How to Find Meaning in a World of Chaos w/Jamie Wheal (Part 1) EP 1099

The Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid has a bold design, a spacious interior with 232 horsepower and a 12.3-inch panoramic display to keep the adventure going and fit with the way you live. And with SiriusXM, every drive comes alive, bringing you closer to the music, the sports talk and podcasts that you love right in your vehicle or on the SiriusXM and app. Every SiriusXM equipped Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid includes a three month trial so the experience begins the moment you drive. Learn more@kia.com Sportage Hybrid Kia Movement that inspires this message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com the School of Greatness is sponsored by Capital One. Nowadays, most people subscribe to everything music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit cardholders can easily track, block or cancel reoccurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more@Capital1.com Subscriptions terms and conditions apply. This is episode number 1099 with Jamie Wheal. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur, and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Marcus Aurelius said, when you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love. And Carl Jung said, who looks outside dreams? Who looks inside awakens. My guest today is Jamie Wheal, who is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated Stealing Fire. He's the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance, and he's written a new book called Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a world that's lost its minds. And our conversation was so fascinating that I decided to split it it in two parts. So make sure you check out for part two coming in a few days. And in this first episode we discuss how to find meaning in your life today, the different arcs we go through in life, how to have faith and deal with uncertainty, the difference between the meaning of life throughout history and where we're currently headed, and so much more. If you're enjoying this fascinating conversation, make sure to share it with someone that you think would be inspired as well. And a quick reminder, if this is your first time here, welcome. So glad you're here. Click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or Spotify right now to stay up to date on the latest and greatest. And please leave us a rating and review with the most fascinating part of this interview over on Apple Podcast when you're done. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Jamie Wheel Recent data shows that out of all the female owned businesses, it is estimated that one in three is owned by a mom. Ever wonder how these amazing moms and dads find time to hire for their businesses while juggling their families? Well, they do it with ZipRecruiter and right now you can it for free only@ziprecruiter.com greatness and CEO and founder Talia Goldstein is a mompreneur. Besides being A mother of two, her personalized matchmaking company, 3 Day Rule, is constantly growing and she needs to hire several matchmakers a month. So she uses ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter's powerful technology helps her find people with the right experience and then it actively invites them to apply. But Talia is not the only employer who loves ZipRecruiter. For four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter, get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at this web address. Go to ZipRecruiter.com greatness this special offer is only good at ZipRecruiter.com G R E A T N E S S ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire Time is precious and Expensify makes it easy for you to get paid back. Simply put, Expensify makes it easy to manage your expenses, bills, invoices, travel and business or corporate card spend all in one place so you can focus your time elsewhere. Expensify is the most widely used expense management platform in the world with over 10 million users. Get rid of all the paper. Employees and end users don't have to worry about losing their receipts. Just take a picture as soon as you get it and then toss it Better yet, link your credit card and they'll auto match the receipt to the expense and submit the report for you automatically to your manager or controller, etc. Admins use Expensify to digitally manage your company's money, so you never forget a receipt, bill, or invoice. Again, managing employee expenses is easier than ever with the Expensify card. They're built for the small business, but strong enough to support the complexity that might be needed for companies of all sizes. Visit expensify.com greatness to get started with a free trial. That's expensify.com greatness.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest, Jamie Wheels in the house. My man. Good to see you, brother. Very excited about this. You've got an amazing new book out that is going to transform lives and blow people's minds, called Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a.

World that's lost its mind.

Why have we lost our minds in the first place?

I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons, and they're all happening at once. So basically, the world has gone exponential, and it is both getting exponentially better. So if you think of Steven Pinker, if you think of inspirational TED talks, you can be like, hey, literacy's up, poverty's down, war is down, health is. All these things are trending in the right direction. And you can honestly and authentically feel like this is the best of times. And then you open the paper and you see wildfires and floods and pandemics and social unrest and. And protest. And you think, oh, my God, this is the worst of times. And toggling back and forth between that is crazy making. And because they're both exponential, it's damn near impossible to figure out exactly where we reside, right? And it's almost as if there's sort of two arcs to life. I mean, I experienced this. I don't know if you do, but the difference. In fact, E.B. white, right, the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web, that old kids book, he has this beautiful quote where he says, I wake up in the morning torn between savoring the world and saving it. And that can make it hard to plan my days. And then I realized, in fact, that the savoring has to come first.

The savoring?

Yes, the savoring. Because if I didn't have a world to savor, then there would be nothing worth saving, right?

The challenges. The challenges.

It seems like a lot of people.

Are in this the world is ending. Although it seems like what the media, the world is ending. How do I fix everything or save something as opposed to how do I enjoy what I have right now?

Yeah, and that's the whole, you know, totally in the power of now. People say, oh my gosh, being in time with causation, like what's happened in the past, what's happening now, what's happening next, that's super stressful. Or we get off, knocked off our center. So just be here now. Ram Dass too, right? Like, and you're like, yeah, kind of like being present. Super important. But we are, we are time traveling space monkeys. We have the ability to conceptualize past, present, future, and you know, at a minimum, because we're 17 degrees off the axis of the sun, you know, unless you're at the equator. We have seasons, right? So that forced us to be thinking there's times of famine and there's times of feast, there's times of abundant photons from our nearest star, and not so abundant chlorophyll and metabolism. So we have to plan, right? So if you just go cross eyed and Zen about it, it's inadequate to deal with linear times arrow. Right. But if, then, if you forget to be present, right, Then there's nothing to savor. So what do we need?

Both.

Yeah, I mean, no surprise, right? But, but it's not, it's not a beige middle, right, that's unsatisfying. It's much more like, you know, Hegel, right, The German philosopher. It's a dialectic. It's forever back and forth between the guardrails. And how do we dynamically steer based on what on earth is in front of us, what are we paying attention to and what needs to get done? So like, hypothermic people don't make very good poets, right? So you're like, okay, I might want to put on a jacket, I might want to rub two sticks together and get a fire going. Now I can have access to greater creativity or expense. So, you know, it feels like to boil all that down, there's the sort of coming alive. Ugh, right. Which is what we were all raised on. Anyone go up to be president or an astronaut and sort of hashtag, best life, right? We all deserve to be healed whole and healthy. We deserve to travel the world, we deserve to have unique experiences. We deserve to have amazing soulmate, twin flame relationships, the whole bit, right? And the entire baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, we were all raised on that, right? And it's beautiful Uplifting and inspiring. It's always been partial, and not everybody's even had access to that promise, but it's pretty awesome. And that's about expanding infinite time frames and expansion of possibility. Right? So if, like, you were at a picnic at the beach, you'd be like, okay, what do we pack? What's gonna be the most amazing lunch ever? What blanket do we take? Where do we lay it out for the nicest view? Like, it's. That's the coming alive arc. But then there is also. And, you know, again, most folks through human history have had to wrestle with this. It's just the bubble kid, the bubble generations, you know, after World War II until lately, like, say, 2008. Right? So. So Boomers Xers and millennials, who. We really grew up in this historical anomaly in the developed West. It's never been. Never been nicer. You know, all war was externalized were massive, insane upward upticks of consumerism, standards of living, education, cheap debt, you name it, all that great stuff. And we're experiencing the intersection of the Staying alive ock and the Staying Alive OC is the exact opposite. It starts high and goes down across the chart. And that's about the diminishing of time frames and resources and options.

Meaning we don't need to work as.

Hard to stay alive.

Well, no, no, no. Like, triage. Like, oh, so staying alive as you picnic at the beach, you're like, wait a second. All the ocean's getting sucked out to sea. Wait, why are all the animals fleeing to higher ground? Like, what's that phone warning going on in my phone? Oh, it's a tsunami. Now what do we do with our day at the beach? So the coming alive ark and the staying alive ark are, like, intersecting right about now. And you can lie in bed. I mean, I've had this experience.

Interesting.

I've had this experience, like, three or four times.

So the world is ending, and the world is the best it could ever be.

At the same time, what do I do with my day? How do I plan my day? So I'll be lying in bed and I'll be like, oh, my gosh, that's such a phenomenal, you know, travel idea. I like to go. We'd like to go do something amazing, an adventure to plan an entrepreneurial idea, a creative project.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amazing. So inspired.

And we're in a pandemic.

I know. You're like, oh, shit. I didn't even get to. Do we even get to. Or should we be doing canned goods and should I be researching getting solar panels on our roof or should we be off to Costa Rica because the wheels are coming off Austin. We've been without power for two weeks.

That's crazy.

So that. Right, it's like Chinatown. Like that Jack Nicholson thing with fade away. She's my mother, she's my sister. She's my mother, she's my sister. It's that schizophrenic toggling between what is the frame or the lens that explains the data I'm experiencing and gives me clarified direction to act. Right. And so that's a meaning crisis.

So we're lacking meaning?

Well, we have lost the, the handrails or the, the trusted institutions. Right. So we've had a collapse in both. Benign authority, like secular, so academic institutions, religion, corporate. Well, those. That's divine authority. So we've got, we've got benign authority on the side of like everything from your doctor, your friendly white coated family doctor is the one who got your cousin hooked on oxycontin and has your little son Billy pinballing off the walls on high industrial strength amphetamines for his entire life.

Or Adderall or something.

Yeah, you know, and Jordan Peterson and maybe, you know, maybe your nervous spouse who's been pole acts by benzos like Klonopin. And you're like, wait, and that's called iatrogenic illness. And the Lancet just published a study saying something like 21 million people worldwide suffer from iatrogenic illness, which is just fancy for your doctor. Wow. And didn't admit it. So, so you're like, okay, so we can't trust those guys. Education, academia, with like, you know, the Ivy League admissions scandals, peer review crisis, replication crisis in social sciences. So you're like, oh, that stuff's not so trustworthy. What about, what about the type, the captains of industry, McKinsey and Goldman, you know, you listen to the big short. You're like, oh, whoops. Goldman was like selling credit default swaps out the front door and hedging it in the back door. They were totally implicated in the One MDB Singapore scandal. Right. McKinsey was fined for partnering with Jacob Zumer in South Africa and siphoning seven in the Gupta brothers and siphoning $7 billion out of the South African treasury and potentially collapsing Mandela's entire post apartheid project. They just got clipped a month ago for conspiring with Purdue Farmer to help sell more OxyContin after it was already determined to be completely addictive and underpinning the opioid crisis. So you're like, wait, this is where the best and brightest from all the Ivies go to get their internships, to get their, to go play the game. And that's hollow.

And they got the political side of things.

Politics. Who cdc, all these things. And there's no more. Even Walter Cronkite or BBC Radio. It used to be like, okay, world's crazy out there. Vietnam War, civil rights, whatever, 7pm we all sit down and literally a sane, rational voice of reason who's a neutral arbiter of all things good, true and beautiful will sit down and tell us what's what. That's gone. Even Snopes and fact checking sites have become politicized. You go to the journals of record like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, they've become, they've got increasingly partisan editors, op eds, boards and readers. And no one recognizes or respects any information coming from out of this. So that's, that's always been a, a shorthand for what is considered consensus. So that's just been boom. And at the same time, we've had, right, we've had the collapse in organized religion. Yeah, right. So Pew Research Foundation, I think it was in 2015, but it hasn't. It's only been continuing, which was the rise of the nones. So like N O N E s, the none of the above. Fastest growing. And now for the first time ever, largest religious affiliation in North America. So it used to be you would always anchor off, you know, loosely or tightly, some family of faith, some family of origin, belief system and authority structure.

And now it's none is what people are saying.

And no NE's, right. And so now you know, and you've got the sexual abuse scandals, you've got a thousand and one things undermining all of that. Right? So what we're seeing is, as we've seen this collapse of the roof of shared meaning, we're in a vacuum. And we're getting fundamentalism on one side and we're getting nihilism on the other side. Nihilism is like, I believe in nothing. So like Tyler Durden in Fight Club.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Like we're the middle children of history, man. You know that. You know, our great war is a spiritual war. We were told we were going to get to grow up to be presidents and rock stars, and we're not, and we're pissed.

So screw it all.

So screw it all.

Make it our own game. Yeah.

Yeah. One in three millennials surveyed within the last couple of years believes that actually military Rule would be preferable to democracy, right?

Is that because they're seeking order or structure or some type of leadership?

I mean, there was a great piece in the Atlantic and it was basically saying, look, this generation, they commit fewer crimes, they have less premarital sex, they drink less potty less, they do all the bad things less, they go to college in historic rates, they have historic amounts of student debt, they've done everything right. And they've been handed this steaming shit bag of society and ecology. And he said, so no wonder the kids want to say, burn it all down. So you're like, okay, so that's the lie of the land. And at the same time, back to the picnic on the beach during the tsunami thing, our spidey senses are all a tingle, right? Everybody knows that business as usual. And not just the old narratives, but the old structures are cracking. And as a result, on a sort of primal, animal level, everybody's hopped up and wound up about what do we do now? And so the question is, you would think or hope, like, okay, we were talking about this earlier, right? In times of great crisis, we rally. And whether this is FDR and the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or you have Winston Churchill and never, ever, ever give up and keep calm and carry on. And in the beginning of COVID right, people started trotting those out like, is this going to be another one of those? And you're like, yeah, maybe.

No. Oh no.

Oh no, not at all. So at a time when a meta crisis, meaning it's not just one thing, it's everything, right? It's economic, it's political, it's geopolitical, it's ecological health, right? It's all of the things all at once intersecting, overlapping and catalyzing. Oh man, right? It's a lot, it's a lot of.

Trauma that's being built up in every human being around the world.

It's an awful lot. And, and, and I actually, funnily enough, it was, it was Tim Ferriss that inspired this. He had put out in one of his newsletters a TED talk that he said made him cry, right? And I was like, oh great, let me check it out. Like it moved the fella. I'm curious too, and it was that, I think his name is Sam Berners. He's a, he's a little bald headed kid who had a congenital condition from birth. And he basically knew he wasn't long for this world. And then he gave this totally bad. He was all of like 65 pounds soaking wet. But he became a boy Scout and he wanted to play in the macho band and he told bad puns and made hip hop jokes and I mean, it's just an awesome. Just one of those testaments to life through tragedy, right? And I watched that like four days before I had to give a talk at a futures conference in Austin. And I just tore up my speech and I was like, okay. And this was right when there had been some of those really, you know, like the, the UN reports for 2020 are saying, hey, we got 10 years, folks. Otherwise this is a wheels off situation. Right? So I really thought long and hard about it and tried to come up with a 15 minute talk that addressed this, right? And where's the, where's, where's the path for courage? Where's the path for hope? All this stuff gave the talk and it was the opener. It was the opening keynote and it went over like a lead balloon. It was, this was all crypto, psychedelic blockchain, future, future, yay.

Going in our space.

Yeah, yeah.

Like pitching the conferences. Like, this is if Ted and Burning man had a baby, I'm like, well, okay, if Ted and Burning man had a baby, you're the people that we need to have this conversation, right? And one of the founders came up to me as soon as I got off stage and he just hissed at me. He's like, you don't give a what.

No, he did not.

He absolutely did. And they stiffed me, which was really, really funny. Like, I've never had that happen in my life. And I spent an entire week building a complete. Not. This wasn't like a pull it off the shelf stump shirt you could give. And it was completely from the heart to try and adjust all this.

Wow.

So I went home in the fetal position.

When was this? 2020?

Yeah. Oh, wow. So. So I was like, what did I do wrong? Like, how did I this up so badly? And. And it occurred to me, I was like, oh, I just totally misjudged three things, right? Why did I get this allergic reaction from an audience that would otherwise should have been primed for this conversation? And it was. First was cognitive complexity, right? Pretty much what we've just been talking about. Exponential everything in different directions. Yeah, Right. Because what we're missing is exponential meaning, you know, you've got exponential quantum computing, you've got exponential current cryptocurrencies, you've got exponential learning with Khan Academy and distributed online exponential transportation with uber copters, We've got exponential biology with crispr and you know, everything is exponential except how to make sense of it all.

The School of Greatness is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb. The holidays are such a special time to travel and gather with loved ones. Think about some of your best trips, those cozy spaces, thoughtful touches and the feeling of being right at home wherever you are. Now imagine getting to provide that same experience for someone else, because when you travel, your place is just sitting empty while you're away. Hosting on Airbnb can be a no brainer. And in a season where new experiences creating lasting memories, it's a unique way to help others make their own. And Martha and I both travel a lot, especially with her family in Mexico and mine all over the usa. So we know what it's like to be on the go during the holidays. And from our experience, hosting has always been easy and straightforward. And whether you're traveling often or just once in a while, it can be a simple way to earn a little extra while you're away. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host the holidays are here and with them comes all the cheer and the spending. And I think we've all felt the pressure of finding the perfect gift for the perfect price. And those prices are sure giving us.

A run for our money.

You know how it goes. One gift turns into 10. You're trying to stay on budget and before you know it you've spent half a day scrolling, comparing prices and wondering if you should have just gotten everyone gift cards. It can feel a little stressful trying to make it all feel special without breaking the bank, but luckily you can get the holiday savings at Metro with the most wonderful deal of the season. Get one line of 5G for only $25 a month and a five year price guarantee on talk, text and data. The best part is that you can keep the phone you love and keep your number and no activation fees. And that's what I'm talking about. A deal that actually lasts five years locked in. That's peace of mind right there at Metro. Get that more for your money feeling, visit your local store today. $25 a month with autopay $30 your first month guarantee exclusions apply. C Site for details Cold mornings holiday plans this is when you need your wardrobe to just work stuff that looks sharp, feels good and you'll actually reach for Quince Makes gifting easy when everything's worth keeping for yourself. By partnering directly with trusted factories that maintain high standards for craftsmanship and ethical practices, Quince cuts out the middlemen and markups. That means premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. So you can give luxury pieces without the luxury price tag. And it goes beyond their clothes. Quince also has incredible home and bedding options to make your home cozy this season. Martha and I have the European linen duvet cover set from Quince. And let me tell you, the duvet set is so soft and high quality. We highly recommend get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with quints. Don't wait. Go to quint.com Lewis for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N c e.com L E W I S free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Lewis so I was like, okay.

So our capacity to hold multiple competing and conflicting ideas simultaneously without crashing our mental browser or shitting the bed. Right, Right, right. So like that's one thing, right? And basically you know, you can, you can address that with a sort of fairly tidy thing which is like a triangle of like a post conventional metaphysics. So like how could we all just kind of upload Because I mean bomb short answer is get educated, right? Like, like good old fashioned Plato and so Crates101 like learn how to learn, learn how to think. But we don't all have time for that, right? So if you have a little triangle where you're like okay, Pascal's wager, Occam's razor and Bayesian probability. So you're like Pascal's wager is basically, you know, he famously said better to believe in God in case he's real, right. Than to not. Than to be an atheist and get doomed, you know, doomed to hell forever if I'm wrong. So best, you know, moral is better at least conceive of the inconceivable just in case, right? So better conceive of the inconceivable. Is there a global cabal of Satanist pedophiles running the world? Seems a long shot, but maybe let me at least keep an eye on that. Are we possibly at the end of the Anthropocene era and this is the extinction of humanoids on this, on this, on this little earth form? Maybe might want to keep tabs on that. Is this the unraveling of the nation state? Perhaps. Is this the collapse of global economy? Perhaps there's all sorts of things that it would be better for me to at least keep tabs on, be aware of. Yeah. Than to be Arrogantly dismissive, right? So that's step one. Once you've let that in the gate, so you've conceived of some of the inconceivables, then you got Occam's Razor, which is the simplest solution is usually the best, right? So rather than once again global, global conspiracies of satanic pedophiles, you might just say, hey, maybe the system is bankrupt and we've been getting lied to and maybe there are systemic structures and maybe there's a bunch of different cabals or small groups conspiring, but they always slam into each other, cancel each other out, do anything. But the idea of some sinister central thing potentially unlikely, right? Or we're all, or there's going to be UFO contact or, you know, and I just did a bunch of psychedelics, I'm now convinced that, you know, the, you know, the Galactic Federation is going to come and land and fix everything you'd like. The Occam's Razor explanation is I was on drugs that night, right? So let's hold that one for like before we go leaping to conclusions. So Occam's Razor is always, just don't get into excessively baroque or complex or self indulgent explanations which require connecting 17 dots to Sunday. Let's bust it all down and say the wysiwyg, what you see is what you get is always a very high bar to go beyond.

Yeah, that's two, right?

That's two. And then the foundation is Bayesian probability. Right? And Bayesian probability is just to say, hey, nothing worse than false certainty in a complex situation. So map your equation of all the bits and pieces that might be contributing and then basically delay. It's a little bit like Tai Chi or martial arts where you like, you know, you put out a foot but you don't weight it because if you put all your weight on your front foot, then your opponent can swap you, right. And take you to the ground. So the idea is like, I'm going to put my foot there, but I can also pick my foot up. Right? So Bayesian probability is saying pay attention to all the variables and constantly update them with the latest, most trustworthy information you have and delay making binding decisions for as long as possible. Right.

Get it peer tested, you know, all that stuff.

Yeah. So that's the first one is do we have the cognitive complexity to hold it without overwhelming our emotions, our nervous systems and our sense making and fundamental, you know, and screen of death, right. Rainbow wheel of death, like just crashing our browser, so. Because if we, if it crashes, we tend to get bored, we get irritated or we just say, that's all too much to think about. So I'm just going with this one. And then we ignore a whole lot of reality and potential impacts. The next one is, are we willing to kill our sacred cows?

Meaning what?

So our sacred cows, right? It comes from India, but the idea of like, you can't touch those ones because they're holy, right? And so. And we just talked about a few, right? If I believe that, you know, this is like Francis Fukuyama, like back in 1989, 89, he wrote that book the End of History and the Last man, because it was basically the fall of the Berlin Wall and there was that kind of moment from like fall of the Berlin Wall. I guess that was 91. I think he might have written this in 89. But like, so right around that era, we won the Cold war. Yay. Right? McDonald's and democracy for everyone. And free markets and democracy are the pinnacle of human civilizational attainment. And they're a steady state. Like, this is it, this is the top of the hill, right? We've got here, we've arrived. History has literally ended. Now we're just scaling, improvising, tweaking perfection. And that worked right up until you could say, you even have the invasions of Iraq, the Arab Spring. That idea of, like, we're going to topple all the despots and the bad guys and the dictators, and then, you know, citizenship and democracy will arise in their place. Like, whoops. Well, that didn't quite happen, you know, and now we have all these ideas of what we took as sacrosanct is now up for grabs. I mean, even in this last election cycle, there were a number of conservative politicians starting to tweet, hey, by the way, reminder, this is not a democracy, this is a republic. Softening the ground for voting suppression and things like that. You're like, whoa. And how did something like a global pandemic, which was supposed to. We would naturally expect a globally coordinated response. Response, and for sure a national effort. Not factionalizing states and pitting different political office, political governors against each other. And like, you guys can rot, but we're going to look after our people. Like, mind blowing stuff, things that go, you know, we're a democracy and we're talking about actively suppressing votes, not gerrymandering in the kind of backroom deals that have always happened, but like saying the quiet parts out loud and you're like, wait a second, what's that? About. Or the fact that the Earth is forever bountiful. We might actually run it out. We're at peak sand, right?

Peak sand.

Peak sand. Like that whole notion of go pound sand. Right? Literally. China has built more in the last three years than the United States. Concrete has poured more concrete in the last three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century.

Shut up.

I'm not.

Oh, my gosh.

And they're having to import sand from Saudi Arabia and they're also mining sand in India to ship to China. We are running out of construction sand in the world. So. So you're like, oh, wow. Like, so. So there's. There's so many things. And then even just take, you know, not like this was our father's generation, but the whole, you know, 20 years in a gold watch. I pick a company, right? Put my head down, I work my way up the ladder, and then I get a retirement and a pension. Well, that got blown up with the privatize everything into your 401k.

Right?

Now you just do your dollar cost averaging and you match your matching funds and you save. And you've invested in mutual funds because no one can play on the stock market. And don't get freaked in ups and downs because it always comes back over time. Right? That whole story. And now you've got baby boomers that are just simply sh. T Out of luck and having to work convenience store jobs for the extra spending money and health insurance. One in three millennials has a side hustle just to make things so, like the American dream of homeownership. Well, that's gone. We're doing Airbnbs now. Car ownership? No. We're doing Ubers and scooters. You know, Marriage? No. We're doing Tinder and hookup culture. Bumble. Like all of these things have been externalized and outsourced, right? So almost the global systemic where there's all sorts of things that we took as sacrosanct our sacred kettles. And on the personal, like, what did I think my life was going to entail, right? That we're having to take long, hard looks at. And it's that whole, you know, like the 100 year, thousand year flood, 10 year flood kind of thing. Floods and fires, right? For a long time. You're like, oh, sweet. Well, we're at the thousand year floodplain. We're bulletproof, you know, except that. Right. We've been having hundred year weather events several times a decade lately. So you're like, oh, okay. So, you know, and Churchill Said it nicely. He said. He said plans are worthless, but planning is priceless. So that notion of having some estimation, like our old rulers or yardsticks are kind of getting blown out of the water. We're experiencing accelerating change. The word unprecedented gets used so often these days. Unseasonable, unprecedented, all these things. And you're like, yep, that's now enough. We have to come up with new adjectives or new yardsticks, right? But having some sense of what do we think is coming gives us. And based on what has happened in the past, right? That's what foresters do for fires. That's what civil engineers.

Dr. We don't know what's coming now.

No.

But we can run back to the planning as priceless. It's a little bit like, choose your own apocalypse, like Mad Max Libs. Fill in the blanks as you choose to give yourself a story to plan and prepare that matches your model of reality.

Interesting.

And at least then you're not in fibrillation.

What are you planning for? Well, I mean, what's your apocalypse?

Apocalypse? Well, my personal sense is. If you run like the cold game theory analysis, you know, just kind of like, almost like not even Homo economicus, but like Homo Machiavellius, like, what the fuck happens? If everybody's acting out of self interest and we just kind of do the things we seem to continue doing, then there's an awful lot of trend lines that don't pencil out happily right now.

If we're all competing against each other, going after our own, trying to take.

What'S ours mentality and, you know, collapsing into factionalism and tribalism and all of those things, not to just mention the pigs and the Python, like, the things that. Even if we all had an Ebenezer Scrooge night tonight, we go to sleep and we have our ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, and we wake up, you know, like Paul on the road to Damascus. I've seen the light. And we all promise to change and do everything right from here on. It's still going to get catastrophically worse before it could get better.

Why?

Well, just because there's a lot of inertia in our systems, right? And it's going to take decades plus to flush through all that. So like I said, even if we suddenly became some cross between Stephen Hawking and Mother Teresa and Elon Musk tomorrow and throw in the Dalai Lama while we're at it, right? If we just became that collectively and we did everything right, it's. We are still going to have A hard landing, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the question is just, is it an inferno? Do we lose the, the landing gear? Right. Or do we end up, you know, in a belly slide on the grass and how many people get off? Right. So you're like, okay. So that my sense is hard saying not knowing. Like, it is too complex to know for sure. And I mean, my background's in like mountain guiding and wellness medicine and that kind of stuff. So I always just think super literally, like, if you're. If you're in the mountains and you have. And you can sleep warm and dry, so like you've got a sleeping bag that's, that's protected from the elements, you can suffer a lot during the day and you can recover if you have adequate food, if you have a fuel.

Source, clean drinking water.

Clean drinking water, navigation. So like maps and compass and medical. Right. If you have those things, then like, the Seattle Mountaineers have a bumper sticker that says, your worst nightmare is my vacation. You can go push it and you can engage, you can climb into the pain cave, you can have the suffer fest, and it can actually be really enjoyable. And you can even choose high, hard objectives that are totally optional. Like, let's go claim climb that wild, crazy thing just to see if we can, because it looks beautiful and treacherous, right? You can actually take on additional challenge, but lose your water filter, you know, break your stove, watch your sleeping bag roll down a ravine into a river and disappear. And then suddenly you're in cascading triage to like, oh, we now have to beat a retreat to the trailhead and get back to civilization, right? So we just saw this in Austin, right? You know, there was this freak snowstorm, power. You know, the entire Texas grid overloaded was literally 4 minutes and 35 seconds from a meltdown crash that would have taken like over a month to rebuild. Was that close. And at the same time, virtually nobody has alternate or backup heat sources. It's all electric because they barely ever need it. And then that. And then all the pipes froze. And then we also had a collapse in sanitized water. So there was boil water notices, there was pipe. Some people straight up didn't have any. The whole thing. And you're like, oh, you know, who was it? There's a fellow at the UN that said this beautifully, which was, we're only ever five missed meals from total anarchy. Right?

Like a day and a half.

Yeah.

If you don't eat for a day and a half, you're like, you're not thinking clearly. You're freaking out, you're stealing, you're freaking.

The doodly doodly doo neighborly.

It's just like, I'm gonna go and break in and take some food.

Yeah. So. So my sense is, is like, how.

Did, how did Texas handle it from your perspective? Well, I mean, people coming together and.

Saying here, some folks did, some folks.

Did come stay here.

Yeah, I think, I think. And I think it's important to celebrate and spotlight those things. Right. Because we obviously need more of them. And there was toughness. Right. There's the same things that we see in stable systems of imbalance that there's absolutely the notion of environmental racism, which is simply that folks dispossessed, disempowered communities are almost always getting the shortest end of the story stick when it comes to where the trash dump is, where. Where the Superfund site is, who has, you know, Flint, Michigan, drinking water, you know, you name it, and then throw in crises and the interruption of services and then the restoration of services, and then that also gets laid over exactly those same patterns and dynamics. So there are folks that, you know, pissed off to nice locations on private planes or, you know, or Cabo or whatever. Right. And that happened. You know, people with mobility, people with disposable income, people with advanced intel or information, news, all those things help. So the question is, how do we rally ourselves together? And I think for anybody that considers themselves like some form of a leader for your family, in your household, for your community, all these kind of things, there's kind of a sliding scale, right? If I can look after myself, and that's, you know, biohacking, peak performance, if I can sleep, rest, nutrition, mindset, all those things, and I've got enough gas in my tank left over, then I can be a loving and engaging member of my family.

But if I don't have those things.

If I don't, if I have a concussion or I have, you know, diabetic blood sugar crash, or I have a depressive episode or some mental health challenge or what, or an addiction, then boom, I'm decompensated and I'm back to. To having to deal with me first. But let's say I get me sorted, then my severe concern can expand to my family. Let's say my family is more or less thriving and happy, then I've got more leftover. I can stop caring for my community, caring for my country, caring for the world. And that is a sliding scale based on basically stability and access to energy and resources. So again, I could be a. I could Be a leader of the world and get hit on the head with a hammer and I'm back to self care. And it also has an expansion of concern and time frame, which is I get hit on the head with a hammer, it's me now.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing else matters.

Healing.

Yeah. Except cracking my skull. Right. If I'm in a plane crash with my family, it's me and mine now. Right. If we are slightly better off than that, we're now on the desert island. It's me and mine now. And next. Right.

And maybe we'll have a helping hand.

Expansion of how many people I care for over what kind of a time frame. Immediate versus longer term.

Yeah.

All the way to like bodhisattva. Everyone. Everywhere. Everyone. Right. And then. And you're not only just caring for humans now, but maybe all sentient beings now. You're maybe not even caring for all sentient beings now. You're kind of caring for everyone that's ever been and everyone that's ever gone up.

Leaving the place better than you found it.

Well, yeah. I mean, and a lot of ethicists talk about that like the idea between what's an existential crisis for humanity versus just a really, really road ahead. Because their point is, what's the difference? Well, and you know, it's pretty academic for us because my sense is that the only thing that actually matters as far as human choices is my generation and my kids generation after that it's academic. But ethicists will say, hey, an extinction event of humanity doesn't just mean everybody on earth snuffs it. It means that every other human that is yet to be born but was going to be has snuffed it.

Interesting.

So you get this aggregate cost when you terminate a species line through a keyhole event. Right. And that's, that's, you know, inconceivably exponentially bigger as far as the loss.

Yeah.

So my sense would be is can we first, you know, first look after ourselves and our families so that. Right. Like put our houses in order so that we can then come back to the front lines.

How do we do that if we don't have a meaning anymore? If we don't trust authorities, trust the organized religions or politics or corporations. If we don't have, if that's all for fractured and broken now, how do we find meaning of why we're even here?

Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously that, that answer is, that's unique for everybody, right? It has to be. And any tops down answers, no matter how good they Sound at the beginning almost always devolve into some form of fascism over time. Right? So a question is. Is like, hey, if we are. If. If like meaning 1.0, we can call that like traditional religion offered salvation. Right? Here's the story of how you get to heaven, but at the price. But at the price of exclusion, right? It was, it was those who believed were saved, those who didn't, weren't. So it was kind of a harsh approach, but it was fair. Like, it was like, we're going to lay our cards on the table exactly how we're going to play this game.

Do this and you're saved. Don't do this and you're stuck.

You are not in the tree of trust. And then meaning 2.0, which we could say is sort of like the French Enlightenment on modern liberalism, civil rights, civil liberties, private property, markets, that whole thing said that whole salvation game, that's problematic, that's led to holy wars, all inquisitions, all of this and superstition and all this bad stuff. So we're not going to do that. We're going to do inclusion. Everybody gets to play this game, at least in theory, right? At the cost of salvation. Right. Separation of church and state. And Nietzsche's sort of God is dead. Right? And both of like. And they haven't worked. That hasn't worked out too well either, right? Because an awful lot of people have correctly said, well, because the story was sort of like, wait your turn, play by the rules and your turn will come, we promise.

Right?

And you're getting a lot of frustration and understandable, even rage at the imbalances of that game. Like, we were sold a bill of goods. And in fact, Joseph Stieglitz, who's, you know, he was World Bank, UN economic adviser, all sorts of incredibly high up positions. I mean, he basically just called the entire shell game. He's like, it's been 40 years and the results are in. Neoliberalism and democracy have broken.

This episode is brought to you by Facebook. Finding the perfect Secret Santa gift can be stressful. You want it to feel personal and unexpected, but not random. That's where Facebook comes in. Facebook is all about turning small moments into real, meaningful connections. Just like giving the perfect gift, it brings people together in thoughtful ways, helping us show we truly see and appreciate the people around us, whether they're co workers, friends or family. And you can check someone's profile to see what they're into. Explore marketplace for unique gifts or join groups to swap creative ideas and inspiration. Facebook connects you with people who are into the same things as you and helps you find something that truly fits, making the perfect find feel more special and personal. And I've actually seen this firsthand with my own community. We have a Facebook group for everyone who's ever attended my Summit of Greatness event, and it's incredible to see how people stay connected long after the event is over. They share updates, support each other's goals, and celebrate wins big and small. And it's a reminder that when people stay connected, great things keep happening. Let's reconnect this holiday season. Explore more with Facebook today. Right now, there's a talented person out there who could take your company to the next level. The question is, do you want to just hope they see your job post before your competitors, or do you want to match them with Using Indeed Sponsored Jobs? When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide who trust Indeed to connect them with quality talent that truly fits their vision. With Sponsored Jobs, your post gets boosted to the right candidates so you can reach the exact people you want faster. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Now with Indeed Sponsored Jobs and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com greatness just go to Indeed.com greatness right now and support our show by saying you've heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com greatness terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the right way with.

Indeed and the benefits have accrued asymmetrically to those at the top. And you know, in the last year we've seen all sorts of things about what kind of recession are we in because of quarantine? Is it going to be a U shaped or a V shaped or a K shaped? Right? K shape just means the top 1% are now trillion and gazillionaires, right? And everybody else is hosed. And I mean to get to put this like really to put a point on it, this blew my mind. I had written the first chapter of this book 18 months ago and I had a paragraph and it said when 68 people on the planet are richer than hold as much wealth as the bottom half, the bottom 4 billion.

That's crazy.

68 people could all fit on a bus. One bus.

They had more money than half of.

The than half of the world's population. And and just to note that that sort of asymmetrical accumulation of resources, energy credits like natural resources it occurs in no living system anywhere ever. Now that was 18 months ago, just before we went to press. Just go back and fact check the number.

How many is it now?

It's 27. They can fit in a stretch limo.

Oh my gosh, 27. Have 27 more money and more resources than the bottom 4 billion. 4 billion people.

4 billion people. Now that, that, that just should break our hearts.

Does that excite you to share so what possibilities you could create potentially for yourself or does that, should that break our hearts?

I mean. Well, I mean, in some respects, I mean, this is the other thing. I think the era of like, I think a good thing for us to think of is that, is that physics trumps metaphysics all day long. So whether you're a dyed in the wool libertarian, free markety guy, whether you're somebody who's all about particular neo Marxist theories or interpretations, whether you're some new age consciousness, it's sort of going to be like, guys, I think it's time at the poker table. It's a call. Like it's lay your cards down because we're about to see what happens. And it won't be talking heads getting to spin their take. There's gonna be a lot of surprised faces going, oh, okay, I guess this happened or this is happening. So whether that's climate alarmists or denialists, like we're gonna see whether that's social, whether it's nationalism is the best thing or globalism, like we're gonna see whether these markets are stable or inflationary or deflationary or efficient or totally inefficient. And there's tons of rent seeking and capture and we're dealing in late stage capitalism is a total sham compared to the ideal of a free market. We'll see. So there's all sorts of things in the coming few decades we're simply just going to experience physically. You know, it's the whole sort of physics. Mike Tyson, right? Like everybody's got a plan to get.

Punched in the face.

Yeah, we're about to take some shots.

We've been taking shots, right?

Yeah, well, I mean, I would even say that, you know, weirdly, because a number of people have sort of approached me over the last six months and like, oh, dude, this is, you know, this is. Right, like you called it. This is all happening exactly as you said. And I'm like, no, no, actually this was a total surprise. In fact, I haven't just to my own sanity and not to be a total buzzkill at parties I took, I haven't I wasn't even deeply monitoring global pandemic risk. I mean, you knew kind of there's these, you know, like favelas in Sao Paulo and crazy uber slums in Africa and Lagos and Shanghai and that those were going to be hotbed incubators of the next wild pathogen.

But you didn't think it was going to be globally this soon.

I mean, you can only wrap your head around so many wild ass things and still be sociable.

You're like, this is going to crumble and this is going to crumble in the next decade, but not this and everything else.

So this to me was a total flyer. And the crazy thing is that actually has nothing to do with the underlying structural conditions that are still, still the blaring red alarm.

Right.

So this was a, this is merely a dress rehearsal, mid level, totally manageable thing. We're f. Cking up terribly. Right, Right.

Meanwhile, everything else is falling apart.

Yeah, yeah. So, so, so the questions are, is.

Is do you think this is a good thing that's happened, this, this soon and not delayed suffering and pain? Is it good that we're seeing this now, the pandemic? I mean, obviously it's not good when people are dying and suffering and things are happening. But in the overall scheme of the world and healing and awareness and reinventing ourselves, is this necessary?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, and those kind of comforting just so narratives. Don't worry, cupcake, it's all going to be okay. Because here's the bigger plan or story, right. Everything happens for a reason. Those kind of things, I have a hard time sinking my teeth into those. And I. Because I just mean how on earth do we know? And I think in some respects, I guess if I had to kind of define how I might look at things, it's a little bit more like a transcendental existentialism. Right? So the existentialism part is life is utterly meaningless. Right, that. You know, Camus said it famously in his book the Myth of Sisyphus. He said the only serious question is whether or not to compare, commit suicide. Right? So you actually have to stare into the screaming abyss. You have to be like, okay, strip it all out, right? Jack Nicholson and A Few Good Men. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth. Right. You got to actually go stare into the screaming abyss and understand that we are just monkeys with clothes on. A little rock next to an irrelevant generic star circling around, floating in infinite space. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's horrifying, right? You know, ant Ant. There are these moments of sublime grace, beauty, and potentiality. And we're little we. And we are the existential mayflies of this universe with opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortexes. And we're here for like eight or nine decades on a good run, like, to fight and to. And to grieve and to build and create and destroy and to be alive and like, holy, we're alive. And so. And that part, like, holding and cherishing that part at the same time is holding the profound grief, which, by the way, is the third leg of the stool we talked about too, which was complexity. Sacred cows. And then as we do this, this is actually the appropriate point of this conversation, which is once we've stared into the screaming abyss and we realize that we're just. We've just been whistling past the graveyard.

Right, Right.

It's kind of scary. So I'm gonna whistle a little song, and hopefully that keeps whatever's really big and scary away. Like, really. Like, what does that do? Right? It's a little bit like all the true Blood movies and all the hit vampire movies where someone invariably, like, spritzes them with holy water or makes a crucifix and they're like, are you kidding? You believe that old wives tale? Like, no, no, no. We're way hipper than that.

Yeah.

Right. So, like, our monsters, I think, are actually far stronger than our superstitious warning.

Yeah, you got to get to the.

Heart to kill us.

Yeah.

Right.

And so. And so the question is, how do we learn to weep, not whimper? Right? We're so, like, whether it's trigger warning.

What's the difference?

Well, the difference is, like. Is fibrillation versus, like, eustress versus distress. Right? So, like, you know, most people think when they see like, you know, whatever, Grey's Anatomy or things like that, Right. Or, er, or house. Right. The idea of, like, paddles. Clear, right? Those things, that's to start somebody's heart. It's not. It's actually to stop someone's heart. Because what's happening in those situations is ventricular fibrillation, which means their heart is in a sense, spasm, which will kill them. Right. And so what they're doing is they're zapping it to flatline it so that then the brain impulses and resets and resets. Right? And we are in ventricular fibrillation. Psychologically, socially, politically, we're all experiencing micro ptsd. And you look on Twitter, you look on social feeds, you look at the amount of bad faith, inflammation we're just looking for excuses, dying for excuses to misread someone's intent, take it wildly out of context and unload rage, grief. And it just because. Because our nervous systems are in fibrillation, right? So that's the whimpering, that's the whining. We're collapsing into these. Who can. Who can play the victim code the most? And there's been an interesting study, and I haven't gone back to look at the. The actual paper, but a friend just told me this yesterday, which was there's a correlation between playing victimhood identities like seeking that mindset, and dark triad, narcissistic, Machiavellian, sociopathic personality types. So now you've got bad actors going, the help, help. I'm being oppressed, right. Simply because it's a highly effective power play right now. And then you have legitimately huge populations that are being victimized by conditions in life that absolutely need infinite care, compassion and support. They're not getting it because we're in this fibrillated state. So the weep, don't whimper is. Open our hearts to the wounds of the world and feel it, right? Because it connects us to ourselves, it connects us to each other, and it connects us to our courage and our purpose. And then get the back up, right? And let's do our part, right?

We're here for a reason. Let's figure it out. Yeah, let's figure out what this is.

What's.

I mean, what should we be having faith in? Should we have faith? Yeah.

Well, that's such a good question and such a good. Such a good word because.

And is it blind faith? Is it just. Well, this is what our grandparents told our parents, and this is what the book says, and this is what our God says or whatever. So we just trust it blindly.

Yeah, I mean, I think those days are gone, right? I mean, we're just. We. There's such a spike in cynicism and there's a collapse in benign and divine authority. So we can't really kind of go back and dust them off and reboot them and prop them. Them back up again. We've kind of seen that they're like, you know, Potemkin villages, like back in the Stalinist days where they would take people driving through Moscow and then they would literally do like, almost like theater stage sets. Those were called, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

To look like they were really robust and thriving. So we kind of have seen that a lot. Institutions that we took to be solid and timeless are Potemkin villages.

Right.

We're seeing, unsee that.

We're seeing how the sausage is made and everything.

Yeah.

And it's thoroughly disappointing. In fact, I mean, I think there would be an amazing Kumbaya situation if you took alt right conspiracy theorists and far left conspiracy theorists and you said, hey guys, let's just get together. Because the diagnosis of the problem is 90% aligned. It's, you can't trust elite institutions. We've been being fed a bill of goods. All media and messaging is massaged and positioned and we're supposed to just take it. There's a sort of dual layer system of politics and power. And really this is Noam Chomsky's critique from way back when. Right. But I mean, it comes from both sides, all those things. And the common man is getting a bill of good fill it in. I mean, Bernie in 2016 and Trump in 2016, their analysis of what was wrong with America was. Yeah, it was at least 80% identical. Now, their prescription as to what we ought to who's to blame and what we should do next about it, those go very different, Differently. Right. And so getting, getting folks together on the shared playing field is, I just think it's, it's helpful. And it also clears away the noise and the clutter because it's like that last 10% is the whole ball game as to who's to blame and what should we do now? Right. And that's where you have to get, that's where you really have to slow the tape.

And what do we believe in?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where you have to get very, very specific. Because, I mean, you know, an example that I can't get out of my head, it just seems to be such a strong one, is like Charlie Manson. Like, I watched it. There was a documentary in like 1973. It was all original footage. It wasn't like a CBS, like after school special with actors and, you know, and it's idyllic. It's naked blonde haired hippies, like smoking weed by the waterfalls in Topanga and like hanging out and doing the whole thing, Right? And you're like, oh my gosh. And then you hear them interviewed and again, 90% of what they had to say, they said, hey, you come out of the 50s, the Eisenhower Industrial complex. You're trying to please your parents. You don't even know who you are. You need to get clear on what your purpose is, what your sexuality is, what your joy is, what you're like, yes, yes. Check, check, check, check, check. And then up is down, down is Up. You're like, kind of interesting. They're tripping. Maybe we'll give it that. We'll give them that one. And then life is death and death is life. Wow. Maybe on a kind of like super Zen point of view, perhaps. And then. And then, like, then kill the pigs and, oh, wait, that pup. Right? And so we're seeing that with anti vaxx conspiracies, we're seeing that with QAnon, we're seeing that with New Age. Like, we're all going to vibrate up to the next density and leave behind this earth form or all the other, the chubby people who don't eat at Erewhons and Whole Foods, right? That whole thing you're seeing, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow the tape right there. Because, like, you can have psychedelic fascism, you can have ethno nationalism, you can have. There's all sorts of pathological places these go, right? And if you're not aware of the philosophical and ethical implications baked into what all sounds reasonable at a hundred thousand feet, but you actually start trying to put them on the ground and you're like, oh, man, those don't go to happy places. So to your point about faith, right, how do we. How do we create a meaning 3.0. Yes. Right. That. That takes the promise of salvation, right? Because without salvation, people who grew up as nuns, people who grow up as atheists, people who grew up unchurched, right? No, N E. Yes. N O, N E. Not habits have succumbed to diseases of despair, depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide.

Because they don't have.

Because there isn't a greater promise. That's the staring into the screaming abyss. If you've got no rope to pull.

You back, you say disease of despair.

Diseases of despair. Yeah.

No hope.

Yeah. And who has shared in the last couple of years, more people on this earth kill themselves than die of old wars and natural disasters combined every year. No way. So think about our news feeds. All we see is war and natural disasters now just disappear. That all and just say the silent epidemic is people saying, I cannot make sense of being alive on this earth.

So why be here? I'm gonna die.

Yeah, yeah. Which is one more breaking of our heart. But the thing about heartbreak and actually facing our grief is it categorically makes us stronger and connects us to our courage. So, like Tonglen is the Tibetan practice of meditation. That's specifically about this. Right. And Pema Chodron, who's a Tibetan nun and Buddhist teacher, lays it out. She's like, most meditations, like, think Happy thoughts. Say a mantra. Try to get to stillness. Try to get to emptiness. Something along those lines.

Gratitude.

Yeah. Happy things, right? Tong Lin's the exact opposite. And it's like. Start with actually picturing every picture. The suck. Like, literally imagine the black tar, the smoke that. Their pain, your grief, your angst, your jealousy, your, you know, your resentment, your neurosis. And then inhale it. Like, literally visualize it as tar or smoke. Inhale it and then exhale light, love, compassion. And then when you can do that for yourself and you actually, this is an imaginal exercise, right? So it only works. It works as you cultivate that muscle. It's not some mysto thing. It's a thought experiment that you can. You can build those muscles to do better, then you can expand it to everyone in your family, everyone in your community and everyone in the world so you can actually play with that. And then over time, that does something. You know, back to the idea of, like, steering into the skid. Racing cars, right? If you steer away from the skid, you spin out. If you steer into the skid, you have dynamic balance. So you're like, oh, now we take our suffering as raw material for our compassion. And like an. Alice Walker, the author of the Color Purple and a Bunch of Other Things, has been a friend and student of Pema Chodron's. And she said she's got this beautiful line in one of her books. She says, my heart's been broken open so many times now, it just swings open wide like a suitcase. Right? And that's what I mean about the. Learn to weep, not whimper.

Learn to feel.

Yes. Learn to feel it all. And, Martine, don't block it.

And don't be whimpering.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. I mean, Martin Praktel, who's a. He's a powerful man, Shaman, poet, teacher from the Mayan tradition, He says, grief is praise. Right. It is love's way to honor what it misses. Right? And our buddy Zach Stein, who is a Harvard trained psychologist and educational theorist, he's. I mean, the number of times I bring this up is obviously, has haunted me. Right. But he said, we are perhaps entering an era where billions watch while millions die.

This era, right now, this time.

Yeah. Like this 21st century. And so you think about that. And televised and live. I mean, think about George Floyd. Right, right. That ricocheted around the world in an asymmetrical way. Right. There have been all sorts of events like that all over the place, all the time. Something happened and it broke our collective brains. And hearts. And if you think about, even about the languaging, like, I can't breathe. It was so profoundly and vulnerably human. And that. And the rage that it prompted was that it was like, it was the anguish, cry of humanity saying, like, no, like enough is enough. And there's infinite complexities and realities and analysis to unpack around that, that event, those protests, all those things. Things. But just at that core, human level. Right. It's. It's profound. And. And part of that is it used to just be if something happened, you heard about it through scuttlebutt in your neighborhood or your village. And that was your. That was our world. That was the only information we had.

Now it's just like, turn on the phone. Every moment you see another tragedy.

Yeah, well, I mean, and I read something. Probably the most psychoactive thing I've read in the last six months was something in the MIT reader. And it's this. It was this wild timeline of humanity's awareness of our own mortality, basically. And it was. And it was sort of going all the way back to like the Greeks and ancient Hebrews and all this kind of stuff. And it was saying, look, sure, there were like end of times mythologies always baked in. But that was kind of like literally like lights out, like, beam up to the mothership. Some complete transformation of reality. But. But it wasn't until like literally the 1700s, 1800s, like the discovery of Halley's comet and then the fact like, oh my gosh, that's a comet. And then like, wait a second, that could come really close to Earth. And they're like, holy shit, are we gonna actually get hit by a comet? And then paleontology and like, wait, there's dinosaurs and evolutionary theory, like, we're not the first ones to be here and these guys aren't here anymore. And what's that about? And like, holy smokes. The idea that humans could go away and that life in some other form could continue, continue without us.

Crazy.

We've only had this for, like, wrapped our heads around it briefly for like the last few hundred years. And in fact, speaking of like that Francis Fukuyama book, the End of History and the Last man there was the first dystopian science fiction novel was written in 1804 by a French guy called the Last Man. And it was a sci fi story about a future with the extinction of humanity. And that poor buster committed suicide.

Oh my gosh.

So you're like, you're like, holy. And now you got Greta Thunberg Right. You have a generation coming up who are like post 2008, they, they weren't raised with like unicorns and rainbows and they're like student debt and loans and financial crashes and unemployment and ecological catastrophe and they're like, you were pissed and how dare you. Right? And so, so this awareness, like there's a sort of sense, it's a little like Neo in the Matrix, you know, it's like, yes, you can learn kung fu and you can fly, but you're also in Nevada goo. And the machines are coming. Right? So let's give you a hug and a high five. Welcome home.

Right?

Right. You get a weekend to bask in your newfound identity and possibility and then Monday morning, show up to work. Right? We need it. We're all needed. Right?

So how do we get back to this place of when we realize all these things are breaking down around us? These beliefs, these ideals, these foundations. What our parents told us was true, whatever it might be. How do we begin to start to understand what our own faith is, what we should believe in, what we should hold onto if there's nothing solid?

Yeah.

Scamming has grown into a trillion dollar industry with no signs of slowing down. And with AI, scammers are exploiting our instinct to trust by using technology to duplicate the voices of people we love. Bitdefender helps protect your family's devices, data and identities from those threats. Choose BitDefender Premium Security, which includes Scam Copilot, the first AI powered platform designed to safeguard you against scams in real time. Ready to make your digital Life safer? Visit bitdefender.com and download BitDefender Premium Security. For families, the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. That's why LinkedIn has the highest B2B ROAs of all online ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com Lewis. That's LinkedIn.com Lewis. Terms and conditions apply.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, the beautiful thing is, is that the answers are all around us. They really, truly are. Like, in fact, one of my favorite pieces to write in this book was talking about because basically saying, look, if we're going to rebuild meaning 3.0, how can we take the best of organized religion and best of the modern liberal experiment and put them together.

Science, ancient wisdom.

Yeah, and inclusion. Inclusion and salvation. And is that even possible? Right. And so clearly a single tops down version contraindicated. We've seen Stalinism, Maoism, fascism, we've seen all the hism schism and they don't work very well. They always end up basically, whenever the ends of a utopian ideal are heaven on earth or offered, then the means are always justified. So you always end up with bad things happening here because you can always justify it against the ideal. So let's not do that. Let's do decentralized, open source. Let a thousand failures burn and 900 of them will go out in the storm, but 100 will catch and then we'll see and we can pass the light, pass the torches, right? And so one of the simplest things is that a dust off all the wisdom traditions. There's thousands of years of accumulated brilliance, insight and artistry. But even in like the American tradition, and if you take America, because we seem to be kind of, I don't know what we're doing, but we're sort of doing it on behalf of humanity right now, right? Like, like the grief, the rage, the conflicts, the discussions, everything that is happening here is sort of in some form rippling out through the world or being echoed by similar movements. So race, class, gender, politics, nationality, ecology, all the things, right? And the American tradition has always been this crazy hodgepodge of international experience. You know, you've got Chinese laborers building the railroads and Irish folks coming in and West African folks coming in and, and Western Europeans, Southern Europeans, all these things and every, you know, and indigenous folks and all this, you know, and Spaniards coming up and like, and smashing and crashing into each other. And somewhere in that created like gospel, jazz, blues, folk, right into, you know, hip hop, into all of these things, this living songbook. And in those songs, those redemption songs, right? It's always the same story, right? It's I've been down so long, right. I'm broke open and it seems like up to me, right? That was a 1920s blues song. Drake covered it, Nancy Sinatra and the Doors covered it, right? You're like, you're like that sense of going down the road feeling bad, Right, right. And I'm singing it. And in fact, that becomes a triumphant celebration.

Acknowledging it, talking about it, being aware of it.

Like Beyonce, I mean the, like there's the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has had the church of Beyonce on Wednesday nights and they literally get together and they use Beyonce songs as hymns and liturgy and it is straight the up praise music.

Wow.

Right? It's like Aretha Franklin, like, dusted off. And, like, Beyonce's mom is, like, Creole, Chinese, African American, French, like, all. She's probably got, like, half a dozen lineages. And she grew up in a Houston Baptist church. And then she's singing this stuff and, like, Dolly Parton, like, singing, like, at the Oscars, she was singing this. It was for that movie Transamerica, which was all about LGBTQ folks, right? And she was singing this song like, we've all been crucified and they nailed Jesus to a tree but when I'm born again, you're gonna see a change in me and you're like, okay. So, like, you hear it and, like, Stanley Crouch at the Lincoln Jazz center, like, the idea that, like, jazz, blues, all of these traditions are actually this heretical, hermetic, mystic spirituality that is unique to America because it was all freaks and misfits who came here. The Protestant Church and the Catholic Church, they wouldn't have signed off on half the shit that ended up in America as these wild hairball experiments. And we created this defiant liturgy, right? This living, hidden scripture in our concerts, in our songbooks, right, in our protest, in our marches of, like, we're here and life hurts and we rise up singing. And, you know. You know that, like. You know, it's powerful because those are the songs that people hold up lighters for. Those are the, like, Lady Gaga, right? Like. Like, Born this Way. These are. These are the Testify songs.

Give you chill songs.

They give you chills, and they give you chills. Like, even that Chumbawomba, like, way back when, like, I get knocked down, but I get. Nothing's gonna keep me down. You've got these drunken, drunken Scots, right? So that you know that, like, going down into the mud of our shared suffering. And that's back to the weeping, not whimpering, right?

And then.

And then. And then somewhere in that, feeling the pulse, right? Feeling the beat, like, feeling the chorus. And then you're like, oh, we are here. And then it becomes that sort of I am Spartacus moment, right? Where you're like, okay, we are all dead men walking. No one gets out of here alive.

Right?

Right. So how do we do this? That's the. It's the oh, Captain, My Captain and Dead Poets, right? We're gonna get expelled for doing what we're about to do. Right? Our love outweighs our fear. Wow. So. So that sense of, like, we all love those moments. We love Leonidas, right? You know, at thermopylae we love. We love those. Those. Those calls to arms and courage. Tank men in Tiananmen Square. Some dude wearing, like, having two shopping bags in his hands. He wasn't prepped for that shit. He just ends up being like, nah, this stands in front of a phalanx of tanks and says, enough is enough.

Crazy good.

Dugout disappeared. We've never heard from him again, and he's never been tracked. There was, like, four people in matching clothes that came. And so either that was good guys or highly likely it wasn't right, but that triggered something. And Nancy Kean at Harvard Business School, she wrote a. We shared a stage at MIT a year ago, and she's. She's a firecracker. And she wrote this amazing book called Forged in Crisis. And it just changed how I think of this stuff. It was Abraham Lincoln, Dietrich von Bonhoeffer, who was the pastor who tried to assassinate Hitler. Rachel Costin, who wrote Silent Spring, which kicked off the environmental movement. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, and one other. And the thing that was crazy about their stories, including, like, the Emancipation Proclamation. Right? Every. Single. Oh, and Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. And the key was that at the moments that are in Wikipedia and the moments that we hear about in school, they had no idea what they were doing. Like, the Emancipation Proclamation was a Doug Flutie, like, Hail Mary, final huck at the buzzer. He had no. It was desperate, and he had no. No idea that it was gonna work or become the tide of history. And so you realize. But she writes. She's like, when people act from that spot with courage, but with desperate courage type. Yeah. A complete. Like, no certified mail saying, this all works out, sonny, but you got to do it anyway. He says it sends shockwaves through the world, right? So we've talked about. We've talked about all the exponential curves doing all the exponential things and how overwhelming that can be and also fundamentally, how scary, right? How much uncertainty, how much fear, how much risk there is in the world as we face it. But the flip side is, it's like nobody promised us a rose garden. Like, have you watched Game of Thrones? I mean, yes, they made that up, but life has been cheap for an awfully long time. Red in tooth and claw and nasty. Brutish and short. Has it ever been thus?

Right?

So can we step out of being deconditioned zoo animals? Can we step back into the bigger arc of history? Can we sack the up with courage and access soul force? You know, and that's what Martin Luther King, he said that in that I have a dream speech is when we can rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. Right? And most people. That's how they know it. That was the moment that concept came up on the stage. But he actually had borrowed that twice over. So it wasn't even his words or concepts. It was this fellow, this African American mystic named Howard Thurman. And he was a mentor to the civil rights movement. But he was so kind of like, in his jaw love groove. He didn't actually ever, like, march with Pickett, but he advised all those guys. Wow. And. And all of them carried his books with him, like, day to day, like, literally, like, in their satchels kind of thing. But he went to Visit Gandhi in 1935. So he was the first interfaith African American ambassador to go to India ever. Wow. Just think about this. I mean, 1935, it's not that after Reconstruction, right? Like, I mean, you've still got living former slaves. You know, this is fresh times. And so he goes there and he meets with Gandhi, and Gandhi shares with him this notion of non violence, which they called satyagraha. And it was basically means alignment with truth, right? And that. That is unbreakable. What is the truth? Well, but truth, integrity, right? Action, humanity, dignity, all those things. And. And so Thurman came home, he's like, okay, satyagraha. That's the Sanskrit. That's a mouthful. No one in this country is gonna understand that. I'll tell you what, let's rebrand this and we'll call it Soul Force. And. And because up until then, civil disobedience was just a tactic in the civil rights movement. They're like, let's not get our heads bashed in, and let's not needlessly antagonize folks with guns and batons and dogs.

We stay alive.

Water cannons. That's what it was. Right after that, civil disobedience became the central philosophical pillar of nonviolent protest around the world. And that's Soul Force. Right. And Erica Chenoweth at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, she's done this study that's been restated a thousand times, which is that when she studied from, I think, like 1950 to maybe 2010, I forget quite what her time brackets were, but based on basically late 20th century into early 21st century civil rights movements that have been successful, that Eastern Europe, Asia, United States, everywhere else, that it required about 3 1/2% of the population. That's it. 3 1/2% of the Population to actually make these phase shifts that then can create this catalytic event, which is beautiful and inspiring. And that's certainly where extinction, rebellion and a lot of other social and environmental protest movements have taken inspiration lately. There's also kind of a critique of that where you're like, hey, it's one thing to be like, I insist on riding in the front of the bus. And the bus has four inflated tires and gas in the tank to get your destination right. That's one move, right? We're saying, hey, there is this civil experiment. We've been locked or blocked out of it, and we are politely asking for our opportunity to get on board, right? But it's another thing to be like, hey, we are sailing off a cliff in that there bus and we have to transform a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang style into a helicopter before we crash. Like, that's kind of, that's kind of where we are, right? So it's like complex intersecting metacrisis and the bus itself of like prosperous, stable civil society is not necessarily persisting. So the Erika Chenowetz three and a half percent is that honking great at asterisk of like tbd, if this holds up. But the other thing is, is like, we're nowhere near three and a half percent, right? So let's get there and we'll take stock, right? We'll take stock once we do. And, and, and that, that sense. So you, you asked about faith, and we've been playing with grief and we've been talking about courage, right? And, and our buddy, actually, Andrew Huberman, he's a professor.

Love this guy.

Yeah, right? Love it. Rock star. And so curious. And then also comes up with ingenious experiments to then validate stuff that you would otherwise just be spitballing. And he told me it was fascinating because he told me the story of this research as it was happening. And then last year he actually finally published it in the journal Nature, which was this story on courage in mice. And they wanted to see, they wanted to see what happens basically when we're terrified and what's going on in our brain, right? And you know, everybody has heard of fight or flight, right? But just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's correct. So it's actually, there's, there's flight or freeze, there's that network, and then there's the stand and fight network, which are technically, it's a salience reducing network, meaning like, don't look at me, right? I'm gonna make myself small or get out of dodge Or a salience enhancing network, which is like, you want a piece?

It's like yelling at the bear or something that's coming at you as opposed to like getting the fetal position.

Yeah. And it all goes through the thalamus in the brain, right? And what if what they found was, is when they stimulated this very specific region, right. That it stimulated a salience enhancing response. Response associated with courage. So 98% of mice, when faced with the shadow of a hawk, right? Which is what they do in the lab, they just torment these poor mice.

Oh, my God.

Here comes shadow.

Here comes dinner.

A snake.

And then 98% of them piss off and hide under the nerves. And then only 2% actually thump their tails. But they do it once they're under shelter. So it's kind of a little bit of like a Chihuahua move, right? Not very ballsy. Okay. So then they stimulate the courage to center, and then they stand, shut up, thump their tails and say, bring it. It's like Bruce Lee.

They do this bite you.

Yeah. But it gets. It gets even better than that, right? So. So Andrew being the compassionate dude, he's like. He's like, man, am I just pushing their buttons and sending them to their doom? That doesn't. Do they have choice? Do they have choice? And so given the choice between food, sex, and having that stimulated, they choose having courage stimulated over food and sexual. And humans do too. So we would rather be brave. We would rather feel brave than get laid.

Why?

Because it is essential. And the final. Just, like, amazing. But you can't make this up. The name of that center is called the Nucleus Reunions. So in Latin, that means the seed of our reunion. It's how we come together is our courage. It's poetry. You can't. I mean, we couldn't have planned that, but Andrew discovered it.

So we.

We want to feel courage over pleasure, over looming threat.

Right?

Like the reason that 300 Harry Potter dead poets, Thelma and Louise, right, Being like, fuck this, we're gonna send it. No skidmites, right? The reason those movements, even Rogue One, you could tell, like, I hadn't watched Rogue One yet. And it got really strong reviews, and people were like, okay, this is kind of money. This is a solid, solid addition to the Star wars franchise. You know, you're like, what's going on here? Like, there's a thing here. I don't know what it is, but there was some gravitas to it. And you're like, oh, it's because they die at the end, right? And in fact, there's a guy. Matthew. Gosh, Matthew Polly or Pollard. I think he was basically like Tim Ferriss before Tim was. So he was at Princeton in the early 90s and he decided to kind of like game his system. And he, he had grown up watching Saturday morning kung fu movies. So he was desperate to go and become a Shaolin monk. So he punched into China long before there were any Westerners, right? So super, super early, interesting. Finds his way to the Shaolin temple, classic thing in the rain, gets shut out, has to sit on the porch, finally gets invited in that they adopt him, blah, blah, blah. And then he gets a bunch of VHS tapes shipped over with Rambo and Schwarzenegger movies. So it's like rickety old tv, plug in the vhs. And he's like, I'm gonna show you our hero movies. And they watch them all night on Saturday night. Binge watch them. And then he finishes like, so what'd you think? And. And they looked at him with funny faces and they're like, well, Matthew, man, what's the deal? He goes, I thought you said these were your hero movies. These are. And he's like, yeah, these are action heroes. They're absolutely amazing. He's like, no, no, no. They all, they all live. They all live.

No one dies.

No one dies for the cause in all of our hero stories, right? You have to die. Really? Yeah. Right. And so that notion of consumerism and rational individualism and all the isms and the stories and the specifics of, you know, 20th century, 21st century Western culture have been, you can have your cake and eat it.

You don't have to make trade offs, fairy tale ending.

The you do deserve your best life. There is no ambiguity or complexity to this thing. And it's happily ever after always for everyone. Or at least for the good guys, right? Versus the, the notion. And my friend and business partner Kurt Cronin, who's a former dev group commander, said a modern version of this. He said whenever they were going downrange into combat, they planned to come home in a body bag. Shut up. Well, of course, right. It's not surprising. But he said, I had written my letters.

Oh my God.

I had established my will. I had figured out my trust for my children so that they were good to through 21 or through their marriages. Like, I had it all done, prepared for the worst so that. And he never lost a man so.

That I could go out there fully.

So it's the samurai notion of meditate on a thousand ways to die so that you're not Distracted on the battlefield, right? And so that notion, we are terrified of death, right? We punch ourselves full of plastic surgery, dyes and fillers, right to the point of creating caricatures of youth and beauty in ways that you just, you know, that are heart breaking. You're like, gosh, just allow yourself to be an elder. You know, allow yourself to have the dignity and the appreciation and the respect. We ship our grandparents off to nursing homes to be cared for by anonymous hourly wage workers and pump full of drugs so they don't make a fuss. You know, we are obsessed with youth and beauty and all of the things, but don't acquaint ourselves with our mortality. And it's that contrast that actually gives us back our dignity. You know, it's sort of like our humanity feels like it's at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity. Say it again. Our humanity lies at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity. And when we can balance those two dialectics, then we have a chance to be what you could sort of call a homegrown human. Like, I'm no longer trying to get off this ride. I'm no longer trying to transcend it. I'm not looking for my next sound bath or cacao ceremony or medicine ceremony. I'm not hop bopping around to catch the next big thing. Nor am I collapsed in despair. It's much more like Jimmy Stewart in a Wonderful Life, right? It's that moment of like, oh holy. I am blessed with the opportunity to live out the rest of my precious life with full agency. Completely committed and fearless, my friend.

Thank you so much for being here for listening to this episode. If you thought this was as insightful as I did, then watch out because part two is coming soon and you're going to want to make sure you get access to this the moment it drops. So if it's your first time here, welcome. Click the subscribe button on Apple Podcast right now, or on Spotify or wherever you're listening to podcasts. And if you enjoyed this first episode, this first part, please leave us a rating and review of the part you enjoyed the most about this. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And also if you want inspirational messages sent to your phone every single week from me, some motivation, inspiration and other goodies as well. Then text the word podcast right now to 614-350-3960. And I want to leave you with this quote from Deepak Chopra who said, when you make a choice choice, you change the future. And today you have an opportunity to choose. Choose a new thought, a new idea, a new action towards a greater life for yourself. You get to choose every moment you have that choice. I'm so grateful that you chose to be here today. I hope you gained value today. Please come back for part two, because it will blow your mind. And if no one has told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And you know what time it is because it's time to go out there and do something great.

They say if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. At Amica Insurance, we're built for our customers and prioritize your needs. Call 877-41-America and get a quote today.