#50 - Samantha Sweetwater - Why Indigenous Wisdom Is Important In The AI Age

0:00There may also be qualities of sentience evolving within AI, but the design of the AI interface is perfectly sociopathic. Why? It's designed to predict how to respond to you in the most attuned possible way, but it has no embodied empathy. So the difference between a sociopath and an empath is that a sociopath can model empathy without having it. So can you explain the difference between a finite and infinite game? Finite gaming is often about right now, with the goal being that you being the top of the pyramid. In an infinite game kind of culture, status might come from what you give away. It comes from different places that are all about nourishing a fabric that creates more opportunity for other players.

0:42That dovetails with an indigenous way of thinking about why you would do anything in the Mohawk tradition would be a seven generations perspective. Any decision of any import is run through the lens of will this support the well-being of the seven generations forward in time. Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Win Win podcast. My guest today is Samantha Sweetwater. Samantha is a systems thinker, she's a permaculturalist, she's a spiritual teacher and mentor. She's also a new author, recently writing the book True Human, which is a beautiful exploration of how we rediscover our role on this world as harmonizers of the forces of nature and technology.

1:26Which is one of the main reasons why I wanted to talk to her, because she is someone who deeply gets what the Win Win Project is all about. And in this conversation, we discuss everything from complexity science and game theory to how indigenous wisdom can help us solve AI alignment. We even discuss some of her psychedelic visions, for want of a better word, some of which include stories where she receives some very surprisingly useful information from conversations with beings from other worlds. So strap in for a very groundbreaking conversation on some topics I haven't really discussed before.

2:06Because if you're open to hearing ideas beyond the conventional paradigm, this is a conversation for you. See you on the other side.

2:18Samantha, welcome to Win Win. Thank you. I feel like it's so weird. I you know we have known each other sort of from afar for a number of years um connected through our mutual friend Daniel Schmachtenberger who was the OG win-win episode um and yeah we've had many conversations and I'm so sure we have met but this is actually the first time we've met in person yes which I've never had this experience before like I have such a strong memory of us hanging out but I'm fairly certain we met in dreams okay this is my hypothesis well we're gonna get into that because you have just written this book called true human um which talks a lot about it seems like a lot of the information you have your the wisdom you are giving through it has come to you through various different methods of dreams psychedelic journeys meditations um topics which we don't tend to actually talk about that much on win-win but i think are important to talk about because um as i've personally experienced they can be a really useful way of getting information to try and solve these very hard problems we're trying to solve.

3:26So normally I like to introduce my guests about what they do and who they are. But I was looking through your biography and I do not know how to put you into a box or explain what it is or what you do. So can you do that for us? Tell us who Samantha Speedwater is and what she does. I can tell. I'll tell you a little bit about where I come from and a little bit about what I do. okay i was born during the cold war and there was a way in which i was raised by queer jewish environmentalists um my family is not a queer jewish environmentalist but that was the community i came into artists and environmentalists and it was the generation of og environmentalists who had already seen rachel carson's silent spring first wave fail i don't know what that is so race there's a book called silent spring it was what it was the first great environmentalist tome and it spoke about how chemical pollution from industry was unraveling ecosystems and so it created a first wave of the environmental movement that was quite large did a lot to clean up pollution and trash in various places and people who were deeply involved in that movement were already seeing the game theoretics of moloch they didn't call it moloch they didn't call it multi-polar traps they didn't but they understood that there were systems dynamics at play that were bigger than the movement and that was then reflected by the fact that like one person had a nuclear button that could destroy the world so i think my psychology is really defined by those two things by being a kid who had like a really deep sense of connection to nature and like a pulse of what again i didn't have language for this but what i've always perceived as an infinite game that humans are embedded in that i'm an organism who's part of that has a logic that is reciprocal you know there's competitive dynamics between individuals and ecosystems but on a population level and on a systems level ecosystems are dominantly collaborative and they all of those organisms and forces of nature work together to keep the system going to have persistence happen so i was like this kid who kind of got that and And then I went into high school and I was like, all of these options that are in front of me are dumb.

6:12They're just dumb. And so I locked myself in the wrestling room in my high school and I started making dances about spiritual states with no names. And about why people get along and why they don't. And what is war and what does it mean to come home? Like home to oneself in the kind of Ram Dass sense of we're all just walking each other home. and then also home in the sense of like engaging in a world where we make choices together to make a world that works and I was like asking those questions as a 14 year old and started grabbing kids and developing processes to go into trance states and altered states through movement and music and created these choreographies that were really long detailed inquiries into these things Like how long would a dance be?

7:02The first dance I ever made was a 12-minute thing that was about war and was like had Robert Frost's fire and ice behind it. Some say the world will end in fire, some in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice. It's like, it's so Moloch. you know it's like it's like damned if you do and damned if you don't and I was exploring that and let me butt in him what what age because I mean these are very like advanced concepts the average 14 year old like I was not really thinking about this stuff at all I was as a teenager I was deeply in my moloch phase right having to win everything um I was not really much of a collaborator So I'm curious to understand, like, what were you were you just do you think this like collaborative nature and it's like this sort of wisdom beyond your years was something that you learned through your community growing up like as a preteen or was it just something innately in you?

8:12When did that first emerge? You know, I think it was in the community that I grew up in. um only until we were I was 10 we moved from Philadelphia when I was 10 so that community was very communitarian I also think like I'm curious if we had known each other we either would have like hated each other or we would have like wickedly loved each other and consciously played the game from different angles because I had a sense for that when as a very young person like i gamed the system by being student body president and like being able to do whatever the i wanted um and choosing to make these really out of the box collaborative choices because they were more interesting to me like i had already in some ways rejected the game of winning but i could imagine that it like it would have depended on the context where if we if i'd known you were an outsider you looked like an insider i might not have trusted you but if i'd like known that there was like an outsider piece of you i could imagine that we could have created like a very wicked back-end friendship where we played different roles in public because those were my friends it was like my best friends were people who in some ways identified as an outsider and then everybody played that differently yeah then we probably would have because i was definitely i I wasn't like a popular kid at that age, but I was, I think because, I don't know, I was definitely a troublemaker and kind of a class clown.

9:49That was what made people like me, but I wasn't cool in the conventional sense. Okay, so you were raised in this community. You were already starting to be a bit of an unusual child by teenage years. How would you describe what it is you are and do now? Yeah, long story short, that stacked on being an artist, being a community leader, being a permaculturalist. And those dance and embodiment and permaculture were my angles into systems work. So working with natural systems and working with the body and communities of people as systems. and what I do now is I'm an executive mentor and a consultant and an author and a spiritual teacher and I guide ceremonies and um in the context of spirituality I'm someone who's bringing a systems conversation into spirituality and some really like sober get real like you don't get to vibrate your way out of this kind of invitation into an effective definition of wisdom which you know in a spiritual context I think is desperately needed as a maturation of that dialogue in a lot of contexts from a Buddhist perspective there's a really good argument to make that we're at a turning of the wheel of dharma that the first turning was fundamentally about the fabric of relationship of relationality the second turning was predominantly about the mastery of mind and the joanna macy argued that we're in a third turning of the dharma which is back to relationality as the focal point for practice and um so that's that's how i'm working in the spiritual context and bringing in a language of systems and complexity and um the basics of you know we don't get to do this on a finite planet and keep going you know so you mentioned before the infinite game i think some people who are watching this will be familiar with this concept but a lot of a lot of viewers won't be so and i always love to hear different people's definitions of it so can you explain the difference between a finite and infinite game sure a finite game is a game that is played for the purpose of winning and an infinite game is a game that is played for the purpose of perpetuating the game another way to think about that is that it's played for the purpose of creating future opportunity for future players i love that definition that dovetails with like an indigenous way of thinking about why you would do anything which is like in the mohawk tradition would be a seven generations perspective like any decision is of any import is run through the the lens of will this uh support the well-being of the seven generations forward in time oh wow i've never heard that it's a really classic kind of indigenous teaching that comes out of the um the iroquois confederacy which is a sidebar that would be great to explore um the indigenous roots of american democracy which is a thing i study and am in collaboration with so that's the simple definition i also think i think it's a really helpful definition because there's a lot of ways to bend it and if it to me if an infinite game is also about your orientation to time so in a finite game play you're kind of like finite gaming is often about right now or it's about the you know the way james p cars talks about this it's like about the immortality of the player in other words you're you're immortalized or memorialized or you get creds um and clout for winning and so that's like putting this it's it's for now and then it's also for your worth as an individual with the the goal being that you being the top of the pyramid whereas a finite game is always oriented towards the continuity of processes through time it's actually not of it's not very meaningful to think out of it about it outside of that i mean you could think about it in the present tense in terms of like vibration or tonality or aesthetic like you could play to create something that has more beauty or more vitality or more harmonic juiciness or pleasure or meaning and it's like the the the value like if it if it if it is really an infinite game play it will create more opportunity for future play and And that's an interesting thing to look at mathematically in terms of how we design systems.

14:58It's a really interesting thing to look at in terms of the value of anything and how we might restructure clout in an emergent game B or infinite game world. Like where does status come from? and in an infinite game kind of culture status might come from what you give away or it might come from um how generously you sing or the things you remember that you bring in as the prayers or the teachings or like it comes from different places that are all about nourishing a fabric of relationships that perpetuates and creates more opportunity for other players yeah what one of the i wonder what you think of this this this saying i can't even remember who it was who said it was maybe might have been eagle my husband sometimes co-host but it might have been someone else but anyway uh it was we need to redefine the term billionaire not to mean who has a billion dollars but who has helped a billion people who has provably helped a billion people freaking love that yeah i like that because it's it's a way of re harnessing the idea of a status game because people still want to feel like the guy totally and there's hybridity in it right like i don't know that word hybridity uh it's a hybrid it would have hybrid hybridity it would have to be a hybrid game because it would imply winning at some very basic like zero sum metrics yes right but the the overall goal would be a zero sum goal or excuse me a positive a positive sum goal yeah yeah no it's like it's very win-win-y like win-win-y things to me are ones that sort of almost use zero sumness as a as an aikido move it has a little bit of it in there yeah you're like oh you guys like to compete great we can compete on this but the externalities are so clearly you know on omni-beneficial yes and so that would be one um which leads me into kind of what your book is all about because I have read about 80 percent of it um it doesn't hasn't come out just yet so I'm reading it on a pdf like an advanced pdf that's that's brave yeah um but it's awesome and it's so it's it's it's like the poetry form of like what I feel the win-win philosophy is you have put into this beautiful poetic and also very rigorous um like bible almost I don't know if you like that word uh but there's this that is what the Japanese publisher is waiting for what do you mean the I I had a business in Japan and my business partner as we were closing the business organized a meeting with the biggest publisher in Japan I'm like and he said to me don't bring me just any book bring me your bible right you've just blessed that meeting it's gonna happen yeah no it's it's it definitely has bible energy and it's it's wonderful because it has it it's it's got a you know a lot of normal um what you're you know writing of what you'd expect from a non-fiction book but then there's these stories and some of which you know it's they blend the line between fiction and non-fiction because they're kind of dreams that came to you.

18:19Insights, downloads, transmissions, whatever you want to call them. So it's a very unusual book. I haven't really read anything like it before. And it deeply aligns with the win-win philosophy. So your book is called True Human.

18:36From what I can tell you, it's a long and hard thing to describe, but can you try and distill it first of all into a couple of sentences? Sure. I mean, very simple definition. A true human is a human being who knows who and what they are as part of the song of life. In other words, a true human is a person who is oriented towards participating in the ongoing game of life in a way that generates more life, that is reciprocal and tends the possibility for future play. like i really like framing what a true human is in terms of infinite gaming because a true human is someone who is uh living their little stitch in life's fabric in a way that is additive to life's fabric it's like if you think of every being's lifetime as a little stitch in this like incredible fabric of life that's moving forward through time a true human is someone who's like ah i'm gonna bring as much awesomeness to my stitch as i can i'm gonna live in that fabric with uh with vitality and beauty and contribution to the overall well-being of the whole there's a a quote that you put in there um which really stuck out to me well you have two quotes in the book that i feel like just succinctly get this point across the first one is by you which is the civilizing impulse of true humans is to harmonize the forces of nature.

20:08And the second one is actually by Dr. Stephen Greer, which was a planet has not reached civilization until its creator species has discovered how to organize itself in harmony with its biosphere and with all of its members. Perhaps you could speak to both of those a little bit, because it feels to me like, you know, the problem that you're addressing is the one. I mean, I feel like, again, most people watching this are already acutely aware of the problem. We are extracting from the biosphere faster than it can replenish itself. We are also piling that problem on, compounding that problem by building these exponential technologies, which will not only speed up the extraction process, but may also just create sort of almost sub-biospheres of their own, which will probably not be compatible with our own.

20:53And then we have all these other like our human agency is actually being extracted away by various attention economy, capitalistic forces, which is so we're simultaneously getting like down weighted. We're being we're losing our ability to discern and have like positive influence over our world while the increasing forces working against us are going up. And so it's creating this what's called the meta crisis all at once. so i think the fair answer is is you are trying to your book is trying to solve the meta crisis but through this very i think personal approach it's almost like a bottom-up approach i would say right of like what are the internal changes that we human each of us individually can and must make what how do we need to shift the way we each individually view the world in order to create this new game um so yeah perhaps you can sort of speak a little to this first this first quote the civilizing impulse of true humans is to harmonize the forces of nature sure well yeah true human is very much about fundamentally it's about the ontology the where the what is true about humanness.

22:07And then from that comes ways of knowing, ways of thinking, ways of acting. That quote came from a dream. And that dream is a dream that I had during COVID, where I found myself on another Gaia, another planet like ours, with a woman who took me for a walk. And as we were walking she was sort of showing me things with her mind she was showing me uh the way that they had built their village and the way that they were uh interacting with each other and then we walked out onto a jetty out into the ocean and there was a massive storm coming and she guided me uh psychically to greet this storm and really thank it for the water it was bringing and the lightning it was bringing that would fertilize the earth and and like be with it as this incredible force of nature and then we bowed to the storm and walked back into the village and as we were walking back into the village she said very clearly psychically the civilizing impulse of true humans is to harmonize the forces of nature and i i woke up from this dream and i was just like And I sat down and wrote it down.

23:33And it was one of the more vivid dreams I've ever had. And it was, yeah, like the details of this ecology were really cool and a little bit different than Earth, but very similar, similar evolutionary process. And so, you know, that phrase is like begs so many questions. Like, what is civilization? What is it to be civilized? uh harmony there was no width it was harmonized the forces of nature which is also very interesting it's an active process it's an active process and it implies also like the way in which we are a very particular like match and mirror for the forces of nature and um and then also it implies that we are a force of nature and that our economy and technosphere are forces of nature or emergent forces that we are in charge of as natural forces and uh so that asked a lot of questions and about six months later there was a much longer piece that came through and in that piece that i that i don't really i don't like saying download i don't like saying channel I actually have had a very deep experience of channeling, and it's a very particular thing.

24:58I don't experience that I'm channeling Sophia. Sophia was this woman's name. But I do experience that I can kind of ontologically mind meld with an aspect of an intelligence that is a human intelligence on a planet where they've transcended technological adolescence without breaking life. and so there's a much there's a couple pieces from her in this book and the first one that came through she said it is uncivilized to pollute the nest it is uncivilized to extinct other beings or people and i love that phrase she's so like meh meh meh but like really doesn't that seem uncivilized it seems pretty uncivilized when you think about what civility is and i think this is a really important conversation it's like we are there's deep protectiveness of the the majesty and the complexity and the um the achievements of so-called western civilization uh and then at the same time a lot of my black brown indigenous colleagues from the global south kind of take the perspective i'm not sure we've ever reached civilization and if we have it's the most bloodthirsty, harmful, toxic, violent, narrowing of spectrums of cultural diversity and biodiversity thing that has ever been on our planet.

26:30And that's a very important inquiry to hold. Obviously, there's immense value with everything we've developed. and in the true human frame, this phase that we're in, if you look at it neutrally, is a phase of immense growth in terms of our intellectual capacity, our technological capacity, our scientific capacity. But it's also a phase, as you said, where we can hem in intelligence because we've become so focused on a very narrow definition of intelligence and of success. and so the sip from her perspective civilization is is tending that broader fabric of relationality in a way that is oriented towards integrity of the individual actors which implies really actually knowing yourself what you're good at what you love what your gifts are what your things are to heal and work out in a given lifetime time uh reciprocity which in our current economic language circularity is an example of reciprocity or engaging in exchanges that are like roughly co-equal non-non-extractive exchange of any kind has often has a reciprocal frame to it I give you my house you lead a ceremony I get to go to ceremony that's a reciprocal exchange why why wouldn't a standard like you know a trade in a market where someone um you know i need beans and you need money that you want to use to buy bricks arguably isn't that also a reciprocal thing that can be reciprocal it's only when perverse incentives get into the system i mean it's not only that that that can get weird pretty quickly just because the trade is symbolic so reciprocity usually implies mutual attunement so the example you just gave there could be mutual attunement in that like in a simple fiat currency system where it's like fiat currency serves the role of creating more fluidity in the exchange but as soon as you add a perverse incentive to that recipe that changes like well like um if you get more money you can buy up the land where the bricks were made and then you also have to pay me rent on the land and like someone who gets very good at playing that game right so but with but on its face like if those exchanges were attuned and were like actually oriented towards everyone getting what they wanted you within a fairly closed system you could say that was reciprocal you know you might then ask what's going on with where the bricks came from and what's going on with the organisms and the ecology there and then you might end up changing your mind about whether that's a zero-sum you know whether that's really a reciprocal process um there's always compromise in these things but um and then the third principle if these are kind of the three principles that you can drop into is complementarity so the example you gave also involves a complementarity where um someone needs money someone needs bricks and there's complementarity in that exchange so you know a classic ecological example is um corn and rice corn and beans grow really well together they they reciprocally nourish each other at very deep levels in terms of the corn needs a lot of nitrogen the beans fix nitrogen like everything is flowing in a reciprocal pathway and pattern um ecology is filled with complementarities and ecology breaks down when you break all the complementarities you could also say that human society starts to break down when you break complementarities that like dopamine addiction in terms of how we interact is a breakdown of complementarity in social process because we're just competing for likes as opposed to like having a more complex affectual um neurotransmitter relationship with like feeling deep connection with a person um so that's a narrowing of complementarities or similarly like funny enough jim rock was just talking about this on the previous episode how once upon a time the market reflected what people wanted but then companies learned how to affect to market to people yes essentially advertisement and essentially propagandize their product to make people believe that they have hypnea is it hypnea or it's a i mean it's a form of hypnosis something like that but isn't that what he called it like the goddess of uh i don't remember maybe hypnea makes me is a good name um yes uh essentially that yes luca do you remember hypnia hypnos yes there's uh the moloch and yeah mammon mammon yeah and hypnia hypnos hypnos yes the the some kind of dark triad totally you have to this mind control totally um yeah i see so that's that's a breakdown of complementary uh complementarity i'm learning so many words before that i've not i thought i had a broad you know broad like it's like wow yeah the glossary is glossary there we go god i haven't done a glossary yet but it's becoming clear that oh you should you should you definitely should there's a lot of words in the book that i'm just like nope don't know that and they're infinite game words i know win-winny it's a win-winny language it is but at the same time it's like it there's a lot of sort of self-referentialness in this whole sort of realm of of you need to red game game b to understand this and well not necessarily i mean i will push back on that because you need to shift what you're observing it's like if you're observing the market you're not going to get good at understanding complementarity true but if you're observing like a transition from a classic farm system to a regenerative farm system you're going to get really good at understanding complementarity and reciprocity if you look at the whole process through that lens i think a lot of the loops that we actually need we need to instantiate in economy and development processes of anything uh have a lot to do with those patterns so if you shift what you're looking for and what you're looking at you will see them and that's one of the that's one of the foundational principles of true human and of enlightenment which is like the spiritual path of a true human is that the concepts are readily available when you put your attention on the things that perpetuate living processes so as opposed to put your attention on what will refine you know heroin into what will refine the opium into the heroin into the even more refined painkiller where it's like putting your attention on anything that expands complementaries and reciprocities and diversity and possibility within a system and it's like Humpty Dumpty actually getting put back together again so reversing entropy effectively collaborating with it in a much more extended way okay I don't think you're reversing I mean certainly yes but but you're slowing down multiple hyperentropic processes.

34:27Absolutely. Yeah. Coming back to this idea of separation, because, yeah, you talk about it, sort of this great separation began. It sounds like around the time that civilization began, when we first left our hunter-gatherer communities and started agriculture. We were plowing. We invented currency, this kind of stuff. That is what you define as the sort of starting moment of the great separation. I think if I understand it correctly, you're not saying that separation was a bad thing. It was just this natural process, essentially, of humans becoming this emergent feature that kickstarted our civilization.

35:15Which obviously, you know, I think because many people listening to this will probably be thinking, yeah, but civilization is great. and it is to be abundantly clear look at this we're talking into these funny little black things which are going to cables going to the camera and you guys wherever you are around the world thousands of you are hearing this uh we would not have done that without the separation super cool so yeah perhaps you can talk about like what a bit more deeply to like what this idea of like separation is it sounds essentially like kind of like the the kickstarter technology um and in what ways it you know what is an example of good separation versus bad or like what are we stage are we trying to get to whereby it is a clearly a good thing i mean separation gets pathological as soon as you believe in the separability in other words um that i'm separate from you and that anything i would say would not harm you or that my poop doesn't go somewhere when I flush the toilet.

36:21I see. Yeah, like we've created a world that obscures connectivity very actively, that death won't touch me. You know, that I can live in a sort of bubble of endless use or endless possibility to buy whatever I want, and there's no touch to the implications of any of those actions. Like we've reified an experience of separation in a way that actually has a ton of harm, a ton of upstream and downstream harm. As soon as you, if you take that really seriously and you allow yourself to open to that to being true, you can engage the tools of separation, like doing great research on factory farming, which is specifically engaged and you know you're engaging that in a lot of different ways to address factory farming you can address factory farming with the tools of separability with statistics with research you can also address it with the tools of connectivity which are storytelling and experiences and engaging and and and using statistics to generate a bigger more wide boundary story like that's a dance between them that we use all the time and to put that in an orientation where the goal is less suffering yeah and greater human health like like as soon as you really go in the direction of interbeing in the direction of interdependence and connectivity the outcome is usually more robustness more health less suffering and the outcome is almost always a wide boundary it has a wide boundary aspect to it because when you reinstantiate you use those tools to start to reinstantiate reciprocal loops you end up with these outcomes that are bigger than like a one-shot target.

38:37Another thing you've talked about as a sort of the differentiator between kind of the old way, the current way, and this evolution we need to go through to become a better version of ourselves is to do with power. You describe the current system as something which is about power over life. and we need to level up essentially into viewing our power as the power of life. So can you explain a bit more what that means? Because it's quite a subtle distinction. Sure. I mean, you start from the insight that life is very powerful. Life is actually way more powerful than we think. it doesn't uh we look at power in terms of agents and action and outcomes um life is doing life oceans are breathing uh trees are inhaling our exhale uh there's an immense like if you think you have to get deeper in a definition of power is what is power and there's a human definition that is largely currently oriented around who gets to the top of a ladder and or who gets the most work done but there's a deeper pulse that's occurring to make that game possible which is like an a pulse of living processes that is not dependent on the human game it could be uh radically it could be halted by the human game could be extinguished by the human game and the and the ai game um it's arguable about whether that would get that far because we could end up in various horizons where like even ai couldn't function on in the context of a biosphere that's darkened for example we don't know would it still be able to extract energy and do its things we don't know but um it's like the power that made a star the power that made a planet that there is a deeper more whole more total more totalizing ways that power moves in the universe than just this little human game thing which is just a blip in cosmic time so that's where you have to start with like kind of thinking about this conversation is that that there's some like wait wait hold on like we're playing you know king of the universe on a planet where we're like we're about two-thirds of the way through like the normal or like halfway through the normal arc of a mammalian existence like a normal mammalian existence is something like 50 million years I don't know that I have that stat correct probably it's on that one but it's it's not that long you know and we're we're we're very young species doing this thing and we're like this is power and so the beginning of that conversation is like okay chill the out on your homocentrism and anthropocentrism and win-win you know win-lose game ism you're and get curious about what's actually occurring to make any of that possible so when i say power over life versus power of life like it's it's again it's about this reorientation of attention to like breaking miraculous processes like the fact that we're cognizant like oh this is miraculous it's also miraculous that we're cognizing each other's words that like water is transducing membranes breakfast is still digesting i mean that's all freaking miraculous and i feel like we're at a moment in time where you know we're like zooming towards AGI um with this very narrow definition of intelligence and of work that hasn't like paused again to like it really we civilization has not absorbed the insights of ecology civilization has not like really absorbed I mean there's amazing biologists and ecologist susan simard that would be a really fun interview um janine benias so many people you know we just lost um jane goodall and and the whole world wept because she was an embodiment of the study of this other power and she was so good at it because she respected it so much she was she was like an avatar of this this attunement this curiosity to the deeper flows of communication and information and um possibility they're flowing all the time they were just so focused on getting a thing done um which doesn't mean that that's a bad thing to do it's one of our superpowers as a species it's just that it's going to extinct us we don't also do the other thing so um the power of life is like the the the great aggregate fabric of all that makes reality possible uh on a material and energetic and information level and uh becoming a deeper both student and collaborator to that it sounds um i'm feeling like it somewhat represents the sort of classic divine feminine divine masculine in some ways right yes because what is what is the the feminine it's the it's the womb it's the the nurturer it's the community.

44:52Those are like classically more feminine things. The women are the ones who often will hold the community together. Or at least, you know, it's a combination. It's again, it's a dance of both. And also the feminine aspects of men can help do that. It's not exclusive. And again, similarly, like the more masculine trait is, is go and explore, expand the boundary, go find, bring things, you know, push the frontier. Wonderful as well. We we have needed that to get to where we are but um you know personally it feels like the the balance has been a little out of whack we've built systems that perpetuate the masculine urge to keep expand grow build to extract um always you know looking for the next thing not be satiated um and neglected the systems that support the the feminine which is there to like actually and make those things stay sustainable um would you agree with that i would and i also think i mean you can you can leverage goal orientation in a more life-centric way like if you put the goal of mothers and children being healthy globally just that one goal it involves a massively wide boundary spectrum of things but if we made that the game globally we would end up in a really different game or like i love the the billion the new definition of billionaire that's a great that's a great definition you could totally leverage competition towards that kind of a goal putting mothers and children at the center is probably it's what I call a non-arbitrary goal.

46:34It like puts something that is biologically coherent at the center of the goal. It's biologically and psychologically coherent at the center of the goal in terms of the persistence of the well-being of the living system. What would be some good ways to try and center mothers and children? What incentives would we build? What are some low-hanging fruit? Low-hanging fruit, really like organic food programs for mothers and babies, education, prenatal education, education on fathering. I mean, the list is kind of endless. And there's a lot of innovation that's already been pioneered in that space because it turns out that it's actually kind of a sub pulse.

47:24if you if you look at the history of social entrepreneurialism a lot of people kind of figured out this hack that if you you know there's a business called indigenous that works with women in peru and has them knit all the sweaters and the things and the insight there was that if you're generating income for the women that they will tend the whole village and that has played out to be statistically true really consistently um that's also true with like some of the um charities we've supported in like give directly for example found if you donate if you directly transfer money to women in villages it goes so much further than usually giving it to the men yeah because the women are like well i gotta feed my baby and um again not always but yeah it tends to be that they'll tend the nest first yeah yeah and i also think we need we need and we get to redefine like what is masculine power i think masculine power can be defined as protection and conservation and um the incredible engineering genius that it takes to redo material and energetic loops in in our technosphere and in our economy i mean that's badass we could redefine progress and say like it's there's really deep progress when we see uh when circularity increases when um entropy decreases when there's greater you know the the gd greatest national happiness model of Bhutan is also a really yeah potent model um they plant like two or three trees for every baby and their forests have increased in size and there's brilliant there's so many really obvious things but that also can engage the the masculine in a way where it's not emasculating like I think I think what happens sometimes in this conversation that is a really deep problem is that is that the feminine becomes empowered and then the masculine ends up emasculated and i think in a in a really human deeply human version of this absolutely both men and women can embody these kind of like feminine qualities but and like there's a masculine role for protection there's a masculine role for um being the kind of the container on that so that there's structural integrity to it and i don't think we have developmental narratives for that yet the woman who worked who developed like moana and some of the other recent movies in disney for the feminine empowerment narrative is a friend of mine and one of the problems they've seen is that that raised a generation of girls with a lot of purpose and boys who feel really purposeless and so we definitely need those narratives and those models in the world.

50:27Yeah I do I do feel you know I'm a fan of like Ken Wilber and his like integral theory work and and you know he talks about these different levels of development of a society of a civilization and and you know during the I guess the sort of scientific revolution the industrial revolution that was what he would call sort of the orange phase of you know largely like very masculine dominated um you know that's where you got like the finance institutions and all these things and you know gdp number went up great um and then as a response out of that you got the um the green movement which was like okay great we've got all this orange stuff but there's a toxic side to the orange where we're getting rivers on fire because there's so much pollution and um you know nuclear weapons are being tested and like wiping out whole communities in in uh you know in in the atolls in the pacific and there's now radiation left over and and um you know so that that came as a sort of counter counterbalance to orange going too far and now i feel so we're sort of at the tail end of the excesses of what i would call the woke movement where that was green going too far where it actually um you know you would you would get very anti-human policies um people trying to force their ideologies like i don't you know i'm a supporter of trans rights but i don't think that you should be trying to enforce those ideologies on young children i think that's again because it's disenfranchising actually parents and children um it's society trying to do a thing um and there are other examples of that uh it almost it's like the mean side of because orange is more of a masculine green is more of a feminine response and i think what you're talking you're speaking to there is again it's like that you start to get the disenfranchised the masculine becomes disenfranchised that's when you get things go really really bad as well um so yeah how what what are um and actually so we've talked we mentioned moloch earlier i don't think we need to define moloch most people watching this will know what it is um moloch to me is a sort of the because it's it's it's the it's if it's the demon of competition gone too far that's a very masculine energy right right it's it's it's like we must win at all costs we're crushing our enemies very masculine thing so i was like well what's its opposite and obviously win-win is this this sort of philosophy born out of like how do we defeat moloch but i realized there's a counter side to moloch which is like the other end of the spectrum which is not enough competition which is this we must have safety no freedom for anybody sort of bureaucracy see red tape um and we need a character for that um and i know her name now she's female her name is norma she's not like totalitarian or um authoritarian yeah she can be that but i think she needs a more like that's too sort of whimsical uh-huh her name is norma and she will not she does not like you playing your little games without her approval you need to come and get sign off and her stamp and she probably won't give it to you um so she's and she's very gray and and like right like annoying sort of school mom that's completely unreasonable um and so she's yeah that's the that's the opposite side of moloch um and i think it's important to talk about that um because i don't want people to think you know i you know we don't we have to defend against the the toxic masculine and the toxic feminine.

53:59Right. So I'm curious if you have any sort of thoughts. I don't know, just like want to riff on that. I mean, I think the models, in my little microcosm, which includes a lot of indigenous work with various indigenous traditions and ceremony work in both indigenous traditional way and also in sort of Mestizo, the blend. Mestizo means someone in Latin America who's blended with like indigenous and western so mestizo is a mestizo tradition is a tradition that blends influences from the west with influences from indigenous traditions and there's like so many incredible examples of profoundly powerful masculine in those spaces i've also been a permaculturalist i almost married a seed farmer like who was a direct plaintiff against monsanto oh wow like badass warriors who are protecting life um in a ceremonial context it's like showing up to like anchor the truth and the clarity and the the reflection of no bullshit humanness and like also pull people up off the floor you know mop their shit up like psychically of like grow the fuck up and this is what it looks like to be an adult it's like there's so many examples of it those examples by and large are not people one of the challenges is that we also live in a media ecology where it's like either two major narratives that are available are like sociopathic kind of evil narratives of various kinds.

55:41Some of them are very psychological, but they're still like sociopath porn. Like, well, what's the one at the resort? It's like White Lotus. Oh, right. Right. Like they're not clinical, but they're like sub. It's a great example of the kind of drama that is like very normative right now. It's like you're watching a bunch of people who are like all on the spectrum of various clinical descriptions. And it's like, it's a porn. It's a kind of porn, psychological porn. um and that's like sociopath porn but like the the dominant narrative that we're embedded in still is the hero's journey and hero's journey is about like the heroic process of like discovering who you are yeah the people i'm talking about also went through massively interesting journeys but the the i write about this a bit in the book i'm going to write a sub stack about it shortly about about an epochal shift from the hero's journey as the primary narrative that we're living out to the kinship journey.

56:47And the kinship journey begins when you realize that disconnection is a problem. So like my amazing seed farmer X, you know, he had sort of a similar realization growing up as I did and chose as a really brilliant, like hyper capable person to become a farmer and a permaculturalist and a seed farmer and like learn how to tend land and watersheds and seeds and like growing seeds is sort of an is the ultimate archetype of infinite game play because you're growing that which creates food for everybody you know and you're collaborating with that to create greater deliciousness and nutrition and it's super cool i love saving seeds i love growing seeds um if we weren't at the moment we were I would be doing that

57:43um so um long story short is to say like the the men I know who embody the divine masculine and embody the like the potency of what it is to be a man in this world they've all they're all people who've taken a kinship journey like they realized at some at some level like the classic shaman's initiation is getting really sick and real like deathly ill and realizing that you have to connect with all your powers and the way that they serve life to actually heal yourself but the purpose of healing yourself isn't just to heal yourself it's to become a vehicle of a power that serves life that's that's like a an archetypal classic shamanic initiation like they actually get sick intentionally it uh there's is that not intent no it's often like in a lot of i am hesitant to say a lot of because i i have my spectrum of anthropological knowledge and um there's all the ones you know generalization heaped on indigenous traditions they're really diverse but the the classic shaman's journey is that like a kid like is so sick that they can't get out of bed and no one knows why or um gets hit by lightning or you know like there's there's many different kind of doorways in in the kogi tradition elders identify that a kid has gifts and then the kid is often raised in complete darkness for up to seven years up to 12 years usually seven and that cultivates like the like the dmt capacity in the brain they actually learn how to see literally see in the dark that's the classic initiation there um in the lion shamanism tradition that i have a little bit of initiation into like classically a lion would come to you and consume you in your dreams which often actually leads to like some kind of illness and that identifies that you're on the path to be initiated in that way um so these are all kind of relating to the hero's journey they're relating to the kinship journey because in all of these cases there's a recognition in the in this in those in i would say my world view as well there's a recognition that the intelligences at play are greater than me and that there's a way in which my life begins to make sense when i true myself to go back to this definition of true with a pattern that is seeking to be born through me with a path of humanness that's seeking to be born through me so for me like i've received all these visions in psychedelic ceremonies i've received these dreams I received from the time I was the first time I had an elder come up to me and say oh you're a teacher of teachers and you come from the future and you need to you know develop that when was that was I was 18 oh wow and I had this you know elder come up to me and say I I know who you are and you're a teacher of teachers and you need to develop your gifts and I've had experiences like that over the course of my life.

1:01:11All of those live in a context where the worldview assumes that there's some purposefulness to my incarnation, to this soul's, this one's, like purpose here on this earth or your purpose on this earth that somehow included like freaking mastering the game. And the recognition there is as you develop that in service to life, Like you're a great example of someone who has developed those capacities in service to life. That's the process of kinship initiation into a sense of identity that is organized ecologically in terms of the soul ecology or the ecology of human actors within the larger ecology of a planetary system.

1:01:57So would an example be like if the hero's journey is our hero Bob goes out, overcomes some challenge, discover something new about the world, comes back and sort of comes full circle. That's a classic story circle, but, you know, change and upgraded. The kinship story would be what happens to Bob after and how he like integrates that into his community. It would start with the why. I see. It would be the why. The why you go on the journey in the first place. i see but but and the self-development would be somewhat similar but it would be a bit more permeable so it would be less oriented towards like my increased sense of heroism in the world to my more available and permeable sense of collaboration with the world where i have some unique gifts to give and then the other thing that's different is um absolutely the thing that you do afterward the end is different in that the hero's journey often culminates with a victory that looks really good in a win win lose system um where the the kinship journey doesn't end in that kind of a victory it might end in a ceremony where you finally get to give your gifts and then the continuity of that is that you're you're now in student a student to that now and you're still you know it's like it's like a parent's journey is more of a kinship journey the journey of becoming a parent is the journey that a lot of people know because it's a deep sublimation like softening and opening of your ego structure to be in service to another being into their future so like everyone anyone who's a parent is already to some degree on a kinship journey relative to their child but they may not be on that journey relative to their work or relative to transforming our world right anyone who's already raised their hand as a change agent who's like i'm interested in being a change agent has in some ways signified that they're on a kinship journey because that that recognition that there wants to be change is a recognition that there's something fragmented or toxic or pathological or problematic um yeah you're interviewing a lot of people who might more greatly understand their own like understand their own process a lot more deeply in terms of personal development if they look at it through a kinship lens are there any movies that you would say that's a kinship story i haven't watched moana or those movies i think i haven't seen them either um um i um ted lasso is a is some to some degree a kinship journey um it's also an interesting narrative structure because it's more about the group process it's important not to confuse the kinship journey is still an individual journey it's the journey of the individual relative to our kinship relationships with an animate world a world that is intelligent that we fit into in increasingly elegant ways.

1:05:12But there's also journeys that are collective, and Ted Lasso is a great example of that. I think I don't have a good example. It's a good homework assignment. You mentioned an animate world.

1:05:30You believe in animism, right? That there is essentially a quality of life to almost all things? yeah I'm not a believer really in anything but I experience intelligence in many things I'm not a big believer of anything but I'm a big observer and I observe that things are intelligent I observe different qualities of intelligence for example going into an old growth forest and like if you just get quiet and feel there's a palpable sense of something different you know if you're honest you probably don't give it a lot of words you probably just get quiet because the quiet the quality the sonic quality of an old growth forest is totally different than other forests.

1:06:26That sonic quality mirrors a whole bunch of very different relational processes that are going on in an old-growth forest, down to the soil and the space between the trees and the kind of organisms who inhabit it from a third-growth forest. Why is that? I mean, bioacoustics is a growing area of research in the world that's totally freaking gorgeous. Sidebar, my favorite bioacoustic factoid is that baby coral, coral little tiny little polyps like babies, find where to settle on the basis of the sound that healthy coral makes. Hmm. What? like it turns out the ocean is this like massive like the bioacoustics of ocean and there's all this communication going on that we're just starting to be even understand is even occurring let alone map in terms of bioacoustics um i mean it makes sense that living coral i mean it's in a medium of water yeah sound travels great in water actually and you know coral is essentially i mean doesn't breathe in the conventional sense right but it's it there's there's cyclical processes going on right yeah so that creates a sound it creates a rhythm yeah and baby coral finds it wow itself finds its way home on the basis of that sound um i can't speak to the specific bioacoustics of a forest of an old growth forest but i i can speak to feeling uh how different the acoustic space is than when you walk into a second growth or third growth space.

1:08:12There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is just spatial. One of them is that there's different statistical gradients of kinds of intelligence moving between different things. um the in in the more complex an ecosystem is the more relations the more intelligences are moving back and forth between things i mean i i can also speak to experiences of uh being a bird or being a spider or go on this is this is getting very woo but um perhaps the first time i had an experience of inhabiting the ontology like the whole the entire way of being of another being was very unbidden i had hiked out very far into long valley in sedona and um hiked up a cliff got in a cave sat down to like contemplate and got very relaxed and then all of a sudden i found myself inside a bird this was sober totally sober when you say inside a bird like i was my consciousness had transmigrated into the bird there's languages for this in like carlos castaneda and things it's called transmigrating but essentially i can't technically tell you about that i can tell you like remote some people i think remote viewing is a word people use yeah it's more like it's more like like the experience of this this organismic experience of being here was not here it was there right and could you feel its body yes but you like seeing through its eyes through its eyes and like like zoom through the wind and like being super fluid and its eyes are like by not like they're on different sides of its head it's a totally yeah how did your brain process that it did and then i was back in my body how long were you in it for that was probably 10 seconds um and i've had experiences on ayahuasca of becoming a bear and becoming a spider and becoming mosquito what was that like it's freaking cool it's like being inside a vr experience firstly mosquitoes don't differentiate as an individual so you don't have a sense of being an individual and then you're like surfing smell heat waves and your visual spectrum is more in the spectrum of heat so it's like very amorphous and very um global and like your whole uh you know your your agency is oriented towards surfing these waves towards where there's heat and possibility whoa um did you because the mosquito mosquitoes are the one creature i just like i try not to kill anything but i do kill a mosquito yeah i do too get the out of my life they told me this was this was not the mosquito ontology this was more like me popping back in my body and talking to the soul of mosquitoes i was like what are you for this happened in an ayahuasca journey where i had gone very very deep into the medicine and i was like basically on the other side of life and death for about five hours and learning a lot about what consciousness does when it's not located in a body which is pretty cool and let's stick a pin that but anyway so um i had like you know gone into mosquito ontology again fairly non-differentiated and then came out and like asked the question what are you for and the mosquitoes said this was all instigated by asking that question prior to the ceremony i don't know if you work with ayahuasca but ayahuasca is very responsive to intention in a way now no other medicine is and yeah so i asked that question and then i asked them and they were like well you see i know we're kind of a pain in the ass and we're a disease vector but we also um help you tend your micro virome like if you think we have a microbiome we also have a micro virome and mosquitoes help keep that robust and diverse and they also give us micro infections which it turns out strengthens our immune system this was their rationale but it has changed my relationship with mosquitoes it's been fascinating i also heard that they especially in the like higher latitudes like up in canada where they're like so prolific um they're a very important transfer of energy from um lower latitudes to the poles or vice versa but because there's like literal life energy because you think how much blood they are sucking um apparently like if you were because i know you know people have looked into like gene drives and so on today to wipe out like the malaria causing ones and you know the worst culprits and i mean actually this would be an interesting thing too i'm sure you have opinions on this but like it might be okay to take out a couple of species of the worst offenders but if we were to take out the entire like cluster of mosquitoes in general it would probably collapse the entire ecosystem, you know, the biosphere, because they're such an important, again, they literally move energy in a way that the system relies on.

1:13:33Again, classic like complex systems. You think, oh, I can just take these little bits out, but actually sometimes it's a house of cards. You take out a thing that didn't seem like it was relevant, but actually it causes mass changes that it can't, the shock is too much for it to absorb. So when I say animacy, that's that would be a great example of a flow of intelligences that is part of what that means to me so i don't just mean like oh that thing talks to me though there are trees that talk to me and i find that very interesting but i think to me animacy is a lens that takes the communications between things and the incredible complexity of living processes very seriously as intelligent and then may cultivate relationships with that in all kinds of different ways um you know or with an eco field an eco field means uh an a field so like this room is an eco field um your house is located in an eco field that includes your yard and the kind of all the flows that comes through the zone so you could also cultivate an animate relationship with an eco field so you've had a lot of these unusual consciousness experiences um going into a bird going into a bear mosquito talking to trees i would love to personally cultivate that kind of thing i'm sure some people listening i mean we might have lost a few people by this point i'm sure and that's okay it's okay it's fine if you're still with us um you're presumably curious to learn how to expand your consciousness in a similar way um so like have you noticed any you know do you do you teach are these are these experiences teachable to others is there a way to access them without you know very high doses of psychedelics um which understandably a lot of people wouldn't want to do um you know have even have you found there's like a do these always happen by surprise or have you actually cultivated like you know cultivated the ability to do it like muscle there's a muscle the muscle that i've cultivated is a muscle of approaching anything relationally in other words like there's the tree outside my bedroom window that's behind my house that feels i honor that tree as a sheltering tree for our house um that's not a complicated thing to do it's like not at all complicated i just like the tree um the tree has never actually talked to me so any conversation that i would be having with the tree is more a function of my own mind i think that it's really useful to be honest about that real mysticism has that as a deep level of rigor so there's there's two things that are really relevant to cultivating these skills and then there's various trainings and traditions that like meet the energy field of the tree and i wouldn't pretend to be actually very good at those things but there's there's two things that are really helpful and one is um to take the view that that thing might be intelligent so you have to suspend the belief that it is not intelligent that it is an inanimate thing or you know materialism is an interesting spectrum of beliefs it's not just one belief so you can be a materialist and be open to the intelligence of the tree or you could be a materialist and like kind of that's just raw material and have a very rigid kind of fundamentalist view of stacking processes i think it's actually more rigorous whether you're a materialist or not to approach the tree from the inquiry might it have intelligence might there be ways in which it's communicating might i be able to interact with some of those Might I be unable to interact with some of those or unable to measure some of those?

1:17:51Those are really rigorous inquiries. They're honest.

1:17:58And those could yield all kinds of results. Might the tree over time respond to me having a kind story about it? Might I change because I have a kind story about the tree?