What The World Will Look Like Post-COVID | Part Two w/ Jesse Elder
11 Dec 2025 · 46 min
This podcast (Ryan Daniel Moran interviewing Jesse Elder) explores how the COVID-19 era and 2020 unrest accelerate large social changes: destabilization of centralized power, potential secession/decentralization, and an unfolding divergence in human experience between immersive virtual lives and localized, self-sustaining communities. Elder argues shock/isolation cycles weaken individual resistance (citing CIA research and "shock and awe" doctrine), predicts mass adoption of VR and related tech (haptic suits, sex robots), and offers a prescriptive emphasis on embodied experience and community-building (CLASS/OSCAR) as remedies. The episode closes with practical advice to seek direct, experiential growth rather than external authority.
Chapters
Hey, capitalists. Welcome back to part two of my interview with Jesse Elder. I brought Jesse to my home because I wanted his perspective on where we are in the grand scheme of things and how 2020 plays a role in the unfolding of where we're going as a species and as a society. And in this part of the interview, you will hear us make predictions and talk about where the world is moving forward, forward over the next several years. And we go into some weird areas that I think are real. And so we touch on things like what society is gonna look like when we start populating other planets, because we're not that far away from that. And why right now we're actually seeing that kind of a thing become possible. Why 2020 and Covid and all of the unrest in the world is actually setting the stage for a huge expansion of human evolution and how we've just scratched the surface of what it means to be a human. You'll really appreciate this if you're going through a hard time right now because you will see that what we are experiencing in 2020 is just a small glimmer in the overall development of where we're going as people and as a species. So that's why I brought Jesse to the house, because I wanted to be able to say I want to know where we're going because my brain can't make sense of everything happening in the world. And I think you'll benefit from hearing this conversation. Thanks for listening and I would love to hear your thoughts. So you can leave a note in the comments or you can shoot me a dm. I'm Ryan danielmoran on Instagram. Thanks for watching. Talk to you soon. Enjoy.
Jesse, everything that you're saying to, to me sounds great. So where do you see the unrest in the short term getting even worse?
Yep. Because with the.
As. As these controlling bodies, mostly government and, and I'm not against government, I, I think government absolutely has a place when it is able to provide a service that is equivalent to, to the price that it's asking. That's not been the case in any first world country, certainly not in any welfare state for a long time. So as the power, the balance of power shifts and more and more.
And I'll use this term, sovereign individual, there's a great book by the same title. As more and more sovereign individuals go where their money is treated best, it's going to create a little bit of a, of a panic among the powers that be or the powers that were. And I actually think that that's what's happening right now. I think that this whole.
A panic among those who are in control.
Yes, very much so. Because they. They very much like. Like, kind of like a farmer going out to milk the cows for all they're worth. And then one day realizing that he has one less cow, wondering what happened. And then next day, he gets up a little earlier and he sees that the cows are growing wings and they're flying away. And so his immediate reaction is to try and put a roof over the. Put weights on their legs, do something. But that requires so much resource. It would be so much easier to convince all the remaining cows that the ones that left are traitors.
It would be so much easier to weave into a cultural narrative that real Americans wear masks. Right now we're hearing real men wear masks. I don't think it'll be too much long before we hear real Americans wear masks. So it's very, very simple to convince people what to believe.
So I think that all of this is going to create massive destabilization of existing power structures. And the byproduct of that eventually, and maybe not for a couple of decades, but it will be a shrinking of power centers. Here's an example of this. Three years ago, four. Three or four years ago, I just happened to be in Barcelona with a couple of private clients. I landed in Barcelona. I started checking on my phone, and there's all this stuff blowing up. There's been, like, protests and all these things. I'm like, oh, what's going on? Turns out that day, Catalonia, which is the wealthiest state or wealthiest state or province in Spain, responsible for 20% of Spanish GDP, they had voted for secession. They voted for independence. And 40, I think 40% of the population turned out to vote, which is insane. 93% voted for independence. 93% vote voted for independence. Said, we're done carrying y'.
All.
Like, we got our own stuff to handle. And how much better could we be if we actually got to keep what we made? Kind of Crazy Prime Minister Rejoie of the Spanish prime minister sent in police and kicked the shit out of 900 people, put 900 people in the hospital, beat up many more. And these are like old. I watched videos old women and kids and families and dragged them by their hair down the steps of these schools where they were voting because to send the message, I don't allow you to secede. And he declared their vote illegal and all this kind of stuff. And I mean, we all know that.
The letter of the law really is the willingness of someone to enforce it, whether or not there's any law there. Violence always wins, has always won. So imagine that happening. And this is not a prediction. This is just, these are, these are ideas.
This is one possible, one possible outcome.
But imagine the wealthiest areas of the world saying we're tired of funneling things through to London, or we're tired of funneling things through to Washington. We're tired of funneling things through to this incredibly inefficient structure. We're going to just do our own thing. Thank you very much. When that happened in Catalonia, I saw that as, and I still do saw that as one of the most important political events of this century because it was the beginning of the cracking apart of these centralized power structures. Interestingly enough, maybe coincidence, maybe there's some conspiracy nuts on, on your podcast that will go, yes, I see it. But that night in Las Vegas, there was a shooting at Mandalay Bay.
And all of a sudden nobody talking about this Catalonian thing anymore. Everybody's talking about unfortunately these, these 50 something people that died. So is there, is there a connection there? I don't know. But I do know that, that if I was running a centralized power structure, I wouldn't want anybody looking at this attempt to secede and create independence. Because that could have been Texas, it could have been Northern California, it could have been many areas of meaning that.
If Texas decided, you know, we're tired.
Just from a pure resource standpoint, if from a pure resource standpoint, Texas is an example and I'm obviously biased. Born in Austin, lived here most of my life, just Houston. If Houston was its own country, it would have the 30th largest GDP on the planet. So a lot of money in Texas as, as there's a lot of money in a lot of places. And because of this, this trend, not just a trend, because of this evolution into non physical wealth, there are areas that are about to explode on this planet in terms of real wealth. Hong Kong, who knows what will happen there. But certainly, you know, Malaysia could be it. There could be areas like New Zealand. New Zealand is the strong contender. I think Brazil is going to be awesome because these are areas that have already been tested and have already shaken off what doesn't work and have the cultural memory to do things a little bit more sustainably. So I think things are going to get really rough in the short term as people are going to have less and less illusion of choice.
6 months ago less and less illusion of choice.
Illusion of choice meaning choices that seem to make a real Difference in your life actually don't mean shit. Six months ago, it was a pretty common. It still is, I guess, but it was a fairly common conversation. Six months ago, Friday night, what do you want to do tonight?
Where do you want to eat?
Where do you want to eat? You know? And you get six people together, and they're arguing for 30 minutes over the best restaurant, looking at Yelp reviews and this and that.
I'm not gluten free, but I'm paleo.
Yeah, totally, totally, totally. Where do we go? So that was six months ago.
And.
Now the conversation has shifted massively to not even. Not even dialogue as much. And I'm obviously generalizing here, but it's like, oh, you wearing a white shirt. Hmm. You must be racist. And now you're in this awkward position of having to defend your fashion choice while simultaneously your worldview, while simultaneously reaching in your phone to scroll back to that one black friend you had three years ago. You're like, I'm not a racist, and I'm not making light of anybody's plight, but look how common that conversation has become. And so things are accelerating and this illusion of freedom. I'm so free, I can watch whatever I want on Netflix or itunes or Prime Video.
Abundance, baby. No, that's not abundance. It's a gilded cage.
You and I have friends who are incredibly intelligent and smart and.
Make documentaries, tell incredible stories through documentaries. And what most people don't know is that a documentary, in many ways, not always, but in many ways, a documentary is just another sales letter. It's just another ad.
Yeah.
And so, you know, you watch the documentary on. What was the one about veganism and getting strong?
Oh, the Arnold. Arnold Schwarzenegger one.
I.
Game Changers. I think it was Game Changers. Yeah.
So that changed a lot of people's behavior. And I'm watching them like that. You know, makes sense. I was vegetarian for 13 years, vegan for a couple. I loved it until I didn't. And then I was like, I had a dream about a cheeseburger. I'm eating cheeseburger. My body's like, good job. But you follow the money. James Cameron funded that. James Cameron funded it through Beyond Meat. The whole thing is an ad for Beyond Meat when Tony Robbins did. I am not your guru. And is this beautiful sales letter for Date with Destiny. But people are watching it like, oh, I'm gonna educate my. No, you're not educating yourself. You educate. You're absorbing someone else's incredibly well crafted message to guide your behavior.
Yeah. And so and sometimes ethically so like, I mean 100% you can. Those both of those examples are people who genuinely believe in what it is that they're, what they're selling and what they're representing. So they can be ethically persuading people. But it's still a sales letter.
It's still a sales letter. And ultimately, and coming back to this, this idea of this illusion of choice, when I, when I first started coaching, I felt very, I was very eager to say, oh my God, you got this problem, okay, here's what we're going to do. And I'd have this roster of tactics and let's do this and this and this and this. And people would try and they get results and it's great. Now when I'm working with somebody and they're like, here's the problem, here's what's going on. I'm like, alright, what do you think you should do about that?
The caliber person that I attract and that I work with always knows the answer. They just need somebody to hold a solid fucking container who isn't gonna let them wiggle and go, oh, I don't know. Wrong answer. We do this all day long. You do know what is. And all of a sudden they begin to access memories, either from the past or the future. They begin to feel these sort of weird, oh, and their intuition starts to scream at them and next thing you know, they snap right back into the best possible version of themselves. And it doesn't take time. The whole reason I share that is because telling people what to do only appeals to the person who's still seeking authority outside of themselves.
God, that's good.
So the best seminar is never in a hotel. The best seminar is give me your phone, I'll give it back to you in 30 days. Go get lost, go get some scars, go tell some stories, go cry, go fall in love, go break some hearts, go fast, don't die, come back. And then we'll talk about what experiences you actually live. And I think that we are facing the rise of the true humans. We're not done evolving, we're just beginning to evolve. There are all sorts of capabilities and perhaps even senses that we don't even know we have yet. We're still evolving. And as we are forced and confronted with the opportunity to embrace our actual humanity, not the illusion of choice that has been crafted and given to us to make us feel like we're successful, we're in for the best time of our lives.
It sounds like we've got that period in between that is gonna look a lot like chaos, 100% and a lot like dysfunction and a lot like power grab. And that on the other side of that, you have a more intuitive part populace, if you will.
Yes.
You have more personal autonomy and responsibility.
I think there will be a, a divergence because like, like right now.
Three, well, four, four months ago, beginning of March, you know, all this stuff starts, starts happening, you know, here in Austin. South by Southwest is canceled. And I mean, I totally quarantined. I'm like, this makes sense. I'm going to take myself out of the chain of infection. And I was very public about on social media and it was absolutely the right thing to do based on what I believed. And I kept studying and researching and all of a sudden things started not add up. And I was like, oh, okay. But during that whole process, how many of us started jumping to zoom calls? And then three months later, we're sick of zoom calls. And now there's this, this relief and, oh, we can get out of the world again. Oh, just kidding. Now there's a lockdown. And now you can, you know, don't be in groups of more than 6 unless you're protesting. In that case, there should be thousands of you.
I have no opinion.
Yeah, zero.
But check this out. When people are put through this cycle, which is very intentional, this cycle of isolation and chaos. Isolation and chaos. Isolation and chaos. Those happen to be the two.
Experiences that completely destroys an individual sense of self.
I get that.
I just happened to be reading a book right before all this stuff happened. And it was a book on crisis economics and how economic changes are put into place on the immediate heels or even during certain crises like Katrina, September 11th, all these things. And there was a doctor, Dr. Cameron was a psychiatrist in Canada and the CIA, and the moment you say CIA, it's like, oh, here we go. But this is all verifiable. This stuff actually happened. The CIA bankrolled this guy, Dr. Cameron, because they wanted to know, how do you deconstruct a human mind? And what he found is that isolation. Putting people in these soundproof light proof rooms for weeks at a time with cardboard tubes over their arms so they can't feel their body. Changing their meal times, breakfast at night, dinner in the morning, removed their sense of self. And with electroshock, he annihilated their memories. And he. What? Their memories. Annihilated their memories with electroshock. Electroshock.
Really?
Yeah. Just wiped out their memories. And so he reported.
With, with this gross satisfaction that there are two factors that allow a profound. To know who and where they are, and that is sensory input and your.
Your contact.
Well, your memories. Yeah, because that's a connection from this to then. So if you wipe out memories and you stop sensory input, people start to lose who they are. When you then follow that with a period of massive chaos and shock, bright lights, loud music, violence, maybe even torture.
The individual ceases to exist. They just go limp. This then got taken by the CIA and put into this military doctrine, which eventually became known as shock and awe, was a military playbook that was written in 1996. We now know those words from the Gulf wars. Shock and awe as a military strategy. But the bombs and tanks and planes was the smallest part of that. Most of the shock. Shock and awe strategy is on the population, not the opposing force. And what they found is that if a population is exposed to this shock and awe, this isolation and this chaos, in the words of this military playbook, populations go limp. It is no longer politics as usual. This is an area where democracy does not apply, where the need for consensus disappears. People will accept whatever is said to be necessary in order for their safety.
So I said at the very beginning of this conversation that I was looking for something to predict.
Especially when I'm looking at the external, it makes me feel insecure in where things are going. And therefore I'm like, I just want to be able to predict something so I can make good decisions right now. And what I'm hearing you say is played out further that that is when human beings are weakest and the most subject to suggestion.
Yes.
It also sounds to me and. And I'm curious how you arrived at this conclusion. It seems like you have concluded that it's much more intentional. And I just don't think government's that smart.
I don't think any single governmental agency is that smart. But.
If we look at. Well, let's just think about it as marketers, we know what drives people. We know what pains or wounds somebody might have that they're seeking a solution for. And we might look at that on a tactical level. We might look at it on a level of a program or.
A product.
The world's best.
The best influencers are not on Madison Avenue. They're not in.
They're not even in the back room.
But the world's best influencers are in Hollywood, in Washington. There's no other way that they're able to continue to keep a population focused on what seems to be so important.
But here's what this is it's neither here nor there.
This rise of.
Self authorized people, which entrepreneurs are at the front of the pack. Entrepreneurs are the ones who can't sit still in class, who got ejected from class, who got in trouble for thinking differently, who have faced their own, their own shit and rejected their religion only to creatively reconstruct their own morality later according to what made sense to them. That's a rare number of people, but those are the ones who are on the leading edge, who are least likely to be influenced and coerced and manipulated. And the moment they detect they're being manipulated, go, oh, good one. And they opt out.
I want to close this loop. A few moments ago I mentioned this divergence where there are people who got locked down, put on Zoom. Now you go back out again. Oh, just kidding. Come back down. People are going to get so sick of Zoom that they will crave something better, but reality itself won't be an option. So they will flock en masse to virtual reality.
Yep.
And that's been coming for a long time. Facebook bought Oculus like five, six years ago, I think.
I just, I can't. I geek out on a thing about what's going to happen when Oculus merges with messenger rooms.
Oh, yeah, yeah. They already have the tech, they just haven't shredded yet. People aren't ready.
And so like you and I are connected on a messenger room, but we're on Oculus. And now we're floating around wherever we float around, but we're together.
And here's. This is the slipper slope of that. I had a VR set. When was that?
Esther had just been born.
Yeah.
Yeah. So 20, 15, 16.
Yeah, it was about four or five years ago. And I was curious and used it with clients and was in it myself. I'm like, all right, let's see this. And I got it immediately. I was like, oh, you can do really cool things. Yeah.
I remember taking off the goggles at your house and then being like, I.
You know, like, just give me a second. Yeah, well, and, and this is, this is something that I, that I think is, is going to happen. So many people already don't trust themselves. Don't trust themselves to, to jump in the water, don't trust themselves to stand, go climb a tree. They don't trust themselves to hitchhike. They don't trust themselves to get a one way ticket. And I'm not saying that any of those things are by any means necessary, but they all contain elements of self trust.
Because most people don't trust themselves and do not continuously seek out leading edge experiences.
It will be very easy to encounter pseudo risky activities in the complete safety of virtual reality. And your brain won't be able to tell the difference. For somebody who's in virtual reality going from that meeting room that, that messenger space.
Yeah.
And. All right, great talk. All right. Virtual high five.
Yeah.
Or hell, we could do, you know, virtual high 50 because my, my avatar's got 50 fingers. You know, you can play that whole game. It's fun. And then what? Then you, then you log out of that and then you're left to your own devices. And then all the shit that people are already doing online, they're just going to do it in VR. So virtual porn with a full haptic body suit that's going to just vibrate you like crazy. This, this is already a contributing factor to Japanese mortality. Japanese government is running ads saying, please have sex. They're the longest lived people on the planet and they're having sex less than they ever have. This is a huge problem. So the Japanese government is running ads saying, have sex. In the meanwhile, companies are churning out sex robots at $5,000 a pop that dudes are putting in their house as a member of the family and having them eat dinner with their family, their sex robots. They're interviewing their wives. How do you feel about this? Well, I kind of don't like it, but, you know, what are you gonna do? What does this have to do with the evolution of humanity? A lot of people are gonna go there. A lot of people are gonna go.
A lot of people are gonna go.
Virtual into this, this virtual world then. And I think it's great. Like it's, it's, it's just part of human specialization.
I mean, I can't help but play that out and see entirely virtual society.
Society is existing 1, 1000%.
And like, of course it's gonna happen. Like if I, if I really go down the rabbit hole, like virtual people who are then birthed and live and like.
Well, Sophia, the, the AI robot, you know, has already been granted Saudi citizenship. You know what, that, that was like two years ago, a year ago maybe. So there's that. Yes, there's going to be total virtual terrain, virtual territory. And there's going to be, I mean, right now everybody's geeking out over, you know, like meal services that, you know, serve up a keto meal and deliver to your door. Wait until somebody shows up. A robot shows up to your house to replace the IV drip with the, with the soylent shake that's being pumped directly in your veins so you don't have to get out of your haptic suit. Wait until a robot comes and works your legs so you don't get, you know, edema. I mean, dude, people are going to go for it. I'm telling you.
They're gonna go, oh, I actually, I believe you. Yes, I have. I've played this out.
Yes.
In my. In my strange thoughts.
Yes.
So, I mean, I can imagine you have a. You could have a virtual relationship and have a virtual child with someone. Yes. That I can only experience when I go into the virtual world because I've never met the person in the physical life. And so now I'm. I want to live in the. In the virtual world all the time because my family is that.
Yep.
That's weird. And we might be 100 years from that if that.
Maybe 20.
So that's one side, and that's one divergence.
That's like a totally one.
Yeah. One direction. Well, if you think about it now, how many people have a television versus don't have a television? Almost everybody has a television.
Yeah.
How many people watch TV versus don't watch tv? A vast majority.
And the people that don't have a television or don't watch television, you're like.
What do you even do, bro?
I was outside at my other house, and I saw a woman fall off her bike. And I was on a walk, and I live right near a nature preserve here in Austin. And as I got closer, I realized that it was a homeless woman who had brought her bike out of the woods and was riding around in of front, fallen off. And this is right in, like, the peak of quarantine. And I went over and I was, like, staying a little bit far away, and I said, are you okay? And she said, yes. Stood up and said, hi, I'm Ashley. And I was like, oh, I don't think you got the memo. Had no concept that we weren't touching each other. Right. She had no media to suggest that we should be distant or we shouldn't touch each other or we shouldn't shake hands or. Or anything like that. And so where. What I'm hearing you say is when we see the person who doesn't have the TV or isn't plugged into media or doesn't know what's going on, where we look at them, kind of funny, we're all. Most people are plugged in in some way.
Right? Right.
And so there's going to be a virtual world that we're all at least Plugged into. But it sounds to me like you're suggesting that there might also be a.
Group of people who opt out 100% who are, who are not, I won't say totally opt out, but who see the games for what they are, see the environments for what they are. That it's like, okay, that's cool and not really relevant to my life. What's relevant to my life is I just want to grow and eat really good food more than I need so that I can sell the rest at the local farmers market. I want to learn how to make love really, really well. Like I've been dabbling my whole life. Like I really want to get good at this. I want to make music and art. I want to make tons of money by creating this authentic value engine that just spins off something that somebody in the world is going to value. And I'm going to take all that excess money which I don't really need to live on because everything that I need, I've got my needs taken care of. I don't really care about the handbag or the, or the shoes of the car. Like that's cool. I'm not in that phase of my life. What I'm going to do is take all this extra money pool with a bunch of my other neighbors and we're going to put together a million bucks and we're going to have a competition and we're going to attract the best young science minds and give them a bias free grant. We don't care what the fuck you find find. We just want to know what you think.
And that will be one community out of thousands of communities that will be. I was writing a novel and then it started to happen for real. So then I'm like, okay, well screw the novel. But in the novel there's, there's, I talk about this divergence which is a little more fictionalized in this, in the book, but there, there's two, two acronyms that form these sort of new communities. And so you and I were actually talking about this just before we came up here. So the first part of the acronym is class. CLASS stands for Closed Loop Architecture for Survival and Sustainability.
So everything you need to survive and sustain is produced within that immediate radius. Then OSCAR is the second acronym and it stands for Open Source Creativity and Resourcefulness, which means everything you need physically is here and you are connected through this hub with other free thinking, risk taking, self authorized, badass, creative, ultra humans who are exploring the edges of their own consciousness, their own comfort zone every single day. Who don't have time to put on the goggles and go into a fake world because the real one is, holy shit, it's so cool. And neither one is better or worse. It's just a different way of being. But I predict the rise of these holons, these self contained communities. I see a massive need for these, what will probably be like very boutique, very.
Tastefully done potluck experiences where everybody brings the best that they've got. And it won't just be food or wine or.
Mushrooms, but it'll be art and music and slam poetry that actually has embedded within it a business plan that'll blow you away. And all of this is going to happen because it is a compression of humanity expressed faster and cleaner and deeper and more beautiful beautifully than we've ever experienced.
So, Jesse, I want to synthesize all this because I don't disagree with anything that you've talked about except your opinion on masks. Apart from that, I think you're, you're bang on. But somebody could listen to this and really take it.
Really, like just discard it.
Sure.
And so my job sometimes is just to translate and bring, and bring this into, into normal life. But what I think we're describing is a period that we're entering into in which we run the risk of more authority, more outsourcing of responsibility to authority, which runs the risk of allowing other people to control our lives. And if that does or does not happen, people are going to start to diverge into their own worlds. Their own worlds being the friendships that they cultivate locally, the family that they cultivate locally, and their own worlds virtually of what they create online, what they create in a microchip world, what they create in a virtual reality. And so whether we have to opt out of it be because there is authority coming in, trying to control us, and then the divergence happening faster where we reject the system or just a continuation of the trend we're on of well, I want to connect with people and I'm really tired of zoom. The trend is that we're going to have this localized physical focus with also the cloud, allowing for the digitalization of.
The best of all worlds.
And taken to its extreme, or just really with time, some people may choose to be their whole lives being in the cloud, their whole lives being creating a new reality that people who are in current physical reality can't even conceptualize right now. And then some people choosing, you know what, I want to live in the physical world and I want to enjoy my in person relationship, relationships and the closeness that I can have, I will opt out of this.
And neither one is better or neither one is worse.
Right. It's just different experiences. And so what you have as a result of that is a completely new menu of options of what you can have.
I have not said this publicly, I've said this to you privately via some of our text messages. But I think like the next step is if Elon gets his way.
10 years from now. We've got people on Mars.
And.
Played out over a few decades. If you also are bringing in the web and their physical experience, you now have a different human experience there. And now we have basically opened up the floodgates. And now. And when you can play that out, you realize that we have only scratched the very surface of what reality is.
Yes. We're just beginning. We are just beginning.
That's crazy.
Like human as a species, we're actually just coming out of the birth canal.
Yes.
And we've been gestating for nine months. And that's what this accelerate, that's what this acceleration is. That's why everything is so chaotic. Think about the chaos of a baby that's had nine months of 24, seven, room service, the best house music in the world.
And you're probably still kind of non physically connected to wherever you came from before this. So it's like you got everything. But then somebody comes along and says, hey.
Time to time to check out.
You're like, what?
No, it's perfect here. No, no, no, go. What's it like? Cold, bright, you gotta cry and eat and all this. No baby would choose to be born. Just like most people in this 3D physical reality wouldn't choose to die. But birth is death is birth. And these are the exact same experiencing from different sides of reality.
Like I said at the end of the documentary that you participated in ushered in that I never released, and I should just put the damn thing out. I was just never happy with how it completed. But my documentary about my religious journey called Losing My Religion, I said at the end of it, I said, wow, I'm gonna believe some weird things in a few years. And I'm now starting to see some of the weird things. The question that comes up with all of this for me, Jesse, is what do we do? Because part of me is excited about all of this contrast that we're about to and all of this opportunity and all this newness. Potential for growth, potential for hurt, potential for new experience. But it's so big that I have a really hard, like part of me is like, wait, was I wrong about bitcoin? Should I buy bitcoin? And even saying all this out loud, I'm realizing that me even even asking the question is a desire for certainty and predictability. The very fact that I'm asking you what should I do? Is me doing exactly what you said of looking outside of myself to an authority figure in this case to say, what should I do? What decision should I make with this?
I think it's a great, it's great that you noticed that. And just the energy change in you.
As you're saying there was, I feel.
Really good and recognizing it as being. Because what, what you just did in real time there, which is awesome, is you went through a micro cycle of uncertainty to certainty. And just in recognizing that the question you were asking wasn't the vehicle that was going to get you to what you really wanted, creative freedom for you. Yeah, just the recognition that, that, oh, oh, that's what's going on. Okay, cool. Done. So all that I can say is what I'm doing and it might be right for somebody, it might not. It might serve as a warning for somebody and it might serve as a bright shining example for somebody else. And I have no attachment to whichever one it is. I do believe that.
For us as, as, as humans, we, we have this, this ability to observe. We have an ability to absorb, to, to pass on and to experience. Most people are very good at observing and passing on and so taking this just information.
Converting that information into knowledge, which is information organized for utility, for use and then just passing that knowledge on. And you and I both made a lot of money with knowledge. Your students have done tremendous things with the knowledge that you've passed on to them, that they've applied and gotten results and their lives are changed and their families lives are changed and their customers lives are changed. And that's a huge force for good moving forward. I don't think knowledge itself is going to be enough. In fact, I think knowledge really was never enough and now that's just coming to light. Knowledge is information that's organized for utility. But wisdom is knowledge that has been embodied through direct personal experience. Wisdom is dying because people are so removed from their own direct personal experiences. So when somebody says, did you read the book about. And somebody else goes, oh my God, yes. And then they talk about it for hours.
And there's very little wisdom. The wisdom that you'll develop is the wisdom of social engineering. The wisdom of how do I jockey for position? How can I support somebody in this conversation, these are not right or wrong, but that's about, that's a very thin band of wisdom. When I'll have.
Private client day and they'll arrive and I'll pick them up at the airport. And the day itself is filled with probably seven to 10 different locations and different experiences, none of which are planned, all of which spontaneously arrive based on the conversation. But it will be everything from.
Going for a hike, to riding scooters, to go and test drive a Lamborghini, to let's go skydiving, let's go do a float, and that's in one day. Because the stacking of experiences causes more of your human functionality to come to the surface as you are forced by these experiences, to respond with more focus, with the alchemization of fear, to convert uncertainty to certainty through direct personal experience. You literally apply, obtain wisdom. Wisdom is the byproduct of direct personal experience. And nothing except direct personal experience can provide wisdom. So wisdom is dying. As more and more people are going to screens and having a psychological experience, an emotional experience, a biochemical experience, but not a fully embodied experience.
And sometimes it can be better, sometimes it can be better intellectually, emotionally, to read a book than to have a conversation or to go and have an experience. But the people who are going to be the most equipped, and this is an answer to your question of what can people do? Get experiential, because that's the only way you're going to learn to truly trust yourself. I made a career lifetime out of bringing people who were overweight, out of shape, learning disabled.
Emotionally traumatized.
Bullied, divorcing.
And working with them physically through martial arts and watching. As their confidence developed step by step by step by step, their body began to reflect that upgraded belief system. They began to say no. Raise the target higher and they aim at it and miss, knowing that they were going to miss. And they weren't afraid, afraid to fail anymore. They weren't afraid to make mistakes. They become immune. They become immune to self criticism because they're a sense of self appreciation. And this experience of being fully, delightfully in love with, they're just being alive. And all that, that self judgment just goes away. You have to practice self judgment. When you stop practicing it, what's naturally in its place is appreciation for your own life. And then that's how you start to see others as being functionally capable of their own miracles. And that's who you see. You don't see a collection of problems anymore. You see a light being in front of you. And it's my light seeing your light. And that's what all these spiritual practices talk about anyway. And so what can somebody do? Go live. Go. Go for a walk into the full moon. Go. Go swim in Barton Creek. And if you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. Go. Go skinny dipping while you're at it. Go. Go. Like, go make out in the rain. Go write some poetry. I don't know how to write poetry. How do you know? You ever try? No. Well, don't write some fucking poetry. It's probably gonna suck, but just don't judge yourself. Make some more. Make some more. Make some more. We're in the most. What happened after? When the church was brought down by information and technology, what followed was the Renaissance. And the Renaissance created this unbelievable.
Rise of beauty in the world. And we are on the cusp of a renaissance that will make that one look like kindergarten.
Yeah, I agree. You know, one of the things I love about you, Jesse, is I feel like we see each other maybe twice, three times a year, but it's like two adventurers from the galaxy come back and are comparing notes. Yeah. And I have been. I have gone. I told somebody that I walked up to the. I'm not dipping my toe in the water of Woo.
Woo.
I've gone up to the pool of woo when I yelled cannonball. Because I have. Like, my reality has started to be shattered by everything going on and just seeing that something's breaking and watching. Where. Where is this going and how do I fit into it? And it's almost inevitable. My buddy Zach, who isn't. Who is an actor, has. Has a. Like a compound here in Austin. And we've. We've talked about how it's kind of inevitable that people are just going to create their own little mini societies. And that's exactly what you're describing. And. And maybe even building and something I've wanted to do. It seems just inevitable to me that people are going to build their own mini societies.
And that and the amount of overlap and the amount of collaboration that's going to happen. You know, when we've collaborated on a project or collaborated on a podcast, what's going to happen? We start collaborating on energy and on food and on all of this. And. Yeah, I mean, that's another podcast.
And. And the next thing that I had been kind of playing with, that you're. I'm hearing you sort of touch on when you talk about martial arts, is realizing that the external world and external transformation is almost always, if not always, a reflection of an internal transformation that happens first.
Yes.
And so in your case, martial arts was a proxy for people's confidence to change based on them observing themselves getting better at something. But as their confidence changes, so does the external world and their performance.
Yes. And the two are completely related. So you can start with the physical action sans any certainty, not have any confidence, just do the physical action. And if you can hang in there feeling uncertain while you're going through the technique and then you stop, your confidence advances proportionally to the repetition and the intensity. Same thing with writing copy, same thing with making videos. Same thing with producing content or building a business or developing relationship skills. You're going to be better tomorrow than you are today. So just surrender to the process and just say, look, this is, this is a piece of who I am. This is not who I am. And in my greatest moments of conflict or relationship stuff or financial uncertainty, I'll just take a breath and go, look, I have a business. I'm not my business. I have a relationship. I'm not my relationship. I have a body.
I'm not my body. And that question, who am I and what am I? There's a questions worth asking.
Love you, buddy.
Love you, man.
Thanks for hanging out with me.
It's been a pleasure. Always.
Hey, team, if you enjoyed today's podcast, please let me know on Twitter or Instagram. I'm Ryan Moran on Twitter and RyanDaniel Moran over on Instagram. And if you're looking to start a business or you know somebody who's starting a new journey during this crazy time, you're wondering, what am I gonna do next? You're wondering, what do I do with my time? You're wondering, where's the world going? My new book, 12 months to 1 million is gonna give you the clear plan to pick a winning product to build a seven figure business and to become a successful entrepreneur. This is for those of you who want to live life on your own terms. For those of you who are struggling with a lack of clarity, who are wondering, what am I going to do next? Who are wondering, what's the path to building a successful business so that I live life on my own terms, I can call my own shots and I don't have to go back to work after all of this craziness is over. If you're the type of person who has to be an entrepreneur, then you've got to read this book. You can get on Amazon, or if you're in a position to order multiple copies, you can book that over@capitalism.com book. I'm so proud of this. So proud of this community for all that it has done. Thank you so much. I hope you love the book.


