#11 - Jamie Wheal: Tackling the Meaning Crisis

27:06And I mean, capital L, liberal, not lefty, Democrat, liberal, right? And just that sense of, you know, reason, empiricism, scientific method, you know, rule of law, all of those things. Enlightenment values. Yes, all the enlightenment values. But that's been taking a beating as well lately. And it sort of went into overdrive during the COVID years, right? The whole epistemic collapse of, wait, You know, the Ivy League schools, half of them have been in the tank for pay-to-play, you know, kid placement. Oh, shit, you can't even trust those guys. The Lancet is in the tank for some super shady publications that they rushed to judgment.

27:42What's going on with the CDC, international NGO organizations, WHO? Can we really trust them, right? You've seen the shattering. Looking at the banks, looking at McKinsey, looking at Goldman, all of these folks getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar. are all of these folks clearly going above and beyond following the science, which created this totally understandable backlash in both the far left and all right, where you now have these entire spun-up cottage industries of saying, we've been sold a bill of goods and we can't trust anything any authority is saying to us, so now we're going to do our own research and make stuff up and then fragment it into the echo chambers of cheap to publish.

28:21Basically, everybody's got their own public access TV station now, And so unsurprisingly, the quality and the consistency of any shared truth claims have gone out the window. Because it seems to, I mean, your friend Jordan, he tweeted a year ago that really resonated me. He's like, everyone's talking about it's left versus right, conservative versus liberal, etc. He's like, no, no, no. The real generator of these culture wars is the tension between centralization and decentralization itself as two sort of forms of societal structure. that's where this is. This is where this conflict is coming from.

29:03It's these two forms of governance themselves trying to find a way to either coexist and, well, not trying to coexist, trying to both dominate how things are done. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I can for sure see the truth in what he's pointing out there. For me, it's a similar delineation, but slightly different, which is, my sense is that we're waging, there's literally sort of a pitched battle for the future direction of humanity, which is, can we level up into playing an infinite game where sort of all humans are created equal and entitled to, right? Life limiting the pursuit of happiness, and the objective is fundamentally carrying on the enlightenment experiment with tweaks, modifications, upgrades, true ups, truth and reconciliation, whatever needs to happen, but still fundamentally that project versus the smash and grab down into finite tribal win-lose dynamics.

30:07And in that way, you get the, let's just take the proud boys on one side as like militarized alt-right and Antifa as militarized far left. And they, not surprisingly, would think they are sworn enemies of each other. But if you actually bucket them as, oh, you're all playing finite game, win-lose, tribal, right, versus us stepping up into collectively figuring out the infinite game, you're actually on the same team. Can you give a definition of finite and infinite games? Sure. I mean, that's James Cass's original terminology, fun and interesting little book. He was a theologian and a philosopher.

30:46But basically, a finite game is win-lose, and it's sort of you're optimizing to win or lose, presumably to win, within the boundaries of the game. Your goal is to end the game by winning. And the infinite game is the intention is largely to continue playing indefinitely and to include as many people in the play as possible. And that's fundamentally the modern Western democratic project. How do we incent income and innovation, but also tax that productivity to create a safety net? How do we create education and programs and rebates and incentives in order to hopefully inspire and lift people up?

31:23Now, that is always, that sounds wonderful in the abstract and on a drawing board. It never ends up that way. You have rent-seeking behaviors. You have all sorts of people coming in to put their thumbs on the scale, right? But that is the game. And the question is, is how well can we play together? Yeah, Western democracy tries to be a win-win game, as best it can. And it's been arguably the best example of that, certainly beyond the Dunbar number in history. But it seems like it's going wrong. My definition for that, the thing I would sort of point a finger at to say why it's going wrong is this thing called Moloch, right?

31:58Which is the god of lose-lose games, essentially. Unhealthy game theoretic incentives where the outcomes in aggregate of those individual incentives acting on the players create outcomes that are bad for the whole. Do you have a similar definition of Moloch? Because we've talked about this a little bit before. How would you define it? No, I mean, I think that's a solid working definition. It feels like it often gets conflated with capitalism or markets and market incentives. And it does feel like it's, you know, we're talking mythopoetically, so we kind of have license, right? But I mean, it feels like it's something almost bigger than that.

32:36It may well be that in its current expression, market capitalist dynamics are one of its most obvious places to see it in action. But it is something, I mean, in some respects, what's the spooky or sinister part, right? Because this goes back to Ginsburg and everybody else, right? And the ancient Babylonian stuff. But basically, the multipolar trap notion, right? Which is kind of a subset of all this, which is sort of if there's an almost certain likelihood that someone is going to do the shitty thing, then it might as well be me. Because otherwise, I'm the patsy. I get left behind. My company fails.

33:18So if it's someone violating tax law or environmental regulation or who's going to collapse the last fishery or chop down the last redwood, if it's definitely going to happen, it might as well be me and mine. And I think that what that does is it basically indexes that we are now going to justify our behavior based on the near certain likelihood that there are sociopaths or psychopaths in the mix. That's essentially making ourselves sociopaths. And there doesn't actually have to be a psychopath in the mix to incent all of us to act like one and claim self-defense. So that, to me, is almost the essence of Moloch.

33:59And that's the sinister evil part. You're like, how the fuck did we get into this pickle? I thought we were halfway decent humans. And the reality is, is I just have to suspect that it's like that game Mafia or whatever. I just have to suspect that someone in the room is a killer. And then I will act like one in order not to be killed. You know, but Moloch is, in essence, it's a coordination problem. It's getting everyone to agree to not do the selfish short-term thing for the good of the long-term whole, even though it puts them at a short-term risk, essentially, short-term disadvantage. Is there a way to inculcate that into people's minds and nervous systems so that they can stay more resilient to that through training, essentially?

34:46I'd love to be able to say yes to that. I'm massively under-convinced. I'm not convinced that simply seeking, interesting or peak states necessarily has a one-to-one or even one-to-three or seven correlation with development of moral and ethical behavior. And in fact, particularly in the extended psychedelic renaissance, Burning Man, transformational culture, Tulum, Ibiza circuit, you can actually make a fairly strong case that it has fuck all to do with what people, the states that people are seeking. So that's the skeptical side of it. The optimistic side is, If people are in a place of abundance, safety, security, concern, or connection, and compassionate care, yeah, I think we behave better, right?

35:36So if we are under-resourced, then that's going to lead to more reactive, more trauma-informed behavior. And if our tanks are full, right, we potentially have a little bit less clutch and grab and a little bit more willingness to share. But that sort of brings us to that question as to whether or not win-win games are possible, desirable, etc. versus win-lose games. And how do we kind of find our way through that landscape? So can we, or even should we, be trying to transition society from what is fundamentally a win-lose game into an omni-win, win-win game? Aspirationally, win-win, where we all get to expand the game, play for as long as possible, include as many people as possible is, you know, in a nutshell, the enlightenment experiment, right?

36:28Buggered up and bastardized along the way, but still, I think really viable and worth protecting. But I think paradoxically, in order to get there sooner, we actually need to figure out how to play win-lose games better, right? So rather than paying lip service to the ideals of win-win, but when push comes to shove, everybody's got the knives out, right? And you can see this in utopian countercultural communities. We're all one love world, but who's going to get the nice house? Who's going to get the lot? Who's banging the leader? Who's going to get the money? All of those things, right? All of those things happen.

36:56And they happen because at the deepest structure of biological life forms, it's one up, one down. It's life or death, eat or be eaten, right? And that's not to say that is the only option we have is not to get all Jordan Peterson about lobsters and things like that. It's just to say that is a deep root structure. And so my sense is that we earn the opportunity to play collaborative win-win games when there is basically a surplus or abundance of energy in the system. right but if it comes down to vital thresholds right and either i live or die based on whether i get that next energy credit photon or calorie right then it is elbows out and that's okay because you could say oh well win-win we have to expand our consciousness we have to level up you can't solve the problem the level that created it all those kinds of things and then you're like yeah and and that's fine if i as an individual get in touch with my inner saint or bodhisattva I say, in fact, my life is no different than your life.

38:00I am you. We are all one. Here's my lunch, right? That's beautiful. Individual sainthood. But that mother becomes a martyr, right? She chooses that, becomes a murderer if she says, yeah, and my kid too for the strange kid halfway around the world, right? So we can have an individual mutation of consciousness where we're like, I'm willing to sacrifice myself for a win-win or so that the least of my brothers and sisters can eat. But we tend not to be willing or able to do that to our offspring or descendants that violates a deeper level of code. So you're sort of like, okay, so what is it like to play win-lose games and actually commit?

38:39Not that win-win, because that only works with a surplus of energy. Then we can afford to be generous. Then we can play for the long term. But when it comes down to true binary, down to survival, and by the way, all the games people play, right that famous book in the 60s that pop pop psych transactional analysis book was basically like here's all the games there's money games there's power games there's sex games you know and certainly money power social status are all versions of survival right if i lose my social status i'm the outcast of my tribe it's a social death potentially a real death if i don't have enough money those are energy credits and coin of the realm and sex is if i lose in the sexual politics game i don't get to reproduce and effectively even if i live my gene my downline dies.

39:19So all of those are still expressions of binary life-death games. So the question is, how do we treat the losers better? So how do we redesign the game so that the losers don't lose so much? Yes. And or you're decent to them, and or you provide off-ramps. The whole classic thing in the World Wars is defeat with dignity. How do you offer... Provide your opponent with a golden bridge to retreat across. Yes. Any number of those things, and including... And if we think about... This is almost helpful in the negative, where the atrocities that we remember through history or that you see in films and stories, the absolute bad guy, bad guy is the one who breaks parlay, right?

40:00Or, you know, the right to truce. Like if the guy comes under a white flag and you cut his head off and send him back, you are the absolute bastard. The ultimate defection. Yes. We have all of these symbols and cultures and norms and customs about how can you, I mean, It's the idea of, in England, the idea of that's not exactly cricket. To say it's not cricket doesn't mean it's not the bat and ball sport. It means you're violating the spirit of the game. So there can still be win-lose games where you uphold the spirit of the infinite game, even as you need to, because of resource constraints, collapse into win-lose.

40:36But you do still acknowledge the spirit of the higher game. And so, again, we notice those in the violations. when people break truces, when people murder all the women and children in a sieged city that surrenders, versus saying, you can go free, we're just going to execute or imprison the potential combatants. Things like the bombing of hospitals and schools and burning of churches. You know, when people seek sanctuary in a religious structure, that's supposed to be off limits. I mean, it sounds like you're referring to sadism, essentially. You know, or just scorched earth competition. And the same thing with Walmart squeezing out mom and pop hardware shops or whatever it would be like.

41:16Is there a place where enough's enough? Is there a place where we've won, right? But we are still allowing for the ecology and the humanity for variants to persist versus winner takes all, winner takes everything. What's your leading contender for the way to do that? Is it just better regulations? because clearly social norms don't always hold true. Most, 99 % of people don't, when someone waves a white flag, they go, okay, I've won, you've lost, great, and that's it. But there's that 1 % that will just for the sake of it. It's very rare in nature, but you get the cat that does torture its animal, its prey before it dies.

42:01It seems like social norms will not be sufficient to just prevent those from continually happening, even though they're so damaging when they do. Yeah, I mean, this is just a tiny cut at it, right? It's infinitely complex. I would say tops down and bottoms up. Bottoms up, I think that we need to actually reinstitute the notion of healthy cultural shaming. Because, and I came across, there was a really interesting book called Enchantment and Exploitation. And it was basically a story, a very detailed analysis of Northern New Mexico, So sheep herding and then cattle raising in like the late 19th century.

42:38And basically the Hispanic communities that had been there for ages, for centuries since original Spanish settlement were sheep and goat herders. And then you kind of had the Eastern, you know, East Coast capital backed cowboys and ranchers with the barbed wire and all the range wars, like who got to fence in what stuff and claim the commons, right? And the idea was that in the Hispanic sheep community, you know, sheep herding communities, there was a natural checks and balances. If one guy got greedy and started growing his flock and all those things, but everybody was still, you know, they had to migrate their various flocks through the same valleys and same watersheds and this kind of stuff.

43:10They would get teased. They'd get ribbed. Like, hey, what are you getting a little greedy? You getting a little gordito over there, buddy? Like, what you doing? Or the aunties and the mothers and the grandmothers would kind of weigh in. And there would just be this social calibration, right, of what was good for the commons, right? And I think Brene Brown has maybe used these terms exactly opposite than the way I've come to understand them. but my distinction between guilt, which is I am unworthy or bad, we definitely want to minimize guilt. But shame, I have transgressed the norms of my tribe, is actually an essential tool of governance and correction from Dunbar.

43:47I use them the other way around as well, actually. Okay. So yeah, however we would want to do it, the idea of - One of them is useful and one of them is very destructive. A natural check and balance when I've transgressed the norms of my tribe. That's important. right and and we've diminished that in the whole you know no fat shaming no slut shaming no to blah blah blah blah all the things that we've said these days lately but the actual thing is like shame is an essential corrective when somebody gets overly agentic egocentric and extractive right so that's one thing and then and then tops down would be probably the two policy decisions would just be massively strengthen the antitrust you know statutes and prosecution i mean peter Teal famously said in zero to one, like the best thing to have is a monopoly because you basically set rates and control terms.

44:32You're like, yeah, that's the best thing for that guy. And it sucks for everyone else. So I think trust busting, whoops, trust busting is an essential skill. And then really the only way to kind of muter Moloch, right, is to go at the Milton Friedman precedent of the singular and exclusive legal and fiduciary responsibility of a board of governance of a corporation is to return maximum shareholder value full stop. That is the toxic cancer and legal precedent that forces even otherwise well-intentioned people into the zero-sum games that we all live and die by. You wrote recently about the issue with the 14th amendment, which I assumed was just a uniformly good thing.

45:20It forced into law the idea that a corporation is a person with personhood, and therefore its rights cannot be diminished or threatened in any way. And that has meant that we essentially humans are in service to corporations as opposed to the other way around. Yeah, it's absolutely, it's the craziest story I couldn't believe I'd never heard before. And so the truth is, yeah, the 14th Amendment was famously, the 13th and 14th were at the end of the Civil War and were about freeing the slaves and granting citizenship and status to former enslaved persons. Right, good stuff. Great stuff. But, and this is the weird thing, because even what you said isn't true.

46:00It's not that the 14th Amendment guaranteed those same rights of personhoods to corporations. It wasn't until 10 or 15 years after it was passed, in like 1866 or whenever it was, that there was a different, completely freestanding lawsuit on behalf of Leland Stanford, who's the founder of Stanford University. He was the robber baron railroad guys. And there was going to be a tax on his railroad. And basically this guy who was a judge, was going to be in the Supreme Court, ended up just being a lawyer and arguing for him, took on the case and then said, oh, by the way, 10, 15 years ago, when that Supreme Court passed the 14th Amendment, I was the clerk.

46:41So I was there. All those other guys are dead now. But here's the deal. Let me tell you what they meant. When they said persons, what they meant, They changed it from individuals or people to persons, because what they meant was to include corporations. And since the railroad, the Stanford Railroad Corporation is a person, we're subject to the same rights and protections, so you can't tax us. He fudged it. He even produced a little black book saying, see, this is in my diary. It says so. It didn't. And they ran him out of town. They said, you're an absolute bunk guy. But the law clerk recorded it, even though it didn't even work as legal precedent 12 years later.

47:19The law clerk recorded it as if it had. And then that recording got dredged up another 10 years later. So now you're into like the 20th century, like 1910, 1920. And the Supreme Court held 32 cases or something like that on the actual 14th Amendment, informing the rights of free black persons to have better treatment under the law. They sat 247 defending corporations with the rights of personhood. So you're like, wait a second, the entire thing about, you know, and then even today, Citizens United, right, which was the Supreme Court decision on dark money into politics, which basically has just blown up the last decade of American politics because now any fat cat corporation, any PAC can just fund infinitely and don't have to say who we are as we buy the votes of American democracy because our free speech as a person is protected.

48:14So you're like, oh shit, this has had some gnarly knock-on effects. And it wasn't even the judicial intent at the time. It was a lie on top of a lie on top of a typo that then just got picked up and run with and given us not only American case law, corporate case law for the 20th and 21st century, but really now the precedent for the entire world's protection of corporations. so it's the most upside down thing you could possibly imagine are you concerned about the direction of AI specifically where do you lie on the doomer to rapid accelerationist curve yeah I mean my sense on that is I only I mean I allow myself a handful of things to go deeply on and then I just tend not to get cluttered so I don't read papers on CRISPR weaponized bioweapons I don't read there's just stuff I'm like yep it's out there and someone's thinking about this, just not me.

49:07And so the thing that concerns me the most about AI is the least sexy case, right? Because if you talk about, oh, is it going to be Skynet? Is it going to take over? Is it HAL 2000? All the science fiction and pop culture references we grasp for to make sense of it, right? But the one that terrifies me is just that documentary, and I forget what it was called, but it was basically on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And it just went behind the scenes as to how the term Crooked Hillary got workshopped by their data and analysis. It was the dark marketing agency that was affiliated with Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica.

49:49It did not spring out of nowhere. It was workshopped with quantitative analysis. They came that out. They sewed it. They pushed it out through all the interconnected media outlets. And then that became the Crooked Hillary locker up emails. You can make a case that that single quant AI enabled decision broke Western democracies. The knock-on effects that we are still living through, everything from Odawan to Orban to Bolsonaro, all of this was made possible because that meme was seeded and sewn and took root. And you can be on that one side cheering it, one side lamenting it, but that's how it happened.

50:31And so you're like, oh shit. When we talk about can AI, what could it possibly do to us other than becoming a sinister self-aware thing that's secretly launching nuclear codes? You're like, we could just get much better slash worse at that. Right, weaponized memes, basically. Just weaponized memes and the collapse. Informational weapons of mass destruction. Yeah. To me, so that's such a low bar. I mean, the answer is sort of we're already there. There's no avoiding that. And who knows what will happen? And then obviously Jonathan Haidt's work, you know, specifically concentrating on adolescents who have, who are basically super digital natives and coming up.

51:06I mean, he said, I don't think on the record, but to a mutual friend of ours, he said, look, basically any girl that has gone through adolescence on Instagram and TikTok is developmentally damaged by that experience. And you're just like, that is heartbreaking. Yeah. you know and they just released his research organization just released a piece I was looking at before coming here today and it was just these two great it was just different age cohorts so sort of 18 to 24 24 to 30 30 and basically the if you were 18 to 24 you were in either of those cohorts you were in hockey stick increases for anxiety depression self-harm those kind of things 35 and older was just trundling along it wasn't great but it was baselines and you just and you could just see it and you're like oh my gosh so like we will be reaping that harvest as they marry or don't as they settle into careers or don't as they have children and raise them or don't so you know just as a citizenry you know we we have all of these toxic inputs already in the bank and then to your conversation with daniel schmachtenberger about you know the fact that ai is just a force multiplier on top of all the existential risk challenges and this is going to make all of the bad things as well as the good things, you know, but certainly all of the bad things as well, that much more possible by more and more less and less skilled or malicious people to have the kinds of impacts that could tip the scales.

52:41Those are, those are concerning. So I almost feel like it's the sort of, it's the statistically incremental and damn near inevitable stuff that if I was going to be a betting man, I would say those are quite likely to happen and can have, they're not sexy. You're not going to make a mini series about them, but they are the ones that could potentially undo us, whether or not the big time, you know, more cinematic epic ones ever come to pass. Where do you think we should start from in terms of inoculating us ourselves? And I mean that from an individual perspective, all the way up to sort of families, whether it's businesses, to societies, from these kind of malevolent forces, let's say, you know, people who are intentionally trying to create either self-serving or just straight up, you know, omnicidal memes.

53:33What are you personally doing to inoculate yourself from those kind of things? Yeah, I mean, you know, this is obviously a ludicrously large and impossible situation for all of us to be in. Simply, the things that I'm actually doing. So never mind grand philosophies. I remember Yuval Harari a few years ago. I just read something where he said he doesn't consume content that isn't in a book. He doesn't read anything online? No. Basically, he's like, if it's worth reading or learning about, I will buy the best book I can find on it and read that. And I just thought, that's a phenomenal, that's kind of like slow data, you know, like slow food movements, all those kind of things.

54:15You're just like, that is good. And I literally feel different and I feel better when I'm reading stuff in books, even if they're topical. You know, it just feels soothing. It feels more measured. It feels more, it feels often more detailed. I get the gist of a full idea or concept or framework. So while I violate that rule all the time, every day, I scroll my newsfeed to see what the hell's going on. I'm aspirationally in that direction of just unplug and go into slow, the slow thinking movement, right? Another is particularly with that crazy making overwhelm, right? Of things are exponentially better and worse.

54:55And do I, you know, plan my, how do I plan my day? I did notice and I've noticed this in a lot of our colleagues and friends that the people I know that are sort of quote unquote fighting the good fight, right, they're out there in the front in the public, they're out there drawing attention to critical issues those kind of things, they're often getting kind of spun up and burned out themselves right, it's a lot to hold and to hold the urgency and the responsibility is more than most of our psyches and nervous systems can handle, right and I thought good lord if I had a terminal diagnosis, like if I knew I had a year to live, the classic kind of thought experiment, how would I act?

55:35And the simple answer is that for most of us, we would be more free, we would be more courageous, we would be more truthful, we'd be more heartfelt, we'd be more adventuresome, we'd do all the things. We'd be outside more. Yeah, yeah. Heart to hearts and bucket lists and you name it, right? And I thought, okay, well, let's say that 30 years from now, we really are in that totally bleak wheels off situation. But I look out my window today and it's actually pretty beautiful. Sun is still coming up. The moon is setting. There's waves to be surfed. There's powder skiing to be had. There's music to listen to or share.

56:09There's people, there's loved ones in our lives. If we pissed away these days, wringing our hands about what might yet be, but isn't, I mean, it's the old Mark Twain thing. He's like, I'm an old man. and I've experienced a great many sorrows, only some of which actually ever happened. We're kind of in that neck of the woods. And I sort of felt like, okay, so the simplest is, for me, it's almost the hospice tour of the world and life. About six months ago, I just kind of set down the super intense urgency that I had been feeling for several years, including the writing of that last book where I was always looking for the solution, always looking for the way through.

56:52Where was the gap? Where was the seam and climbing that crazy mountain that would go and that we can make it through? Because every single one of them that I tracked pinched out. And it was almost always Moloch. Basically, his fingerprints are everywhere where you're like, oh, fuck. That's hypothetically possible, but we're just not going to do it, are we? We're not going to do it because of a perverse incentives. We're not going to do it because of greed or, you know, all of the things. You're just like, fucking goddamn, why? We could, right? We absolutely could. But statistically, my gut sense on are we going to, incredibly low given current conditions.

57:31So step one was like feed the holy, like celebrate life. Shame on us while there is still goodness, truth, and beauty in abundance, right? Not to be sucking the marrow out of life and not to be putting those memories in the bank. And at the same time, we can never give up hoping. Because if we give up hope, then that adjacent possibility can never happen. Like for certain, it's nails in the coffin if we just go into despair and cynicism or even just hedonism, like, fuck it, while Rome burns, I'm just gonna party. Like those are unconscionable decisions. So can we use our feeding of the holy, the idea of like, I'm gonna bear witness to the glory of creation, right?

58:15And the absolute heart-rending poignancy of this human experience. Can I use that in some tiny, small, insignificant, but profound way, ritually keep the world on its axis? As most indigenous cultures do. We pray, we make these offerings, we do these things, so that the sun keeps rising, so that the rain keeps falling, so that the crops grow. Can we participate in the wonder of that creative cycle while we are fortunate enough to still have that opportunity and choice. And then, oh, by the way, leave space for grace, right? Because it has always happened that way. And funnily enough, this was also Yuval just mentioned, he typed something maybe just about AI like a month ago.

59:02And he said, we have forever, all of human history, all of human civilization and culture is living in someone else's dream. You know, free markets was a concept, you know, So like the democracy, civil rights, everything that we take as the mimetic norms of our reality came up and someone dreamed them first. So the leaving space for grace is, and how can we dream a way through that we cannot see from here? We cannot, because at least I can't. And I've looked, right? And most of the people I look up to have been looking. And if you really behind closed doors sit down with most of those folks, it's far grimmer than even the headlines encapsulated, right?

59:42But the reality is, is we are still amazingly adaptive, cunning little monkeys with opposable thumbs and brilliant prefrontal cortexes. So we can't see from here what adaptations, what permutations, what mutations will happen around the bend. And this goes back to, you know, Jim Stockdale is Admiral Stockdale. He was the highest ranking POW in Vietnam. And he actually went on to be a vice presidential candidate at one point. But the Stockdale paradox was he noticed that in those North Vietnamese POW camps that the pessimists didn't live because they were like, oh, I'm fucked. Sure enough, they snuffed it.

1:00:21But the really interesting insight was the optimist didn't live either. Because what happened is they'd be like, we're going to get the boys home for Christmas or Easter or July the 4th. And those dates would come and go. And then they would just collapse. They would lose all ability to maintain hope after their hope for redemption came and went. And he said the paradox was the people who survived were ruthlessly realistic about short-term realities while remaining relentlessly optimistic about the long-term possibility. I don't know when we're going to get out, but we're going to go home. And that is, to me, is sort of all of us right now.

1:00:59We are in a massive, intersecting, chaotic, and complex tight spot. And it's the confluence of every intentional and unintentional quality of our civilization to date. And we're just hurtling off the cliff, no skid marks. Now, whether or not we can figure out how to turn into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, you know, and sprout wings or turn into a boat or do something else, we can't see from here. And I wouldn't give it super long odds. We may just get subject into the trash compactor of history, right? But it is on us, it's incumbent on us to maintain a thread of hope and resilience. And just so that doesn't seem super pie in the sky, you're like, okay, to me, where we can look for the most compelling examples of that?

1:01:51I mean, A, a POW in Vietnam, that's a pretty reality tested one. But the other are, what are fourth world nations or peoples? Right. First world was the US, second world, Soviet Union, third world was everybody else, aka all the poor folks that weren't worth scrapping over for the first two. but the fourth world were literally diaspora peoples, the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Roma, right? The Rohingya, like the all first nations in the Americas, right? Where we are uprooted from our home and we are dispossessed people and placeless people in many instances, right? And so the question there is like, okay, how did those?

1:02:27In fact, we're just about to be at an event with Bob Thurman, who's the preeminent Tibetan scholar at Columbia University's Uma Thurman's father, but he's a brilliant, wonderful man and scholar and was largely responsible for the Dalai Lama's bringing the Dharma to the West and all of the free Tibet movements and those kinds of things. And have actually asked him to speak exactly on this subject, right? Which is like, how do you maintain cultural continuity? How do you maintain love and compassion? How do you maintain hope for future generations that haven't yet been born while this generation is in the absolute suck of it?

1:03:03How do we maintain radical? hope. And the key is, you know, as Westerners coming to the end of the tether of our hyper consumptive, hyper individualist society, the last thing which we should fucking do is do some ideological neocolonialism of like, hey, all you poor bastards that we really gave the short end to over the last 300 years, you seem to have figured out some stuff about how to endure conflict and hardship and chaos, which by the way, we were sort of responsible for, but now we're realizing we've cooked our own goose and can you give us any pointers or tips? Like that, we definitely don't want to do, you know, because it just becomes, right, the last gospel of neocolonial extraction and fetishization, right, of like, oh, you wonderful wise ones who have endured so much, do teach us, you know, like that would be insufferable.

1:03:49To your point about do flow states or do peak states, can they contribute to this, right? An example would be the Native American church, right, which in the late 19th century started as the peyote cult, and it was, and it was, and Kwanapaka was a, was a Comanche who helped spread it. And it was literally after Indian removal to the reservation systems, most of their world, world views, connections to their place, their, their, the Buffalo hunt or whatever, whatever ecosystem they were part of shattered. And they were moved to bumfuck wastelands, you know, in Oklahoma or all these other places.

1:04:21And, and yet the connection to the peyote ceremony, right? And the connection and the singing and the prayer in the teepee, right, and it was highly syncretic, so it also included elements of Christianity and connection with Jesus and all of these things, was a profound healing modality. And it allowed there to be rehabilitation, restoration, and community out of a culture that was otherwise in collapse. And so those kinds of moments and those kinds of movements can be, I think, profoundly informative and instructive. How do we digest our grief? How do we metabolize our trauma, individual and collective?

1:05:05And there's quite likely going to be more of it, right? In fact, again, Zach Stein has said we may be entering an era where billions watch while millions die, right? And that's actually optimistic. You know, if you think about the UN's reports on climate refugees for every additional one degree Celsius, we're expected to have an additional billion climate refugees. Billion! You know, there's only eight of us total. So, like, that gets large in a hurry. So, for sure, you could say that Fourth Nation, diaspora peoples, do hold insights. And to acknowledge that none of this is neat and tidy. And one of the questions I intend to be asking Bob Thurman about this is, what about the Tibetan nuns and monks who have engaged in self-immolation?

1:05:54There have been hundreds in the last decade who have said, okay, Dalai Lama, we revere you. And we absolutely get the long, infinite game. Maybe the Chinese invasion was actually a part of the impetus to bring the Dharma to the West. And maybe this is, you know, good luck, bad luck. Who knows? Maybe this is all going to work out for the best. But fucking hell, man. This is genocide, right? And we have to take witness. And there have even been monks in Dharamsala, younger ones, who are like, actually, we need to engage in some terrorist acts. we actually need to fight back. The Kampa, the Kham people in Tibet were actually, they were badasses.

1:06:29They were like the Lakota of the Tibetan plateau. And with all sorts of interesting cahoots with the CIA and everything else during the Cold War, actively, aggressively, and highly effectively fought the Chinese. And it wasn't until Kissinger betrayed them completely, as Nixon went to China, and then suddenly it was like, oh, we don't need you anymore, that those guys all got clipped. So the questions as to how do we navigate the decades to century ahead? How do we do it maintaining hope? I would say the first is unplug from our craziness online. Be more of an analog human to the extent that you're capable.

1:07:06Live as if it's your last year on earth and suck the marrow out of all the things that are beautiful and wonderful and true while we still have them. Without falling into hedonism. Without falling into hedonism and diversion. Where you're becoming even more extractive. Exactly. And then also, let's start girding our loins. What does resilient culture look like? And my sense is that just a psychological categorical analysis is that we're actually not built to handle the stresses and the challenges that we're facing right now because we're almost 100 years into being conditioned as fragmented, isolated, rational consumer individuals.

1:07:46so we've all been conditioned to almost be like potted plants you know and we're wrapped in plastic and our root balls are all bunched up and we have to rely on artificial watering and artificial light and artificial nutrients right but if you think and of course we blow over and of course we get mold and mildew and fungus and all these things and of course we're not resilient in a shadow of our former selves but when you realize oh we have to take our stand in a stand of relationships and networks and ecology and you know the beautiful we took our kids to do a canopy tour in the redwoods in California a few years ago.

1:08:20And the interpreter was like, hey, here's the deal. And this was before that book, Overstory, came out. It was before all of these neat books that have been acknowledging this. And she was just like, yeah, here's the deal. The redwoods that are down in the creek shunt water to the ones that are up on the ridgeline and are dry. When one of them gets attacked by a beetle or a pest or a fungus, the others instantly understand and develop antibodies. And even albino redwood trees, and they point into one. They're like, evolution, law of the jungle, that motherfucker should not live. A plant that cannot conduct photosynthesis does not get to spread its genes.

1:08:53And the entire ecosystem of the redwood grove funneled food to the albino tree. And it was not as big as the biggest, but it was thriving. So you're like, okay, so what if we move more towards that, right? Because all of our anxiety, depression, diseases of despair, all of these are coming because we're isolated, potted plants. and if it's I mean mine now and that's how we've been conditioned as consumers every itch has a scratch and if not I pull a Becky and call the manager or a Karen I'm upset I want mine my rights my rights yeah that is not going to be up to the task but if you go back to again I mean think of any of those diaspora peoples like I guarantee you their lives have sucked roaming in transition etc why do they keep going it's the Israelites and the you know, Moses in the desert for 40 years.

1:09:43It's, we keep on going, even if we won't get ours. And this goes back to that Stockdale paradox. We keep going on behalf of our children's children. And it feels like integrating some form of like seven generational awareness, right? Which is the idea of like, hey, I'm active. And not just seven generations ahead, which is the way sometimes people describe that, but three generations behind me, what did my parents my grandparents my great-grandparents do to give me even this crack at life almost certainly for most of us they they had to embrace harder things than we did for sure right so you're like okay hat tip and gratitude and let me not fuck up the lead you gave me and then what's the and i stand in the center and then what's three generations ahead of me i can absolutely wrap my head around my children right we're just biologically hardwired i can even think of my grandchildren that's not a stretch at all so add one more and now i am in the center of that seven generational orbit or ecosystem bridging time and space.

1:10:40And I now have, I'm galvanized in my responses, right? So my stress levels, my fear, my sense of even my own narrative all get expanded and buffered. And they've done studies that show that children who know the family story, interestingly, who know just not just their parents, but their grandparents as well, they less depression, less anxiety, higher SAT scores, higher attendance and completion of university. It's literally like being inoculated. And the story, interestingly, the family stories that are the most inoculating, they have the most positive effect on outcomes, isn't like, we kick ass, you know, like, go team USA.

1:11:21It's like, hey, this is us. This is who's come before you. We've had our shares of ups and downs, and we're still here. Like those kinds of stories of triumph and disaster and perseverance are the ones that actually galvanize us the best. And you're like, oh, that's beautiful. So really, I would say that the best way forward into our future is to, not in a nostalgic way, but in a respectful and intentional way, is to dust off and go back to the past and realize that we cannot weather this storm as isolated potted plants. And we have to put down our roots into an ecology of relationship, both in space, the stand in the stand, we take our stand in a stand, and then time, the seven generations.

1:12:06And that, again, doesn't let us off any of the hooks, but at least gives us a fighting chance. I think a large issue for many people is that they don't have their family unit nearby. My parents live in the UK. I live in America now. If I'm having children, how do I give them the same upbringing that I had with my grandparents a quarter of a mile up the road? A large part of people listening to this will probably be like, yes, absolutely, I want to be more located in time and space with both my ancestors and physically in the same city as the people who I consider my crew. But that is not possible.

1:12:45And how do you marry that up with, online can bridge that gap to an extent, but then it's making us be more online, which, as you were saying earlier, is something we need to reduce because it is not good for us. So how do we resolve that tension? I think online to coordinate real life is a beautiful level up, right? Online to get lost in the endless looking glasses of refractory projected digital narcissism, not so healthy. So the idea of the ability to find and coordinate among like-minded folks is beautiful. And also, just to kind of expand our notion of what our relations might look like, is that you know humans have always been these crazy mashups tribes and bands i mean even the notion of like non-chattel slavery right so slavery has been around for an awfully long time before there was just like the west african movement right and slavery as it was almost always practiced was basically we we beat you in battle and we're either going to torture you and kill you or we're going to adopt you and you become one of our own and in the same there's just been recent findings on like Viking grave sites.

1:14:01And they're like, oh, whoa, there's way more Angles and Saxons in the gene pool of Scandinavia than we thought. And what that was, was it was bringing back slaves, bringing back workers, adopting or marrying, often women, having children, interbreeding, all of these things. And even millennials these days, right? The friends giving and chosen family, right? So those two working terms exist because people are saying, gosh, man, my family of origin, bit of a crapshoot, maybe kind of dysfunctional, especially if I had different gender identities or anything non-conforming to the culture of the place.

1:14:35I had to leave that in order to find myself and find my people. That's a beautiful notion, but it's new old. It's a new expression of what is an ancient thing, which is we always sort of pitched in and got on with who we are around. So even if our biological families are incompatible or geographically distant and those kinds of things, chosen family, chosen kinship, those kinds of things can be beautiful nutrients that we all sort of make us stronger and healthier. What books have been most formative to your thinking, almost helpful for you in the last couple of years, particularly in finding this healthy middle ground of maintaining hope, but without getting lost in constantly looking for solutions?

1:15:25I think the one, and I've been recommending this to everybody lately, is a book called Bittersweet by Susan Cain. And she wrote a book called Quiet, which was how to be like being an introvert in an extroverted world. It was New York Times bestseller for like two and a half years or something. And Bittersweet is her most recent. And it was her original premise was, why is it that Leonard Cohen songs make me cry, but I love them so much anyway, right? And then at the same time as she was writing the book, she lost both her father and her brother to COVID. So she experienced actual real loss. And then she was also on this sort of more philosophical journey.

1:16:00And her whole thing, it's a little like Pema Chodron and like when things fall apart, it's just this beautiful notion of like, hey, we often think of like Maslow's hierarchy and self-transcendence and all these wonderful things. But the whole toxic positivity thing is real. And she's like, actually, there is this bittersweet, sweet spot of being a human. And it is this yearning for something that is beautiful and not yet, right? And this sort of residing in all of the constraints and limitations and heartache and heartbreak of this actual experience. And that is gorgeous, appropriate, healthy.

1:16:36And it's just this wonderful, just kind of like, ah, you mean I don't need to fix this, solve this, biohack this, transcend this, daily affirmation is, I can just be in that ennui. And so to me, I feel like that is super helpful to all of us who, you know, you just scroll through Instagram or TikTok or Twitter for this, and everybody's just shouting at you. You're unasked for, you know, like, here's the things you're doing. Here's what I think you should do. And 10 easy steps and click on the links and likes and swipe. And, you know, you're just like, oh, dear God. So I think that one's beautiful.

1:17:14I like, I really enjoyed David Graeber's Dawn of Everything. That big meta analysis of just human civilization. He was one of the advisors for Occupy back in whenever that was, 08 or 10. So he's definitely got an anarchist bent, but his whole thing of like, he basically just critiques the endless rise of civilization narrative. And he's like, man, we've been trying all kinds of different formulations and we've been coming at this and we've been, we got into agriculture and we abandoned it and we went back to hunting. We started with cities in Gobekli Tepe, but we didn't have farming, we didn't have priests, and then we buried them all and moved on.

1:17:51And we've just this idea that we are constantly innovating and that there's all sorts of decentralized ways that humans have done the human thing instead of we were in caves and then cities and then priests and then cathedrals. He just critiques that and dismantles it in really, I think, fun and provocative ways. Do you know Tyson Yankaporta? He's an Aboriginal scholar. How indigenous thinking can save the world. In fact, if you're asking for another book, I would say Sand Talk. Sand Talk? Sand Talk. Sand Talk. Yeah. And he said something, and this goes back to that seven generations idea, but he says, you know, sort of playfully, he was sort of like you Westerners, right?

1:18:31You're wrapped around the axle of all these childish questions. Like, who are we? And what's the universe? And what's the meaning of life? And where do we go when we die? And all these things. These are things that any young person in any intact tradition would already know, understand, and trust the answers to those questions. Like the idea, this goes back to the potted plants thing, that we're all sort of isolated and fragmented and trying to figure this out for ourselves, by ourselves. He's like, those are ludicrously pretentious questions to presume you're just going to take on and solve for yourself.

1:19:07You know, like the answers are in our elders, the answers are in our ancestors, The answers are in our gods and rituals and worship. This is who we are. This is the way the world works. This is why we're here. This is where we go. This is where we came from, you know? And just that idea that that's a sort of almost adolescent hubris that we can and ought to figure that shit out from scratch. Because I think it's fascinating. I just heard that a few weeks ago, and I'm still like percolating on the implications. Okay, do you think we are living in a cosmological game? And if so, what do you think the purpose of the game is?

1:19:44Do I believe we're living in a cosmological game? Yeah, are we in some kind of game? And if so, what is the objective of the game? I mean, the old hippie bumper sticker, like, life's the school and love's the lesson. No, I heard that one. Yeah, I don't think it's half bad if you want to commit to the bit, right? that yes, this is a game and this is the purpose. And in fact, John Lilly, who's the famous slash infamous University of Pennsylvania PhD, psychonaut, LSD with dolphins, inventor of float tanks, that guy who went longer than almost any other human ever has since and come back to tell about it, went as far as divining.

1:20:29I mean, he would intramuscularly inject ketamine and spend hours at a time in float tanks in deep space He's communicating with multiple levels of entities. And because he was a rational scientist, he was also mapping it. Now, if you look at his later shit, which you can find on YouTube, he's wearing like a Davy Crockett coonskin camp and looks like a lysergic shoemaker's elf. So like definitely, definitely. He's gone there, huh? He went there. But he even articulated the Earth Coincidence Control Office. It was this system that oversaw Earth. And you can even go to his Wikipedia page, just John Lilly Wikipedia, and it lists there, the eight rules that he received from Echo, from the Earth Coincidence Control Office.

1:21:09And it was like, everything that's happening in your life is happening for a reason. The key is not to forget. Everything here is training you and training you for purpose-built shit. We control the large coincidences in your life. You control the small coincidences. And it's just this whole rules of the game. And you're like, oh shit, that is awesome. So if that were the case, wouldn't that be amazing? My personal situation is I'm almost in the sort of the antithesis of Pascal's wager, right? So Blaise Pascal, right, famously said, better to believe in God in case he's there than not believe in him and burn in hell for my doubts, right?

1:21:48And I would almost sort of say, and I don't, this wasn't a choice. I just kind of have ended up here. It's almost more like Nietzsche's wager, right? Better to believe that God is dead, right? And if it turns out I've got guardian angels looking out for me, fucking bonus. you know so i would say what's your what's the mvp what's my minimum viable philosophy right that gets me through the night and to me um i don't know and i'm not sure any of us can but i'm pretty certain i i haven't yet figured out with any declarative certainty whether there is a bigger picture whether there is um you know the goddess is alive and magic is afoot whether all of these things.

1:22:30And that's not to say I haven't had life-changing, shaping, and informing profound non-ordinary experiences. I have an idea. But epistemically, where they live and what that means about larger orders or truth claims, I don't know. I'm an agnostic gnostic. I've had the experience, the undeniable truth of effing the ineffable, and I have no fucking idea what the implications are of that. So for me, the MVP, my minimum viable philosophy is just, I choose to believe, and this is, I'm willing to like double click on this. Like this is where I end fact-based assertions or evidentiary argument. I choose to believe that a universe with a little more goodness, truth, and beauty in it is better than a universe with a little less.

1:23:23and then that gives me all I need to know to act and to act in hopefully a direction that more aligns with that I'm not saying that is the truth of it I'm not saying that is validated or stamped you know by a higher power I'm just I choose to believe that feels right-ish and it's enough to govern all my actions from here and if now if it turned out that like I crossed the pearly gates and I get a little pat on the head like oh Jamie you were such a sweetheart you had to you try you you struggled and you did this all alone and you never prayed to all of us. We were just sitting here ready to cheer you on.

1:23:55It would have been so much fucking easier if you just relaxed and realized you were on rails. And I would have gone, Oh, stone me, right? The jokes on me, but for me, it's enough to get out of bed. Right. And I take that. I would rather be pleasantly surprised than gutted when I went to lean on something that wasn't there. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening, everyone. and of course thank you to Jamie for joining me today. I've linked in the show notes below all of the resources that we talked about and do check out his books Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture. They are excellent.

1:24:31Also check out flowgenomeproject.com and also his sub stack. Again, link below. And thanks as always to my wonderful editor Raymond Way for putting everything together on this, dealing with all my camera snafus which always happen. And to you all.