Can We Save Humanity? Jamie Wheal on Saving a Global Culture on the Brink of Collapse

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversation with tom i am here today with somebody who is an extraordinary thinker you guys are going to want to buckle up for this one we are joined by jamie wheel jamie welcome thanks for having me tom oh dude uh like we were saying before we started rolling super sad that this isn't happening in person but so grateful that we at least get a connect over skype um your book recapture the rapture is is a thrill ride it is uh reading your books and talking to you is like taking drugs like i and i mean that in the most positive way humanly possible but you touch on things in a way that is so radically different from the way that everybody else looks at them and man you really hit on something in recapture the rapture so i'm going to do a really bad job of summarizing the book and then all the things that i get wrong we're going to spend the next couple of hours parsing through because i think that um this is a really interesting guide post for people in terms of what we're dealing with right now so i want to read the full title so the full title of the book recapture the rapture rethinking god sex and death in a world that's lost its mind so first and foremost for anybody that you know is uh with their kids right now i have a fair warning you may want to uh be be cognizant that we will tread on territory that is um that is interesting and adult at times in nature um but the okay so here's my quick synopsis of the book and and we'll then parse out where i go wrong so first of all we've lost meaning in our world and that has created sort of this god-sized whole and capitalism and sort of classical liberalism is failing to deliver the solutions that we hoped would be there in the absence of something like god that you know this would spread out to all humanity and would be this wonderful utopia that has not quite worked out and if we look to our biological drivers which is a huge part of the book and part of the reason i'm so like thrilled that you wrote this because to me so often people don't acknowledge that we're all having a biological experience so if we look at sort of the realities of our biology understand the drivers that we have then sort of this last meaning 3.0 sense of understanding the tools that we have understanding where we've come from and what this loss of meaning really means we have a chance to use what you call cultural architecture to build something new that hopefully does not repeat the mistakes of the past and we're going to go into extreme detail on exactly how you pull that off because you give a lot of actionable ideas but did i get close that's awesome that's awesome yeah amazing so then i have understood the book which was again it was a total um thrill ride you start with explaining how basically the world is going to end um walk us through this have your attention yeah right walk us through the loss of meaning i think that's maybe the most important thing for people to understand yeah well i mean i think the simplest thing to say is is is you haven't gone crazy the world has you know like we can all just exhale that especially in this last year super acutely but increasingly over the last four or five years things have been getting super weird and they've been getting you know exponentially weird in competing in conflicting conflicting directions so i told the story you got to see it i was at a singular university conference in johannesburg about future proofing africa and it was like there was this kind of schizoid split between what was getting discussed you know some of it was like hey we can you know we can get drinking water from clouds and we can use desalination and we can use blockchain to provide passports for refugees so folks actually get to keep their identities also it's a really awesome innovative amazing thing to do like whoa you know like things are getting exponentially better and then there was things on exponential biology like crispr and exponential currencies like like blockchain and exponential education like online learning and exponential transportation like uber doing helicopter drone helicopters and all this stuff and i'm like wait a second everything has happened everything's going exponential but the thing in the middle of how do we make sense of all this exponential meaning isn't keeping up and you know the harvard biologist eo wilson he had a great description of this he says we have paleolithic emotions it's just kind of how we are hardwired we're 50 000 years behind this curve right we've got medieval institutions and we've got god-like technology and that sense that in our world right now you know things are getting exponentially better you know war wars and poverty are down nutrition is up you know all the all the good happy things that stephen pinker talks about or if you've seen those hans rosling ted talks and you're like look at all the awesome like yay i should be more optimistic right um and then you doom scroll your news feed and your little mice like there's fire and there's ebola and there's covet and there's racism and there's sexism and there's tribalism and there's fascism and there's all the isms you know all the time we're like oh no things are getting exponentially worse like which is it and and it becomes totally crazy making to try and toggle between those two things and sort stuff out so most of us because you know all animals but humans especially we're lazy and we're seek we seek efficiency so like instead of always reinventing the wheel we base things on predictions like i'm going to open the door the same way i opened it yesterday and it's going to take the same amount of force to get it across the carpet and get it to slam shut behind me right so we're always making energy trade-offs and shortcuts based on predictions so one of the things we do is we look to authority figures we say well what do the clever people the smart people the people we trust the people in power right that whether that's academics or business people or clergy or you know or social groups whoever it is right we look to others to help us make sense of all that complexity efficiently and and so to your point about meaning at the same time everything's been going hockey stick exponential in all directions exponentially better exponentially worse we've seen a collapse in the two most pervasive institutions benign authority so that's the academics the scientists right the the politicians you know all the folks in secular society we've seen the collapse in benign authority but we've also seen a collapse in divine authority organized religion right and so as and in that we've seen this kind of like giant sucking vacuum in the middle that's led to a meaning crisis and so you know the pew research foundation has recently found that you know the nuns the spiritual but not religious are the largest and fastest growing you know denomination in in america never been o n e not n u n not little black habits but n o n e's none of the aboves right and and so that's novel never happened before so fewer and fewer people are kind of under the under the big tent of church or synagogue or temple right and at the same time we're seeing a collapse in the promise of modern liberalism the sort of hashtag burn it all down ethos which is like wait um you know we were told in seoul this is like that tyler dude and fight club thing you know we were we were told we were going to grow up to be presidents and rock stars and we're not and we're pissed right and so we we see that like meaning 1.0 like all of organized religion for thousands of years promised salvation like if you believed you were saved you know but at the price of inclusion like if you didn't believe what we believed you were damned or you were not part of the part of the party right french enlightenment onwards the kind of modern liberal order and i don't mean liberal as in democrat i mean liberal in the sense of liberalism you know nation states democracy civil rights private property like that kind of classical definition um they tried something else because they just come out of all the wars the religious wars of europe and they're like whoa whoa whoa let's not do any more of that let's do inclusion let's take salvation off the table it's super problematic let's do inclusion so all men and women are created to life liberty the pursuit of happiness liberty equality brotherhood all those good things regardless of race color or creed so meaning 2.0 said well let's do inclusion but it came at the cost of salvation because that's super problematic we're not going to touch that third rail so in this collapse right now like ever we need to make sense of things more than ever it's more complicated it's moving faster and it's more how consequential than ever to make meaning out of things though well i mean at the basic we're storytelling monkeys did you know and and then at a at a sort of higher level we have to figure out what to do you know i always think of that george clooney character and oh brother where are that where he'd be like damn we're in a tight spot right and like we're in a tight spot there's there uh there are intersecting overlapping and reinforcing metacrisis happening right now and so it's not just any single thing and none of the challenges that we're facing stop or or respect zip codes or political boundaries right so we actually have to for the first time in in humanity's life ever expand our awareness beyond clint tribe clan faith and even beyond nation state to a global perspective where we interconnect and collaborate together it's super hard it's really fragile it's the boldest baddest ass experiment we could ever hope for but it's never been done and conditions are getting tighter so the question is right i wanna i wanna tease some of that apart so um we go to this becomes important because we're meaning making machines um we've relied on religion up until this point to sort of give us that meaning science has moved us probably been the biggest contributor to the downfall of religion i think you would agree with that um and now we have we have to make a a heuristic we need something that allows us to to shorthand things and heuristic for anybody that's never heard that word for a long time it's stymied me it literally is like uh rule of thumb so we have to have a rule of thumb that so we know when we pull on the door that it's going to take the same amount of energy to drag it across carpet like the things you were talking about earlier so i'm trying to make sense of my world super complicated my brain literally compels me to tell a story about what's happening i used to be able to clock it with the scripture i'm not able to do that anymore and so in a hyper-connected world where in the book you refer to it as oh god like fiber optic cable are neurons something like that basically computers sort of melt all the borders they bring us together because what i'm trying to figure out is why and look i think i know the answer from reading the book but why do we have to think globally is it is it where you start the book which now might be a good time to to talk about the concept of choose your apocalypse um is that why like is that the point like hey it's it's an interconnected world coupled with the loss of religion that makes this necessary or is it something else entirely well i mean there's so many reasons why but i think that the first is the complex intersecting meta crisis that we're facing and that so it's not just give me some of those well it's not just climactic and you know ice shelves the size of new york coming into the ocean and you know loss of polar bears or this and that it's not just you know wildfires and natural disasters it's not just the rise of you know well i mean look we're talking about potentially the end of the american century and the rise of the chinese you know we've seen all sorts of geopolitical you know moves on the chessboard uh in the last few years we are in fact still a nuclear world with a with a pile of those floating around there's increasing asymmetric technologies that can wipe us all out accidentally or on purpose and whether that's bio terror and gene editing or crispr or you know or you name it or you know or weaponize viruses there's infinite amounts of that and that's kind of never been true the you know the the archetypal 400 pound guy in his you know in his mom's basement with a laptop like that guy can actually unplug the whole thing right now that's never been that's never been possible so the the um the doomsday clock which was originally created around nuclear weapons um let's broaden that now to all the things that you just talked about or you know lump them all together to sort of the state of the world and the way that we can destroy ourselves if you had to pick a time so it's you know how close to midnight midnight being what was originally sort of the nuclear winter um how close to midnight do you think we are well i mean i defer to a bunch of smart atomic scientists and and as i want to make sure that we're not just talking atomic stuff i'm talking about all of that yeah yeah like meta-systemic risks so those guys as of 2020 and then they they kept it the same for 2021 they said we're at 90 seconds to midnight and that's closer than during the cuban missile crisis that's closer than any any other time or event uh that we've experienced since 1947. so that alone is bracing you know and there's been the un reports which have been updated and saying hey we have 10 years to figure this out and whoops now another year or two or three has gone by and you know those dates may or may not be holding in general what's been happening is that most forecasters in a specific discipline right that could be antarctic researchers or that could be political analysts or that could be you know you name it to take a pic of a specific field most of them have been running their calculations but understandably they're somewhat in their silos and then typically what happens is when they get to a conference or they're doing something where they swap notes with other people also modeling other things they're like oh didn't think of that one let's put that back into our model and then you have these kind of things where um i mean you know i am a creature of my time i always think of like empire strikes back right where those big hats come clunking along and then they get whipped you know whipped with the ropes and they're like douche and then finally they fall over and explode and we're kind of like we're down on at least one knee right now and so the question is you know can we muddle through this you know it's tempting to be like oh yeah you know someone's always saying the end is nigh right someone is always crying doom and gloom and that's how they get attention or followers or sell whatever their solution is and that kind of thing and that's that's a hundred percent legit right the apocalyptic fantasy has been around for thousands of years and it just hasn't ever come on you're shown up on time so we really do have to like there's a there's a high bar to say well are we absolutely certain that we're not just in another one of those right every round number on the calendar every big meteor event or strange you know or volcanic eruption that's done something wiggy or weird you know has always prompted people to think and feel and say these things and act accordingly the only question is is is this different and are we are we actually like against all odds is our generation the one who kind of drew the golden ticket because you know you mentioned you know a minute to midnight right and the thing that i you know that i think is really interesting kurt vonnegut the famous author who wrote cat's cradle he wrote slaughterhouse five he was actually studying anthropology at the university of chicago and you can google this you can look it up on youtube he has a fun a cool lecture about it but he talks about the shape of stories he's like all stories have basic shapes and they kind of fit in only to in only a handful of buckets and he's like you know the common one is like rags to riches that's down rags you're dirt poor then riches up so down to up and he's like and then there's kind of the boy meets girl one which is like you know they meet cute in the cafe and then for stupid contrived reasons they they fall apart so that's up then down and then boom then they immediately they well soft into this into the sunset so so up then down then up again and then he noticed he's like actually though the one that we love the one we cannot get enough of is the cinderella story and the cinderella story right is the whole you know down you know like stepsisters and sweeping ashes and miserable stepmother up you know bibbidi-bobbidi-boo fairy godmothers and a wonderful gown and dancing with the prince midnight clang pumpkins you know lost lost slipper and everything super duper down everything is lost for the ultimate happily ever after ever and so if you think well where are we in our story back to us being storytelling monkeys like we search for meaning and we need narrative that explains where we are and why and therefore what we should do next together then we're at you know a minute before midnight and so we have to actually be willing to lean into that drop it's like skateboarding or snowboarding or anything like you're standing on the lip of something steep you don't fall back away from it you actually have to lean into it to stick the landing and then what do we do and how do we get to the greatest like the best happily ever after in the greatest story ever told you know the history of humanity all right so in the book you refer to the omega point which i assume is what you're referring to here um one thing though before we get to that that i think is important to cover is you're careful in the book to say you know the notion of just burning it all down is very naive and to think that you know you would be better off to burn it down um and then rebuild something from scratch is ignorant of history and you talk about in fact i'd love to because i don't remember the exact um stat but it was like from the fall of rome until some period in the future the declaration of independence so get give that whole stat because that's very sobering well yeah just just that you know in whatever it was 80 400 a roundabouts you know when the vandals sacked rome you know it roughly took until the declaration of independence 1776 for us to get back to the same standard of living you know and you're like hmm man and so when you hear like seasteaders or cryptocurrency folks or alt-right accelerations i mean basically accelerationists of any type and all accelerationism means is let's actually accelerate the unraveling let's not fix stuff because we are convinced that it the sooner this all comes comes apart the quicker we're going to get the chance to build our favorite utopia and i think the reality is is just those folks you know they're they're typically single dudes you know right i mean i mean you know in the sense that they're they love to be in their minds eye and they don't want to have to deal with the hassles and the complexity and the humanity of what's right in front of us so then they fantasize about a blank slate where they get to build their perfect model train set and the reality is is like these guys it's going to be a smoldering wreckage you're never going to get to build your perfect train set and some mad max are going to come in and run the joint you know and your weak ass is not going to become the new emperor you know so so those are the kinds of things that i think you know and it shows up it shows up anywhere it shows up on the the the movements towards social justice where they're like let's disassemble the western canon let's stop teaching any of the things that have implicitly have you know racism or oppression um you know implied or inferred it's all that stuff and it just feels to me now granted there are actual schisms happening right now there are people that do not believe in a global humanist project that everyone everywhere should be entitled to life liberty in the pursuit of happiness we're already seeing the move into tribalism right where they're saying no no no we're not even we're not even shooting for that we're not even giving that lip service we want to smash grab and win and so kind of buried in our current culture wars and our current sense of crisis and what to do about it and the anxiety and the grief but also the rage is i think the simplest way to describe it is it's a it's a contest between playing the finite game right win lose me and mine versus recommitting to the infinite game which is win-win and the point isn't to end the game victorious the point is to keep keep playing for as long as possible with as many people as possible okay right i'm gonna put a pin in that because now we start getting into a part of the book where i i really want to believe in your um the omega point where we sort of all get it we're willing to um take that dip which i think you're gonna need to define exactly what that is but um you know that we come back on the other side and we've got this sort of humanitarian project and it's it's all-encompassing but the thing that i loved most about your book which is hey you're having a biological experience and you're so honest about all right we have to take into consideration that these are humans humans act some kind of way they have a brain it compels them to do some crazy you go into a lot of stuff about sex really powerful we will definitely talk about that but the idea that everyone is going to be willing and or capable of showing deference to you know sort of humanity all-encompassing without the arrival of aliens which you actually talk about in your book um i i don't think it's possible like i think that that is so far outside of the realm of reality that we crash into what you were just talking about which is hey everybody's got utopia on the mind sounds great it's the experiment has been run it hasn't worked um everybody goes no no that it wasn't done right you know socialism communism whatever it just like let me give it a shot and i'll show you how it works and then you get to the problem about you know your um soft ass i believe is what you said is not going to be elected emperor it's going to be a hardcore that comes in and is like yo mike makes right smash and grab they do what they want they run roughshod history literally if people aren't looking at history that's really terrifying because it's people that have run a lot of experiments for you to figure out exactly how humans react in a given situation and when you create destabilization what rises is not peace and love what rises is might and uh power and aggression and so that gets real scary real fast so how do you think through that like how do we what is the drop let's start there and then how do we make sure that people rebuild something that makes sense not rebuild that's not the right word because you're very careful to say this is going to be sort of additive layers versus destruction so i want to understand in in your world what is the drop the cinderella story drop yes you said we're you know we're a minute before midnight we have to lean into the drop what's the drop well i mean the short answer is we can't possibly know from here right it's too complicated does it imply something bad though like some yeah if i had to guess right i would say we kind of run out of imaginary money um we have to make transitions on energy sources that um global i mean we've seen a lot of it in the last four years you know accelerated by accelerationists but the unraveling and unwinding of a lot of global treaties compacts cooperation and probably a retrenchment that's either you know all-encompassing or just kind of a little bit at a time and you don't really kind of notice into nationalism and even bioregionalism so so there will be you know and then quite likely an increase in intense weather events a potential impact on food supplies increasing tightness around natural resources and obviously excuse me obviously water is one of the main ones um but you know we're at peak sand right now right like saudi arabia is importing sand from india and australia to build with like you would think sand what the hell go pound sand right we literally use it as a total pejorative we are running out of sand to build in the last three years china poured more concrete than the united states did in all of the 20th century whoa yeah yeah you're like what i didn't even know that was a thing you know and so so yeah and you know now of course there will be techno utopians who are like ah that's just you know that's just hysteria we always invent stuff we'll create stuff and then they always trot out the story of you know late 19th century new york and chicago where up to there is in cow i mean horseshit you know and it was it was a big huge problem and then we invented the automobile but you're like yeah but we also just figured out how to stick straws in the ground and set on fire a whole bunch of dead dinosaurs all at once so we just like got this like payload of millions of years of accumulated starlight in the form of compressed photosynthetic plant material turned into petro chemicals that we just set on fire and that worked and it was like woohoo and the question is it's just can we make it to the next stepping stone in the river here's what's interesting to me about that so we haven't run out of oil yet so if this is really people fighting over energy it it begins to feel and here is maybe my very fumbly thesis and i hope everybody will forgive me for thinking out loud on camera which is a very dangerous game in today's world um but nonetheless i hope that it helps you know somebody so when i look at this i say okay i'm really having a hard time reconciling all the things that have gotten better right that we're getting close to eliminating global poverty um and by by like pretty objective standards and that thing's you know the stephen pinker argument or the matt ridley argument the rational optimist that you know you're looking at just year after year decade after decade of progress it doesn't make any sense to say oh all of a sudden we're going to go backwards and this feels without diminishing the real problems that we have it feels like our narrative about our problems has become the problem and given rise to what you're referring to as acceleration is so again i just want to say emphatically i'm not saying that we don't have problems and that's all delusion i'm just saying we've always had problems and in fact those problems have been horrendous so much worse and these problems are just getting they're getting more um solvable like it feels like we're getting closer and closer to things being better and so it's odd to me that as things are getting better the narrative the internal feeling is no no it's accelerating it's way worse like this is madness we're 90 seconds we're closer to annihilation than we were uh during the cuban missile crisis right and so i'm just like this feels like a narrative problem this does not feel like a reality problem well well i mean i i would i would sort of agree and then also flip it and agree with the opposite which you could also say no it's a reality problem right because we're actually entering because of the narrative like people are reacting the way they're reacting and therefore it doesn't matter if it's narrative it just is happening well because the reality is that we are we are caught at the intersection of the ark of coming alive which is always the happily ever after anyone grow up to be president or an astronaut what's my hashtag best life who's my soulmate twinflame what's my wonderful entrepreneurial experience where do i want to go what do i want to travel what do i want to see and who and be that coming alive right basically the sort of the gift we were collectively given between 1945 and say 2008 you know which was just yay upwards onwards right versus the staying alive arc right which is triage it's like wait a second maybe i don't have the time the money the resources maybe you know what we've seen with real estate prices in all rural rural new york everyone's getting the hell out of manhattan all the mountain towns in colorado i'll pay triple your asking price let me get the out of la right all these things we're starting to see people move because they're getting a sense that the music's about to stop and do they have a chair they actually want to be caught sitting in right and that coming alive and staying alive arc is crazy making it is exponentially complex and so our narrative what most people do is they can't hold both so they just pick one right and if you just pick it's all staying alive then you end up a paranoid prepper in northern idaho eating canned food out of your basement right playing red dawn you know and if you just go to the pollyanna staying alive or coming alive then you off to a beach retreat in costa rica you know and do yoga and ketamine until the wheels fall off right and so right and so like these are the challenges the question is is can we the narrative challenge i would propose is actually can we acknowledge that both are true it's an incredibly complex quadratic equation we don't know how it's going to turn out our participation in it plays a big part in how it turns out so we need to be vigilant and subtle and adaptive and responsive all at once that strikes me as a big ask my friend well to your point about globalism you're like i don't think we're going to get there i agree i agree i think actually if you kind of feel what's happening in society right now my sense is is like you know back to the pax americana like the american peace that was 1945 we kind of won the war we nipped in nipped out kind of took the took the gold ring but took none of the hits so like not only was japan you know atomized but europe good guys and bad guys was bombed into ruin and then we set up bretton woods we set up the world bank and the imf and we ran the table and we funded everybody and we built the world we came to dominate right now that is is you know that included the 1960s and the counter culture that included the personal growth explosion new age the introduction of psychedelics the introduction of you know gestalt workshops and landmark and all the things right so you're kind of like man if we didn't get to like that was a pretty damn lucky little bubble in history you know half century of and you have unprecedented prosperity stability and opportunity if we didn't figure out how to become bodhisattvas um i don't think we're going to suddenly stop figuring it out now so that was our crack at it and we can be absolutely grateful to it but i think it's in the rearview mirror so the question to me is more like well what's healthy tribalism because if you see the impulse in like like christian nationalists white identitarians that kind of thing right um and it's and it's even got weird echoes in putin's russia which is kind of part of the reason and how like steve bannon's of the world and all these things you're like wait russia was what's the bad guys how'd they suddenly become our friends and what's that going on about and it's a very masculine white anti-homosexual like pro-christian kind of thing you're like wow that's a strong strong urge to belong and to be part of something and to be part of a group and you can see that on the far left as well you can see all these movements where people are like screw it we can't figure this out now those are unhealthy tribes right because they're based on race they're based on identity they're often strongly othering the other but what if we actually said well what's the health what's healthy tribalism and healthy tribalism is community healthy tribalism is rooted in place healthy tribalism is like we you know this is our these are our neighbors this is our watershed this is the place where we get by and when and when communities rally in fires or droughts or floods and various things you see it but you're like those those ties have been getting weaker and weaker i mean vivek murthy the former u.s surgeon general just wrote a book about this and i think it's called together and it's and it's just this idea of how fragmented isolated alienated and alone we are and obviously quarantine is just you know 10x that but so what is healthy tribalism i think it it get it's like re-stitched together community bonds because like brock long who's the head the head of fema i mean last year he's like yeah folks um you know you need to really like americans you need to stop thinking of fema in the federal emergency management association as 9-1-1 yeah not it right we don't have the skills we don't have the people we don't have the resources like you're on your own when goes really upside down so i think actually fostering healthy regression or regression to healthy tribes rooted in place rooted in community that are self-sufficient and can look after themselves and each other and including the the most needy uh and least least privileged folks within that community that feels like a really important move for us to start making okay so let's start um figuring out how we do that through the lens of the book so you've got this need for people to broaden out their sense of um connection of their sense of tribe you go into great detail in the book about what you call ethical cults and i'd love for you to walk people through i thought this was really interesting that all cults basically have these i think it was four things in common um and then sort of differentiating between you know a cult and then an ethical cult and how that feeds into this notion of community yeah so and when you were saying the four things were you thinking of the rapture ideologies or were you thinking of the three oh you're right the four were rapture ideologies but you do tie in um you go through a list of things that like are the signifiers of a cult like basically hey if any of these things are true and you go through a bunch of them oh yeah yeah but you're right i was melding to two ideas there sorry about that no worries um so yeah i mean just this this idea of you know so so the middle the first part of the book which is kind of what we've been discussing right now is is playfully titled choose your own apocalypse right because the idea there is like who knows so it's on each of us to come to our own provisional decisions about what we think is coming what we think is happening next and therefore what should we do about it the middle section of the book is called the alchemist cookbook and that's saying hey how do we build for ourselves the things that used to be the the toolkit of religion and so how do we you know find inspiration reliably because otherwise life's a and then we die how do we heal our trauma because we take a bunch of hits in this world and otherwise we all end up with ptsd and how do we connect to each other and so the third part of the book that tom you just talked about is ethical culprit which is saying okay the world's going off the rails part one there's nowhere to go we have to figure this out right two here's how we have peak experiences and deep healing oh but like yay wouldn't that be enough no it's not because every time you have ecstatic experiences and cathartic experiences in community you tend to end up with culty communities right so that's that's why part three is all about like how do we put this into gear and into culture without putting it in the same ditch that it keeps getting put in right by cultic practices and so what's interesting is that the you know in my background my my academic background is as an anthropologist who did a lot of kind of comparative religious studies and that kind of thing and so within academia you use the word cult very differently because it simply means a mystery school or practice outside state sanction right so dionysus had a cult kali had a cult right the listening mysteries were called even early christianity before the roman emperor constantine made it the state religion was a cult and the latin term is cultis and that just means to worship so you're like oh okay so a traditional cult just was a group of people worshiping together right and and david foster wallace the writer you know he wrote that i mean he he gave that really famous graduation speech called this is water right right so good and he and in that he has one of one of his more memorable lines he's like everybody worships the only question is what right and you've got to be really careful what you pick to worship because anything other than something divine and sublime right is going to eat you alive so the differentiation between different types of cults traditional cults you subjugated yourself you said okay i'm going to bow down and i'm going to follow the instructions it was subjugation of self to the lineage there may have been a priest there may have been an officiant but they were one in a long line and they kind of answered to tradition and they answered to elders right so it was relatively stable and relatively safe in the you know let's say 1950s through 70s and then kind of you know forever onwards we then had a lot of gurus breaking with their lineages and they said i'm a new covenant i'm a clean slate never mind any of that that came before me you subjugate to me a higher self but there's no ballast there's no lineage there's no tradition there's no elders anymore and that obviously became super problematic and that's how we got drinking the kool-aid with jim jones that's how we got charlie manson it's also how we get you know weak versions like nexium and heaven's gate so i think this is actually a really important part of your thesis i'd love for you to explain so what this what this seems to bring together for me is the idea that hey i get that you want to tear down the current structures because they're not delivering all that they could but it becomes problematic when you don't have checks and balances and the sort of um one of the ideas that that has come out of 2020 for me is this idea of the real magic is in the friction between uh liberals and conservatives that you actually need both and that the human impulse you can sort of divide people into do you lean a little more towards one way or the other forgetting the extremes just do you lean more towards like empathy and hey we need to take care of everybody or do you lean a little towards yes but we also need to take personal responsibility and that you don't want either one of those things to run rampant because they become um evolutionary problems is probably the easiest way to think of it meaning if you only have um empathy as your driving thing we never go anywhere because no one's ever striving and you get people that take advantage of that that sort of drag the society down and on the other hand if you never think about other people and it's just sort of individualistic and take care of yourself you can see how the society doesn't really ever form so it's it's in this sort of ebb and flow the back and forth friction between the two so is it so go ahead i just said hundred percent like exactly that yeah that to me is what i see lurking in what you're saying now is that okay if you have a cult or uh you make a joke in the book i forget who said it but the only difference between a cult and a religion is how much real estate they own that's really good that's a great quote um and this idea of okay when you become the new lineage as the cult leader now there's no checks and balances you're removing yourself from that the the flock the group the tribe whatever we're gonna call them from saying hey that's not how we've done it in the past and so now as you uh you know break so far free of that that you're not anchored to anything then you can drift into the madness of you know the kool-aid and helter skelter and all that stuff um but also you can see how if you remain stuck that that will also calcify so it's like you need that you need some like departure from the past without that clean break is that is that a a good read on what you're talking about well for sure i mean i think we obviously have to be i mean there's sort of you know ecclesiastes like there's nothing new under the sun right so like all we're ever doing is reinventing and repurposing and stitching stuff together that is you know what what is old is new again kind of thing so you know huge hat tip to the past and we forever have to re-recreate so that it feels fresh and relevant and timely and helpful for us um there's there's a there's several issues because the thing that in a lot of like cult exposes documentaries etc um there's there's almost always the situation of like but how did but such a bunch of smart young clever talented people fall for such a thing right and whether that's movie stars or heiresses or you know homecoming queens or varsity quarterbacks and you know that's true you know via from nexium all the way back to the manson family and and and on the heels of that is almost always like oh guru with feet of clay huckster shyster was really oni in it for the power the sex the money the whatever and that is true for a whole bunch of low to mid-level cults but the ones that i couldn't solve for i was like well wait what's going on here were the ones who actually were early badasses right adepts they had kids examples so adidas would be one osho would be another there's a i mean that there's a trunk would be another like they were legit none of these people i feel very very uneducated right now no it's okay so so chogyam trungpa was a tibetan scholar he he came to the west he was schooled at oxford he then came to america he started the naropa institute in boulder and he was one of the major bringers of tibetan dharma to the west right and was badass he's the one who coined the term spiritual materialism he had all sorts of cool insights but the community he also died at i think like 46 of cirrhosis of the liver because he was drinking so much because you take somebody out of a monastic tradition in the east and you're suddenly like in the west and that was a corrupting influence osho came up through the the the indian experience and kind of continued to leave that behind and then he came to this country um adidas was actually a a westerner he was he grew up in queens i think and then came to california super duper smart and everybody like there's still shock waves from adidas lineage people who were close to him and got tons you know lit up by him that are now second and third generation teachers but he also got bent so my inquiry was always like well wait what's happening with those guys not like the keith renery twits right that guy's just a multi-level marketer with a little bolt on a landmark you know and you know you know and a bit of a horn dog to scratch right so not those guys but actual transmitters realizers and how do they get bent and and i think that the one of the first things is they grab the ring of power right and that's there's that sense because there is something that happens in sort of tribal primates right when one person gets sufficiently advanced to boot up and then light up others what happens and and almost always right there's those four basic feelings that we have and this work comes from lisa feldman barrett who has she's a she wrote she's actually one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world um she has appointments at northeastern university and at harvard med school and she wrote a kick-ass book called how emotions are made and she's like she's like all that theory of constructive emotions and you can monitor micro muscles in the face and tell people what the things you're like that's actually way more cultural than you'd think but at our root is interception like what do we feel in our guts and she's like it's only four things it's just a quadrant it's like am i feeling positive or negative and am i feeling active about that or passive about that right so active positive is joyful you know active passive is content right negative negative active is rage and negative passive is depression right so that's that's just kind of it and then we assign emotional labels and we assign plot and characters and who's to praise or blame for the way i feel right now right we do all the transactional analysis games people play kind of but at our root it's one of four things and so when we experience an avatar right a human who has really stepped up above and beyond we tend to have one of four feelings we want to if you know the first one is active passive like oh my gosh they're amazing they're so beautiful i want to follow them right and then if you get really lit up with the holy ghost feeling right then you're like i actually want to merge with them i really want i want to i want to actually them right you and then they could be it can be heterosexual homosexual erotic it can be confused because like i've never felt this much ever outside of physical attraction so i get my wires crossed and you know in the greek terms it's eros and agape right agape is kind of spiritual love and errors is obviously erotic love and sometimes if i've never felt agape before i get i probably confuse it the only tag i have in my body brain is this must mean love and passion and you see this even in evangelical mega churches there's all kinds of fornicating that goes on right people cannot keep the holy ghost feeling under wraps right so so the first one is to follow him the next one is to him but then if it all gets too much right and suddenly i feel like i'm i'm in deep water or i have friends or family they're like you've just joined a cult or you've lost your mind or you know you're then i start to fear them and that could even have been with a good person that that avatar could have been like hey i'm going to help you let go of things i'm going to help you let go of your ego and your ego is going to say may day may day red alert this is a this is a survival situation so you fear them and then the final one is if either you have the capacity yourself or you get into a crowd and this you know cancel culture is a micro version of this which is you then want to fight him you want to take him down and this is the pitchforks the torches and and the crucifixes right which is we have to eradicate this person because their very existence actually threatens our worldview so so those are the four you know follow fear and fight that most humans most times that's our response to one of these exceptional humans right so the question is is what's in the middle of all that to your point about it's both like you know liberal conservative all those things what's at the center and that's can we feel it can we actually when someone hits the gong and we're like oh i resonate with that that's true for me too can we feel it and can we step up and own our own power and that's really hard and we tend not to want to do it we almost almost would so much rather just collapse into a family dynamic that's a mother or a father i get to follow them and and steven uh we're actually robert johnson i think that's right i think it's robert johnson the jungian psychologist um coined a phrase which i think is beautiful he calls it the golden shadow and the golden shadow people are probably familiar with like shadow shadow in psychological work which is like the things i disowned about myself right that guy's an angry i'm not you know that kind of thing right but the golden shadow is the exact opposite the golden shadow is the things that are that is our own capacities our own strengths our own greatness that we deny for ourselves and then we project onto a guru so i'm not that spiritual but they are i'm not that awakened but they are i'm not that insightful but they are and the challenge for the guru and this gets back to the grabbing the ring of power right is if they actually accept that gold so everyone comes and they bestow their gold onto the neck of the guru and the guru's like are you not entertained right and and then but over time that gold drops them to their knees no one is that strong and it takes their community with them yeah that is uh that that goes back to this idea of okay how do we get to this global ideal where we're taking everybody into consideration when you have and this is my favorite part of the lord of the rings trilogy is when unfortunately i don't know lord of the rings very well but the kate blanchette elf character takes the ring turns into like the beast and then she's like ah and i can give it back and for her that was like the test to feel just how powerful she could get and then to hand the power back over the funny thing is that that is a very good analogy to being a ceo so when i i fought so hard to rise up when i was first an employee and just working my way up to really becoming an entrepreneur i fought so hard to get to the top and then when i got to the top i realized oh my god this is all going to implode unless i can give away that power and make sure that everybody feels that they can challenge me that they don't need to give me any deference because of my position and and that really came from like a super selfish place of recognizing i just wasn't talented enough or smart enough to solve all the problems by myself and i had to find a way to get the best out of everybody else and the only literally the only solution out of desperation i don't expect anybody to think that i'm clever for this just out of desperation was like i have to not in any way shape or form make them cow before me like i have to go way out of my way to make them feel safe and that they can speak up and if i do something that's dumb that they can just say that's dumb that they don't have to worry about hurting my feelings and again just because knowing that if i'm going to get where i want to go i have to give that away and so when i think about a that's hard right because it's rad to be in charge it is rad to be at the head of the company i'm not gonna lie right like it's amazing if you can deal with you have to be the one to make the decisions because that can stress people the out there is no going home when you're the ceo you're thinking about it 24 7. but if you can deal with that part of it it's really quite amazing so how do we get like now we're beginning to recognize it we see everybody handing you the gold is going to be a real problem we'll go more into the weeds probably right after this about the um the lisa feldman barrett notion of look you're just feeling in your body and until you have awareness and control over that like you're or tell yourself a better narrative it's probably a better way to think about it about what you're feeling you're going to be trapped forever and and the um the deep element in the book that you have it's the only thing where in the book sex part one and part two nothing else gets a part one and part two so sort of telling you how powerful this is is a way to um sync back up maybe with something more elemental and profound but again we'll set that aside so how then knowing the difficulties that human beings will have to give the ring back how do we move forward such a beautiful question right and i mean and i think you know the whole premise of the book for folks that are kind of familiar with either technology or cryptocurrencies you can kind of the analogies are the same i think our intention is to say hey any single solution is either going to just be instantly out of date the moment you know the world is unfolding faster than our plans um or that all top down solutions end up fascist and totalitarian over time or just bad and not quite right so like if you're if um boris yeltsin like famously came to the united states to check out the houston space center and then he had a day off and he had his handle and she's like i want to go see the real americas they dropped him off at a randall's grocery store which is kind of one of the chains in texas and he was just gobsmacked he's like are you kidding me like there's all these open freezer bays with you know tv dinners there's pudding pops there's like what he's like even even um our polar bureau doesn't get access to this if anybody in moscow saw this there would be revolution in the streets and he basically went home completely crestfallen forgot all about nasa and was like that grocery store man and he was like how did it happen and what it was was you know it was the invisible hand of the free market right it was a thousand autonomous decisions operating seamlessly all at once to produce you know grocery store greatness and you know bill gates has been getting you know taken through the ring out in the last year or so especially around vaccines but actually one of his other projects at the gates foundation is an even i think simpler clearer example of the problem of tops-down answers no matter how well-intentioned right so a bunch of smart people at the gates foundation they crunched all the numbers they're like we got millions and millions of dollars how do we save the world do the best thing they're like okay malaria kills the most people anywhere and wouldn't you know it people get bitten at night and so 10 bucks you know spend 10 bucks buy a mosquito net save a life that's it we're going to go do that and they did it in africa and they did it in around lake tanganyika and what was so they pumped all the money they distributed all the nets and then they came back a few years later and they realized oh my god no one's using them to sleep with this is a food scarce area on the edge of a lake 87 percent of the mosquito nets were being used to catch fish and further deplete the fishery because people were starving and hungry and it wasn't that the gates foundation was nefarious or stupid they were well intentioned and well informed but what happened the folks representing all the clinics in africa were like you look they're trying to they're trying to do tech bro solutions to complex problems of rural indigenous poverty and it's a wicked problem and so anything you optimize for especially from headquarters far away is almost always going to be wrong by the time it gets there it's the same with big military supply chains versus special operations guys in the field you know it shows up all over so the question is before you move on from that the um that ties directly for anybody sort of that hasn't heard the boris yeltsin grocery store story it ties directly if i remember right one of the most famous quotes from that is him saying but who makes the decision on how many whatever blocks of cheese to order people like what do you mean who makes the decision it's like every grocery store makes a decision for themselves based on demand and but like in a country where everything had to run through the bureaucracy that was he didn't even contemplate that you would just give the power over essentially to the market um so that idea of the sort of decentralized decision making um and now i'm curious to see where you're going so i just wanted to draw that that connection for people yeah i think it's just it's so tempting and right we don't have a a stalinist communist tops down bureaucracy but we do have like philanthropic capitalism like oh jeff bezos or bill gates or elon musk or some other smart super loaded dude is going to fix it for us like an iron man fantasy and it's like no no no not no one's that smart no one beats our collective intelligence so you could think of this entire book as basically a an open source toolkit that is the cultural equivalent of blockchain or linux right i mean most of silicon valley runs on linux it's an open source code and people because this will ultimately boil down to the individual it will boil down to the community at a bare ass minimum right and that's what i mean about sort of like you know and in the state of the world you can think of those old bumper stickers you might see on whole foods parking lots on subarus or you know priuses which was like think globally act locally and i think maybe an update for that these days is grieve globally right like actually open our hearts to the wound of the world right now and and everyone and everything on it but thrive locally right rally your people come up with solutions that work where you are with what you have and what you face and so the toolkit is not a singular tops down solution it's here's the lego blocks here's a few examples you can build a castle or a boat or a tow truck right and now we have the the building blocks of culture architecture let a thousand let a million experiments happen you know most are going to fail but if but but a bunch are going to catch and when they catch people will look over and be like hey what's that they're doing can i borrow it can i see can we can we try ours and that's how we unlock human spirit human initiative right to actually create enough novelty and enough solutions to help as fast as possible as many people as possible with as much fun as possible because we are wired to create we got opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortexes and novelties fun yeah all right are you familiar with the kulaks from russia yeah okay so i hear you say that and i want it to be true and if i hadn't read um the gulag archipelago then i i might be like oh my god yes this is it uh but so yes in some circumstances the soil is such that when people see other people thriving they're like oh my god teach me what you're doing so i can do it myself but there are also times where people look at that and go why is he doing better than me or why is she doing better than me and that's unfair and they've got some undeserved advantage over me and now i just want to tear them down which of course is what happened i think it was in the ukraine where they you have this class of successful farmers and there were all these posters put up everywhere um saying like that the you know the kulaks are basically uh the reason you have nothing is because they have too much and so they literally rounded them up and killed them took their land and what ended up happening was a famine of untold proportions in the most fertile land on the planet and so i wish i want to believe because i am fundamentally so deeply optimistic i am startled by the estimation that people think that we're 90 seconds i i i edge up to pollyanna in my like belief in people and oh my god everybody's wonderful and they'll all like get it but then i also look at history and i see something like the kulaks how do we avoid the human propensity for active negative feelings playing themselves out in the form of rage and tearing down um somebody who has more than me because it feels unfair yeah dude i mean i think that's super true and potential i mean mugabe and zimbabwe right did the same thing and and you know like did a lot of repatriation and and turfed out um a lot of the white colonists and farmers you know from rhodesia uh and then there was just kind of a decimation of the infrastructure and the fertility and the abundance of that that country um even in the japanese internment in the us during world war ii we used to go kite surfing in this awesome town called hood river in oregon and mount hood is this beautiful snow cap volcano and it's got all the cherry blossoms and orchards and the japanese coming from mount fuji coming from those other places had made amazing farms boom they all get yanked out right thrown into internment camps their land taken over by jealous competitive neighbors right and so you we we do see that and i think that all goes back down to the finite game versus the infinite game right because because we are hardwired for tribalism right everybody thinks of something like oxytocin as the cuddled you know the cuddle drug or the love hormone or the trust hormone but it's also the ethnocentric curb stomp your neighbor hormone it bonds from mother to child and love her to love her but it also bonds us against a whole new way to think about that yeah no absolutely it is a moral molecule that is a bonding device and in fact when people go to political rallies or or soccer stadiums right you get soccer hooligans like what's that all about what it's all about is that you get juiced on oxytocin being around your people and then your ability to over other the other goes through the roof so basically we regress under stress that's not a surprise so you know sort of after tribalism right tribalism is destiny and humanism is optional so we have to choose this we have to choose the better angels of our nature they don't show up by default or by accident and that is why in the past it has taken a lincoln it has taken a gandhi a mandela a king it has taken somebody to hold the higher frequency and say hey folks i know we could collapse into rage here i know we could seek the path of vengeance that way doesn't work here's the higher clearer signal and nancy keene at harvard business school she wrote a rad book called forged in crisis and she took a look at ernest shackleton abraham lincoln dietrich von bonhoeffer the the pastor who tried to assassinate hitler rachel carson who founded the environmental movement with silent spring and frederick douglass the abolitionist and the most amazing thing i mean there's just i'll just tell one story i mean people are loosely familiar with shackle and total show pulls it off anyway but the emancipation proclamation like good old abe lincoln we're like yes and i write this to free the slaves and yay ta-da right no he was at his wit's end he had no goddamn idea it was a desperation hail mary that he had no idea would do anything or work at all and he was out of ideas and to like steer it to that point right that oh my gosh even our heroes were human it was confused it was in no way a layup and it was no way a sure thing and they had to choose the right thing and do it anyway and those little tiny choice points right scattered through history through people we know and people will never know that on that has turned the tide of history like my my dear friend uh is a former uh commander for seal team six and specifically gold and black squadron right and he was put into yemen to track one of the gnarlier terrorists and was on you know hunting him for two years and they went rolling in to this night up and their v it was a total it was a you know not a comedy of errors but it's sort of a show that night and their vehicle got high-sided and they suddenly they're getting they're getting intel from the overhead support planes there's like there's six vehicles approaching from the town they're like they're splitting up they're starting to stagger they're doing leapfrog approaches like these guys were trained militias they knew exactly how to minimize their exposure they had four seals and then a bunch of natives locals right and and and and and his and his and they could see them on night vision it's like t-minus like you know 30 seconds 20 seconds approaching like what's happening here's his buddy flip off his safety and he's got you know he's got his goggles and he's got his night vision and he's about to open fire and he was like look i know if this turns into a fire fight we can we can take care of these guys but we can't take care of the next three waves that come in support so this is our death sentence like if you pull that trigger it's the beginning of the end and he just said he had this feeling and he just put his hand on his buddy's shoulder and he said just he says just just hold just hold for a second and then out of the darkness there's this and then then from one of these guys but turns out they're cousins they come to find each other they hug they share a cigarette right and everybody goes home alive and on their way that night and so that story is was he was like yeah you have to leave space for grace and that to me is is like because if you know i mean i hang out with some way crazy smart folks that like make me feel like usa today like i'm like comic books and pretty pictures and captions you know and i'm like holy smokes i have to like completely empty my brain just to keep up with them and they run game theory analysis and they run all the complex things and and none of them pencil out they don't like you would just like slit your wrist if you just listen to these data sets and you're like okay i just give up i give up it's all pointless right and yet all right and yet there's that there's that missing piece like somehow we muddle through if we can leave enough space for grace and grace comes through a human who is grounded centered courageous fearless right and willing to do what they must at the moment they must and that's what nancy keane said she says when lincoln did that when bonhoeffer when all of these heroes have done the thing mostly anonymous often alone right it sends shockwaves through the world right and that's our force multiplier right like that's the sort of ace in the hole of heartache because we could just collapse we could just break with the burden and of of the awareness of all the things right now you know but if we can just be like okay not my will but thy will and when the moment comes i'm here to play my part like that can change the world so now how do we do that how do we look at the evolutionary biological drives that we have to turn that into a tool kit to architect culture in a way that allows us to escape move the clock backwards away from midnight and thrive into the future yeah beautiful i mean what what what a wonderful softball down the middle there that is just fantastic um i mean my sense is is is that we need to get more effective and more deliberate and more inclusive about our access to healing inspiration and connection right we understand the neurophysiology of those things we can dive into the kind of the mechanisms like you know breathing and embodiment and sexuality and sync you know sacred substance use and music and we can use these things to do to do all three right because you know we can because you know life's a and then we die and that's hard and we take a bunch of hits so we have to have ways to defrost defrag our nervous systems digest our grief right and kind of reboot after all the pain and suffering so healing is essential otherwise we just get gunged up and then we are just rage monsters and we can't see or think straight but we also have to have the capacity to have peak states because life is you know the burden of life is hard like you know ernest becker you know the denial of death you know like we were born we were born to you know comprehend the stars and we sort of you know you know only to know we're going to die and rot dumbly you know in the dirt like how the hell do you handle that well you handle it by having access to peak states where like ah yes this is all this is wonder right this is access to the sublime this is inspiration i remember i remember this so that's what that you know we set down our burdens we stand tall even for a moment we can pick them we can pick our packs back up again right and then connection because we're we're tribal social primates and we need each other so that can deal that can deal with both our you know day-to-day micro ptsd but it can also deal with our deeper wounds you know the hits that we've taken like adverse childhood events adverse life events we can actually work lose some of that scar tissue and then we can do it together and robin dunbar the oxford anthropologist who's most folks are familiar with him from the dunbar number which is like you can you know beyond 150 people it's kind of hard to keep things together um he did a study of the son bushmen in the kalahari and they engage in trance dancing right so they get together and they throw down right and he and he noticed something interesting he's like he's like oh um rather than during hard times they don't have time for recreation and silly things during hard times they have even more trans dances because they use them as a way to discharge their collective frictions and tensions right so instead of like when mandela right coming out of south african apartheid he set up the truth and reconciliation committees like hey we're again he didn't just say hey whitey you know you afrikaan afrikaner right you guys had your time now it's ours and we're going to put the boot to you he didn't even dismantle the springbucks rugby stadium for anybody that's seen the film invictus right that's a that's a key part he's like he said he saw the finite game of apartheid he even saw the finite game of afrikaner rugby and he popped that up to the infinite game he's like oh this is symbolic right this is about rainbow nation this is about all of us and and that unlocking of what gandhi called satyagraha what mlk called soul force like mandela had it and that's what transformed that moment can you define soul force you define in the book it um it sounded silly to me until you walked through sort of the roots of it and then i was like whoa this is actually quite a powerful notion it's crazy powerful and and just to finish that right so so instead of the truth and reconciliation committee you know you go back to the bushmen doing their tron stances how do we create the groove and reconciliation committee right how do we actually have ecstatic celebratory communal events that wipe our collective etch-a-sketch now and we we walk out on and on with our brothers and sisters now that's not always true and there are certain interpersonal things that are going to require true sit downs but there's just a lot of friction and tension that just accumulates in social situations that we don't have time we need batch forgiveness for ourselves and for each other right and so grooving reconciliation committees i think canon should be a thing i mean think about a flash mob where you actually got together and everybody got their yayas out and everybody felt reset like we need these in the local level we need these at the macro level so so that notion of soul force is actually it's a beautiful story and i didn't even know the whole the whole part until doing the research for the book um but it actually came from um howard thurman was an african-american mystic in the early 20th century and he was one of the key inspirations for martin luther king and all the others in the black civil rights movement in fact he wrote a book called jesus and the dispossessed which like dozens of those dudes carried around with them every single day like in their in their briefcases and in 1935 he was the first african-american interfaith ambassador to go to india and he met with gandhi and gandhi was sharing his emerging philosophy of peaceful nonvi you know peaceful non-violence and he shared the concept of satyagraha which basically meant truth force means when you're so aligned with with the infinite game basically then you're immovable and then there is no fight there is no struggle all you're doing is testifying all you're doing is being a human bearing witness to that integral truth and so thumb and went back to the states and he wasn't a big talker actually he was very interesting he was like he he he spoke and transmitted but it was this like deep baritone it wasn't like southern baptist preacher like kind of rhyming and bopping and kind of carrying people along on a flow he had like huge silences and you would just baritone like transmit you know like the lorax and and he was like okay sachi graha that's a mouthful but let's call it sulfurs and he gathered all of the the young leaders at that time um uh of the civil rights movement he's like this is the thing and before that um peaceful non-violence like non-violent protest had been a tactic it wasn't a strategy so the civil rights protesters were like well we're not going to piss off a bunch of cops with german shepherds billy clubs and cannons right we'll get our heads busted and then sometimes they did anyway right but we're not going to do it that was it was tactical right we will live to protest another day after thurman introduced the concept of soul force it became the central guiding philosophy right and it was the philosophy that king attempted to manage right and the black panthers would come and they'd be like nah this this is too slow this we need to fight back there was all kinds of power struggles and differences of opinion but soul force carried the day and then with the impact and selma the impact in you know the i have a dream speech right when we can meet physical force with soul force right then we can change the world and it did right and so erica chenoweth that um harvard kennedy school of government did a famous study where she was looking at that non-violent protest around the world and she and she studied i think like 19 different historical examples and ran you know did the did the math and concluded that it takes three and a half percent of a population that's it just three and a half percent of the people in non-violent testimony to sole force to change society and now you know there are definitely critiques of that like how applicable is that for today you know because it's one thing to be like hey i'm going to sit at the lunch counter and ask to be fed or i'm going to sit in the front of the bus and the bus has been well maintained and has gas in the tank it's going to get to its destination is running on schedule it's another thing like when that bus is like huddling off a cliff and you've got to figure out how to change that thing into a chitty chitty bang bang you know before it crashes right so so where are we now don't know is three and a half percent died in the wool and gonna work every time probably not are we there yet absolutely not so how about we just like put a pin in that map and go for three and a half percent as fast as possible and then we can just have a snack break and we can look around and say okay humans how does it look from here okay so now i think this is going to tie in perfectly to where you're at but why spend so much time in the book talking about sex in my right to assume that it's described mostly as a vehicle to [Music] get in touch with um to to generate an awakening of sorts well i mean the only reason it's got two chapters is because you just have to snip all the wires to the bomb because sexuality has so many loaded taboos around it but like sex makes an appearance in the subhead of your book what is it about sort of the the end of the world uh you know in a world where we've gone mad what what is the role that sex plays and maybe we should broaden it out because you talk about the four or five things um that you list and sex drugs and rock and roll under different names but those three make an appearance in this um i'm curious i'm not sure how to what what umbrella to put it under what shell to put it in like to me there is this um would you call it the things that lead to an ecstatic experience like what what are those i would say sort of the big five evolutionary drivers right and so if we're thinking like so you think of music as one of the big five evolutionary drivers absolutely interesting absolutely right and and daniel levitan uh at mcgill in canada has written a book called this is your brain on music and makes all sorts of fascinating points but not the least of which is that music quite likely predated language so it would just give us uh respiration embodiment sexual embodiment what do you mean by that well i mean there's a thousand ways to describe that but some of it is lisa feldman the entire the notion of like how our bodies and brains are functioning affects our hearts and minds got it right at a simplest level and then at more complicated levels like what are some of the mechanisms of how we process pain and pleasure what are some of the interior strongest systems and i took a deep dive into both the vagal nerve as well as the endocannabinoid system both of which do amazing things to like regulate our organs and our blood pressure and our digestion and our inflammation and our healing and our responses so like how do we actually understand how us as organisms work and can we use that understanding to actually trigger healing in peak states together right so you put all you put all of the you put those five things together and they can reliably deliver everything from micro ptsd resets to ptsd deep healing and integration all the way to i mean if you really take you know all the way to peak states and ecstatic states and inspiration all the way to an actual death rebirth practice and if you look across all societies you know indigenous traditional greek classical you name it right they've all had death rebirth practices give me an example well the lucinian mysteries are one right i mean so so that was the one that was that was the one i started uh stealing fire with the idea of like stealing the kaike on like like socrates is you know you know bad boy student and then he threw a house party with it right and the id the listening mysteries were this nine-day initiatory mystic death rebirth cult and they used ferment potentially fermented ergot which had lsa which was a precursor to lsd so it was this deep dive initiation and and plato said it he said you know the mysteries don't just teach us how to die a better death they teach us how to live a better life early christianity our buddy brian murray rescue who wrote the immortality key recently he drew a connection between the ancient greek mysteries and the early christian you're like oh my gosh the other christians were psychedelic what an interesting hypothesis right and you see this with shamanic initiations you see this all over the world which in goethe right the the philosopher said he said he who does not know the secret die and become remains forever a stranger on this earth so for all of human history these have been pervasive they've been central to culture religion philosophy and they've absolutely all tied to psychedelics no no no and this is what i mean that's why there's five not one right um there's there's lots of different ways in and and fasting and sleep deprivation and pain like privation whether that's flogging or being hung up on trees or you know or being suspended by your flesh like the lakota sundance there's all sorts of ways to override a human nervous system right and create a deep system reboot but now right we have the science we have the neuroscience we have the psychology we also have the comparative anthropology to be able to look at and be like okay that's been happening all over the place there's definitely there there what's happening and now let's look under the hood and say what are the mechanisms of action to your point about like we're having a biological experience once you understand that you're like oh we've just cracked the code on all mystical initiatory traditions throughout time and space and here's the code right you're like okay boost endorphins dopamine nitric oxide and oxytocin in your system increase the endocannabinoids in your system and your vagal nerve tone right load up load up your body with sensation right it could be alternating current direct current magnetism sound vibration pain or orgasm right use any of those or all of them right and then and then in and then do something it could be electrical stimulation to the tongue it could be a compound a pharmacological compound like ketamine or nitrous oxide or even 5-meo dmt they all push you into a low delta wave brain state right load up the system send a pulse of energy through it and and you end up with a complete brain stem reset you delta waves are normally not accessible during waking consciousness they're usually only in deep and dreamless sleep so very few people know about them very few people study them almost no one knows how to get to them and that signature and and you know in karl deiseroth actually at stanford has just done a fascinating study on this and he's like he's like they had um epileptic patients who they gave ketamine for depression and then tracked their brains and was like okay you're having a dissociative experience you're having a kind of out-of-body experience when you have the out-of-body experience it seems to increase your health and well-being and your ability to manage your depression oh look it's at three hoods which is super super low right normally we're in beta which is way up high way down in three hoods almost nodding off almost effectively dying right decease of brain activity and and wouldn't you know it now we can just electrically stimulate you back to three hertz no drugs right just electrically stimulate because now we've got the signature and now you're having the same out of body experience with the same anti-depressive effects so you're like bingo so now it's not about i don't drew drugs or i do or i don't use technology or i do or i don't believe in that deity or that custom or that practice right you're like oh no we've got the cheat codes and the typical thing is is like in that delta wave state and this is this is i don't know why i mean i offer some potential hypotheses at the end of the book but in that state you get metric piles of information you're basically surfing the cosmic browser so those death rebirth experiences that all the religious traditions and all the mystical and esoteric traditions that kept them under wraps and kept them secret and cloaked them in tons of crazy language you could never decode you're like now anybody can go and see for themselves anybody can actually right have that experience for themselves and it and here's the back to the open source idea let the mystery stay the mystery we don't need to make up bunch of stories because like most religion would be somebody just happened to like get the tumbler right open up you know open up the ark of the covenant go hot damn and then come running down the mountain and be like guys guys you'll never believe this i just had the most wild-ass experience i think i'm going to start a religion and then centuries later you get priests and they're all playing chinese you know the telephone game and like it all gets gobbled it all gets calcified and then people have lost it and then you end up with placebo sacraments downstream that don't recreate the original experience so now we've got the cheat codes and now everyone can go and see for themselves and because when you're in that state the information is auto didactic it just seems to appear in the order that you are capable of perceiving it and apprehending it right then you're like oh so we can just leave all the storytelling on a shelf and you can believe whatever you want to believe you can skin this as a theist you can be like oh i've just communicated with the angels and gods of my pantheon you can skin this as a you know as a rational materialist you're like this is just a complex synaptic activity in my mind and some interesting fractal symmetries it's aesthetic it's neat but i'm not going to assign a goddamn thing to it right or you could be agnostic like hey i appear to be accessing an information layer but i'm not going to presume to define it right so you can believe what you want to believe just never lose the faith right and that's the the faith part is key nevertheless the faith that what just never lose the faith that that we are here we are we are at choice that that we are in choice i'm getting more confused here by the word well well i i'll unpack it right because the reason the reason i came to that is um my college roommate his his grandfather was a famous quaker theologian who was the minister at stanford he advised eisenhower he was actually responsible for undoing those japanese internment camps and he has a beautiful quote where he says faith is not belief without proof right but rather trust without reservation okay and so trust me what well here's the thing right that's that is the gnostic part you got a like zora neil hurston right the the african-american poet and anthropologist um she studied with franz boaz and margaret mead back in columbia back in the day she said you gotta go there to know that right the taoists say you know know ten things tile nine right so this is where though some of this stuff starts to be in danger of going over people's heads so i let me try to pull this down into my layman terms here so what i love about the way that this is all laid out in the book is anchoring around okay you're having a biological experience and you have uh the human experience is such that traumas will begin to add up over time or just a bad frame of reference and the way that you're in what i mean by frame of reference is the way that you look at the world the story you have told yourself about yourself and the way the world works is no longer serving you it's not functional so now you need a reset of some kind you need something that knocks you out of that frame of reference so that you talk about this in the book you get that little blue dot effect that the astronauts got when they were looking back at the earth and you realize oh my god like it's also small it's also insignificant by stepping out of your frame of reference you see that it is a frame of reference so going back to david foster wallace and this idea of this is water you don't realize that the way that you're perceiving yourself and the world is made up of choices beliefs things that you perceive to be immutable are actually probably accidental choices that you have made along the way so we are going to use your neurochemistry as influenced by your body to give you a view back that oh this is all these are choices when i change my neurochemistry i change the way i feel one of the most astonishing things in the book i i wrote this one down because i was like i cannot believe this is true that andrew huberman who i think is amazing did a study with mice and found that mice when they can self-stimulate would sooner self-stimulate bravery and courage then they would self-stimulate and have sex and i thought oh my god like the and you talk about how that's the whole ballgame right dude that's insane to me and the fact that you you said um there are brain states where you feel more resilient and you want to visit trauma when you're in a brain state where you feel more resilient and i was like that is literally what i've been trying to get people to understand is dude you change one little thing in your brain you can look at the same thing and feel radically different and that to me is super intriguing now it's interesting because i'm talking to the author you obviously know better than me but even hearing your argument i still believe it's ridiculous but i still believe that the whole sex thing um has a more central part to that brain chemistry manipulation and the reason it felt to me that you went into such great depth is that there is such great depth to go into when you begin to understand how you can unlock brain cells because i'm not a big drug guy like i've done the um ketamine oxytocin nasal spray and was like it's basically like being drunk now maybe i just didn't do it in the right setting i didn't have intention that actually is true and maybe all of that would change it and i would feel differently but anyway but the sex thing like that's already a hugely important part of my life yeah and you give this one you go into detail this one point about uh that if a woman isn't necessarily fully engaged in her sex life in general one thing to start with is 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation without expecting reciprocity or for it to even lead to orgasm or sex and that you said over i forget what period of time but days weeks or months i don't remember how long um that it begins to sort of um connect something it's not quite that way yeah that that's actually and i'm i think it's probably still unpublished i keep on pestering her this is dr nicole prouse's work um and she was a kinsey institute fellow she was at harvard i think she did some of her postdoc she was then at ucla and now she's an independent researcher and she's done some of the more interesting and kind of cutting edge work on sexuality and especially women's sexuality but not only on basically orgasm as a replacement for prescription pharmaceutical right because if you and this you know the trailer breadcrumbs that i was kind of accidentally stumbled across was i was giving a talk at the battery club up in san francisco with jason silva and rick goblin and it was all about psychedelics and all these things and then kind of in between a set break rick and i were talking and i was obviously always like i always picked the brain of my like like my idols i'm like tell me all this and here's all the questions i have and you probably know the answers right so um i was asking myself so what's happening the neurochemistry of the mdma trauma work and what you know and he's like well meaning that mdma helps people with treatment yes and that's now in phase three clinical trials and it's you know and it's being given special access you know as a special medicine intervention because the results have been so strong so effectively the fda is sort of fast tracking it because it has such a power to potential power to help people and he's like well look it's it's high vase or vasopress press and high prolact and high oxytocin because you know the closest analog we can think of or have seen is is the post orgasmic state and you're like and you read the studies and the accounts of those people suffering from trauma they're like oh my gosh i had childhood sexual abuse or war trauma or whatever it would be i've been jacked up i haven't ever i haven't felt joy or happiness or a whole host of things we all deserve and now i have and now i realize that this is in me now i realized yes it was the medicine but it was also this is me and being able to reclaim those parts of themselves of just full feeling like oh my god like that that makes you weep right it's just profoundly beautiful and hopeful that folks who have been so banged up and broken have a chance to heal and you're like well wait a second you know like it's taken maps 30 years and tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to navigate this process through federal law to take a schedule one substance and make it available and it's moving faster and faster but there's still lots of things that need to be done and you're like but wait you know how else could we get people to that post-orgasmic state and you realize oh evolution through the kitchen sink at pear bonding right now that has created all the taboos it has created tons of our trauma and our suffering you know and lots of pain well just think i mean go back to helen of troy on the face that lost a thousand ships that sounds nice but that you know the battle of troy wasn't so pretty you know and right and think about rape think about incest think about you know unintended pregnancies i mean the stab that blew my mind the simple one but after doing all this research on the evolution like the anthropology of sexuality to realize that even today i did double check the stats i thought i'd misread it in the developed world western europe and the united states half of all pregnancies are accidents so like half of us weren't supposed to be here weren't welcomed by loving parents celebrating our arrival it was a oh whoops and you just think of that and you're like what if every child was a wanted shadow you know we can put men on the moon and split atoms and we cannot figure out how to modulate our accidental desire to procreate it's crazy so you know jealousy infidelity divorces betrayals all of it like evolution is utterly immoral it does not care who we pledged what to when all it wants to do is shake up the snow globe and create the most you know the most robust gene pool possible and there's so many crazy dirty tricks right i mean that notion of you know when women are on the pill right it messes up their endocrine system and it lets puts them in a sort of a broody state like i you know i i feel like i'm pregnant so i'm not going to conceive again and um they are drawn to safe nurturing kind homekeeper kind of guys and then they get married and then they go oh we're we're married this is okay now i'm gonna go off the pill and then it's like and they're like wait a second who's this weak chin i'm gonna go out and shag a biker like i want testosterone i want danger i want excitement and they go out and shag that biker and once you know it they have you know erica jones like zipless they have an amazing hot and heavy one-night stand they climax and when a woman climaxes especially with a new partner ovulation can slide 72 hours either direction from her normal cycle oops just got knocked up by a bit by a rough and tumble baby daddy and now what you know or the classic 40 year old guy who's like ah why am i all soft in the middle the rest of my life is so hard like paul simon 101 i think i need to get a convertible and a tattoo or an earring and wouldn't you know it suddenly my little ea is looking really sexy or maybe i just just download tinder just to see and the next thing i know i'm blown up my wife and my life and my family i'm in a seven figure bitter divorce all because actually what happened is my testosterone was dropping at age 40 and the french call it la fer de la cuandonten which is the affair of the forties they got a name for it you know and wouldn't you know it the best thing to boost testosterone in a male is sex with a novel younger partner and you're like oh my gosh if i could now just send that email to a dozen of my friends you know and take take 10 percent cut on this on the alimony payments i'd be a rich man i'd be retired right so you're like just things like that where you're like okay so right now we're puppets on a string right we're just getting jerked around by those incredibly potent evolutionary impulses but what if we could hotwire evolution what if you can say okay we've been reproducing for a hundred thousand years with no instruction manual this is very very very strong in coding and is responsible for most of our grief and oh by the way jared diamond ucla anthropologist wrote guns germs and steel makes a fascinating case that actually human sexuality is so weird it is so different the fact that we have sex often outside of ovulation the fact that men have much much larger penises proportional to body size than any other even primates that women have big wide you know curvy hips and full breasts even when they're not lactating right that women have frequent orgasms there's a whole host of things that we do and take for granted that almost no other animal in the animal kingdom does and you're like and his case was it was as essential to advancing our higher consciousness how we went from homo erectus to homo sapiens as language and tool-making so you're like okay so now we're on to something right this is there's definitely a lot of like there's a lot of easter eggs here so now can we say what if we untied the puppet strings what if we hotwired evolution and what if we took that psychosexual capacity the flooding of norepinephrine dopamine endorphins oxytocin the slowering of heart rates the increase in vagal nerve tone all the things that pair bond us and deliver us to transcendent and interesting states and can we use that as an engine for healing and growth comparable to what rick dublin at maps has been exploring with the mdma ptsd therapy so you're like whoa we could use this to heal each other like it's one of the simplest ways for humans to make each other feel really good in a world that's often hard right so at a minimum we could do that better and at a maximum every single mystical tradition i wouldn't say every single because i'll be wrong if i say that an awful lot right of wisdom traditions around the world if you dig underneath the covers there's a sexual yoga at the heart of those mystery schools including christianity including kabbalism including obviously shaiva tantra hinduism tibetan buddhism you name it right where is the sex magic in christianity oh my gosh i mean all over the place i mean you see a polluted distorted version of it in our current sex abuse scandals in the church right celibacy is a form of sex magic it's cultivating and isolating but it kept jumping the tracks in dysfunctional ways um there's all the early gnostic christians were were you know arguably i mean a women could be priests it was it was much more egalitarian and there were sexual rights and practices the western hemetic and magical tradition all the way through aleister crowley and some of the dudes who kind of put it in the you know put it in the ditch um the idea the concept of errato comatose lucidity you know errata just to do with sexuality comatose lowering our you know i mean technically lowering our brainwaves out of conscious waking stuff down into theta and delta and then lucidity i'm still here right i'm still awake i still have consciousness that was the domain so sexuality is a evolutionary biological let's you know accidentally or purposefully make babies be done together with a high trust loving partner can be an amazing way to discharge the day-to-day trauma and even go deeper into healing and then see potentially a vehicle trans personal experience and like yes yes is it a phenomenal story she's a tibetan tantrica and she was a total badass she was a princess she ran away from home to to ditch an arranged marriage she then did like this trial of hercules she ended up like fighting and beheading a tiger she comes back to her home province dude well i mean she's a mythological you know this this is like a chick working in the bronx now i was like wait a second jenny on the block right so so she's she um she was actually padmasambhava who who who is one of the baddest ass like tibetan um you know god men who brings the dharma to tibet she was his consort and in the legends she's the one who woke up first right and actually switched him on so she comes back to her home province after being initiated as a tantriquer and gets raped by seven bandits right but she's such a badass that that that that the men all fall to their knees weeping like she just allows it and they all fall to their knees weeping and then pledge to be her body gods for life and like that story right is is is beautiful in encapsulation i mean including the fact that she denied the socially defined roles she became an initiate she transformed sexual violence into loyalty and dedicated service and then woke up the dude we all hear about parma samba as one of the bringers of dharma to all of tibet so so a lot of the studies if himself said he said uh you know a human body is the strongest vehicle for enlightenment versus kind of asceticism or like starving yourself or kind of denying it all she goes but if a woman is inclined a woman's body is better so that kind of gets you back to that old calypso tune you know that's right that women are smarter uh is there any explanation like are we meant to take that literally or is that a reference to like the divine feminine versus the divine masculine i mean gosh i have no idea um but it for sure i mean if you just take you know a woman's role in conceiving gestating and nursing life it sure to me would seem that that they've got an awful lot more going on than we do and even if you took a look at sexual and biological response i mean there's a fella who was um at harvard medical school an ob gyn guy who said you know women need a reason men just need a place kind of thing so like i mean you know it's a lot of reductionism but in general i would say men are simpler you know and women have just an awful lot more going on and and is that possibly and you know and they grow life right i mean that's kind of pop back to why there have always been not always but often taboos around menstruation taboos around those kind of things is because like what on earth do you do we sure as hell can't come anywhere near that magic it's interesting to me that that manifests as a taboo versus manifesting is like whoa this must have something to do with that incredibly important thing that you do that without which you know we would cease to exist um yeah that's surprising i mean i guess i shouldn't be too surprised your people are bound to take things in a very weird way given enough sort of um collisions enough people approaching it that things will get bizarre but it's weird to me that that's that borders on universal well i mean look to put it in perspective i mean if you think about even the prisoner experiment and things like that you know that the one that has since been critiqued as as that was it stanley pilgrim or pilgrim something like that the stanford professor who did the prison experiment of like you know make people gods and prisoners and they you know the gods treat people shittily that was just an effort to figure out what the happened in nazi germany right like world war ii was a crazy thing and hannah arendt called it the banality of evil right she was i think she was at er like men's trial and she's like wait a second these guys were just bureaucrats doing horrible horrible things on behalf of humanity so like to put it in perspective there's this pulitzer prize-winning book called overstory it came out it was a fiction it came out in 2019. it's a beautiful book about this really about hope and about growth and about trees and all this kind of stuff but he has a great phrase within there he's like he's like to put this in perspective anatomically modern man showed up at you know if all of life on this earth was a 24-hour day anatomically modern man shows up at four seconds before midnight cave paintings show up at one second before midnight and we've been playing the civilization game for a fraction of a second so to just give ourselves some humility and a sense of we have no idea what this monkeys with clothes game is and we barely understand how we operate or why we do what we do or how to understand it or how to be better at it or how to be born into this life this nasty british and short and harvest enough energy credits to stay alive through you know feasts and famine and winters and to then assign meaning and purpose for ourselves and for each other like and we're only just now beginning to get a handle on it we're like oh whoops looks like we might have overclocked a whole bunch of things and the pots are boiling over this is a little like you know like mickey and the sorcerer's apprentice you know like oh yeah we're gonna we're gonna turn on fossil fuels and nuclear power and we're gonna get us do all our dishes and then we're like oh no things are getting a little out of hand so so to just give us some some tenderness and some forgiveness you know like like like back to your your political thing of like you know it's both it's liberal and conservative like is it free mark is is it is it free markets or social safety nets you know is is it supply-side economics like keynes or or or or um you know or free markets like milton friedman is it revolution or evolution is it church or state you know is it carrots or sticks in in national policy like you know we don't know we're not sure you know we can't even figure out whether like eggs and butter and coffee are like awesome or are going to murder us in our sleep you know like so so give us ourselves i think we all get a mulligan to forgive ourselves and each other and to keep on keeping on and there is you i think you you know you rightly said hey wait this is getting a little abstract and esoteric right like let's ground this and and i think the simplest is the idea of when we have the capacity like life life hurts we know that it can it's tragic but and that and that's that'll beat us down if that's all we've got it's sometimes magic right and that's easier to forget and and and when we find ourselves whip sold between those two he's like all you can do is kind of laugh you can be like that's the cosmic joke and then it's comic and we share it with each other right we share those laughs at the absurdity of this song right like it makes me think about what you talk about in the book which is really interesting the concept of the trickster yes what did you mean by that well i mean you know this um it was it actually came out of elaine pagel she's a scholar at princeton um she's one of the baddest us uh religious scholars i think in the world actually and she was one of the original translators of the nag hamadi scrolls that when she was over at oxford and they were these like indiana jones papyrus things like hidden gospels the gospel of magdalen the gospel of thomas all these other ones that what that didn't make it into the canonical bibles and tell a completely different story of first century christianity and it's way rather much much more interesting um you know and again like women's priest and sexuality and music and odd very bohemian and very mystic and initiatory and then you know and then paul takes it and he's like oh no that that'll never scale you know let everybody in jew gentile like pack him deep sell him cheap pass the collection plate like that's how we grow this thing and so we got robbed of that whole living lineage but she also piggles took a look back at the old testament and specifically the book of job and job's that famous story where satan and and yahweh have this bet and and yahweh is like see he's my he's my man he does everything he says he's a pious dude and saying he's like ah yeah he's only doing that because his life is awesome like you know see how faithful he is when fortune turns away so yahweh then goes and kicks the out of joby right and nothing good happens to the dude and joey gets really pissed off and all this kind of stuff and this is kind of one of these weird old testament stories that people try and make sense of but in pagel's scholarship she found out that in fact there were at least a couple of authors across spread across centuries and that the first version didn't have satan in it it was just yahweh being addicted to job and right and that's a hard one if you've established that your god is all powerful and all good right if he's all good he wouldn't do such shitty things if he was and but if he wasn't powerful then then then he wouldn't be able to prevent them and and and this became this weird splinter in the mind of western spirituality and philosophy and what it led to was essentially that author number two had to create satan because he's like this doesn't pencil out it doesn't make any sense so he put in this plot device of satan the opposer and then that all cascades down to you know 20th century you look at the auschwitz problem how could god right both be all powerful and allow the gas chambers to happen and if he did he wasn't good if he was good he would never let that happen what do we do with this and what we had and and in that that western tradition created a schizophrenic split where the like god is all powerful and all good everything happens for a reason all the bad has to be the force it has to be the actions of some other dark force and pagel's i mean it's it's heartbreaking but it was the it's the source of her wisdom she lost her six-year-old son to a congenital disease and she lost her husband to a freak mountaineering accident in aspen within 12 months within 12 months so she's like okay so i am wrecked with grief and i'm this profound scholar of this western tradition how do i look to these texts and make sense of this and she's like you know western theologians talk about the problem of evil as if bad isn't baked into the script she's like no other tradition does this you look at the greek gods right the greek gods do all kinds of awesome stuff and they bring fire to men and gifts and all these kind of things but they're also fickle and petty and jealous right they're vengeful they do all the things right and they're just like the people that worship them and you look at indigenous traditions like tome and you know and and and the brah rabbit you know even bugs bunny is a descendant right of actually west african trickster mythologies and the ideas of the tricksters in fact um neil gaiman's book uh american gods there's a tv show about it right now as well and i was watching it and there's this colonial woman and a leprechaun shows up he's actually like six foot six he's a giant dude but he shows up and he's a leprechaun and she's like oh you're one of the fairy folk i want to thank you so much for all the amazing things you've done and he's like ah you know you know we were like we're like the wind baby we blow both ways good and ill and that idea that life is tragic and magic it's not just perfect and it's not just hashtag universe everything happens for a reason allows us to take the hits without having a an ontological break in our mind without tearing our mind when our hearts break because if people subscribe to the secret or see people subscribe to new thought you can see this with pandemic and qanon you can see that mind virus like this is the back door it goes in which is everything has to be happening for a reason and everything that i can't explain has to be the work of dark and sinister forces over there versus good luck bad luck who knows and so reintroducing the trickster like when we try and suppress that trickster energy when we try and suppress the random and fickle and unknowable nature of existence right we tend to create more trauma we tend to create more heartache versus just bearing witness in the not knowing of it all all right so this is also it's such a fresh take now let's put it back in context of this idea of hey maybe we can use all these tools understand our neurochemistry understand where religion comes from understand that something like the devil is a plot device that you add to this and yet we have this need to make this meaning we have a need to get control of our neurochemistry we have a need to explore our bodies if for no other reason than to recognize that we have a perspective a frame of reference is either helping us or it's not and now you talk about this omega moment which i think is that fall right so we we drop to you know that potential end that is part of the death and rebirth cycle put in put in a more spiritual context where you were talking about all these traditions have this death and reverse rebirth notion in the way that even an orgasm is low petite mort right the little death okay so we've got that grand context we've got to do the work we've got to reconnect to our body we have to um understand that we are just as prone to sort of the banality of evil as anybody else because we are an ape with clothes uh and now though we're we want to transcend all of that to become something that's more um globally minded so how do we take everything that we just learned over the last two hours and um connected to this idea and i i think you'll have to put a very fine point on what it is like what is the omega point and then how do we use that as like the springboard into something better yeah well i mean i think the simplest right i i wouldn't it wouldn't be intellectually honest to like unpack rapture ideologies and say anything that has a hockey stick happily ever after is you know suspect and then just you know like um take the piss out of all of those and then just smuggle in one at the end it's structurally identical just new rapper right like that wouldn't work so my senses is that there's there's no place to go right this is this is it this is the freedom of no escape because we're at a moment of crisis i'm just this is seconds well just i mean i mean yes that like that can say hey you know maybe you don't want to spend the rest of your time youtube binging or netflixing like like there's purpose where where the time is now and and our contributions matter but i wouldn't say with because because that that evie white thing of like i'm torn i wake up in the morning torn between the desire to save the world or savor it right and and that can make it hard to plan the day that's right that's kind of where we are but that's good man i've never heard that before oh check it out but but his next sentence is even better he says and then i conclude that in fact the savoring has to come first because if there was nothing to savor right there was nothing worth savoring there would be nothing worth saving so we right we have to come back to you and howard thurman right the theologian that inspired martin luther king right he has a beautiful quote it's a little bit instagram hashed at this point but um he says don't ask yourself what the world needs ask yourself what makes you come alive because what the world needs is more of us who have come alive right and so that gets back to the death rebirth thing so what it can look like over time and this actually happened this happened to me and julie my wife we were having a big ass fight over the kitchen table and she was super pissed about or just still hurt like legitimately hurt about things just up you know careless things i done in like at age 18 to 21 when we just met you know like it was still in the foundations of our relationship and on the other hand we've been having all these wonderful magical experiences and it felt like and i was like hey we've already won like we've done this like everything's redeemed that got us here why are you still stuck back there come on up with me which is kind of my classic move come on up here right like i don't want to deal with back there come up here and i just kind of had this vision i was like oh it looks like a jesus fish right it looks like that kind of classic bumper sticker like the nose of the fish is where we're born and where the two lines cross is kind of the tail and where we all die and all of us have that biographic life right we all have the arc of our life and along the way we take hits those are our traumatic events if we're lucky from time to time we'll have a peak experience and that could be a campout where you saw shooting stars it could be your first rock concert where everybody's holding up their lighters or these days their phones not nearly as cool right and you're like yeah we're all singing along and we were all one together it could be you know your first true love whatever it was you have a peak experience and you're like i cherish that but i don't really know what it was or how to get back there right but then you have another one you're like okay sweet i thought that was a one and done i'm super glad i'm back here again still nothing then the third time three points make a line that line makes a trend that trend makes a plot and you're like oh i might actually have a kind of a mythic life that is this complement to my biographic life right and every time i have a peak experience i feel inspiration like woohoo and i experience a forgetting of the forgetting i remember who i am up here i remember my deepest purpose and i also actually quite often get like a printout of like and here's the places all you're banged up and broken and out of integrity right so i'm like ah now i can go back and i can start mending those trauma points because i'm filled with juice right now but i've got a love to spare this goes back to that supersaturated neurochemistry right i feel expensive i feel safe i feel resourced and i can actually go back and do some of the work i've been i've been avoiding or have just been too blocked to get to now when we have that experience you have to you first start articulating your mythic life and this is true for lots of people in the new age space the conscie space the psychedelic renaissance you name it they're like ah i like it up here i'm not going back i'm never going back right it's like apocalypse now you know like like and and you get stuck in a spiritual bypass so i quit my job i changed my name i start wearing long flowy stuff and excessive jewelry and you know and and flowy sandals we go to cacao ceremonies and sound buffs and you're like no that's not it either right and and something that happens there is that we'll have a breakthrough on our mythic ark and we'll be like oh my gosh i'm a new person like i now understand all the things that i was doing that were broken wrong out of whack whatever and you come back home quite often to a spouse or a partner family kids whatever the people who have been with you along and you're like hey guess what great news everybody i'm a new person and they're like you you know and you're like oh you don't get it you don't you don't understand i'm absolutely amazing and you know the classic is the you know saul the tax collector on the road to damascus becomes paul right he's like hey baby you know i understand i mean i was a son of a and i collected everybody's taxes even when they didn't have any money and but i'm paul now can't you see and what happens is we get out of time with each other so our leading edge in our ecstatic life or our mythic life gets yet gets crosswise to the people around us the people who love us their bleeding edge the place back in time where we wounded them or hurt them or broke their trust and they're not willing to sign off on our leading edge until we're willing to come back and make amends and a tone and help them at their bleeding edge and so that's the beautiful human part like we don't have lineages anymore we don't have you know trustworthy gurus and teachers to defer to but we do have each other right and so we can use that and then over time if we do the work we can raise our biographic life and we can bend down our mythic life and then they come to that intersection at the fish's tail right and that's the place where we can die and be reborn again that is the place of becoming that that's the resurrection practice that's the place where we're like oh okay now instead of me trying to escape my mundane existence i'm coming back to it and i'm coming back to with fresh eyes and an open heart and gratitude so you see this is dorothy and wizard of oz there's no place like home right she comes back to that broke-ass dusty ranch in kansas and she's like wait tin man and scarecrow you're like you guys are the wrong chance oh my gosh you've been here all along it's jimmy stewart in a wonderful life right i died and was reborn the angel visited me and i come back it's ebenezer scrooge on christmas morning we have i mean the stories are everywhere and the key is that at what point do we stop trying to escape or transcend or bypass this human experience and instead we come back to it with tears of gratitude and fearless commitment and and the best example i think in the traditions is the zen oxiding parables right which is there are these ten beautiful penis sketches you know mapping out the path of enlightenment and and i remember reading it i was like oh this is super awesome let me where is it without what's the road map and and i got to number four and that was what four of 10 and that was the end that was when you get enlightenment and i was like wait i thought that was the end how the hell is this panel for what happens next and then there were like all these crazy esoteric zen distinctions that i didn't really understand at that time and then but panel number ten it it's this fat dude with a you know like like a buddha dude with a walking stick and it says it says even his his doors and windows are locked even the wisest sages and scholars cannot find him he is down in the marketplace among the people with helping hands so you're like when the extraordinary can become absolutely ordinary and when we can come back to this life not looking to wiggle off the hook but to willingly step up on the cross and to say this like like that our humanity right is only realized and expressed at the intersection of our divinity and our mortality right that we are here with beating hearts that we get knocked down but we get back up again that we testify with redemption songs right like that's soul force like that's the thing and we know it i mean think about beyonce i'm a survivor you think about dolly parton you think about the grateful dead you think about gospel jazz soul blues like those answers are in our living scriptures they're in our american songbook it's like this secret hermetic tradition right about how do we do this thing and we've been making ought about it for centuries so like we already know we like all the tools are all around us and it's just time to kind of dust them off freshen them up put them back together and then share them man well said well said brought all together the the book man was really really incredible thank you so much for taking the time where can people um hang out with you online or get the book yeah well i mean i think the simplest is recapture the rapture.com and that's the hum for the book but it's also for the toolkit there's all kinds of you know access and things that people can use and take away there's chances to plug in with community trains support different research projects all that kind of stuff there so recapture the rapture.com we're on instagram at flow genome so floww genome for both instagram and facebook and then an intermittent series on clubhouse on friday afternoons uh by the name recapture the rapture as well nice i love it well brother thank you so much for joining me and by the way guys speaking of things that you will love if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] you