Sociobiology and World Building

I've been looking forward to this all week. Ever since I first had a conversation with Stephen on the first day, I'm like, oh, this is going to be a good one. He gave me a little preview of it, so I'm going to read his bio and then get you right to him. Stephen Barnes, the novelist, screenwriter, writing instructor and life coach has published more than 25 science fiction, fantasy and horror novels, written New York Times bestsellers and won an NAACP Image Award. He has been nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Gable ACE awards. His modern classic A Stitch in Pine, episode of Showtime's Outer Limits won an Emmy. He has also written for the new Twilight Zone, Stargate, Andromeda, Ben the Wizard, and the Real Ghostbusters. His solo novels include Street Lethal, the Kundali Khan, Kundalini Equation, Gorgon Child, Fire Dance, Blood Brothers, Far beyond the Stars, Charisma, and his highly acclaimed Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart. Once a nationally ranked karate competitor, he now makes his home in Southern California with his wife, American Book Award winner Tananari Dhu, and his son Jason. His daughter Nikki graduated from UC Irvine in 2009 and is currently doing theater in Central California. Everyone, welcome Stephen Barnes. I wanted to start by saying that I had, when we came on the tour, on the cruise, I actually didn't know that this was a genre group. You know, I just thought it was, you know, writing group. And I also did not know that you guys had an interest in social projects. I walked on this on the ship and was sort of stunned. And I haven't been able to get over that, being stunned since, since. As a result of that, my original intent, what I was going to lecture on, began to be modified somewhat, began to deepen, began to grow more complex. Because what I wanted to do, first of all, you guys are more advanced than I anticipated. This is not a one on one crowd. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to give you something meatier, something that will really, really fit the bill of what you need. So I've been listening week. What is it that people need? What is it that people want? We're going to cover the subject that I got there, no question about that. But we're going to do more than that. The title of our piece is Sociobiology and World Building or why I Hate those Fucking Zebras. Or Understanding the Past, Healing the Present and Creating the Future. In order to do this, in order to give, give this the serious consideration that it deserves, I'm going to have to rip through about 13.7 billion years of history, and we're going to end up today, and then we're going to ask questions about where are we going so that we can go all over the place. Now, I will tell you that my. I've written a number of science fiction novels that had to do with the future, and I'd written them that had to do with other planets. But it was when Betsy Mitchell asked me to write a novel set in an alternate world in which Africans developed a technological civilization prior to Europe that I really learned what world building was. There was a movie called White Man's Burden, bad movie. It was basically reversal of racial roles, and they had simply not thought it out. It was melodrama. They had not thought out the cultures at all. And I think that it was well intended but a little embarrassing. A few years later, there was a television series called Sliders. Anybody remember Sliders? Every week they go to a different world. They called me up and said that they were interested in doing a world in which they would slide to a world in which the racial relationships reversed. I freaked out. It was like, oh, my God, this could be so bad. It could be so bad so fast. I drove from Vancouver, Washington, to Vancouver, British Columbia, in a hailstorm to get up there to beg them to give me the room that I would need to actually apply my science fiction skills to create a world that it wasn't going to cost him anywhere. But let me take this seriously, please. And they decided that it was going to be too much trouble or I was going to be too much trouble. They wanted no part of me or of that. I'm not sure which it was. But when the idea continued to fester in my mind, what would this be like? So my original concept was to do something where the racial relationships were reversed, and I was going to set it in an analog of 1950s the South. I wanted to do a reverse version of in the Heat of the Night. In a lot of ways, when I talked, you know, Betsy Mitchell is trying to buy a book from Tananari. She was already under contract somebody else, But I just happened to be sitting at the table at the time. And she turned to me and kind of said, you know, second cry. Well, what are you doing, Steve? And I said, well, I'm working on this story about the world in which the Africans. And her eyes lit up. And she found out that I wanted to do it in the 1950s, said no, said it in the analog of, like, 1850 during slavery. And she bought two of them. So the amount of money that she paid, gave me the time to actually spend time researching. I'd already been researching, but in total it took me about six years of research I had to come up with. I had to study theories about civilizations and how they form, why they form, why Europe conquered Africa instead of the other way around. There's so many different things that I needed to get it right. I had to get it right. I could feel that this was the culmination of an entire lifetime of thinking about this question since I was six years old, literally, and I was in first grade and my teacher sorted me into the slow reading group because of my skin color. I knew that the people who were building a map of what reality was were not going to be able to help me, that the map makers were inaccurate. They didn't know who I was. That's a terrible thing to realize at that young an age or when I'm 10 years old. And my mother, who grew up in Augusta, Georgia said and was very light skinned and always the tragedy of her life from her point of view was that she hadn't passed for white and she felt that her life would have been much better if she had. And she told me when I was 10 years old, Steve, if you let white people know how smart you are, they will kill you. To hear something like that and the person who you trust to tell you the things you need to survive in the world is rather sobering. So I started life knowing that I was an outsider. I started life knowing that I could not trust the maps that I was given. Thinking about why had this happened? Why was the world the way it was? Leads you to the only two questions that matter in philosophy. There are only two of them. One of them is, who am I? What is humanity? Another is what is the world? What is the world that human beings live in? Those two questions, everything in philosophy boils down to one or the other, though. And as writers, you only have two things to write about. What are human beings and what is the world that they see? And everything that you're doing is going to relate to one or the other of those things. So I'm going to walk you through my thought patterns. But because we have such a small amount of time, because there's such a vast amount of information, I hope you will pardon me if I jump around a little bit. I will get back to it because I remember that what's really important is that art, a story, is a Swiss watch timed to a beating heart. That what's important about art is self expression, expression of who it is that you really are. But successful art is self expression plus communication. Someone on the other side has to have an emotional change. A nonfiction book is about information, a fictional novel or a short story. A movie is about choreographing an emotional change in the person who reads the story. So just throwing it out there, that just asking someone what is the emotion you want the reader to feel when they read the last line of your story is automatically hugely effective at helping people focus what it is they want. Because if every word, every image, every sentence, every paragraph, every scene, every sequence, every act in your entire story has to be choreographed to guide the reader to the emotion you want them to have when they close the book, turn off the television, finish the story, and say, what a story, what a story. Oh my God. You want them to cry or laugh or be afraid or feel uplifted or whatever. So everything you're doing is in the service of that. Can we agree pretty much on that? Okay, cool. So every tool that everybody's been teaching you is about how to take the information in your mind, the images in your mind, the emotions that you have. I mean, if my son at 2 years old stuck his hands in the potty and smeared it on the wall and said, look, that's art. He was expressing his emotions. Not a lot of craft involved. But you see, art is the self expression. Craft is the communication. That's what allows you to communicate. If it's dance, if it's martial arts, if it's pottery, if it's whatever it is, you learn craft so that you can communicate your art to an audience that is either not educated in what it is that you're doing, or in some cases, is extremely educated, has an extremely rarefied and developed sense of aesthetics, and understands the different symbols that you're putting together in the specific order that creates a cascade of emotions up and down and sideways and seesawing them back and forth until you take them to the epiphany that you want them to have seen the story. So one of the tools that was used in this workshop this week is the Hero's Journey. And it is my favorite tool for discussing store. And we have to discuss this very, very briefly before we go on. The Hero's journey can be interpreted in a number of different ways. And there is a particular way that I like to discuss it because it see somebody put these up on the wall because it's multipurpose. So hero is confronted with a challenge. Initially they reject the challenge. They are allowed to, or forced to accept the challenge. They set out on the road of trial, during which they meet allies and gain power. They have their initial confrontation with evil, in which they are defeated. They enter into the dark night of the soul, which is the moment at which you feel that all of your capacities are insufficient for the task at hand. The way through the dark night of the soul is called the leap of faith. And the leap of faith is always faith in one of three things. Faith in yourself, faith in your companions, or faith in a higher power. If you take the leap of faith and you've taken the other steps, then you have a final confrontation, evil, in which you are victorious, usually. And the last step is the student becomes a teacher. Now, in the Western world, you know, the 20th century, what is the most famous example of a film using this pattern? That's right. That's right. George Lucas adored Joseph Campbell's work. Joseph Campbell is basically a cultural anthropologist who studied information from around the world. Mis patterns from around the world. And if he was too focused on one culture and if he was too focused on a particular way of looking at things, the man was still a protean genius. And it's up to us to take it the rest of the way and ask, how can we make this more universal pattern? But in Star wars, confronted with a challenge. Come with me, Luke. Learn the ways of the horse. Rejection. The challenge. Sorry, I can't do it. I promised Uncle Owen and Aunt Maru I'd work on the moisture evaporators. Accept the challenge. Somebody conveniently kills his aunt and uncle. Somebody left a bomb me sign on their back. Oh, gosh. I guess I'll just have to go off and become a Jedi. Accept the Jedi. Whee. It's so sad. He said it's out on the road of trials. He goes to Mos Eisley Cantina, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, and takes off in the Millennium Falcon. And he goes to Alderaan, which also got blown up. And then he goes to the Death Star, and then he goes over here, and then he goes. The world trial is just the stuff you do, the places you go. Because if Luke woke up one morning being a farm boy on Tatooine, and suddenly he's in the trench of the Death Star, he's dead within seconds. So the road of trials is the stuff that awakens your character to who they really are or teaches them the stuff that they need in order to make the final challenge, the challenge that will take them to the next level of who it is that they are. As a human being. So his allies. Who are his allies? Princess Leia. R2D 2C3PO. Chewbacca. That's right, Chewie. And so forth and so on. All the people. And if you take a look at the stretch of six movies, so is Darth Vader, because it's really the Skywalkers versus the Emperor. Oops, did I blow that? Everybody see? Oh, my God. I'm sorry. Forget what I did say. Cancel. Clear. Cancel. Clear. The powers, courage, leadership, innovation. Using a lightsaber, using the Force. Being able to all those things, the things that he has to be in order to expand, to fill the role that he needs to fill by the time he's at the end of the movie. The dark night of the soul. Now, this is where it starts becoming more art than science. And I'm not going to be dogmatic about this. I tend to speak very positively. But I want you to understand, I don't mistake my opinions for the truth. What I ask you to do is to say I genuinely accept. I genuinely believe that these things are this way. Empty your cup. Sample it when you go home and say, ah, this is bullshit. This is bullshit. Oh, there is a little nugget of something that's useful. That's fine. Just take what is useful. Discard the rest. Fair enough. But now I can go on without constantly reminding her. It's just my opinion, really. I know everything. No, the dark night of this, the moment at which evil defeats him, I say, is the moment at which Obi Wan Kenobi is killed. Because Obi Wan was supposed to take Luke, his surrogate father figure, who's supposed to be the one who took him to the next level, right? So his death is devastating. Takes him to the dark night of his soul. Now, if Star wars had been a film of feeling, than Luke would have gone deep into his feelings and he would have cried and it would have been so bad. But this is an action movie. So they immediately cover that up with an action scene and they do a slide note sort of to, you know, him going to the rebel planet. And then they attack the Death Star. And the Death Star is about to blow up the rebel base, okay? So that's where you get your big dark night of the soul where Grand Moff Tarkin is saying, fire up the lasers. And John Williams music is going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you know, Princess Leia with the cinnamon buns on the side of her head is looking very pensive. And you know, it's like olive gloss. Olive gloss. All right, and this is where it goes into the leap of faith. Now, if you want to know why George Lucas is a billionaire, listen very carefully. Which was it that Luke had faith in? Was it faith in himself? Was it faith in his companions? Or was it faith in a higher power? All of them. That's right, because the Force binds everything together. Higher power. It also obeys your wishes and flows through you, so itself. And Han Solo comes diving in out of the sun and blows the guys away. So all three at the same time. I've never seen a movie like that before. I'm not sure anybody had at that point. So he confronts evil, and he's victorious, blows up the Death Star, last step, soon becomes a teacher. Han and Luke are given medals by Princess Leia, which is the way we know that what we do in a society to say that somebody's behaviors are exemplary and that they're worthy of emulation. You know, poor Chewie doesn't get one. The Wookiee always loses. So this is a hero's journey. But in order to use the hero's journey, you need to go to the next step. You need to go closer to what my good lady wife Tinanery was talking about in the last session, which is, what is a hero? Far more importantly, what is a human being? Because a plot is nothing more than the way the universe reacts to your behaviors. You want something, you do something. The universe responds to you. And then the way you respond to that, you follow that path and you've got the plot of your story. So this is like an intermediary between what the universe is and what the hero is. It describes the way the hero travels the territory. So the next most logical question is, what are we? What is a human being? Now, there are lots of different plot structures. I really like this. It's infinitely flexible. Any story can be mapped on here. Especially once you realize that this is not a story. Any more than the 88 keys of a piano played in order or music. You know, you play them out of order. You understand the emotional significance of each of them. And your art comes in the way you play with that. So what is a human being? What is the hero that is traveling now, the most complex. You're about to see why I'm a writer, not an artist. This is supposed to be a guy with a smile sitting cross legged. I don't know what you thought it was. I'm afraid to ask what you thought it was. But this model comes. There are lots of different. The simplest model of what a human Being is, would be probably body, mind, emotion. You cover all three of those in terms of physical description, education and politics and philosophy and so forth. And their emotions, their love of self and connection to others and so forth and so on. That would be the simplest three dimensional approach to characterization. But the best approach to characterization that I know of comes from yoga. How many of you practice yoga? Great. How many of you understand how familiar with the chakras? Fantastic. Because right there, what you have is the best friggin characterization system you could possibly have. Do my little one Sanskrit trick here. The chakras are supposed to be seven energy centers in the human body. You can also look at them as like max levels of the way we evolve as a being and the way society evolves. And it goes mulhara, pajasana, manapura, anahata, vichavi, anja and sahasarara. Survival, sexuality, power. Now this is interesting because it maps over with the hara. The hara maps over in Japanese, hara and would be like 2 inches below the navel and 3 inches in the center of balance. Or the Zantian in Chinese medicine and martial arts. Anahata is the heart, space, love, emotion. Vishnuhi is communication. Anja is intellect. And sahasrara, which is outside the body, is spirit. In other words, it's the question, what was the shape of your face before your parents were born? What matters? What do you care about that will continue to exist after you're gone? Those things that move beyond the envelope of our existence. Spirit, intellect, communication, emotions, power, sexuality, and core survival. Core survival trumps everything. People with a shallow understanding of Freud. No. Sex is the most powerful emotion. Oh please. Nobody's ever stopped running from a forest fire to get lazy. There is a great story of a monk who said, I want to achieve enlightenment. I desperately want enlightenment. The old monk says, are you sure? Young monk says, yes, yes, I really want enlightenment. So the old monk says, come with me. And he takes the kid down to the river and he grabs him by the back of the head and sticks his face in the water, pulls him up, puts his face back in the water, pulls him back up, does that about five or six times and then throws him on the riverbank. And the kids laying on the riverbank. And the old monk finally said, what were you thinking? And the old monk says, I'm thinking that I'd do anything for just one more puzzle there. The old monk says, when you want enlightenment that much, you can have it. Almost every profound discipline on the planet uses your breathing. It modifies your breathing. With prayer, with song, with pranayama, breath control, with physical movement, something for core reasons, because you're hitting the reset button on your neurology if you're about to be audited tomorrow. And you, your wife ran away yesterday. If I stick her head in a toilet, trust me, you're not thinking about anything but air. You bring it right here, now. And that is the truth of human society, that the things that hit this button right here, survival trump everything else. And if you want to know why we are what we are as a people, why society is what it is as a structure, understand how important survival is. If you don't take care of your survival needs, you don't live to pass on your genes or your means, and your society is dead in one generation. It does not matter what perfect Shangri La societies may have existed up on a mountain somewhere if they could not protect themselves from the barbarians, it doesn't matter. We have lost so much art, so much music, so many wonderful things because they did not handle their survival. So we're going to keep coming back to that as we start now, taking the journey of humanity, this being what we are, and start 13.7 billion years ago as a big bang, to give you every building block you need. And if you take my suggestion, which is to take every major thing I'm going to say and look each separate piece up on Wikipedia, follow links if you want to, that's great. But spend one day on each of these steps. In 30 days, you will know more about the world and why it is what it is than 99.9% of the human beings who have ever walked this planet. It's up to you. That's my prompt for you, is to not take my view on what these things are, but to have your own view of what these things are that you are as solid with as I am in the way I hold the way things are. Because every story you write is an argumentation. It is saying, this is what human beings are, or this is what the world is. That's all you're doing. That's the most important thing you can do. And for those of you who are really interested in social reform, who have a cause of some kind, who see that the world can be a better place, who feel in your heart that there is more than what we've got here, every one of you, put up your hand if you can feel. You want your work to mean something. You want your life to mean something. All right, Excellent. You are my people. You're my tribe. You need to be armed. You need to be able to write into the argument saying, this is what I believe people are, and be able to back that shit up, because people will challenge you, and you need to be strong. If the adults are not strong, the children are not safe. It's as simple as that. That's our job. So. Real estate, survival, sex, power, emotion, communication, intellect and spirit. So somebody please take this sheet, put it up on the wall. Thank you. Isn't that special? Okay, so 17 years, billion years ago, there was nothing. Except in the sacred texts of multiple countries. They imply. When they're talking about the great Nothingness, they imply that there is an observer, like a God figure lurking in the background somewhere that says, let there be light, or I am. And suddenly, boom, something pops into existence from nothing that we can determine, to something expanding faster than the speed of light until suddenly, within the first fractions of a second, it fills the universe as we know, and continues to expand, which implies that the speed of light is different inside this structure than it was outside the structure. And really, we did not evolve to have brains to even really think about what was outside that structure. Our brains don't work that way any more than we can think in geological time. Something happens. We start with physics then. So that's the first thing. You need to have some grasp of that. Beginning at that moment, the laws of physics as we understand them came into existence. The first things that were created. Well, first of all, the universe, what happened at that moment was not distributed equally. If it had been distributed equally, the forces pulling on each individual particle or affecting the wave, it would have been a soup forever. But because it was distributed unequally, things began to happen. Inequality means there's a possibility of work. The fact that water runs off of a dam here and generates energy on the way down is because there's an inequality in terms of height there. And you can use that to create work in the universe. This stuff was sort of distributed in lumps, so there was a little bit more gravity here than there was here. So the stuff begins to collect. And when it collects to a certain intensity, you get fusion and you get heat. So we get stars out of that soup. After the Big Bang, we get stars. Astronomy. So that's the second step. Stars are fantastic because they're fairly simple. You know, you got helium and hydrogen and stuff like that. But stars create chemicals. So now the next step is chemistry. Okay? The chemicals that were created continue to clump, and in our solar system, which is what we're mostly interested in, we start creating planets. Planets are created a little bit like, you know, the stuff that the batter that's left in a bowl after you make a cake kind of collects. And that's the stuff that then starts collecting into being planets. Then we get geology. As soon as you've got geology, because we went from 13.7 billion years, which was the big bang, to about 4.5 billion years, which is the creation of our solar system, you start having the possibility of biochemistry, certain chemical formulations. There's a thing called chemical evolution, which is prior to natural selection or biological evolution, that certain chemical compounds have a tendency to want to form. They just do. And so at some point, it seems that organic chemical compounds kind of like to be made. If you have energy and you have these complex chemicals, we start getting or complex organic compounds. And at some point, probably events at the bottom of the ocean, things that we call living things, the very, very earliest forms of life began to be formed. So we want to look at biochemistry. After biochemistry. You want to look at natural selection, because it's very common for people to say something like the complexity of a Boeing 747 and the complexity of a virus are roughly equivalent. They have about the same number of parts. So you say a virus formed by itself, just natural selection. That's about as likely as a tornado going to a junkyard as it's formula 747. And it makes sense in one way if it was random. On the other hand, like we said, chemicals have a natural tendency because of various factors, to form into certain patterns. What if when chemicals join together in a particular way, they lock? Instead of bouncing away, they start becoming more complex. There's two lock and then get a billion random collisions, and the third one locks. So, in other words, that life, if this is true, and there are things that we do not know absolutely, because we cannot perform the experiments necessary to test these theories, we don't know what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. We don't know exactly how life formed, but we have been able to form organic compounds in the laboratory. We've been able to get very close. We can see things that are so simple as life forms that they barely seem to be life at all. Somewhere these two things met, and we had living things. And the process of natural selection said that those living things that are better at surviving or develop traits that enhance their capacity to survive will stick around to reproduce. So one of the things that, you know, what is the definition of life? It's slippery. Every Idiot knows what a living thing is. But scientists, like, you know, get pretty close to the line. It's like, well, well, I don't know if this is alive or this isn't. I mean, they reproduce, they take energy from the environment, they have waste products, you know, but minerals do a lot of that. So what is it? We don't know exactly. Except, you know, I know it when I point at it. But things started becoming more complex. Now, complexity per se is not a good or bad thing, it's just a thing. And these living things became more and more complex. And you're going to. You could go through the difference between fish and reptiles and mammals, but at some point, one division is vertebrates and invertebrates. So that's another thing to look at. Once again, spend about one day in Wikipedia looking at each of these different levels. Vertebrates lead to hominids, eventually mammals and then hominids. We're starting to get closer and closer to what created us once again. Each of these things, if they survived, had tricks that made it possible for them to harvest energy from the environment to survive and live. Better to catch prey or avoid predators. And then human beings, we don't know exactly when the first hominids appeared, somewhere between 15 and 20 million years ago. But human beings that were more than australopithecine, you know, about a quarter million years ago, we can say that human beings as we know them came on the scene. We're pretty sure about that. The first human beings were pretty much hunter gatherers. You can look at bonobos and you can look at chimpanzees and you will have the yin and the yang of what human beings are probably about genetically equidistant between these two, between those two animals. And there's lots of interesting ideas. Are we closer to this? Are we closer to that? Because bonobos make love, not war, and chimpanzees will tear your face off. It may be sobering to consider that the bonobos are closer to becoming extinct than the chimps. It says something about what works in the world. And it's not necessarily a pleasant thing to consider. But there's another threshold. About 30,000 years ago, judging by cave paintings in France and South Africa, it seems that human beings woke up. It's not that we were not intelligent. We could hunt. We had complex hunting strategies. But cave paintings suddenly, instead of just showing the animals, started showing human beings hunting the animals. Almost as if at some point they said, did a Scooby take? I'm here. I am the I am part of us, perhaps woke up. I don't go into the bicameral brain thing. The ancient Greeks are the first real human being and all that stuff. Interesting and ignorant, no? Did I say that out loud? But something happens then. Here is where it might be useful to look at several different theories about what is the difference between human beings and animals. And there is no sharp distinction, but one of the distinctions that I kind of like is that human beings are the only animals that make and use fire as a tool. There is a really interesting spiral, ascending spiral when you start using fire. Fire does a bunch of, of different things. It makes protein more bioavailable. Your body can literally utilize it better. You can also acquire protein more easily because you can harden. Fire hardens sticks that make them better weapons. You can also use fire to drive animals, thereby you can get more animals, the protein is more bioavailable. That means you get larger human beings. Women have larger hip girdles, means that they can give birth to children with larger brains, which leads to more complex hunting strategies. And you have got a spiral, a biological spiral of human beings becoming the alpha predators on this planet. But there's also something that is more gentle than that, is that fire led to storytelling because fire led to abstract thought. The ability to create shadows and control them was the transference from a three dimensional object to a two dimensional image. The ability to push back the knife meant that we have light. We don't just have to go to sleep when it gets dark. We don't have light. When you have light, you can sit around and talk about the day. You can talk about hunting that lion, hunting that mastodon. And that's the beginning of storytelling. And storytelling binds information into a nonlinear non temporal matrix. It's connected by emotions, by feeling, rather than raw temporality. You take your identity with you and you have a story. We are the people who crossed the great village and climbed the mountain. We came to the fertile valley. And you can keep the stories of your ancestors. And now we have human beings who are awake and aware and begin to have a sense of who they are in the world. And when you move from hunter gatherer to agriculturalist, you get an additional advantage. And the advantage is you get some downtime. After you have harvested, you have some food who actually last for a while before the next planting season. And you get to sit back and take a pause and think about the fact that you're here. I'm here. There's a world here. What is this? Who am I? Where am I? Going the beginning of philosophy, not just being, but thinking about the fact that you are. The truth is that the hunter gatherer lifestyle is actually healthier than the agricultural lifestyle. Fewer diseases because you have roving bands and New York passing the diseases back and forth. Diseases crossing from animals to human beings once you start getting domesticated animals and so forth and so on. But the reason that the agriculturalists won is because they were sedentary and staying in one place meant that they could have more children. More children meant more warriors. That meant that every time the agriculturalists came into conflict with 100 Gatherers, they won. So the healthier lifestyle in many ways died. Because when groups get into conflict, you know, human beings, that's how we roll. You take a look at the arrival of human beings as we began to spread out through the world. Timing with the extreme extinction of the megapauna, or for that matter, when Homo sapiens arrived and started getting into conflict with the Neanderthals. Ask the Neanderthals how that went. Oh, that's right, you can't. They're gone. Either they were integrated into our gene pool or just possibly we wiped them out. Or we, at the very least we out competed them because anthropologists, who studies a paleoanthropologist studies that will say that the Neanderthals were trying to imitate the innovation of Homo sapiens and they couldn't quite do it. They could not adapt. There was something that kept them from changing as rapidly as they need to in this new world that had been created for them. Little pause as we think about anthropology, if we think about rather agriculture. Because right here we have the potential for human beings to put down roots, that instead of extensive agriculture which is gathering, you have intensive agriculture where you can support far more people per square mile. We can stay here. Now, the first agriculture was just squid and agriculture. You just burn stuff, okay? You just burn it out and you plant and then you move on once you raise the ground. But people started learning things about how to plant, how to nurture the ground. And roving tribes turned into stationary tribes turned into villages, turned into states. And now we start getting into power dynamics. You go from families to tribes, you go from big men to councils. You go from power from the ground up to the group getting so large that we cannot sit in a circle and make our decisions. So we're going to appoint leaders to do that for us, appoint representatives to do that for us. So power starts at the bottom and there is no situation of all the power being at the top doesn't exist. You have to have some cooperation from people at the bottom where it doesn't work. But once you get a top, the top starts justifying its power. They like it. Yeah, me likey. I like the fact that I can just sit here and tell people what to do. So they start creating philosophies, religions, monarchies. You start developing situations where you gave me the power, but now I'm taking more power than you gave me. So there's always going to be a problem, fight between the bottom and the top. And what's going to make a difference is those systems which help people survive are going to outlive the system that cannot protect themselves. This started in Africa. The general hypothesis is the out of Africa hypothesis. Most people accept that people spread. Spread. Evolution was not consistent. Straight line, there's punctuated equilibrium, a bunch of other ways of looking at things. But people began to spread. People began to share information. Societies became more complex. And this is where innovation kicked in. Written languages were only invented about four times, about four different places. And it spread from them. Innovation is not generally some solitary genius thinking about stuff. It's looking at what your neighbors did. Doing something like I grow apples, My neighbor is growing peaches. My neighbor is doing something with his peaches that I adapt to my apples. That's innovation. I look at nature, I look at the pattern of veins in a leaf and I build a freeway overpass. It imagines that because the physical of it work, the flow works because the veins and leaf are transporting nutrients and sugars into the plant. I am interested in something that will transport cars, works the same way. Billions of years of evolution over here. So what that means is that most human innovation is about communication with your neighbors, stealing their ideas. Cultural appropriation, that's what it's all about. So we pause here for a moment to ask the question, why did Europe take Africa instead of the other way around? I had to go through 13.7 billion years to get to the point where I could answer that question for myself in a way that makes sense to the science fiction writer. Logical part of my brain. And the book. If you have not read this book, you should read it. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared diamond says something really, really fascinating. Your population has to get to a certain size before you develop technology of a certain kind. That's one of the things that is true. You need to have domesticated animals, Most animals that were. Because domesticated animals allow you to move beyond simply hunting and killing things to be able to reune things in Other words, to be able to have milk, to have eggs, and so forth and so on, rather than simply killing the animal and eating them. Most of our domesticated animals we did not co evolve with because the point of domestication is up here, whereas the hunting is way earlier than that. Anything that is slow and stupid enough for us to domesticate, we were eating it. So why do I hate zebras? See, I get back to it. I was in Tanzania doing research for a novel called Great Sky Woman, and I saw these vast herds of zebras over there. And I'm thinking about the fact, you know, domesticating animals. One of the things that domesticated animals did was animals are a source of energy. An oxen will deliver four times as much energy as a human being in terms of being able to plow. So you can plow the ground deeper. A horse, you can ride it, so you can travel more rapidly. Okay? But zebras, their eyes are different than horses. They could see you coming. Nobody has ever domesticated a zebra. If Africans had been able to domesticate zebras, it would have freed up a gigantic amount of human energy, which would have led to more efficient agriculture, which would have given them more time to be able to develop greater technology, perhaps shift that would have allowed them on the east coast of Africa to travel more and trade more and get, get more ideas and therefore be able to be more competitive with the Europeans when they showed up. It's possible. Every time I saw one of those zebras, I was remembered. You betrayed us. So what your red diamond said, okay, take this off. There you go. I'm going to draw a clumsy version of the here's Africa up here, and here's the Eurasian land mass going way over here. And here you have the Sahara Desert. When the Sahara desert began to expand, it cut sub Saharan Africa into basically the status of Australia. There was no land bridge that was as easy as the Europeans had. The Europeans had a trade route that would go from the Mediterranean from Pillars of Hercules. The road of silk went all the way over here down into India and over here into China. And everything that we call civilization, technological, civilization, advanced civilization is along the road to silk, where people were trading ideas. Not only trading ideas, but notice that Africa is primarily north to south, whereas Europe, the Eurasian land mass is primarily east to west. You have the same climate all the way across here. That means that any plants or animals you domesticate over here will work all the way over here. Whereas in Africa, if you domesticate something here, all you have to do is go a few hundred miles north. And it doesn't work anymore. You don't get the same population sizes, you don't get the same agriculture. You don't get the same. You don't get the same, you don't get the same. Can you see how the same processes that had to do with the universe finding greater and greater levels of complexity with animals working from the simplest viruses up to vertebrates up to human beings, increasing complexity can be applied to human societies. You start very simple. The most simplest unit is the family, a reproductive unit. You can see the same family dynamics existing in any homeowners association. You can see that replicating itself in towns and cities. You can go on Facebook and watch the political argument. People say, oh, people in Washington should just be able to get it done. Really, you can't get three people to agree on something. How the hell do you get 300 million people to agree? It's a miracle. It's a miracle when you can get this. We can get that done. The levels of complexity are all dependent upon. Upon the level of complexity underneath something stable. But you don't get it. You go from there to the earliest civilizations. They begin to correspond with each other, trade with each other, grow more complex. If they work then become stable, they get to move to the next level. If they're in contact with the civilizations around them, each of them is doing something a little bit different. They take innovations from each other. Technology begins to develop. Human beings. One of the things that human beings are animals that save more information than they lose because of writing, because people write stuff down. Storytellers, oral storytellers, if you're confined to oral transmission of information, if the person who has the information does not like you or is asleep or dead, you can't get that information from them. But if they wrote it in a book, they can have been gone for a thousand years and you can pick it up and you're right there with them. Writing spreads like everything else, like domestication of animals, domestication of grains. How did we get where we are? How come we don't understand this? Because human beings are hierarchical. Octavia Butler said that the thing that bothered her the most about human beings scared her the most about human beings is one, our tendency to be hierarchical, and two, the tendency we have to place ourselves higher on that hierarchy than we place other people. This is that little Buddha baby thing. Earth below, heaven above. No one in the world like me. Everybody remembers when they were the center of the family. Everybody remembers when everybody oohed and ahhed. If you didn't the slightest thing just standing up and they applauded. And we take that to the rest of the world. We're the center of the world. That's if you're healthy, if you're unhealthy, you spend your whole life wondering why people don't applaud you anymore. Where went the acclaim? Wait a minute. People used to just love me. I would do my silly little dance and everybody would why do that? What's wrong? So the writers or the artists, the people want to express their emotions who are still tied to that child self go out in the world and they think that just telling the stories that they love will get them the acclaim that they want. They are screwed until they grow up and they realize that there is an adult complete component to this, that it's about survival, that it's about providing a good or service that somebody needs or believes that they need in order to reduce their stress or to teach them something so they can survive better. It all connects to there. In order to understand human society, then you understand all of these early building blocks. Ask yourself how we got to where we are now and then change a couple of things with lion's blood. In order for me to change the relative position of social development of Africa and Europe, I had to find a pressure point. And it couldn't just be a Toronto Star with left instead of right. It, it had to be something that people have an emotional association with. So what I said was Socrates doesn't drink the hemlock. Instead of that, he flees to Egypt. Alexander the Great goes to Egypt to study with Aristotle. So a bunch of other philosophers also went with him. Alexander the Great becomes a great statesman, a great conqueror. Instead of dying off in foreign lands, he is just wounded. He comes back to be pharaoh of Egypt, marries an Ethiopian princess, puts one son on the throne of Egypt, another on the throne of Ethiopia. Later on, Egypt and Carthage stand together and break Rome. They are controlling the Mediterranean. They get lazy. They hire African janissaries to come up and control their empire. I just went on and I got a cat of things that was connected with something and at every step. Was it true? It's not a nerve if it's true. An alternate history is not about being able to predict where a leaf will fall if you drop it out of a 10 story window. You can't make those calculations. Chaos theory keeps you from doing it. But if you see a leaf on the ground, I say it fell out of that 10 story window. It's plausible. All I had to do was to Be plausible in the way it all fit together and then create a story about people. All of this work, 13.7 billion years of history, just to be able to understand what a world is, so I can take a human being, an emotional human being. And that entire book was about two people, two young boys, one Irish boy named Aidan O'Dare, whose village is raided by the Vikings and suffers the Middle Passage. Another one, a young Islamic nobleman named Kai Ibn Jalaluddin, Ibn Rashid, and their friendship over the past of about seven years. I had to rewrite 2,300 years of history to be able to tell a simple little story. I had to understand human life and then before that, life itself, and then the evolution of the universe so I could be sure that every logical level that I was progressing through made sense. Why was it so important? It's so important because the racial mythology of America is that blacks were natural slaves. That's the mythology. And it was designed to justify an economic institution. Human beings as energy. We weren't quite like zebras. With a sufficient level of technology, we could be captured. You could wipe our hard drives of culture, name religion, language, and install Slave 1.0. And then finally, when the north has sufficient technological advancement that they could afford to start thinking about the fact that what had been done to the slaves, that the south couldn't afford to do that because they needed the agricultural help. And one of the things that human beings will do is they will justify what they need in order to survive. They will keep their heads in the sand. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about. I'm going to talk about. But what did they need to do in order to feel good about themselves? Because everybody likes to feel good about themselves. You create a mythology that slavery was good for the slave. That's the only way you can justify it and consider yourself to be a good Christian. What else are you going to do in order for it to be good for the slaves? They can't have been as much. That mythology outlived the influence institution it was designed to protect. I don't think it even began to really break down until the mid-60s. So I knew if I wrote this book, I was flying in the face of mythologies that people used to protect themselves from guilt and fear for centuries, that they were going to attack me on every conceivable front unless I could make. Make it solid. This based on this. This based on this. I wanted to be able to say this is a way that the world might be. I am presenting an argumentation. This is what human beings are, this is what the world is. This is what I'm saying. Now. Socrates was afraid of drama because he felt that drama allowed you to express an idea without giving the chance for intellectual rebuttal, rhetorical rebuttal. So each and every one of you has some cause, something that you believe in. If I lay this out, this is how we got where we are, you know, because human beings are what they are. We are driven by, you know, we are born. We have very few basic things programmed into us. Fear of heights, fear of falling, fear of loud noises, few basic emotions. If you give a baby a bottle, the baby will go, face will soften and start making little love sounds. You take the bottle away, the baby will get angry. And if you drop the baby, the baby will express anger. So anger, love and fear are your basic human emotion. Fear of heights, fear of loud noises are the basic instincts. And everything else we are as human beings are tied into that. Anger is not a primary emotion. Fear is the primary emotion. Fear and love compete for the same place in your heart. When you see people being violent, ask your yourself what are they angry about? Once you can determine what they're angry about, ask yourself what are they afraid of? Almost always violence is connected to anger and anger is a mask over fear. And people who do not want to hear the voices of the disenfranchised will deny that they're even afraid. If you haunt right wing sites, having them talking about the rioting in Ferguson, or people who are upset about Trayvon Martin, they will not even admit that the protesters are honestly afraid. It's not even that they're saying they're wrong, you know, saying they're wrong is just saying you have your information wrong. That could be debated. But when you say you're not even afraid, this is all just political fear, you are totally denying the humanity of those people so that you can stay asleep so you can continue to enjoy your power, which serves to enhance your survival chances. Because that's what works. If it works, if it enhances survival, we'll keep it. If it doesn't enhance our survival, we'll lose it. What is going to be necessary for you to be able to create societies world build is to understand, to have your own theory of how we got here. If you take a look at those intervening steps and you will spend one day on Wikipedia with each of them, just go up through the logical level, you will create your own Ideas about this. Maybe you and I will agree about this stuff and maybe not. If you disagree with me, write a story. Show me the way you think about it. Okay, so why do you think the relationships between men and women are the way they are? I've got my ideas. What are yours? Why do you think that homosexuals have this status in our society and not that status? I have my ideas. What are yours? I tie all that stuff into whatever rules make the maximum number of grandkids. That's what a society is going to do. And it takes time for that to change. There's fantastic inertia in the system. Fantastic inertia. Most mutations do not create Wolverine. Most mutations create cancer. So most social change does not change things for the better. That's why conservatives are so afraid. There's nothing wrong with them per se. There's just a range of thinking. The people who want to change things and the people want to hold on to the things that we already know because that's proven to help survival. And sometimes the people want to change things lead us to disaster. And sometimes the people want to hold on to the past, take us into disaster. We have to have that dialogue. We have to have a dialogue between these polarities. We have to have people willing to say, this is what human beings are. This is what society. Society is. Without that, we're pretty much screwed because everybody's going to do the things that they feel are going to enhance their survival. If something seems to threaten your survival, it's going to cause fear. We don't like being afraid, so we mask the fear with anger. And anger leads to violence. And now we're all fighting and killing each other. This works not just on a social level, but also on a personal level, as they said. I've been in the martial arts for 45 years, and who'd like to hear my very best martial arts story? That's what I got. Okay, I got one for you. This happened 30 years ago. I was coming out of a friend's apartment, apartment in Oakland, California at about 2 o' clock in the morning. And I'm walking to my car and this huge black guy steps out in front of me and says, hey man, give me your wallet. And I looked at him and I said, what do you really want? He said, what? I said, what do you really want from me? I'm a human being. You're a human being. If there's something you need from me and I can do it for you, maybe I'd be happy. In which case nothing has Happened here. Just two people who had an exchange. We could both walk away from this feeling good about each other and about ourselves. So tell me honestly, what do you really need? He looked at me, you know, like, are you on crack? I mean, do I have a gun? Was I would. What? What? It was one of those moments. I have no idea how much time passed. It could have been 10 seconds, it could have been five minutes. We were just in this timeless space. And all I'm thinking to myself is, please make the right decision. Because if you make the wrong decision, I'm going to hit you in the throat so fast you won't see me move. And he looked at me and I looked at him and his face cracked. That mask of anger that he was wearing cracked. And underneath it was this scared little boy. And he said to me, $5. And I said, sure. And I opened my wallet and I gave him $5. I said, take care of yourself. And I went away. And for $5, not only did I not have to hurt another human being or risk being hurt myself, because make no mistake, in any actual fight, both people could die. But I also got a great story I've been able to tell for 30. Neuro Linguistic programming is a relatively soulless discipline that has to do with the nature of communication in the human nervous system. However, in other words, it's as soulless as a box of tools. It has no morality. But there is one group in Colorado called NLP Comprehensive and a lady named Connie Ray Andreas who created something called core transformations. That is friggin brilliant. Because what it does is it uses hypnotic trance to prove that every human action, no matter how venal, no matter how negative, no matter how violent, is an attempt to get closer to God. Attempt to find peace. If you follow the chain of. Why did you do that? I needed the money. She was screaming at me when I tried to take her. I had to kill her. What, is she just giving you the purse? Well, then I would have gone away. And so why did you want the. I wanted the money in the purse. Well, if you had all the money that you needed, what then? Well, then I'd be a big man. I'd be able to have fun, I'd be able to do this, I'd be able to do that. So if you had all that fun that you wanted with all the friends that you wanted, what then? Well, I probably want to pay my bills and stuff like that. So if you paid all your bills, you had all of your bills taken care of so you weren't Worried about any of that, what then? Well, you know, I really kind of like to protect my family. You know, I got family that I'd like. I'd like to get my mom out of the hood. I'd like maybe my little brother. He's really smart, I think. I like to pay his way into school. I had all the money I needed. And if you could do that, you could take care of everybody that you cared about, what would happen to all, you know, they'd be so proud of me. They'd love me. If you knew that the world was proud of you and you felt that love from your family, what then? You follow that chain to a certain point. And there is always a point at which this happens. It's like they exhale. All that fear is gone. Well, I would feel so alone. And if you didn't feel alone, if you felt connected, what this, I'd stop being afraid. And if you felt no fear, if all that fear was gone totally, fully and completely, what then? Sometimes they can answer in words and sometimes they can't. But it has to do with a feeling of peace that they've never had. No matter what the behavior is, you can follow it back to that. People just want that peace that they felt in the womb or that sense of connection to the divine, however they put it. And when you look at any society and the terrible things that we do to each other and try to understand how human beings could be so cruel, remember that we all feel alone and afraid, every one of us. The only question is, what do we do with our loneliness and our fear? Pause. Questions, comments, requests about anything that we've covered before I go on. Yes, sir. Oh God. I mean there's a whole world of stuff he didn't cover, but it created a framework within which I could take the other information I had and say, is this true? If, let's say the. Let's say that a particular like the Japanese are considered a test very, very highly on IQ test. If in other words, if guns germs are steel and steel or it's the bell curve, you know, really those are the two extent. So if the Japanese are smarter than the rest of us and Gunther and Seal is wrong, that there are not these patterns that get more complex as you get larger, then you should find Japanese people on little islands that are building Mitsubishis. No you don't. We all know when you get into little tiny islands, often place little villages off some place. It's not as true now with the Internet because we're all hooked Together, but it's like stepping back in the. Yes, it's a simpler world. We know that. So I was able to take the basic structure he gave and see instances of it everywhere. And Suddenly, to be 100% honest with you, I had spent my entire life up until that time using faith to keep me from believing that black people might just be enslaved. I was not willing to believe it, but I did not have the logical understanding to refute the information. When I was about 13 years old, I opened an Encyclopedia Britannica from 1938, and it said it very clearly that black people are less intelligent than white people. That's the Encyclopedia Britannica. I grew up in a household without my father, and I looked at into fiction all over the world for those images of what being a man was. I wanted to be a man. And I read James Bond and the Saint and Conan the Barbarian and Tarzan, and every single one of them had degrading racial images in them. Every single one of them. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the worst I loved. I had his books lining my bedroom. But in Tarzan, the Jungle, Tales of Tarzan, the story Tarzan and the Black Boy, he specifically laid out his thesis. White men have imagination. Black men have little, Animals have none. He said that just like that. And I could not reject it because I needed the images. As I put it once, I sacrificed my melanin on the altar of my testosterone. I needed that. I swallowed the poison pill. But somehow I could not believe in the God that would be so unfair. And I do believe. I do have faith. But once I read Guns, Germs and Steel, all the stuff I had learned, bam. It's like, oh, I can see this pattern recurring there. I can see that pattern recurs. I can see it, see it, see it fit, see it. And this is one of the things you need to do. This one doesn't need to be put up. Yes, my advanced aesthetic sense does not require that. About two months ago, I awakened from a dream of swimming across an oily river and realized I had an insight into a process that would enable people to both deal with the fear and the uncertainty that people are feeling in the the world right now. How many of you are feeling fear and uncertainty about what's happening in our country and feeling like I want to do something? I don't even know. Are we falling apart? Is it possible? Is it over our head? I decided that it was possible to do something with this. And I doubted myself. I had those voices of doubt in my head. But I realized that I'd been Thinking about this for almost six years. Years. And it is not unreasonable that I might have come up with an answer. At the very least, what I can do is put the answer out there and give people a chance to tell me whether or not it makes sense that this might be a thing that has. There might be an answer for us. And it works like this. It's five steps. The first step is love yourself. You have to start by loving yourself because otherwise guilt and fear will poison you. Love yourself deeply enough to take care of yourself, enough to heal yourself, enough to deal with the stress. Who feels a lot of stress in their lives and like to get rid of the stress in their lives? I can teach you how to get rid of the stress in five minutes. I kid you not. I kid you not. Get a digital watch. Set a timer for three hours every hour. Every three hours, stop. And for 60 seconds, do deep, slow, diaphragmatic belly breaths. Just do it. Every five times a day. You will completely change the way your nervous system processes stress, which is nothing more than a fight or flight response. Your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system trying to get you ready to run from a tiger or hide or whatever it is. And you're just taking the abstract of life and taking it down there. There's an entire week I could spend talking about that stuff. But love yourself enough to take care of yourself, enough to forgive yourself so that you will look at your own flaws and failings without feeling that you are corrupt. Without feeling that there's anything wrong with you. Critically important second step is love. At least one other person. Person. I like that. Being your significant other. Because that romantic sexual connection takes you back to the source of energy that drove all life. It is your connection to the divine. The dissolution of the subject, object, relationship. Selfishness is not the problem. The problem is defining yourself as ending at your skin. As soon as you start expanding yourself out to include other people. The first time you who has children here. Okay, how many of you know what I'm saying when I say the first time you held that newborn child, your world changed. A door of perception opened in your head. You understood life in a completely different way than you had before. That's what love does for us. Forgiving yourself, accepting one other person into that heart space. The third step is what we have just been doing, which is understand history. Without guilt, blame or shame. We have done the best we could with the resources we have. We have really tried as individuals. We're all working as hard as we can. And as a Species. We have done the best we could. We can do better now. We can do so much better now. But you can't get there if you're filled with guilt and shame about how we got here. You look at everything, the wars and the pogroms and the terrible things, but also the art and the discovery and the sacrifice and just the beautiful things, the ugly things, and be able to embrace all of it the way you would love your own most beloved child, who sometimes stumbles and sometimes unthinkingly does cruel things, doing the best they can. If you can forgive yourself and you can love one other person, expand that until you can understand all of humanity. But also if you love yourself, you will defend yourself. Don't take shit from anybody. Anybody. If people wonder how somebody is kind of open hearted and seemingly nice as I am, would have spent 45 years learning how to kill people with my hands, it's because I wanted to deal with my fear. I had that much fear. It just took me decades to deal with that terror, existential fear. And I did. These techniques, prayer, affirmation, martial arts, yoga, these transformative disciplines, they work. It takes time. It takes time. They're not kidding. You really can move beyond them. And when you don't have that fear, you get to see what we are. Clearly the fourth step. God bless each and every one of you who are here. Because the fourth step is find your tribe. You do not need everyone to agree with you. Stop arguing with Internet trolls. There are a thousand of them for every one of you. They will literally burn your life and your time up. And they will tag team you. As soon as you got one beaten down, another one will pop up like a whack a mole. Find your tribe. The people whose see the world the way you see it, who share your values. You know something, you only need yourself. Ultimately, you only need to love yourself. And you can be in the world and you can exist. But if you have one person to love you and hold you, the two of you can stand together against the world. And if you've got five friends who you know love you, who would bring you a bowl of soup if you were sick in bed, you are blessed. And if you could find a circle of people who are aligned with you, who see you know, 100 people in total alignment can change the world. Change the world. I got bigger goals than that. My goal before I die is I want to create 1 million Awake Aware adult human beings. And my method to do that is to create 1000 Awake Aware adult artists, writers. When I Got on this ship and I realized what was here. It blew my mind. I said, oh, my God, let me serve these people. What can I do to make their lives better? What can I do to help them take whatever their passion is and go out and integrate it into their work so that it is entertaining? Because, trust me, if your work isn't entertaining, it won't sell. And if it won't sell, it ain't going to get out there. So your book had better be as entertaining as a six pack of beer, because it roughly cost the same thing. There's your tribe. And then they're what I call sleeping children. Don't worry about them. Don't wake up the sleeping children. Let them sleep. You might whisper to them once in a while. You're having a nightmare. The door is over here. Life is good. But if they need to sleep, go ahead and let them sleep. But about one out of every thousand people is what I call a smiling monster. There really are monsters out there. There really are people who will actually hurt you. People who like the smell of blood, people who like the screams. People who enjoy the chaos. And the children need to be protected from people. So you either avoid them or you step on their heads like snakes. If you do not have that temperament, then include in your tribe a few warriors. That's what they do. But make sure to love them because it costs them to be those people. They need to be welcomed back to the fire line with love. Mead, meet my sister. Meet my brother. We need to connect them back to life because they paid the price that we could not pay to step on those stakes. That is a reality. Love yourself. Love at least one other person. Understand history without guilt, blame or shame. Love yourself without guilt, blame or shame. Same thing. You're just expanding the circle. Find your tribe. Let the sleeping children sleep. Step on the snakes or avoid them. And the last step, and my favorite, succeed. Have a wonderful, happy life filled with passion and pleasure. Enjoy your life. Have love and health and happiness and success. Because nothing attracts people. People like success. They're going to want to know, how can you do that? How are you so happy? How are you so satisfied with your resistance? I don't get it. And you get to come to them and put your arms around them and whisper in their ears, first, love yourself. And the cycle goes on. The simplest building blocks up to the most complex societies. The simplest human drive up to a spiritual commitment to change the world. I can only give you the bare bones of this, but if you will take 30 days and spend one of these subjects every day. Go to Wikipedia, follow the links. In a month you will understand yourself and the world better than 99.9% of human beings who ever walked this planet. I promise you. Because people have not. We've not had the information to understand how we got here. We haven't had the time to stop and consider it. We can let go of our fear. And when you let go of your fear, all that's left is love. Love and faith are the ants. And when Tananariv and I came here, we were planning a week from tomorrow to start a class of what we call revolutionary writing. Taking these principles and teaching them in a six week workshop. And we pushed that back a week because I realized I wanted to listen to each and every one of you. What can I do for you? What could we do in that class? I'm going to make you an offer because I believe you will not take advantage of it. Now, I believe that about you. I've been listening. I've been watching. Yeah. The class costs money. You go to www.createthenarrative.com, you'll find out about the class. Anybody in this workshop only do not pass this on to your friends. You can pass that on to your friend. What I'm about to say to you, do not anyone involve this workshop who cannot afford it. Get in touch with me. Don't let the money stop you. We will find a way to get anyone who wants to be in that workshop in. If you're flat broken, busted because of what you did here, we love you anyway. I would love to have everybody part of that. We're going to share everything we know about creating revolutionary art, about how to integrate whatever it is you want to do in your life at the of level level that you can do it. Don't let the money stop you. Please God, we're as serious as we can possibly be about that. You guys are special. If I want to create a thousand awake aware adult writers, artists, I would love to start with a nucleus like this. There's seven minutes for questions, comments, requests, but other than that, thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me be here and letting me share a lifetime of thought about this with people who are as bright and committed and focused as you guys. I have not been in the company of your like before and that is the truth. Thank. You. Question. So your first step there, you said to love yourself without guilt, blame and shame. Yes. But it does seem if you look at what there are in fact acts a person can take that do in fact deserve guilt blame at the time. If you're not doing them anymore, why hold on to it? Guilt is useful if it pushes you in the right direction. So by learning to love yourself without guilt, blame or shame, that means committing to never doing those things again. You have been learned by those things. A genuinely repentant prisoner will understand why society wants them in prison and will not ask to be free. Because there are other people who will pretend to be penises and they will make whatever adjustments they need to make. But whatever it is, you need to love yourself. If you love yourself, you will be able to avoid codependent relationships. You don't need to be loved. I don't need Tananarive. I love her, I want her, I desire her. But all I need was given to me when I was born. All she needs was given to her. Does that make sense? All right, next. Yes, sir. In the vein of. Yes, Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene is a great book because it goes to that idea of the world was not about. For instance, in terms of gender relations. I would use that for gender relations. Neither men nor women are in control of this world. Our genes are. Men think they are, but they're not. That's how you get them to march into cannon fire. That's how you get them to die by the thousands. I kid you not. They think they're the lords of the universe. It's our job to die. What? Excuse me. This is why freedom for women is good for men. If men think if it's really a zero sum game, if freedom and power for women means men have less, they're going to fight to the last man to keep you from doing it. But if you can wake them up to the fact that they have been asleep just like the rest of humanity. And we can play a different game now. Wow. Now you got allies. Because everyone wants to survive. Connect it, whatever you want to teach someone to do, connect it to their survival drive and you got them. Yes, sir. Yeah. All these perspectives are helpful and limited. We're not totally linked in with our biology. But if you ignore the biology, you're being closed minded. A lot of stuff. Like I said, hold your breath for more than 45 seconds and see if you can do calculus. I don't care about politics. I'm not political, I'm philosophical. Politics, the way I define. I had an interesting conversation. Politics is the way you mobilize philosophy. Okay, so I care very much about what is, what is truth, but not very much about the systems that People create in order to implement or drive it. So I'm out of that. I look at this and I say men and women are two halves of the same being. Black and white and Asian, just different parts of the same human being. There's a politics. It's just the way people work stuff out. I don't care about that stuff. But evolutionary psychology says that certain things that enhance survival will become part of our psychological structure. And psychology is basically quantum sociology. Sociology is basically mega psychology. So you look for the ways to look at the same things at different levels. You look at ways if your goals, for instance, when your goals are connected to your survival drives, your sexual drive, your drives for power, your emotions, your communication, your intellect and your spirit all at the same time. That is the goal. Where all your dip switches are set to go. You're not in conflict with yourself at all. You can really get up in the morning and go from morning till night writing those books, writing those stories, writing those scripts. Because I'm going to change the world and make some money. Make some money. Anybody else? Yes, sir. It sounds like the student became a teacher. So who influential your life that helped you shape who you are? Oh, right. Yeah, him too. The men and women. If I was to try to my mother deeply. A lady named Dawn Callan, who is a cute little honey blonde, about this tall and one of the most lethal human beings you could ever meet. My martial arts instructors, Sri Chinmoy, my spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti. Scientists like Richard Dawkins, writers, great writers like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison. Larry Niven, for God's sake, Larry Niven lifted me out of the inner city. You ever been to Beverly Hills? Ever seen Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills? When he has a city, he has a street in Beverly Hills named after his family. On his 21st birthday, his father gave him a bank book with a million dollars in it. Said don't blow it. And he saw me. He looked at my work and he saw my heart. He decided that he would help me. And for years he has been one of the best friends and teachers and mentors that anybody could possibly have. I owe everything to the men and women who taught me everything. I'd be nothing without them. Who else? Lady in the back. It should. Could be by their behavior. I don't know if good or evil exist. But I do know that the universe continues to organize itself at greater levels of complexity. So greater levels of complexity and anything which makes the world safer for children seems to me to be as close with definition as Good as I can get those things that have to do with seeing each other's humanity connecting as opposed to separating. What you look for is the people who seem to relish the destruction. Avoid them at first. If they keep coming back again and again. I remember I was teaching at a children's camp and a rattlesnake came onto the path right near the showers for the kids. So we pushed the rattlesnake in into the brush, rattlesnake came back, we pushed into the brush again, rattlesnake came back, we cut off its head. I mean, I've spent like 45 years studying martial arts. My favorite model of what a warrior is, in many ways is the European knight. It's model, not the reality, not the historical reality. With all the armor and the sword and the lance and the fiery steed and the skills and the attitudes and all of that was supposed to be at your service, my lady. The strength in service to softness. Strength is only valuable in service to softness. If you are not protecting those who cannot protect themselves, you're a bully at best. Okay, who else? Yes, sir. Two part question, one of which I already found. The altitude, which is quite difficult. Of course, it's $200. It was going to be three, but we dropped it. And like I said, anybody who wants to be in that room, we would love to have everybody there. Don't let the money stop you. It's a webinar series. You'll be able to do it from home, and you'll be able to either be live online or you'll be able to get the replays later. CreateTheNarrative.com don't let the money stop you. There's no one in this room who will not get in that workshop. Regardless of your finances. If you want to be there, that's what I promise you. But only for you guys. Okay? All right. Any other questions? Yes. Yeah. In a different time zone, everything will be online. We're going to create a social media site. And so for all the talk, all the guests, all that stuff, the homework, you know, the ability to interact with each other, share manuscripts, brainstorm, all that stuff. It's all going to be for people at any time zone, wherever you are, whatever it is that you're doing. Yes, sir. Well, Core Transformations by Connie Ray Andreas, NLP Comprehensive in Colorado. Fabulous, fabulous book. If you follow the processes in that book, you can get in touch with your own. I can only call it Divinity. It's one of the most. It's a remarkable application of those techniques. We're out of time, people. Thank you so much. I'm proud to be here. It. That was awesome. You guys are awesome. Oh, man. I got three whole pages of notes.