UNLOCK THE POWER Of Your Mind For PEAK PERFORMANCE Today! | Jamie Wheal & Lewis Howes

This is literally what picks me up off the floor when I am destroyed by staring at the screaming abyss and feel like there's no point to any of it.

What is that?

Yeah.

It is Seek novelty, make art, help out.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. Very excited about this. You've got an amazing new book out that is gonna 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 is up. poverty is 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 protests 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 experience 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 kid's 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.

Ooh.

Right?

And then he says, 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 challenge is it seems like a lot of people are in this, the world is ending, although it seems like with 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 knocked off our center, so just be here now, Ram Dass too, right? And you're like, yeah, kind of. Being present, super important, but we are time-traveling space monkeys. We have the ability to conceptualize past, present, future. And at a minimum, because we're 17 degrees off the axis of the sun, 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 it's not a big beige middle. That's unsatisfying. It's much more like Hegel, 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. 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 expanse. So, you know, it feels like to boil all that down, there's the sort of coming alive arc, right? Which is what we were all raised on. Anyone could grow 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 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 of vag. But then There is also, and again, most folks through human history have had to wrestle with this. It's just the bubble kid, the bubble generations, after World War II until lately, like say 2008. So boomers, Xers, and millennials, who we really grew up in this historical anomaly in the developed West. It's never been nicer. All war was externalized, massive insane upward upticks of consumerism, standards of living, education, cheap debt, you name it. all the great stuff. And we're experiencing the intersection of like the staying alive og and the staying alive og 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 is you picnic at the beach, you're like, wait a second, all the oceans getting sucked out to sea. Wait, why Why are all the animals fleeing to higher ground? 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 och and the staying alive och 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. Oh, did we 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 So that, right? It's like Chinatown, like that Jack Nicholson thing with the fedora. 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 handrails or the trusted institutions, right? So we've had a collapse in both benign authority, like secular, so academic institutions.

Religion, corporate.

Well, that's divine authority. So we've got benign authority on the side of 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. his entire life.

Or Adderall or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and Jordan Peterson and maybe, you know, maybe your nervous spouse who's been pole axed 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 up and didn't admit it. So you're like, okay, so we can't trust those guys. Academia. 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 the captains of industry, McKinsey and Goldman? You listen to the big short. You're like, oh, whoops. Goldman was selling credit default swaps out the front door and hedging it in the back door. They were totally implicated in the 1MDB Singapore scandal. McKinsey was find for partnering with Jacob Zuma in South Africa and siphoning seven, 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 Perdue Pharma 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.

Then you got the political side of.

Things, politics, WHO, CDC, all these things. So, and there's no more even Walter Cronkite or BBC Radio. It used to be like, okay, world's crazy out there. Vietnam War, what's the right source? 7:07 p.m. 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 Journal's 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 those. So that's always been a shorthand for what is considered consensus. So that's just been boom. And at the same time, we've had the collapse in organized religion.

Yeah.

Right, so Pew Research Foundation, I think it was in 2015, but it's only been continuing, which was the rise of the nones, so 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 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 O'Nees, right? And so now, and you've got the sexual abuse scandals, you've got 1,001 things undermining all of that. 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, 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 were not and we're pissed. So screw it all.

So screw it all.

Make it our own game, yeah. Yeah, one in three, one in three millennials surveyed within the last couple of years believes that actually military rule would be preferable to democracy.

Right?

And 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, it's saying, look, this generation, they commit fewer crimes, they have less premarital sex, they drink less, party less, they do all the bad things less. They go to college and historic rates, they have historic amounts of student debt, they've done everything right and they've been handed this steaming shitbag of society and ecology. And he says, 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. 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, and we were talking about this earlier, right? Like, 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. marry on. And in the beginning of COVID people started charting those out. Is this going to be another one of those? And you're like, yeah, maybe no. Oh, no. Oh, really? No, not at all. So, at a time when a meta-crisis, meaning it's not just one thing.

It's everything.

It's economic, it's political, it's geopolitical, it's ecological.

Health.

Right.

All of the things all at once intersecting, overlapping and catalyzing. Oh man.

It's a lot of trauma that's being built up in every human being around the world.

It's an awful lot. And I actually, funnily enough, 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. 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 Bernes. He was 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, and he was all of like 65 pounds soaking wet, but he became a Boy Scout and he wanted to play in the marching band and he told bad puns and made hip hop jokes. I mean, it's just an awesome, just one of those testaments to life through tragedy. 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 UN reports for 2020 of 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 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. This was all crypto psychedelic blockchain, future, future, future. Yay.

You know, going in outer space.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like pitching the conference, it's like, this is if Ted and Bernie Madoff had a baby. I'm like, well, okay, if Ted and Bernie Madoff 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 He pissed at me. He's like, you, don't give up.

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-- this wasn't like a pull it off the shelf stump. Sure, sure. You could give me-- and it was completely from the heart to try and address all this. Wow. So I went home in the fetal position.

When was this?

2020?

Yeah.

Oh, wow. So I was like, what did I do wrong? How did I do that? this up so badly. And it occurred to me, I was like, oh, I just totally misjudged three things. 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, pretty much what we've just been talking about, exponential everything in different directions. Because what we're missing is exponential meaning. You've got exponential quantum computing, you've got exponential crypto currencies, you've got exponential learning with Khan Academy and distributed online, exponential transportation with Uber coppers, we've got exponential biology with CRISPR, everything is exponential except how to make sense of it all. 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 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, short answer is get educated, right? Like good old-fashioned Plato and Socrates 101. 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 than to not, than to be an atheist and get 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? I don't know. It 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 little earth form? Maybe. You 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. And 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've got Occam's Razor, which is, the simplest solution is usually the best. So rather than, once again, 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 centralized thing, potentially unlikely. 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 not convinced that, you know, the Galactic Federation is going to come and land and fix everything. Like, the Occam's Razor explanation is I was on drugs that night. Right? So let's hold that one for sure. Right, right, right. 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, Wizzy-wig, what you see is what you get, is always a very high bar to go beyond. Yeah.

That's true.

Right.

That's true. 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 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 sweep you, right? And take you to the ground. So the idea is like, I'm gonna 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.

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? The rainbow wheel of death, like just crashing our browser. So, because 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, 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, 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. 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 Arabs springing that idea of like we're gonna topple all the despots and the bad guys and the dictators and then citizenship and democracy will arise in their place. Whoops, well that didn't quite happen. 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. You know, like, softening the ground for like voting suppression and things like that. You're like, whoa. Like, and how did something like a global pandemic, which was supposed to, we would naturally expect a globally coordinated response. Ronson 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 gonna 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 and 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, like 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 you're like, oh wow. So there's so many things. And then even just take, not like this was our father's generation, but the whole 20 years in a gold watch. I pick a company, 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 and do your 401k. Now you just do your dollar cost averaging and you match your matching funds and you save and you Invest in mutual funds because no one can plan the stock market. And don't get freaked in ups and downs because it always comes back over time. That whole story. And now you've got baby boomers that are just simply 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 home ownership. Well, that's gone. We're doing Airbnbs now. Car ownership. No, we're doing Ubers and scooters. Marriage. No, we're doing Tinder.

Right, right, right.

Like all of these things have been externalized and outsourced. Right, so on the global systemic, where there's all sorts of things that we took as sacrosanct, our sacred candles, 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, 100-year, 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 1,000-year flood plane. We're bulletproof, you know? Except that, right? We've been having 100-year weather events several times a decade lately. So you're like, oh, okay. So, you know, and Churchill said it nicely. 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.

Right.

Unseasonable, unprecedented, you know, 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 do for floods. But we don't know what's coming now. No, but we can run back to the planning is priceless. It's a little bit like choose your own apocalypse, like Mad Max lives. So 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, 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 mentally.

And 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 throwing 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 gonna have a hard landing.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the question is just is it an inferno? Do we lose 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 wilderness medicine and that kind of stuff. So I always just think super literally. Like 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 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, you, worst nightmare is my vacation. So you can go push it and you can engage, you can climb into the pain cave, you can have the sufferfest and it can actually be really enjoyable and you can even choose high hard objectives that are totally optional. Like let's go 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 your water filter, 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. So we just saw this in Austin. There was this freak snowstorm, the entire Texas grid overload in was literally four minutes and 35 seconds from a meltdown crash that would have taken over a month to rebuild. It 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 your fricking neighbor's food. And the doodly doodly do neighborly. No, it's just like, I'm gonna go.

And break in and take some food.

Yeah.

So my sense is, is like, how did Texas handle it from your perspective? Well, I mean, people coming together and.

Saying, here's the deal. Some folks did. Some folks did.

Come stay here.

Yeah, I think it's important to celebrate and spotlight those things, because we obviously need more of them. And there was toughness. 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 stick when it comes to where the trash dump is, where the Superfund site is, who has Flint, Michigan, drinking water, 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 pissed off to nice locations on private planes or, you know, or to Cabo or whatever. Right. And that happened, 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 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 a diabetic blood sugar crash, or I have a depressive episode, or some mental health challenge, or an addiction, then boom, I'm decomposing. compensated, and I'm back 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 left over. I can start 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. It's not about the ceiling.

Yeah, except the crack in my skull. If I'm in a plane crash with my family, it's me and mine now. 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 you can see.

Maybe we'll have a helping hand.

An 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 gonna.

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 has 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, 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 helpful?

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 fractured and broken now, how do we find meaning of why we're even here?

Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously 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 like, hey, if we are, if if, like, meaning 1.0, we can call that traditional religion, offered salvation. Here's the story of how you get to heaven, but at the price of exclusion. 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. 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 stuffed.

You are not in the tree of trust. Right, right, right. 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, at the cost of salvation, separation of church and state, and Nietzsche's sort of God is dead. And both of them, that hasn't worked out too well either, 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. And you're getting a lot of frustration and understandable even rage at the imbalances of that game. We were sold a bill of goods. In fact, Joseph Stiglitz, who was World Bank, UN economic advisor, all sorts of incredibly high up positions. He basically just called the entire shell game. It's been 40 years and the results are in. Neoliberalism and democracy have broken and the benefits have accrued asymmetrically to those at the top. 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. And a K-shaped just means the top 1% are now trillion and gazillioners. 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, 68 people on the planet are richer than... Hold as much wealth as the bottom half, the bottom four billion.

That's crazy.

Right, 68 people could all fit on a bus, one bus.

They have more money than half of the world.

And half than half of the world's population. 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. Did you just go back and fact check? How many is it now? It's 27. They can fit in a stretch limo.

Oh my gosh, 27 have more money and more resources than the bottom.

4 billion.

4 billion people in the bottom.

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

Does that excite you to show what possibilities you could create? potentially for yourself, or is 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 market 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, like it's at the poker table, it's a call. Like it's that lay your cards down because we're about to see what happens. And it won't be talking heads getting to spin their take, right? There's going to be a lot of surprised faces going, oh, okay, I guess this happened or this is happening. So whether that's climate, Almonists or denialists, like we're going to see whether that's social, whether it's nationalism is the best thing or globalism, like we're going to 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 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 Mike Tyson, right? Like everybody's got a plan to get.

Punched in the face.

We're about to take some shots.

We've been taking shots, right?

Yeah.

And I would even say that, you know, weirdly, because a number of people have sort of approached me over the last six months and be like, oh dude, this is, you know, this isn't 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. Well, it's just like, I just, I mean, I can, you can own You only wrap your head around so many wild ass things and still be sociable.

You're like, this is gonna crumble, this is gonna 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 the blaring red alarm.

Right.

So this is merely a dress rehearsal, mid-level, totally manageable thing. We're fucking up terribly.

Right, right. Meanwhile, everything else is falling apart.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the questions are, is... Do.

You think this is a good thing that's happened? 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, 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 a story, right? Everything happens for a reason, those kind of things. I have a hard time sinking my teeth into those. Because I just, I 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. existentialism. So the existentialism part is life is utterly meaningless. Camus said it famously in his book the Myth of Sisyphus. He said the only serious question is whether or not to commit suicide. So you actually have to stare into the screaming abyss. You have to be like, okay, strip it all out. Jack Nicholson and a few good men. You want the truth, you can't handle the truth. You've got to actually go stare into the screaming abyss and understand that we 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? And, and. There are these moments of sublime grace, beauty, and potentiality, 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 f**k and to grieve and to build and to create and destroy and to be alive and like holy s**t, we're alive. And so, and that part, like holding and cherishing that part at the same time as 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, where this is actually the appropriate point of this conversation, which is once we've stared into the screaming abyss and we realize that we've just been whistling past the together.

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 hip vampire movies where someone invariably spritzes them with holy water or makes a crucifix and they're like, Are you kidding? Like, you believe that old one? 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 Yeah, you got to get to the heart to kill us.

Yeah, right. And so the question is how do we learn to weep, not whimper? We're so, like, whether it's trigger warnings, what's the difference? Well, the difference is like, is fibrillation versus like, you stress versus distress, right? So, like, you know, most people think when they see, like, whatever, gray'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 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 stops up and resets, right? And we are in ventricular 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 just unload rage, grief, and just because our nervous systems are in fibrillation. Right, so that's the whimpering, that's the whining. We're collapsing into these who can play the victim the most. And there's been an interesting study, and I haven't gone back to look at 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, 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? Well, there's, Should we have faith?

Yeah.

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 books and this is what our God says or whatever, so we just trust it blindly?

Yeah, I think those days are gone, right? I mean, 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 back up again. We've kind of seen that they're like Potemkin villages, like back in the Stalinist days where they would take people driving through Moscow and then they would literally do almost like theater stage sets, you know, 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 can't unsee that. We're seeing how the sausage is made and everything.

Yeah, and it's thoroughly disappointing.

In fact, 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. 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, you know, 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 goods, you know, fill it in. 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 do, who's to blame, and what we should do next about it, those go very differently. And so getting folks together on the shared playing field is, I just think 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. It's like Charlie Manson. Like, I watched it. There was a documentary in, like, 1973. It was all original footage. It 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've 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. And 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, oh, then kill the pigs. And you're like, oh, wait, that putt.

Right.

And so we're seeing that with anti-vax 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.

How.

Do we create a meaning 3.0? That takes the promise of salvation, because without salvation, people who grew up as nuns, people who grew up as atheists, people who grew up unchurched, Right? Has succumbed to N-O-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 a greater promise of greatness. 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 all 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 hot, you know, one more breaking of our heart, but the thing about heart break and actually facing our grief is it categorically makes us stronger and connects us to our courage. And so, like, Tonglen is a Tibetan practice of meditation that's specifically about this, right? And Pema Chödrön, who's a Tibetan nun and Buddhist teacher, lays it out. She's like, you know, most meditations, like, think happy thoughts, say a mantra, try to get stillness, try to get to emptiness, something along those lines.

Gratitude.

Yeah, the happy things. Tonglen's the exact opposite. And it's like start with like actually picturing every, the picture of the suck. Like literally imagine the black tar, the smoke, the pain, your grief, your angst, your jealousy, your resentment, your neurosis, and then inhale it. Like literally visualize it as tar or smoke, inhale it, and then exhale. love, compassion. And then when you can do that for yourself and you actually, this is an imaginal exercise, right? So it only works as you cultivate that muscle. It's not some misto thing. It's a thought experiment that 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 back to the idea of like steering into the skid racing cars, right? If you steer away from this kid, you spin out. If you steer into this kid, you have dynamic balance. So you're like, oh, now we take our suffering as raw material for our compassion. And Alice Walker, the author of the Color Purple and a bunch of other things, which 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 Martin don't block it and don't be whimpering.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, Martín Prakel, who's a powerful man, shaman, poet, teacher from the Mayan tradition, he says grief is praise.

Right?

We only is love's way to honor. what it misses. And our buddy, Zach Stein, who is a Harvard-trained psychologist and educational theorist.

The.

Number of times I bring this up, it obviously has haunted me. 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? that ricocheted around the world in an asymmetrical way. There had 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 anguished cry of humanity saying, like, no, like, enough is enough. And there's infinite complexities and realities and analysis to unpack around that event, those protests, all those things, but just at that core human level, right? It's profound. And part of that is it used to just be if something really 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 Now.

It'S just like you 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 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 mythology is 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 it wasn't until like literally the 1700s-1800s, like the discovery of Haley'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 then like holy shit are we gonna actually get hit by a comet and then Paleontology and like, wait, there's dinosaurs and evolutionary theory and like, we're not the first ones to be here and these guys aren't here anymore. What's that about? And like, holy smokes, the idea that humans could go away and that life in some other form could 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 baster committed suicide. Oh my gosh. So you're like holy and now you got Greta Thunberg, right? You have a generation coming up who are like post 2008, they weren't raised with like, you know, ones 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 this awareness, there's a sort of sense, it's a little like Neo in the Matrix. It's like, yes, you can learn kung fu and you can fly, but you're also in a vat of 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're needed, 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 on to? if there's nothing solid.

Yeah.

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, was talking about because basically saying, look, if we're going to rebuild meeting 3.0, how can we take the best of organized religion and the 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 top-down version, contraindicated. We've seen Stalinism, Maoism, fascism, we've seen all the hism-schisms 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. Right, right. Because you can always justify it against the ideal. So let's not do that. Let's do decentralized open source, let a thousand fires 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 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 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 Western European, Southern Europeans, all these things and indigenous folks and all this, you know, and 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, this living songbook. And in those songs, those redemption songs, right, is, it's always the same story, right? It's, it's, I've been down so alone.

Right?

I'm broke open. And it seems like up to me. All 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.

Yeah.

Like Beyonce. I mean, 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 f*ck up praise music. Wow. Right, it's like Aretha Franklin dusted off and Beyonce's mom is like Creole, Chinese, African-American, French, 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 Trans America, which was all about LGBTQ folks, right? And she was singing the 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 of 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 s*** that ended up in America as these wild a** hairball experiments. And we created this defiant liturgy, right? This living, hidden scripture in our concerts, in our songbooks.

Right?

In our protests, in our marches of like, we're here and life hurts and we rise up singing. And you know that, like, you know it's powerful because those are the songs that people hold up lighters for. Those are the songs, like Lady Gaga, right? Like, born this way. These are the Testify songs.

You give me chill songs.

They give you chills and they give you chills. Even that chumba wumba, way back when, I get knocked down, but I get back up. Nothing's gonna keep me down. You've got these drunken, drunken Scots. Right, right. So that you know that going down into the mud of our shared suffering, and that's back to the weeping, not whimpering. And then somewhere in that feeling the pulse, feeling the beat, 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 going to 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? At Thermopylae, we love those calls to arms and courage. Tank man 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 dude got disappeared. We've never heard from him again and he's never been tracked. There was like four people in matching clothes that came in. And so either that was good guys or highly likely it wasn't. But that triggered something. And Nancy Keohane at Harvard Business School, we shared a stage at MIT a year ago and 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 Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, which kicked off the environmental movement. Frederick Douglas, the abolitionist, and one other. And the thing that was crazy about their stories, including the Emancipation Proclamation, right? Every single-- oh, and Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer. And the key was that at the moments that are in Wikipedia, in the moments that we hear about in school, they had no fucking idea what they were doing. Like the Emancipation Proclamation was a Doug Flutie, like, well, Mary, final huck with at the buzzer. He had no, it was desperate and he had no idea that it was gonna work or become the tide of history. And so you realize, and she writes, she's like, when people act from that spot with courage, but with a desperate marriage type. Yeah, a complete, like, not, no, 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, how, how much uncertainty, how much, how much fear, how much risk. There is in the world as we face it. But the flip side is, is 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, you know, 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 pickets, but he advised all those guys. 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 crazy. 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, got humanity. dignity, all those things. And so Thaman came home, he's like, okay, Satyagraha, that's the Sanskrit, that's a mouthful. No one in this country is going to understand that. I'll tell you what, let's rebrand this, and we'll call it Soul Force. 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. After that, civil disobedience became the central philosophical pillar of nonviolent protest around the world. And that's soul force. And Erika 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, basically late 20th century into early 21st century, civil rights movements that have been successful. That's Eastern Europe, Asia, United States, everywhere else. It required about three and a half percent of the population. That's it. Three and a half percent of the population to actually make these phase shifts that then can create this catalytic event, which is beautiful and inspiring, right? And that's certainly where Extinction Rebellion and a lot of other social and environmental 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 you to your destination. That's one move. 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. 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. That's kind of where we are, right? So it's like complex intersecting of meta-crisis, and the bus itself of like prosperous, stable civil society is not necessarily persisting. So the Erika Chenoweth was three and a half percent is at 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 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. Rockstar 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 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 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 of pie.

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. And what they found was, is when they stimulated this very specific region, that it stimulated a salience enhancing 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's a snake.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then 98% of them piss off and hide under the nearest rock. Right, they run. 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? It's not very ballsy.

Yeah.

Okay. So then they stimulate the courage center and then they stand, shut up, thump their tails and say, bring it. It's like Bruce Lee, they do this.

Bite you.

But it gets even better than that, right? So Andrew being the compassionate dude, he's like, man, am I just pushing their buttons and sending them to their doom? 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 sex and humans do too. So like we will, we would rather be brave, we would rather feel brave than get laid.

Why?

Because it is essential. And the final, 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 want to feel courage over pleasure.

Over looming threat, right? Like the reason that 300, Harry Potter, Dead Poets Society, Thelma and Louise, right? Being like this, we're gonna send it, no skin off my nose. 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're like, what's going on here? There's a thing here. I don't know what it is, but there was some gravitas to it. And they're like, oh, it's because they die at the end. And in fact, there's a guy, 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 had 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? Shut up. Super, super early. 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, 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. and they watch them all night on a Saturday night, binge watch them, and then he finishes, like, so what'd you think? 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. 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? Yes.

Right?

And so that notion of consumerism and rational individualism and all of that-- and the stories and the specifics of 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 ending.

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 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, you know, 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 through 21 or through their marriages. Like I had it all done. Prepared for the worst.

So that, and he never lost them in.

So that I could go out there Bully.

Wow.

So it's the samurai notion of meditate on a thousand ways to die so that you're not distracted on the battlefield.

Yeah. 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 a 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 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 collapsing 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, balls deep, completely committed and fearless. And to your point about faith, right? We haven't touched on the notions of healing trauma, peak state cultivation access, the kind of things that we have been playfully calling the Alchemist's Cookbook, right? But the TLDR of it is that we have access to more transformative technologies than we have ever had in human history.

Therapeutic modalities, experiences.

And high tech and expensive, like sensory deprivation tanks and transcranial magnetic stimulation and brain wave stimulations and all these things. They can be middling, like the new trials at Imperial College and Johns Hopkins and NYU and elsewhere with psychedelic therapies. They can be super low tech, like breath work or trance, you know, trans-EDM music, all the way to, you know, at home with a special friend and psychosexual practices. Right. So there's a whole kind of stack and access and depict time, money, effort, complexity, and you too can blow yourself sky high. And the protocol is actually consistent. And in fact, Kyle Dicerath at Stanford, one of Andrew's colleagues, has been the godfather of optogenetics. So the ability to kind of stimulate light in brains and turn on different genes that kind of stuff.

That's not EMDR stuff, is it?

No, but EMDR, funnily enough, put a pin in that because I'd be happy to come back to this. This is part of this integrated theory of peak states and trauma relief. Got it. So what they found was they used epileptic patients who normally have such seizures and tremors and gave them ketamine, so a dissociative anesthetic that also promotes depending, very interesting to totally otherworldly interior experiences, sort of dissociative. Like I have sort of have an out-of-body experience. It's used in battlefield as an anesthetic and it's also lately been starting to get used in psychotherapy more broadly and had been underground for a while. And what they found was that that experience of dissociation, there were two things. Subjectively, It helped as an antidepressant. So stepping out of myself for a moment, allow me to come back into myself with a little bit more equanimity.

Towards my view, having awareness of the situation. It was helpful.

I got to unzip the monkey suit.

You're not in it, you're out of the situation looking in, reflecting.

Yeah. And then really interestingly, they're like, oh, and what's going on when someone is under the influence of ketamine and self-reporting that they're having an out-of-body experience? that also then is alleviating depression. Three hertz neuroelectric brain wave. Fascinating. Okay, so now we've got a signature that's going on. And by the way, that also happens with 5-MeO-DMT and a whole host of other psychedelics, even if they are actually interacting with different neural pathways and systems. So psilocybin, LSD, other things, Prozac, are all in the serotonergic system. Ketamine is not and does things differently. It's not a tryptamine-based thing, but they're all doing this. delta wave activity. But then they reverse engineered it. This is the interesting part. They reverse engineered it and said, okay, now no drugs, but we're just going to electrically stimulate your brain back to three hertz. Now what happens? And same dissociative experience and same positive impact. So you're like, okay, so we used a compound to be able to reliably get the conditions we want to study. We don't need the drugs. Now we don't need the drugs. And the same thing happens with specific advanced meditative techniques and breath work techniques can get you into delta waves and different compounds. So nitrous oxide, there was a study with an anesthesiologist at MIT, and they found that nitrous oxide will put you into delta wave states for 3 to 12 minutes. So not indefinitely, like if you're breathing it for a dental surgery, you're doing something over a long time, 3 to 12 minutes is all you get. But in that time, you get double the amplitude. of when you're asleep, because normally the only time, like, Delta waves are a little bit like the redheaded stepchild in the EEG world, right? Because people are interested in beta, because that's where we do our talking, and if folks are listening to us, unless they're like multitasking, they're probably in beta.

If they're trying to follow this.

It's beta, and then there's Delta, and then there's Theta, right? Yeah, except that it kind of goes the other way if we're dealing with hertz. So basically, beta is the most fast that we typically have access to. Above that consistently is gamma, and that's like the occasional flash bulb Eureka kind of moment. Tends not to be unless you're like a super disciplined meditator, something you hang in. It's usually like a gestalt integrative flash. But below beta, which is our waking state normal, comes alpha, and that's starting to get into more relaxed, more contemplative, a little bit more spacious, a little bit more kind of zen. and then below and potentially flow states and then into theta, which is often people often power down and get sleepy in it, actually. Like unless you're trained and you know that that feeling is something to power through, most people are like, oh, I'm not up here in neurotic hamster wheel, so I'm just going to power down now. Right? But it's actually even more expansive. It's typically like the hypnagogic state. Like when you're lying in bed and you don't think you're drifting off to sleep, which you actually have, and you get jiminy leg or you like elbow your partner or something like that, right? Or you had some wacky dream where you're like, wait, whoa, whoa, I guess I'm dreaming. Like that's right around theta. Below that and barely into consciousness is delta. And typically we don't have access to that while awake, right? So waking EEG researchers, consciousness researchers tend not to spend a lot of time there. And then sleep researchers are almost always focused on REM and dreaming. And Delta is deep dreamless sleep. But what happens is it correlates with a brainstem level reset. And what we're seeing is that when you're in it, that is as close to being dead as possible. It's like backdoor lucid dreaming.

Yes.

But it is not without content. So if you can be conscious while in Delta, You sort of have access to the cheat codes of the cosmic browser. And this is consistent reporting, right? Across experiences, like Winston Churchill, you know, was one of the first patients to get exposed to nitrous oxide. And he said, you know, he said, world upon world of almost alien information reveals itself. And he goes, but it slips through your fingers. And I've come to regard it really as mere substitution of mental pain for physical pain. In the sense of like, oh my gosh, I've just seen the light, but I can't remember.

Oh, man.

So you're like, so this is fascinating. And you realize that all of those compounds plus neuroelectric stimulation to the cranial nerves, right, and to our brainstem do that. They do a systemic reboot of the brainstem, which accompanies delta wave activity, which tends to subjectively yield equanimity. out-of-body experience and access to insane amounts of highly salient or relevant or interesting information. And when we get into those states.

We get out of suffering states. Is that what I'm hearing you say? We're getting out of pain and this.

What'S happening in the moment? Yeah, I mean, yet you're long gone from that. And you're basically, like I said, I mean, it's basic, you know how that they have that vomit comet, that plane that you pack, install the windows blocked out, and it does the roller coaster arc do the sky. And for that part, right? Everybody's in zero G. Yeah. That's pretty much what it is.

Yeah.

So for three to 12 minutes, you can find yourself in zero G hyperspace where you can think anything you want about anything you can think of with a 300 IQ. And the only game, the name of the game is you can't fumble the football in the end zone.

So.

So this. This is. That's. That's one step. So we have Delta wave. neuroelectrics. And basically what we're doing here is we're telling the cheat codes to a do-it-yourself death rebirth initiation peak state that discharges trauma and allows you to establish somatic experiential faith that it all works out. So just didn't want to bury the lead or let anyone think that we're gathering wool. So we have pay attention to the things that allow you to do brainstem research resets, and that can be cranial magnetic stimulation that can be electrical stimulation through the tongue. There's an FDA phase three clinical trials on POMS device that I've actually tried. I tried it downhill mountain biking in Whistler and rode it down the track. So put it in, crank the juice, and it's because all the headsets, like the biohacking headsets, don't really work because your skull's really thick and nine-volt batteries aren't very strong. So you gotta get into the tongue. So it's connected. So the tongue goes into two, I think it's 10, I think it's 10 cranial and it goes straight into the brainstem. So there's the pons, the medulla oblongata, and then the other, and the vagal nerve is also there.

Wow. So, you wore this thing that was a shock to your tongue.

Yes.

And it was a shocking, like every single thing.

And funnily enough, I mean, well, this is a fascinating tale, and if people can hold the branches in this conversation, we'll take this quick one. So, the reason this device came to be, is Paul Bakkerida at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's the father of sensory substitution. So if you know David Eagleman's work at Stanford and the sensory vest and all that kind of stuff, David is very much coming out of Paul Bakkerida's lineage. But the SEALs were looking, they were doing night dives, combat night dives, no visibility. And the A sucks because you can't see what you're doing, and B, spatially disorienting. You're literally, it's like just being in a tank. Yeah, so imagine those, five-day darkness meditation retreats. Oh my gosh. In a sensory deprivation tank, right? It's crazy town. And eight hours at a time, right? So they would sneak in and then post up and then wait, you know, all this crazy stuff. So they're like, okay, can we do the same techniques that folks are using, that blind folks are using, like tapping with a cane and lending to see through the field?

Yeah.

Can we do with electrical stimulation with this paddle in our tongue?

So if it buzzes on the left, I swim left. If it buzzes on the right, if.

It'S on my tip, the tip of my tongue, I swim down. If it's on the back of my I swim up. So can we basically joy stick our frogmen?

Someone else joy sticks you. Watching you and then guiding you.

And again, our buddy from Dev Group was just saying, he's like, yeah, you get under a big ship and it goes haywire. So they swim on these paddles, they've got their compasses, the metal starts spinning, you can't have lights, you have no idea where you're going. There's prop wash, there's noise, it's a s*** show. So they took these panels and started learning to steer their they're swimmers. And then they realized something, which is that when they came out from super long, like six hour, eight hour submersions in zero visibility situations, a lot of folks had basically like spatial vertigo or the bends, right? But the guys who had been running the paddles didn't. And so they're like, that's funny, why is that? And the electrical stimulation into the brainstem was actually serving as a global system reboot and a calibration. So it enhancing neuroplasticity and improving vestibular training and action, which is back to the downhill mountain biking. Sure.

Right?

So you can actually create peak performance situations by conducting neuromotor pattern repetition, right, while experiencing brainstem research resets. And then they've now taken this to phase three clinical trials. And it's used for cerebral palsy, it's used for TBI, it's used from MS, and it's also being used for peak performance. So that's just a Another example of, okay, so now we're hot on the trail. We're like delta waves rock and seem to be the signature of heightened access to the information layer. Enhanced pattern recognition, cogitation, inspiration, information. Right? So we're pinning that. Brainstem reset and then, oh, by the way, the vagus nerve starts here. It goes all the way through our bodies, modulates our heart, our lungs, our digestion, our immune response, and goes all the way through our root. So, like Anish Seth, who's a Princeton gastroenterologist, called it poophoria. Like, if you've ever had an especially large bowel movement and somehow felt sweaty or palpitations or goosebumps or even really, really good, right? He says, to some it feels like an orgasm, to some like a religious experience, and to a lucky few like both. Well, really all that is is moving the male and that's putting pressure against your vagal nerve, which is actually stimulating your entire spinal column. so you're like, oh, okay, so we're just worms, like chop off our legs and arms, right? And the circuitry of how we work is our spinal columns and our vagal nerves. So you're like, okay, so now we realize delta waves, brainstem reset, vagal nerve optimization, increased nitric oxide in your system, and that can be everything from eating beets and what are those little seeds? beets, greens, or even supplements like Neo-40 that are concentrates or even ED drugs, right? Viagra boosts nitric oxide. Interesting. And not only does it, and it's a vasodilator, which is why Viagra used it, but actually what nitric oxide does is it crosses the blood-brain barrier and it allows for the transport of stress chemicals and optimal psychologically enhancing neurochemicals. so Herbert Benson at Harvard called it the bliss molecule. And it's actually the precursor to flow states and peak states. So you're like, okay. So A, vasodilation is generally healthy and happy. And by the way, it's actually an anti-COVID.

It's an antiviral. That's what I heard from James Nestor talking about this and breathing through the nose and how the virus can't survive in this, right?

Yeah, so high notch, basically basically the more, I mean, I wouldn't say the more the merrier period, but in general we are under and boosting can enhance. So you do these things and then you also realize, oh, and then engage in spinal and pelvic mobility, right? And the issues are in our tissues. So if you engage in it, and this gets to your EMDR point, right? There's kind of a progression where you can be like, okay, there's neurotremor release. Have you seen that stuff where people do like an asymmetric hold, like a wall sit or a leg lift, and they wait until different levels of frequency. And first it's disorganized. I think they call it brown waveforms. I don't quite understand their color coding, but I think that's how they do it. And that's just spazzing. And most people are so uncomfortable and so self-conscious they won't let it happen. But if you are with a therapist and you understand the jam, you start doing that, and then it actually settles down and it starts getting organized. And it's literally as if it's your nervous system defragging.