Your Undivided Attention - Making Meaning in Challenging Times — with Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

What helps you make meaning in challenging times? As you confront COVID, the climate crisis, and all of the challenges we discuss on this show, what helps you avoid nihilism or fundamentalism, and instead access healing, inspiration, and connection? Today on Your Undivided Attention, we're joined by anthropologist and writer Jamie Wheal. Wheal is the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind. In the book, he makes the case that in order to address the meta-crisis — the interconnected challenges we face, which we talked about in Episode 36 with Daniel Schmachtenberger, we must address the meaning crisis — the need to stay inspired, mended, and bonded in challenging times. Jamie argues that it doesn't matter whether we're staying inspired, mended, and bonded through institutionalized religion or other means as long as meaning-making is inclusively available to everyone.What we hope you'll walk away with is a humane way to think about how to address the challenges we face, from COVID to climate — by enabling us to make meaning in challenging times.

Real quick, before we dive in, the Center for Humane Technology is hiring for a senior producer for this show, your undivided attention. To learn more, please visit HumaneTech.com slash careers. And with that, here we go. What if people subscribe to intense ideologies or conspiracy theories, whether pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, Antifa or QAnon? Not only or even necessarily, because they think those theories are true, but because those theories, give their lives meaning. What if we approach the problems of misinformation or polarization by accommodating people's need for meaning?

I'm Tristan Harris. And I'm Hazaraskin. And this is your undivided attention, the podcast from the Center for Human Technology. On the show in the past, we've talked about the meta-crisis, the interconnected challenges we face, which we talked about with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Part of the reason we have a meta-crisis is because we have a meeting crisis, or a collapse in our ability to make meaning in these increasingly challenging times.

Our traditional ways of making meaning are breaking down, and in the vacuum, people are increasingly turning to rapture ideologies of fundamentalism. or nihilism. Today in the show, we're joined by Jamie Weill. Jamie is the author of Recapture the Rapture, rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its mind. In the book, he makes the case that in order to address the metacrisis, we actually need to address the meaning crisis.

We need more ways to stay inspired, mended, and bonding in challenging times. And he argues that it doesn't matter whether we're making meaning through institutional religion or in other ways, as long as the meaning-making is inclusive. And what we hope you'll walk away with is perhaps a new and more humane way to think about how to design technology that helps us navigate the challenges we face from COVID to climate by considering what helps us make meaning in challenging times. So, Jamie, what is the meaning crisis? Sure, and great to be with you guys.

I'm looking forward to having this jam for a while. I think for me, I mean, at the highest, most structural levels, we used to turn to organize religion, and that you could kind of call that meaning 1.0, for what does it mean to be human, to be alive, to be an individual, to be a member of a community, to be on this earth, to be of a tribe or an elect, and where do we go when we die?

And that held up an oriented humanity in both indigenous and tribal and then increasingly organized in complex forms for pretty much 99% of human existence. And then 400 years ago, you kind of get the European Enlightenment, you get the American experiment, you get this kind of emergence of modern liberalism, where it's suddenly not based on salvation of the elect, it's based on inclusion of the masses, regardless of race, color, or creed, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all men and women created equal, that general bundled package. and that for a long time of reason empiricism, science, evidence, tort law, you know, the accumulated

body of both English and Western law and custom, became the thing we hung our hats on. And what we've been seeing, especially in the last decade and then accelerating in the last several years, has been both a sort of an erosion of meaning 1.0, you know, the Pew Research Foundation finding that nuns, the spiritual, but not religious, and now the father. is growing demographic in the country. So we're kind of having the erode, you know, the church scandals, all of those kind of things that have been degrading established belief in orthodox mainline institutional religion as sources over truth on authority. And then you can also say, but at the same time, we're having these increasingly intense critiques of global modern

liberalism. And we see that with the fracturing of international alliances like NATO, world trade, IMF, World Bank, we see questions on WHO, CDC, we see all of these kinds of things happening. And so in that collapse, we're seeing people getting sucked to the extremes of fundamentalism on one side. So rather than going, oh, the church has collapsed and this is no longer compatible with my life, people are getting actually pulled to increasingly fringe interpretations of traditional faiths. So fundamentalism on one side, and then nihilism on the other. And I think that's the kind of intersection of the crisis and meaning that we're having. You could say some of it is long time overdue and worthwhile.

We should be reexamining our epistemic foundations and shared consensual realities. But some of it is also stress fractures that are, I think, widening precisely because of the collective pressures we're all feeling right now. So part of what I hear you saying in connection to the metacrisis is the metacrisis brings these increasing sort of threats that we're going to have to be facing. and threats and perturbations and instability force us to make meaning of what the hell is going on. And in your framework, we have meaning 1.0, meaning 2.0 and meeting 3.0, these are meaning-making structures of how do we orient and navigate inside of these problems that are coming our way. Can you riff on that a little bit? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, the meaning 1.0, the traditional organized religion, offered salvation, which is profoundly important from mortal humans, you know, wrapped around Ernest Becker's fear of death, right? but that salvation came at the cost of inclusion. If you believed you were saved, if you didn't, you were damned or a heretic. So that was 1.0. Now, 2.0 attacked to the other Godrail, and it offered inclusion at the cost of salvation. So all men are created equal, right? And everybody, at least in theory, has a shot, is entitled to a fair shot at life, liberty,

in the pursuit of happiness. But God's dead. And rational material empiricism becomes enthrum. as the ultimate arbiter of truth. And so the question is, is, you know, and both of these as they are under stress, are susceptible to rapture ideologies, to a rapturous bypass, which is basically a solution for the 1% at the cost of a 99%. So traditional religion, obviously, many of those are encoded in ancient scriptures, whether that's the Book of Revelations or it's ISIS, actually, with its sort of Jerusalem endgame as well.

There's that sense of the moral, the save, the pure, will get to bypass the metacrisis, as it were. But also, weirdly, modern liberalism is also susceptible to the bypass move of a rapture ideology. It just shows up as techno-utopianism. It shows up as blockchain seesteading. We're literally going to sail into the sunset.

Or Ray Kurzweilian singularities, We're never mind this mess we've made, we're going to upload ourselves to computers and we're going to become immortals. So each of those are sort of strained with the reckoning of the metacrisis and the yearning temptation is to get sucked into these rapture ideologies. But all of them, no matter how sexy or flashy, whether it's Silicon Valley or Saudi Arabia, they work for a tiny fraction of humanity and leave the rest of us holding the bag. So they become pathological. So for meaning 3.0, the question almost by irrefutable logic is like, can we have inclusive salvation? Can we come up with a means of making sense of this and acting effectively that delivers us from evil, right, at the 11th hour, for everyone? There's some beautiful things about sort of the Enlightenment experiment, and it was basically inclusivity.

It was the tentative notion of all men and women are created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of race, color, or creed. Like, notional, completely undermined at every step of the way, but a absolutely radical and novel and fragile concept to entertain. And this is, you know, counter to those rapture 1% solutions, right? And so the modern experiment is, well, it needs to be open source. Everybody needs to have access. It needs to be that kind of inclusive. it needs to be scalable because if it's not cheap or free, then it's not a solution for the bottom $4 billion. And it needs to be anti-fragile because if it relies on perfect conditions like me

listening to Enya with my incense and my herbal teas and my meditation cushion and my headspace and all my roommates out of the house for me to get to my happy place, well, that's really quite fragile and quite privileged. You know, that's Nassim Teleb's well-known phrase. Antifragile means it gets better when things get worse. So given those criteria, salvation plus inclusion, can we create meaning 3.0 that is actually inclusive salvation? And can we do it not by tops down fiat, you know, a pope or an imam or a president or a podcaster, right?

But can we do it by bottoms up mobilization of an open source human design-centered toolkit? So that's really the premise of what we could explore together as psychosocial technology that's humane. One of the experiences I had before the pandemic is a friend had created an art piece called Grace Lights. And the reason why I bring this up is that it shows how understanding how human beings work at the physiological, neurological level can create these kind of peak states. There's Grace Cathedral here in San Francisco. It's beautiful, huge space, non-denominational. They filled the whole thing with smoke and put, I think, the world's largest or at least most powerful projector at the top

of the cathedral pointing down to the labyrinth underneath. And you would walk in at night and you would lay down on the labyrinth and then there would be light tracing the labyrinth in various patterns. And even though you knew in your mind that this was just some light going through fog, the experience of laying on that floor and looking up to the ceiling and have this godlight reached down to you was so profound that a fourth of the people there, often who had never experienced psychedelics, would talk about reconnecting with a dead parent. I would look around, I'd see people crying. It's a known psychological property that it's just the act of putting your head back and looking up creates the experience of awe. And there's something about knowing these

truths about humans that lets you design. If you understand the ergonomics of human beings, then you can fit culture or technology to wrap around the affordances of humans. Yeah, absolutely. And just to riff, A's on your bit about something as simple as lights and smoke and caverns in awe. There's a couple of research papers that have come out in the last couple of years on Neolithic Cave Art. We often derisively call them, you know, cavemen. But the reality is they weren't. They were like lean to men and mouth of cavemen.

Like nobody lived way back in those dark, scary places. Right. But that's where all the art was. And one study was the idea that, oh, why on earth would they crawl way the hell back in these places? There's no other benefit to it. What were they doing? And why did they pick those spots? There were so many places with better light and bigger canvases, all the things.

Why'd they go where they went? And they did an acoustic studies. And they found that not for all cave out everywhere, but in these particular instances, they were studying, they were studying, they were studying, they were studying, they were studying, they were doing whatever. and constricted airflow. So a very tight little caves where you would become basically hypoxic. You would increase your CO2. That would be a state-changing like holotropic breathwork. And the one I just read this month, I think it was fascinating because on a number of cave art, there's like these skinny little lines that bisect all of the art. And then there's also situations where there's beautiful sort of Picasso-like bull. So these aren't clumsy artists. But the animals often have three legs or two heads or something like that. And what the researcher, hypothesized was, oh, we've been looking at these all wrong because we've been using electric lights and gas lanterns, like steady, high lumen, blast out, wash out all the shadows light. But if you actually go back to grease, talofat, torches, or Kemp for the flickering ambient light, you suddenly get animation.

You actually get these things crawling and you move things. So you're like, holy shit, between CO2 hypoxia, right, vibroacoustic base in the caverns and flickering light movies. These are like Neolithic IMAX. Like, let's get high and go to IMAX, you know, back in the fucking day. So you're like, we've been geniuses at this and yearning for these experiences and architecting and designing them for as long as we have been human. It's absolutely beautiful.

Dolphins have been videotaped passing around a puffer fish. So quite literally puff, puff, puff pass to get high, then change their state of consciousness. And, of course, whales have been around, you know, 40 million years. human beings vocalizing for maybe 60,000 years, and they have cultures and song, pop songs that a whale in one part of the world will come to another part. It'll catch on and then all the whales in Australia will start singing this new song. This seems to be, as you say, cross species. And I know in part two of your book, and actually I think you should sort of walk through the cookbook for how you apply, you know, human-centered design to, as you call it, the

meaning crisis. So how do we meet the mandate of the open source, scale, and anti-fragile design-centered approach to building meaning 3.0. And playfully called that the alchemist's cookbook. And that sense was as if we want to be able to create healing inspiration and connection, in a way that everybody has access to that works and we can start experimenting with, one of the best places to look is evolutionary drivers. You know, if you're relying on some fancy bit of smart tech, if you're relying on a highly scheduled, tightly controlled, esoteric compound or pharmaceutical if you're relying on any of these other things. Those are actually kind of fragile and definitely not scalable. So those don't meet our criteria. But things as simple as

respiration, right? Varying the rate, rhythm, and depth of our breath can completely shift our consciousness. So you can, if you're stressed and you just need to calm down, you can engage in super slow vagal breathing, which signals to your body, hey, rest and digest, everything is safe. You can lower your heart rate, you can lower your stress hormones, and you can calm down. So you can down regularly. If on the other hand, you're about to get up on the blocks to swim, or to base jump off a thing, or to propose to your true love, or step up on a stage to give a speech, you can upregulate. You can be like, I need to be at my best, right? And I'm going to hyperventilate or breathe quickly and powerfully to bring my nervous system up. This is Tony Robbins jumping on

the trampoline for a minute before he jumps out in front of 6,000 people. Exactly. And ultimately, you know, if you're looking to transcend waking state consciousness, hyperventilation combined with breath holds is one of the simplest ways you blow off a lot of CO2. You turn your blood pH alkaline and it creates a host of body brain and cognitive sensations up to, and including complete out-of-body experiences and access to, you know, interior, subjective, psychological, mythopoetic, archetypal experiences. So that's just one.

Another one that is very strongly encoded is sexuality. It is the strongest driver we have outside of breathing and eating. The very next thing that is on our genetic imprint is to procreate. And that is at the root of untold amounts of human grief and suffering. And on the other hand,

if we can just set aside the kind of titillation or the volatility of the content and just look at it like an anthropologist from space, you know, you'd be like, okay, if we can be informed about it, we can take all of that neurochemical enticement and encoding and jump the tracks and put it over to healing inspiration and connection. And to that, you can add embodiment and then music and substances. So if you're tracking along, that's what we would call the big five. Of the five, three of them are sex drugs rock and roll.

And just to recap that again, the big five meaning-making ingredients in Jamie's alchemist cookbook are breathing, movement, music, sexuality, and substances. And, you know, everybody from Robin Dunbar at Oxford, who's most famous for his Dunbar number of 150 people in a group, to Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer winner for Guns, Jones, and Steel, right? They've all co-allessed around this idea of saying, actually, it's not like, pearl-clatching parents in the 1960s who were like Elvis, you know, and the Beatles and the Grateful Dead are going to be the, you know, and the birth control pill are going to be the bane of civilization. It's going to undo us. Diamond and Dunbar and others have actually really

advanced a really compelling case that it's actually sex drugs, rock and roll, music, dance. These were the birthplaces of civilization. These were the actual psychotechnologies that bonded us, that mended us, that inspired us. And it's actually time to dust them off, reclaim them, and share them so they were all fundamentally literate about the workings of ourselves. I mean, back to E.O. Wilson. If, in fact, we have paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions at godlike technologies and how do we develop this divine wisdom, the answers have been with us all along. And it's a matter of going back and reclaiming them and integrating them together, I think, that provides our best way forward.

And it's also profoundly empowering and inclusive. Because it doesn't mean some super smart, somebody has just discovered a thing and now we all need to get forced to do it. It's like, no, no, no, no. You've got this in your body. You've got this in your culture. You've got this in your community.

Right? We just all need to go back and bring it above the waterline again. So let's connect this to technology. We're interested, you know, obviously in this podcast for the big redesign project and getting our philosophy straight. as we're thinking about, okay, if we were to do this the right way and not just the ways that we've

highlighted in the social dilemma and for many episodes in this podcast, what would technology look like if it was developed from the perspective of meaning 3.0? Yeah, I mean, perversely, I think our best case studies are in cells, ISIS, the alt-right. Some of these fringe ideas were better off dying in the crib, but they're not. They're actually catching fire. And instead of just being one lone whack nut in my town, I now find a thousand people. around the world and now we're a thing and now we share and we cross pollinate and we propagate and the same with any extremist recruiting strategies of like hey you're isolated and alone but

you're not we're your friends and then relationship community first is quite often the way in right and then we see your pain we feel your pain we share your pain and that's profound on a human level I've got relief here and this is true for A&A any of those kind of recovery movements and things like that and then there's a question of like and now what do we do we do about that shared pain. Now, of course, extremist movements create the other and vilify the other. It's migrants, it's, you know, people of different beliefs, it's fill in the blank for who the other is. But the question is if we now say, oh, okay, so first established community, then acknowledge the traumas, basically, the bewilderment of existing at that intersection of

the metacrisis and the meaning crisis. Find those folks say, hey, you're not alone, and you're not crazy the world is and now what do we do about it and instead of making that move to the other to blame we expand our tent to reflect back us and what are we going to do about it and a couple of easy simple examples are things like the transition towns movement and the two kilowatt society which you turned me on to actually when you recommended ministry for the future but that sense of like transition towns is a global movement it started in england but it's popped up all around the world. And it's basically just saying, hey, where you live, where we live matters. And we are fragmented, isolated, and alone from our neighbors. And let's

re-knit by a regional tribe. Let's reconnect with the people we live next to, the people, our kids go to school with, you know, where does our food come from? Where does our water come from? How do we deal with fires and floods and all the things when they happen? Because FEMA and federal or governmental organizations are strapped and failing. So how do we just knit? And it's not even prepper based. It's celebration. It's great. It's it's building, it's creating, it's networking, and it's communicating. And when you see that that's possible, it becomes more possible. So instead of me being the lone whack-nut utopian in my community, thinking there's got to be a better way but collapsing in despair because it doesn't

seem like anybody else is asking the same questions, I now find 1,000 and 10,000 and a million people like me and the 2 kilowatt crew that originated in Switzerland and they've all committed to be living at 2 kilowatts of energy consumption or lower. And here, Jamie's talking about the 2,000-watt society, which is committed to decreasing their consumption to 2,000 watts per year. And for reference, an average U.S. citizen consumes about 12,000 watts per year. Their whole premise was, are we going to change the world by riding our bikes and putting solar panels in our roofs and doing backyard gardens? No, we're not. But what we might be able to do is via positive pro-social networks say, hey, we're doing this and it doesn't feel like austerity.

In fact, we are actually healthier, we are happier, and we are having increased quality of life versus decreased. And I think six of the ten, maybe cities that were voted best places to live in the EU, are at least in part subscribing to the two kilowatt society parameters and the show, now you're like, okay, now instead of a canary in a coal mine, you know, we've got a phoenix in the fire. We're saying, look, there can be life after the ashes. Instead of global humanism, it's bioregional tribalism. Most forms of tribalism, we think of bad because it's based on race, it's based on creed, it's based on something that is divisive. But if you say, hey, instead of think globally bi-locally, like that old sort of, you know, Whole Foods bumpers sticker, it's like grieve globally, but thrive locally, right? Like pay attention to the wound of the world. Really take in and grok what is going on, because there's no dodging it.

But at the same time, thrive locally, I would love to see more of that. Because right now, many of the innovations into meaning 3.0 are in the dark arts. What we're seeing is we're seeing in the collapse of meaning 1.0 and 2.0, you know, nature abhors a vacuum, but so does culture. And so I think if we're going to be pursuing that idea of meaning 3.0 and inclusive salvation, we have to be offering examples and exemplars via distributed tech, via meshworked communities, all around the world, so you don't have to get to critical mass where your zip code is, you know, or in the accident of your biological family. So you can find your brothers and sisters.

You can be like, I have affinity with these folks. But we also have an open source toolkit. We're not all being told to build the same thing, but we are being shown the Lego blocks. And we can trust that they snap together and they hold together. They work. Let's take an example of something like the in-cell community, which for those who don't know is the involuntary celibate community. The group that does not voluntarily choose to be celibate, but feels that they are sort of disenfranchised from society. I'm just thinking there we are on the user interface.

There's Reddit. There's Facebook and we're in the in-cell group. I mean, obviously one of the fundamental problems is the disembodiment of people. Of course you're going to sit there feeling like you're excluded from society and having physical, you know, sexual, intimate connection with others or with women

if you are spending all your time on Reddit. But Reddit doesn't put buttons on the screen that says, here's the button to host a block party in your neighborhood. It doesn't put some kind of other button that gets you off the screen. We've talked also about Next Door and things like this. But do you have any ideas we're just riffing here about kind of ways that we would reintroduce that embodiment and reintroduce some of those building blocks that would get people into a more meaningful form of belonging than one that celebrates their shared grievances? Well, I mean, look, I've been wearing an ura ring, the kind of biometric device for the last year or two, and one of the things it does, I'm never happy when it tells me, but it's like, hey, you need to stretch your legs, right?

Like, time to get outside, couch boy. And those kind of things, you know, if we're talking about the next five to ten years of integrated tech, the multiverse, as the big tech players are looking to move into that kind of space, I think that for sure there could be some of those sedentary eyeball strain, take a break, go outside warnings, but beyond. just those, they could actually lead into what you were just describing. Go hug a friend. You know, go walk a dog, you know, go smell a flower, watch a sunset. Like ding, ding, ding, it's sunset. Did you know? Get outside in next 10 minutes. There could be all sorts of fun ways to do that. But I think the first thing we have to do is, I think the power of most of these fringe and fractured movements, the ones that are not just picking up stragglers who are feeling like they're left behind the bus of modernity, but the people who are like, they're sweeping them up, they're radicalizing them, and they're pulling them further from any shared sense of collective humanity, reciprocity,

and action is to acknowledge the state of play. Because what I think is, and the reason that Q, I mean, Q is so bafflingly falsifiable and laughably incoherent that you're like, how is this even a thing? How did this get beyond like 12 weird dudes on Reddit? And yet it has. And it's not actually because of the incisive clarity of their analysis of what to do, but it hits it out of the pug on saying, you kind of have suspected that something's a little off about the society we're living in. You've kind of suspected that, whoa, maybe this isn't all sweetness and light. And maybe we're not all going to get our shot at the good life, and you've kind of suspected the game has been

rigged all along. And all you have to do is check those boxes, and that is a visceral sense, and that can be more or less informed by evidence and facts in reality, or it can just be a spidey sense at a sort of tribal primate level. You first move people by actually acknowledging what they feel to be truthy. Anybody who is aspiring to demagoguery these days is beating the drum of collective grievance. And many of their insights aren't wrong. I mean, if you really did a side, like a play-by-play on Bernie and Trump in 2015 to 16, their critiques of why the common man, why the working guy was getting the shaft,

were remarkably similar. It was the final 10%. What then ought we do about it that was massively divergent? And so, and I'm seeing. this in, I mean, here in Austin, it appears to be a hotbed of bubbling and metastasizing Q&ON, anti-vax, libertarian, godguns, and guts. It's not that I agree with the logic, the selection of evidence, the validity of the truth claims, all those things, but at a visceral level. It's important to, like, I think, take time in that 90% of, like, you're not wrong

to think that things are badly off and that many people. people who are demanding or asserting authority actually aren't trustworthy or worthy leaders to follow. One of the first things in Akito, which was an inclusive martial art, the idea was dissolve the conflict with your enemy. The first thing you do, literally the very first movement when someone's attacking you is you step out of the attack so you don't get brained, and you step towards them, not away from them, and you turn and you look in the same direction that they were looking. You literally take their perspective. And then you take your hand and you pin

their head to your shoulder. So now not only if you've taken their perspective, but you've taken control of their perspective and you're sharing it with them. And from that place, you can put them anywhere you want. You can dance with them. You can drop them to the mat. You can flip them over your shoulder. You can do anything you want once you control the head. And I think in this kind of, in this epistemic warfare, it is as always, and as it always has been, a battle for hundreds. and minds. And if we meet our adversaries, if we take their perspectives, and if we leave them feeling seen, met, validated, and acknowledge, then with gentleness, with grace, with compassion, with whatever's need, or decisive violence, you can then take the next steps that need to be

taken. And we saw a little bit of this. I've seen, you know, in social, the last couple of weeks, the whole like, I'm anti-authority and I still got the VACs. That's an example. That's to say, hey, all my friends and neighbors and my crazy uncle in upstate New York, I get you. I don't trust this system either, but I'm doing the other thing that you have assigned in your Manichean breakdown as the ultimate evil, but I'm actually going to try and bridge. Now, is there virtue signaling that gets sucked into those? Does it get co-opted? Yes, all those things also happen. But to me, that is a little blip, the kind of thing we could potentially all be doing more of. Yeah, when you were using that example of Aikido and design that says yes or sort of affirms or reflects back positively

and affirms, yes, that is an experience that people are having. I was thinking about the current way that social media platforms implement fact-checking and community guidelines where, you know, if you basically say the word ivermectin or here's a breakthrough case, people are having the experience of, hey, your post or your video channel has been disabled by YouTube and this decision is not repealable. of course people are not going to feel matter-affirmed and it's going to heighten. And of course, I would feel very shut down and angry if that had happened to me. And it's the opposite of saying, how can we, like you said, sort of an Aikido, design with a yes to the underlying sentiment and then reveal the complexity.

And one of the first examples that came to my mind is the one you mentioned that's been going around my circles with Facebook profile photo frame where you basically add this frame to your profile saying, I have a healthy skepticism of authority and I took the vaccine. Another one are these Venn diagrams that I think you and I were exchanging during the height of the middle of the pandemic a year ago. I have one in front of me right now. It's imagine a four circle Venn diagram. And it says here's the four pillars of the Venn diagram. The first one is people taking COVID-19 seriously. People worried about the expansion of authoritarian government policies. People acknowledging that the pandemic is highlighting deep-seated structural racism and injustice.

And people very concerned about impending. economic devastation and fear of too many lockdowns. And the point is there's a center point that says you can be here at the center of them. And if I think about humane technologies that are ikedoing and expanding, like you were sort of saying, it's that inclusive salvation, or at least some kind of inclusive meaning, you can take that thing that's correct, which is, yeah, maybe there are breakthrough vaccinated patients and we actually really need to look at that. That's incredibly important. And we can do a calculus on how bad is COVID versus say how bad or say vaccine side effects. It's some kind of yes-ending to the experience. And I was just thinking, you know,

since we're in this design exercise, how would you design social media differently? The current approach by social media platforms is an approach called reduce, remove, or inform. So reduce is sort of shadow banning or minimizing the spread. So if you use the word ivermectin or you use some word that's, you know, Q&N or something like that, invisibly, there might be a dampening of the virality or spread of that piece that platforms might include. The second, that's reduced. The second one is removes. This is just use the word kumanon. Boom, you're deplatformed the entire platform or your post just are hidden. And then the last one is inform, which is, you know, this claim is not true or here's a fact-checked article. It's sort of labeling or informing or that kind of thing.

But all three of those approaches are not inclusive meaning making. They're all forms of sort of saying no. And it's very tricky because how do you introduce this complexity, which requires a kind of wisdom and you have to be able to steal man all the different perspectives and sort of show a meta perspective that's greater than that. But I'm just wondering, you know, I'm imagining some resource in which every time you talk about one of these topics, it sort of shows you that kind of yes and more inclusive view of some of the meaning making frames that people are using and then standing on the top of shoulders of giants instead of there being just sort of a yes, no, on a single point. Yeah, well, I think the simplest thing to do is if you think of like a music festival,

I mean, here in Austin, we have Austin city limits, right? And so it's, It's a bunch of bands playing on different stages in this big beautiful park every October. And I think the simplest thing is play a better song. Make art that is so delightful and compelling, right? I mean, Banksy has done more to rock people's worlds and change their thinking, right, with his guerrilla art than any earnest policy wonk holding forth on what we ought to do. So I think absolutely it is on us to tell better stories and make better art. And rather than telling people that they're wrong in those stories, reminding them how right we can be.

So that notion for me is, for instance, things we're doing, right? I mean, we've been playing with a game YAnong to Culture Jam QAnon. And like, if you want a really fun conspiracy matrix-like story, then let's tell a good one. Let's tell a true one. And let's invite people into that same dopamine rush. I'm solving puzzles, I'm doing my own research, I'm trusting the plan. Like, play with that, not in a wink, trickster it, punk it, guerrilla theater it.

You know, we're even exploring experiential plays on Broadway. We're partnering with a group that has the largest fund on Broadway. They've backed three of the last Tony Award winners. And the idea is what are some interactive experiential stories that can start on the stage and go beyond that? Make good art. So play a better song. Play something that just grabs people's attention.

and entices or entrances or delights, and then tell better stories, and not where we've gone wrong, but where we've always been right and remind each other, hey, we know how to do this. Hey, we can be better than our last tantrum or breakdown.

And, hey, we've got this together. So I think this is a great time to reify. I've just played through Wyanon. I now have this cookbook. Walk me through. So there I am. I have these tools. I'm ready to do a meaning 3.0 local community culture. What do I do? What does that look like? Yeah, that's such a fun question. And the short answer is, I have no idea writ large. All I know are things we're fired up to try. And I'm sure hoped that other people get equally fired up to try similar things and totally different things. And again, back to Dunbar and Robin Dunbar did a really

neat study with the San Bushman of the Kalahari and found that their incident, they engage in trance dances. So they would drum, sing, dance, and move, you know, around a fire, potentially with sleep deprivation, fasting, you know, all the techniques, the common and available techniques of state induction. And they would get their yawas out. And afterwards, they would all feel better. And what he noticed was it wasn't an exclamation point, or it wasn't solely, an exclamation point at the end of a good day or a good hunt or a good month. They actually increased the frequency of their transdances when things were hotter. So they actually used them as a psychosocial technology. When we're starting to get a little prickly, a little salty, a little sick of each other, we throw

down and wipe the etch askech clean. So batch forgiveness. Because I think it's essential. I mean, clearly, when we really bang into each other, we need to slow down and process that one-on-one. We might even need mediation from somebody wise and trusted, but there is a whole bunch of irritation and grit in the social gears that really we don't actually need to talk about it. We actually need to get past it. And so the notion of psychotechnologies that provide batch forgiveness. Mandela pioneered the Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South Africa. They've been attempted in other places with mixed success. But I think the premise is really beautiful. How do we mend and go forward after cataclysm? and we could even blend it with Dunbar and create something even more fun. Like, what's the groove and reconciliation committee? How can we learn to sweat our prose? How can we learn to atone and digest our grief

and make a joyful sound? And that's that Church of Beyonce, right? That's the Grace Cathedral. Like, we've got examples. You know, we've got examples all around us. And I think it's just an opportunity for us once again to realize that. And that, to me, is the potential phase change.

right because all the graphs showing all the things right now don't look great and it's really easy to break our hearts or lose our minds with the burden of that realization and can we can we not just walk each other home you know provide each other company along the way but can we dance each other home we had a lived experience of this because we just did a guy exploring meaning 3.0 up in the mountains of Colorado. And we had the sort of folk fusion band Rising Appalachia with us, which is two sisters, Leah and Chloe Song, and their bandmates. And they've been carrying forward the American songbook, like old school Celtic stuff, Scots-Irish stuff, Appalachian stuff. And their songs are almost 201. They're redemption songs. They are about

the pain and the heartache and the heartbreak, the bad luck and the set downs. I fought the law and the law won't. You want to talk about distrust for authority, right? Baked into the folk, gospel, soul, blues, jazz traditions is a very anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment bent. It's fiercely individualistic, but it is also transformative. And it's redemptive, and it doesn't seek to bypass the pain. It actually starts there. And in fact, the choruses, they get everybody up off their feet, they get back in the day flicking their lighters, you know, sadly now holding up their phones, right? But the choruses are always like, I am acknowledging the deep pathos, the pain and the suffering in the injustice and the sort of irreducible illogic of this whole thing

we're in. And I rise up singing. And that's where you get, Beyonce, that's where you get Lady Gaga, right? Like the IMA survivors, like those kind of, like this is, it is archetypal for us to celebrate in the midst of our suffering. And what you don't see in most of our current culture wars is, A, a kind of playful, trickster sense of humor and a redemptive, joyful sound as to what do we do in spite of all this. Right? We're getting wrapped around the axle in the intersection of the meaning crisis and the meta-crisis, and we're getting overwhelmed by our grief and grievances. Versus, hey, and don't take this too seriously.

And hey, by the way, there's a much funner jam we can share together. And quite often it is an artist. It is somebody testifying, right, who reminds us it is possible to wail with it. I mean, Cornell West at Harvard, he said something beautifully. He said something like, you know, courageously bearing witness until the worms get your body. He said, like, boom, you know, and living to sing about, he said, boom, that's blues. A beautiful tradition. And we're all living the blues right now.

The question is, is, are we doing it to music or are we doing it in the ditch? And to me, that's the notion of, like, making better up, right? The songs that remind us of what's in us to be. what must be done. Jamie Weill is a leading expert in evidence-based peak performance. He's the founder and executive director of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance. Jamie's the author of two books, Stealing Fire,

How Silicon Valley, Navy Seals, and Maverick Scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work, and most recently, Recapture the Rapture, rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its place. mind. You can find information about Recapture the Rapture, along with tools for building your own version of Meaning3.0 at Recapturetherapture.com. And Jamie will be joining us for a live discussion and Q&A at our podcast club. Details are at HumaneTech.com. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Our executive producer is Stephanie

Lepp, and our associate producer is Nur al-Samurai. Dan Kedney is our Edomede. Dan Kedney is our at large, original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday, and a special thanks to the whole Center for Human Technology team for making this podcast possible. And a very special thanks goes to our generous lead supporters, including the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Evolve Foundation, among many others. I'm Tristan Harris, and if you made it all the way here, let me just give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention. Thank you.