that even if we can't measure it, is very important and is very real. Many years have passed in this river town.

I sail through many traps. I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse. I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil and one of gold. Keep a place for Mary Ann, soon she will come home. I know I'm a long shot. Us have you got Get taker Many tickets have I torn

We will float above the storm