How To Exit The Matrix: Psychology of Propaganda & Marketing | Sky King @WellnessAndWisdom

When you fast, you force yourself to become more aware of what you consume, whether it be food media. So where I have people start is I say do an advertising fast without changing your behavior. See how long you can go without seeing, hearing, viewing an advertisement. People think a 24 hour food fast is hard. This is impossible. The only way you will escape is if you don't have your phone on. Don't listen to anything. You're in the woods because the moment you walk down your door and drive down the street, you've seen a few ads.

Sky King, welcome to the show.

Thank you, brother. Appreciate it.

So stoked to have you at the house, man.

I'm stoked as well.

We have been in conversations probably for like a year and a half.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's been amazing. You have a very brilliant mind. And you're 30.

29.

29. You're not even 30 yet, so you haven't even hit the third decade of life. But man, you have this incredible pulse on advertising. And I was just feeling into the intention of like what I wanted to create with you today on the show. And it was around this aspect of propaganda.

Okay.

We have been hit real hard with propaganda, especially since the Mask theater and the COVID Theater. Before we dig into that, man, tell people about your podcast and how you identify. Maybe it's Asian, as we were talking about before we recorded, but tell people, just give us a high level on sky right now. I mean, I know your soul is always shifting and changing, but give us the lens from 30k feet for sure, man.

So, yeah, my name's Sky King. I have a podcast called Sky King's Mental Playground where I focused on the tension between centralized and decentralized systems. The world I live in, a lot of like the crypto space web three of what we're trying to build and like a new future, new business models. Really, like Hyper focuses on decentralization as if it's this perfect thing. I tend to lean more decentralized, but I don't necessarily think that's the answer. When I think about the world in my perfect utopia, like, I want to live in a world that has 7,000 countries, not necessarily geographically prescribed, but because it allows us to react more appropriately to whatever outcomes come in front of us. So we don't know what the future holds. Like, that's like probably the end of where truth that we can say is we don't know what's going to happen next. And so we actually don't know the right system of government, the right system of being the right diet, you know, the right gene to express for in order to deal with what the future brings. And so that's where decentralization gets really cool. And why I'm super into it. The main thing I'm working on right now is a company called Stoa. Our goal is to change the business model of media. So, and I'm sure we can get into this, but if the old business model of media was subscription based, and then in the 1940s, when FDR was president, this guy Henry Luce, who created Fortune, Time in Life magazine.

Oh, yeah, don't go there yet. Okay, I got some questions for you on that.

Well, so then the advertising becomes as a subscription model. Right. Or as the next business model. And then after that, we've just been in this advertising bubble for like the last 80 years and has led us down a very dark path. And so I think that we will never beat Facebook with Patreon. So we can't go back to the old model. We can't go back to subscription and assume that's just going to work because it wasn't even working at the time. But we can actually start to build a more exciting business model. And I'm thinking in terms of gamification. So that's what Stoa is and what I'm working on now.

What does Stoa mean? That name?

Yeah. So Stoa comes from the painted Stoa, which is in Athens. It is where Zeno, who is the father of Stoicism, the philosophy, would speak truth to power. So Athens at the time was basically like just like kind of like Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs. Athens was Silicon Valley for philosophers. So it was just all of these different schools of competing philosophy. And then. So Stoicism was one of that. And their names, Stoicism, because they're taught on a Stoa, which was this platform. So it's a platform for truth to power.

That's a perfect name for what you do. Your hands have been in pharma. You had a pharma background also deep in ads. Some of the podcasters I know here in Austin, you actually helped Aubrey Marcus with his show quite a bit.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I built Aubrey's ad business for him.

Yeah. So, you know, I guess you could say from the inside, like the belly of the beast of the advertising industry. And also you had time in pharma. And I think this is a beautiful blend of knowledge for you to have Stoa and also for us to unpack the first layer of this conversation.

Yeah.

Because really, when I see what has been going on for a long time for my whole life, but especially sky, especially in the past two years. I am just absolutely blown away at the way that media, specifically Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, have really devoured the psyche of our brothers and sisters, of our people on earth. And let's start here. Talk a little bit about your advertising background and what you saw in the culmination of early 2020. Like juxtapose those two.

Yeah. What's really, really scary is at the basis of it, it's the business model of media that is allowed for this outcome there. It was the same business model in 1914. It was the same business model in 1940. It's the same business model today. The reason it's gotten seems like it's gotten worse is because what used to be something that we would only be able to read once a day, once a week, is now constant. That's the only thing that's changed. But the negativity of the business model is still there. So if we go back to 1914, Hearst Castle. So like William Randolph Hearst, he owned 50 newspapers across, across the United States. He bought a bunch of land in Mexico on the California, Mexico border. And then he decided he was going to start a war. And so he put in all of his 50 newspapers across the United States. US might be at war with Mexico, might be in tiny little, little, like little, little type, US at war with Mexico, huge type. Almost started another Mexican American war because he had his incentive was I bought this land, I have this control, I'm going to do this. Okay. So that just like brings it back to kind of the old things like yeah, the business model of media is a prostitutional model. So when you have a prostitute, what it looks like is let's say you've prostitute, pimp, consumer, right? The john. So the john goes to the pimp, gives the money, does the in sacred act, the woman or man gives up the sake, like this very sacred thing. She gets less money from it. Pimp walks away, doesn't have to do anything. So the business model, media is actually worse because at least like when the body prostitute gets fucked, they get paid. What we get in this model is so we have this sacred thing, our attention, our focused attention. The most valuable asset in the world. The only thing that you will never ever get back, the most valuable thing, we give it to creators and you know, that might be good. That's fine. I think that's a normal transaction. You know, it's very clean, boom, boom. But instead of us Giving them money for it. They give that attention to brands. So then brands give them money. But where do brands get the money? We give the brands the money. So if you're looking at this triangle, we are giving on both sides and receiving attention at best or entertainment at best, and it's, it's very, very scary. And so you. Let's build that model up, up, up. So what Facebook has been able to do is able to hyper target people to build this model to the extreme of what it could possibly be and to have it online 24 7. So when we go to where we are 2020, who is the real customer of media? It's the advertisers. It's the people who pay for media. Who spent more on Media in 2020 than any other person in the entire world. Big Pharma. So who, who is the client of the media? Is it us or is it them? And it's crazy because you have things like the New York Times, who they literally do campaigns that say just truth. Like they associate themselves with truth. And I don't think, I think truth is such a hard thing to find. It's so fickle in my mind. Like, honestly, the idea of truth, like, the only truth I know is that we can't predict the future. Like, outside of that, everything else is opinion.

Even gravity.

Even gravity. It's relevant because. Right, because like, if you're on Mars, gravity is different. If you're in a vacuum, there's no gravity. So again, like, there's very few enduring truths at the limit when you really start to think out at the limit. So then I like to focus on sincerity. What are systems that reward more in sincerity? Well, if your client isn't your end consumer in your media, there's no way that you're going to have a sincere thought. And so what I did with, like, advertising and podcast and the reason I got into podcasting was because during the 2016 election, I was flying back and forth between New York and Indianapolis every week, and I felt like I was living in divergent realities, because in New York it was so obvious it was impossible that Trump was going to win. It was completely unrealistic, was never going to happen. And then you go back to Indianapolis and it was like, fully possible, like, very confident it's going to happen. And I was just watching these two realities and I don't really have that big of an opinion on it either way. And the podcasters got it right and kept getting it right. And I was like, why do they keep getting it right? And then when he won and they were right, I was like, whoa. And that's when I started getting really big into the history of advertising and seeing how much the influence of media has on one, the outcomes of reality, but then are influenced by the advertisers.

Let's pause right there, because you just unpacked a huge suitcase. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I started podcasting in 2015. I had been wanting to podcast since 2010. It took me five years because I wanted to be sincere. I wanted to share my greatest lessons in wellness, my understanding of the world, and honestly, what we're doing here. How do we make sense of this human experience here in the 3D world? And what hit me the most in the beginning was when you start a podcast, there's no money coming in unless you're funded or unless you have some big list or JV partners or whatever. So for two years, it was like the ultimate soul journey for me to ethically host a podcast, begin my affiliate relationships, and seek out some really solid brands. But there definitely is, and I feel this pressure even now to let my audience know, like, you know, I really actually do love these products, and I would. I would never have a product in our store page that I didn't either have here in the house that we use or that we consume. But there is this essence of that. There is this essence of that pressure where, you know, I'm reminding you guys, like, buy the stuff in our store because it hooks up the show. And I feel good about it. But I can see what you're saying. When do you think podcasting turned to that triangle you were speaking about, or was it there since the very beginning?

So I actually think podcasting is the one place where that triangle is the least strong. And that's why I came into podcasting, because I was literally like, oh, shit. They, again, it was more sincere. They called the Trump election way more than I saw any of the other news organizations.

Yeah.

And I. So I started realizing it's because advertisers inherently have less influence on podcasts, because how high leverage podcasts are. Rogan has, you know, same audience, bigger audience than cnn. There's three people on his team. So if they lose an advertiser, which happens all the time because of something that he said, Not 50 people, 100 people aren't getting fired. New York Times does, I think, like, $1.2 billion a year in revenue. They only have, like, profit of $100 million. So, like, 90% of that goes to operating expenses because of how big it is if they lose a huge sponsor, they're firing people. That's where they have big, big influence. And this is what scares me about big podcast networks, is it's starting to go that direction because the networks have to make money off of, you know, this huge infrastructure they've built. They have to make money off the podcasters. So they start to pressure because they're the ones paying the podcasters, and they focus on so deeply the relationship with the brands that. That worries me a little bit, because that's where it starts to get dicey. When you go away from independent, you build these huge, centralized machines that, you know, don't care about the podcast, definitely don't care about the audience. But that's why I chose podcasting. And even, like, my business right now, the thing that, like, pays for my lifestyle is Modern Stoa, which is an advertising agency for podcasts. But the way that I think about it, and we're the only people that do this, is the podcaster is our client, not the brand. And I have lost so much money setting it up like that, consistently. So much money, like, it's insane how much I leave on the table because I refuse to ever sacrifice my relationship with a podcaster's audience than I would with the brand. So I think it was as a moat. Like, I don't even bring the issues that brands bring to me to podcasters because I don't want to put them in a moral hazard situation. I just defend them and say, like, you know, I'll figure out another brand that will sponsor them. If you guys don't want to, I.

Bet you sleep good at night because of that. I can't imagine, like, some of these shows, they're. They're hawking Coca Cola and Pepsi and these. And even I've heard pharmaceutical ads. Are pharmaceutical ads allowed to be on podcasts? I think they are.

I mean, yeah. Dr. Drew, there is no. I mean, one of my clients. I didn't do this deal, but my clients had, you know, the vaccines ads that was, like, run on top of Spotify.

That's so wild.

Yeah. Podcasting is no regulation on ads. So if they can be on TV, they can 100 be on podcast.

Okay, well, I'm gonna say it right here before we go any deeper. Y' all can trust me. I'm never gonna offer you a product or, you know, open up your eyes to a product that. That I don't actually use myself. So that's. That feels good. I love the grassroots element of podcasting. It's what has given me everything. You know, I love. I love what I do, man. I love that you're studio. I love that we get to talk about things that are truth. And of course, some are objective, some are subjective based on our life experience. But when I really peel back the layers and I see these big podcast networks, it is kind of shocking, you know, And I'm not going to name them because I'm not here to slander anything, but some of the brands and some of the products that they're pushing, I'm like, how could you actually give people aspartame? How could you give people, you know, products that are going to exacerbate type 2 diabetes? And really what that is. And this is a layer that I wanted to explore with you for quite some time. Think about the dyad or the division that's created by large media networks like the CNNs or the New York Times. You have one camp that's pro. This. One camp that's pro not. You have one camp that's red and one camp that's blue. It's all a fucking figment of our imagination. There's actually no such thing as left and right. We just have been taught that. And we're taught, and I'd love to feel what you think about this, we're taught to hate one another, to divide, to have some states that are red and some states that are blue. When did that divisional conversation actually start? Was it in the 40s with Henry Wade? Was that the beginning of it all? Or was it even deeper than that? Was it early 1900s? Propaganda has been happening for a long time.

Since the 1400s.

Yeah, since the 1400s. So walk us through some of the history of that and then definitely touch on Henry Wade. Because when you drop that on me, I was like, whoa, this is Mad Men on a whole new level.

Yeah, just to clarify, too, Henry Luce.

Henry Loose.

Yeah, Henry Loose. Yeah, I guess so. History of propaganda, Just a little bit. There was a pope in the 14th century, so 1500, sorry, 14th century, who basically said, we need a minister of Propagation of the faith. And that was when the first propaganda department was. They named it Propagation because that's what propaganda comes from. Propagation. Yes, of the faith. So that's like kind of the basis of it to answer the broader question, like, when did we become so divisive? I don't know. And again, this is. To where. I don't. It's almost like the whys don't matter as much. But I like to think about systems. It's like what systems allowed for this to happen? So when you feel afraid, like. So there's a. There's a psychological study done in the 1950s and it was focused on anxiety and fear. But one of the things that happens when you're anxious is you tend aggressively towards affiliate relationships. So you affiliate with somebody else, you look for connectivity. It makes sense evolutionarily. Right. You get worried, you go to the tribe.

Yeah.

So what has happened if we. If like just focusing on my kind of expertise, not into the politics as much, but really on the advertising. Like what happened when we in the 40s subsidized? Because what that was was a subsidy, essentially. Henry Luce comes in and he convinces fdr and him and FDR actually didn't get along that well. It's like they're in bed together. Henry Luce is a really interesting character in general. I don't think he had malicious intent with this, but he went to FDR and he's like, look, you want your populace to know about the war effort, know about all the good you're doing with the conservation orbs. Love the New Deal. You want all that, right? And obviously FDR is like, yeah, that'd be good. Like, I want to, you know, be dictator for life. Like, you know, he had like four terms. Three and a half. Yeah. Because he died. But so he's. Yeah, I want that. He's like, what do we do? And so Henry Lewis devised this plan where he was like, so before this. And this is where, like, I'm very much a capitalist, but I'm very much a capitalist. And we are. Don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a corporate society. And this is the birth of one of those moments. This is a pivotal moment where we change the law to benefit something that is not in the interest of the population. So they make. So before this moment, any advertising dollars you spent, you did that after taxes. So your revenue was inclusive of the money you were going to spend on advertising. It wasn't considered a part of R and D, it wasn't considered a business expense. So you had to take from your post tax money, which usually is profit for people. Right. That's like all theirs. That's theirs now we're good. And you had to spend that on advertising. So what they did is they switched that up so you could actually do it pre tax and that, like subsidize, create this huge subsidy for an entire system that has just run, like built us in a race to the bottom to where we are today. And, and this is where Like, I truly believe this is a very common quote, like a cliche at some level. But, you know, cliches are true for a reason, is we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich. And that that's really is like what it is like. If you're going to start a company, you have no funding, no background, it's just as expensive for you to go out and buy ads because you don't have any revenue yet. And I kind of think, you know, it should be reversed. We should have capitalism for generally everybody. And then, you know, maybe some things to help people out. But that is one of the biggest subsidies that's ever happened. What's crazy is when you're saying, you know, people have aspartame in their products, they sell this, they sell that. Dude, think about if we didn't have advertising subsidized, how much fewer products would be in the world in general. It would be a tenth of the amount of products in the world. Now think about how less, how much less plastic would be in the world. Then think about how much plastic would be in our bodies and think about how much better our hormone systems would be. Like this business is literally now castrating us because we have built bullshit products on bullshit ideas that were subsidized by the government and we let that divide us. Because this is one of the crazy things is around link, around Clinton time, corporations in general started going a lot more left leaning, a lot more Democrat. And that's where. And that also integrated into the corporation, the pharmaceutical company I worked for. Super left leaning.

Yeah.

So then they pay the companies, they pay cnn, they pay MSNBC to run our ads. That's where they get their money from. Those are the clients. They're left leaning. So now the media becomes left leaning. And that is literally like that story is what I fundamentally believe is separating us. And you want to focus on fear. One, because the attention is really good and two, because of that affiliate relationship. So let's hijack that evolutionary mindset of when I'm anxious, when I'm afraid, I'm gonna go to my tribe and let's associate tribes with brands. So when I'm anxious, I'm going to buy the thing. My tribe, the people who watch CNN buy, which is what is being told to us, that they buy because the little customer of the company. Like that is a tragedy because we then associate our desire for community with the brands that we buy. And that is the perfect example of where we are today.

Wow, Bomb drop right there. You know what I was visualizing when you were speaking was the ads for camels in the 40s and 50s. My doctor smokes Camels because they provide a healthy moisture throat or something like that. And then the sugar industry lobbied. There's a Coca Cola ad we're gonna drop right now so you guys can see this while I'm talking. And it was feed your baby Coca Cola because the sugar will give them greater health. And it's absolutely wild to see in every single industry, not just pharma, food, gas and oil, any industry in the world, it is 100% dictated. And really, the ship is being manned by the fuel we call money, and money is energy. So really where I think we are, and I want to know how you could expand this actually is. We're at a consciousness evolution choke point. We're at this point where we have to decide as a humanity, as a collective, are we going to come together and are we going to dismantle and disperse this structure because of the grassroots media like podcasting and like shared communities and forums like Patreon, or are we just going to stick our heads in the sand and pretend like everything's okay? And I think really the blessing of 2020 and the blessing of what the propaganda theater was with COVID and mask wearing and fear mongering was that it really woke more people up, I think, than ever. And yes, this is a spiritual conversation. It's also a really practical humanity conversation too, because I saw people that I never thought would succumb to fear completely give away their power. And I lost friendships, I lost business associates. It was so weird. But also, this isn't about right or wrong. This is about what's most loving for our evolution as a species and what's most loving for the way that I interact with you and that you interact with me. It's a soul level integrity conversation. So expand on that a little bit because this is way bigger than the media and ads. Those are really just a window into how we're growing up as humanity, as society, for sure.

Yeah. So I think with how we have evolved consciously, technologically, spiritually, like, we have to build a model, a system that transfers energy, money more in alignment with that, like at all, at all, at all costs. Like that, that is. That is pivotal because we live in a capitalist system where that is where we are going to. That is the basis of how we interact with each other. And if, until you change the fundamental business model again, because business is just literally the transfer of money, which is energy. If you change the model because Right now, essentially what we're doing is we are, instead of us giving energy back and forth together, it's. I'm going to give energy to this person who has no intention of like good bonds between us. You're going to give them energy too. They're going to give a little bit back to me. And you're just sitting there like, that's what that triangle is. That's what that exchange happens. It's inefficient. Like, the universe is efficient. That's the most inefficient. We just built this middleman. Like, what we have to do is go back to the connection, the creator to the consumer, the consumer to the creator, and have honestly a window of connection. And that's what I really am trying to build, is the opportunity for people to go a lot deeper in that space and have more direct lines. And it's really. It's just like physics, dude. It's just down to efficient systems. My godmother always told me she was a tennis player and she was like, the quickest distance between two places is a straight line. And yet somehow we've forgotten that. And we literally think right now that the only business model, we think it's elegant. I heard in the Social Network, the guy who created the Facebook business model, which again, he didn't create it. It's the business model of media. It's literally took that and did. He's like, it's so elegant. And it's like, oh. Because you trick people into thinking they're not paying for something when really they're giving up their most valuable resource.

Elegance can be evil or loving.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's malevolent elegance. Yeah.

I feel that this the history of propaganda starting you said back in the 1400s with the Pope leading up till now. Don't you get some sense in your psyche and in your heart that we are. This is part of the big story. This is part of the big story of us growing up as human beings. Right now, if I put an age on us, I feel like we're 12 or 13. Like, what would you. How would, how would a 13 year old act if you gave them a $300,000 Ferrari? They probably crash it. So in this conversation, I'm not here to demonize or shame anyone. Even the pharmaceutical companies. You know, a lot of what they do is not in the highest good. However, a lot of what they do can be in the highest good. You know, with the type 1 diabetes for children, there's many things that save lives. So how do you make sense of where we are now with the big history of the things you've talked about? What is the next step in the evolution of media and how is Stoa creating that specifically?

Yeah, so to, to what you're saying with pharma too, like, I, working in a big pharma company, working at two different ones, there's probably of, you know, the hundreds, if not thousands of people I interacted with, worked with, maybe one person I felt like was disingenuous and like, malicious in his behavior. Unfortunately, that was the person who Trump picked to become leader of the health part of the his cabinet. But, but literally that was it. And everyone else, it just, they didn't seem to see reality. They couldn't see past the consequences. And like, club has a. Has a quote that the two most addict, most dangerous substances are heroin and a salary because they'll make, you know, distort your reality in a lot of ways. And yeah, yeah, I really see that. And I know I keep kind of like beating this in, but. And it's become, to me, I'm so focused on this, and to me, it's become so simple that if we can just change the business model of media and the way that I want to experiment with it, and again, I don't believe, like, truth to me is incredibly fickle. But if we can create systems that reward people, consume to earn, create to earn. So you reward people for their most valuable asset and you also reward creators for building, you know, edutainment, entertaining, educating content that creates community, changes people a lot, people's lives. You know, through podcasts, I have met my best friends, lost 50 pounds, you know, decreased my anxiety, decreased my opportunity for depression. Like, all of this stuff through podcasts, through the communities I've built, I've, like, invested my whole life into this because it's so important when you can have that connection. And then on the reverse side, it's so scary when you start to think about. And I'll finish up the question, I just want to say one thing is that we are giving away this asset, our most valuable asset. So there's time is probably the most valuable. The only thing more valuable than time, because it's finite, it's done when it's done for us, at least in these meat suits, is attention. It's focused time that is the most valuable thing. And when I launched my podcast, I launched them as NFTs. So no ads. The amount of money we made on that first launch, it would have taken 600,000 downloads of like a two minute ad. Right. So 1.2 million minutes. It's like 16 years of collective time. I went down and I broke all of Joe Rogan's advertisements across all of his podcast episodes when he was at, like around 1740 or something. The collective attention of our society that we have spent listening to ads on Joe Rogan's podcast, like 66,000 years. And Rogan himself has spent almost a year of his life, of his waking hours, recording ads. Assuming he knocked each one out immediately, which you probably had a couple takes, you know, there's always more takes than one. Yes. Like, I wish people could just, you know, wake up a little bit to realize that this is not free. In fact, it's more expensive than $5 a month. Like, far more expensive. So what we're trying to do in one of the experiments, I don't know if this is the right answer. This comes with a ton of other externalities, just as any piece of change does. But at least this incentive, to me, the physics of it is a lot more direct, it's a lot more clear. So I want to build a gamified business model for media. And so what that looks like is when you are a super fan of somebody, you have spent 500, 1,000, 10,000 hours on their content. You know them super well, which is crazy because they don't know you at all, probably, but you know them super well. And that's actually a skill that you have invested time into that should be rewarded. And so how we're doing this is. And this is where our MVP and what I've kind of tested and did a proof of concept for with my podcast is doing this thing called meme farming. So essentially what we're gonna do is if you own an NFT to be able to listen to the live stream of this podcast, you can then compete with all the other people there to find the most fire clips. So you're being rewarded by knowing their content, knowing what's likely to go viral. And this is what I did for Aubrey too. Right. Like, I got so into Aubrey, I then tried to pick the content that would go the most viral on Instagram. I would find those clips the exact moment where it started, get the goat going at the beginning, which is kind of like this thing where it draws people in and then you do the music and then now we go through the whole quit quote, quote, building it to the desire of the platforms that we're on, optimizing all of that stuff. I was a skill. I built and I was paid for it. But fans can actually go and you can open source this. So you will no longer need this team to build these clips for you because. Sorry, guys.

Because I'll need you in some way.

Yes, yes, there will be room for everyone because you can open source to the fans and then the fans can actually then sell those as NFTs. And now you guys, instead of it being adversarial in nature, instead of you selling the fans information, content, even sincerely, but like, that's the transaction that's going on, they now face the same way you do. They have an incentive to grow your show, to be your marketing arm. Because if your show gets bigger, if more people listen, if more people join the tribe, the value of things they own goes up in value. So that's like our MVP concept. We want to also do like a prediction market on content. This gets a little dicey. You know, there's a lot of. It just sounds really fun to me, like a fun experiment. But I want people to be able to bet on what's going on in a podcast.

Yes.

Okay.

So I can think about who's listening right now. So there's someone maybe in Alabama, and they're on a walk and they have two kids and their greatest pain point in life is that they don't sleep well, they're stressed out, and they also have maybe a scarcity around money. What would a beginning step for an audience member of a podcast they believe in, of a movement and a mission that they feel in their heart is worthy of helping humanity. What would that actually look like? Like, what would that look like from a starting place for this person with the kids and the stress and everything?

For sure.

How do they actually get involved in that?

Yeah. So going to like the MVP portion of it, right? Let's say, you know, super fan walking through Alabama, two kids, like, let's say struggling to sleep. You drop some knowledge. They. They do it. Let's say they do your breath workhorse. And then they all just, all of a sudden you're like, more balanced, able to sleep better. They hear, they're like, now this next day, you're on a live stream. They're there, they're listening. They hear. You start to talk about what that meant, right? Like how to do it. As you're talking about, they go mint. And then the ends, they pay you a minting fee. So you just got that section they now own. It goes to their wallet. You just like received some money for it, and it's something affordable, something for whatever you Want to set. It's whatever you, few bucks, whatever you as the creator decide.

Got it.

It'll be, it'll depend on how big your audience is really. Because then it gets competitive because we're not going to like, we're going to do competition based. But that moment, let's say then, you know, a year later, after doing your breath work, his life has fundamentally changed. No doubt he can sleep better, lost 50 pounds, better sex with his wife or husband, loves his kids more, more present. And he can go back and he can, you know, have it on a screen in his house and like, this is the clip that changed my life. I own it now. He's telling all his friends, sharing the clip with people, it's helping change people's lives. All of a sudden, your audience at the time, as he's talking about, as everybody's Talking about it, 10xs, 20xs, 30xs, somebody offers him, let's say you paid $100 for it. Somebody offers them $1,000 for it. He's like, no, this is the most important clip to me. Your audience keeps growing, keeps growing. Sonny gets $20,000 offer, he sells it. You get 7% of that sale every time he goes. Now, not only did that podcast change his life from his actions and his time, and he actually took the knowledge, embodied it, used it, then it changes his financial life as well, because he's being rewarded more than just for the education, it's for consuming the content, Becoming an avid consumer, you should be paid for that because you're giving up your most valuable asset.

To me, that seems very practical. I think it's brand new, though, you know, the web, 3O space and NFTs and crypto, a lot of these things. The majority of the population, I don't know what the percentages are, but they don't really know about them. They've heard of them. Maybe they've seen a quick YouTube video here and there. But for someone to actually get involved in 3.0 and in NFTs and really start to understand this digital world that's coming, I mean, it's coming. We actually, we need to embrace it. And I say that we really need to embrace it. I love nature more than anything. I love holding my son, going for a walk, being with Carrie, cold plunging, these, these are all things that they don't need monetization because we just, you know, inherently are drawn to them as a human species. However, there is a wave coming and many people might argue that it's already here. I know it Feels like it's here for me with the community that I run in. Talk a little bit about because you gave us some pretty good starting steps for what it would be like to own an NFT for a podcast and have a clip, change your life and then have that financially incentivize you. For me, that seems like a win win right now. People support the show by buying organic products and healthy products with integrity. But I could see that, I could see there being a parallel life for this as we move more towards this NFT ownership space where someone does maybe both, maybe they're buying some integrity based products that they already use anyways that help their health and they're starting to gain financial resources from the NFT model. Talk a little bit about 3.0 NFT and crypto and blockchain. Those are all huge, those are all huge podcasts of their own. But take those four things and just combine them because I really love the way you think, think about this stuff. 3.0 NFTs, crypto and blockchain. How does that relate to media on the road ahead?

Yeah, I just like how podcasts are using the advertising model and it's fine for now. I think it's the best. It's the best there is in media.

It's much better than tv. I don't know, I don't know who's.

Radio, tv, all of it, everything.

People still listen to radio. I'm like, who are these people?

Yeah, dude, okay, like much better. But as we build these more centralized podcast networks, like the influence of advertising will increase. I was at this Ethereum conference like two months ago and Sandbox VR, one of the most well funded metaverses. Sorry, Sandbox, not Sandbox VR is a different company. Sandbox, one of the most well funded metaverses. The co founder was describing it, how they built it, blah, blah, blah. And then in the section of it, they had culture and the whole culture was all brands. That's what they defined culture as. So I'm really afraid, like web3 is the opportunity to build a new business model. So let's just get like super clear, what does web3 mean? So one of my favorite memes to describe this was Web one was email. Like you go to a website, you log in with your information, everyone. Web2 is social, so you log in with a social account. Web3 is where you actually own your information, own your day, and you log in with your wallet. So like a metamask or a talisman.

Which is just for people that don't know A wallet is where you store your crypto.

So right now, wallets, where you store your crypto, your NFTs, blah blah blah. Right. It's a unique address that you only you have access to self storage. Storage self contained. You can do a physical wallet, so it's like a little USB drive or you can have browser based wallets which again they interact with the blockchain, the private keys that you have, you only have access to that logs you into your wallet. That's it. Big fan of Talisman. We did a podcast with the founder of Talisman, he's done two it's really cool ux but what that allows you to do and how this really changes media is now you own every interaction you have with advertising. So what does that mean? So like right now when you go to any site, basically any site in the world that's selling a product, you are being pixeled, you are being tracked. And unless you have DuckDuckGo and you can go and see all the ways you're being pixeled and cookied and monitored, you have no idea and you're not receiving anything for it.

And Pixel just means they can track you by your IP address.

Yeah. So Pixel is Facebook's tracking mechanism. Basically it attaches an ad, it detracts your IP address. Every website you go to, how long you go to it, to how you've interacted with Facebook ads, which then gives data back to creators to say when did they or to brands to say when did they convert? And that's you're being tracked on everything you go to. Apple just did this thing. The biggest move that has ever happened in advertising basically is they auto untoggled your ability to give ad data. So on Apple, so when it first came in it was, it was automatically on. About a year ago they made it automatically off. Facebook was like $231 million short or something of their projected earnings in Q1 this year. Largely a large part was because of that brands are struggling to be able to hit what they could get before because of just Apple auto untoggling as opposed to having it auto on.

How do you feel about that from a moral perspective what Apple did?

I love it. I personally love it. Yeah, because like we should choose to be tracked. And this is where web3 you have to accept and sign, verify that you accept something interacting with your wallet, something tracking you if you will. So right now it's just for holding coins. But what it can actually be is oh, you want to interact with me, you want to know my wallet Address. You want to know what NFTs I have? You want to know my name, you want to know my email? Pay for it. I'll like accept if you give me, you know, 0.1 Bitcoin or 0.1 Ethereum is probably more realistic. That'd be an expensive accept. But like, that gives you the opportunity to start to pay, receive money for what you're consuming. So you stop being the product and the product you use starts being the product. Okay, so then let's go take it back one step. So that's what web3 is. Right? So then let's go into NFTs. What are NFTs? NFT is the biggest buzzword in the world right now. It's funny because I'm in the space. I tend, I try not to be a part of like scenes or like in like too much of a, of a bubble. The bubble just popped. So I'm talking in a big bear market right now, which just makes me feel better, to be honest. I'm just writing a hype train. But when Lee Kuan Yew, the guy who created Singapore, he brought it from a third world nation to a first world nation in 20 years. He had insane race issues. Three different languages equally spoken across the country. Insane race issues. Like we in the United States, and I'm not trying to belittle anybody's experience with racism, but we have no comprehension of how intense racism is in Asia. Like you any, if you have like a Japanese friend or a Filipino friend, you go like, rank the Asians, they will have it immediately and everyone will be different. As in each, each ethnicity tends to rank ones differently. Obviously usually put yourself first. Actually you'd be surprised how many of like Southeast Asians don't put themselves first. But it's tragedy. So Lee Kuan Yew is dealing with all of these issues. There were slums and what he did, he was like, you know what we need to do in order to get people to believe in Singapore to take pride in their community? We need to give them property rights. And so he made, he subsidized housing in the sense of made housing really cheap. Help subsidize it so people could buy clean housing. But again, buy. It's not like the housing projects in the United States which are rented buy. And what that did, like that single decision giving property rights to people completely shifted how people interacted, took care of the streets. Singapore is one of the cleanest places in the world. Yeah, they have like one or two draconian measures around cleanliness. Like no gum and stuff. But it wasn't just that. And that happened in the United States as well when we did a huge push to get people to buy housing. And that's why so many government programs do, you know, first time home buyers, 5% down, all this stuff. Because when you own something, you have property rights to it, you care about it, you take more care of it, it's yours. It's not just something, it's not just this thing. I'm a leased.

Yeah.

What an NFT does is it's the property rights of the Internet. It is that level of shift because go Back to Web 1.0. It was mostly, it was like right now where we are with Web3, right. It was mostly people who were hackers, developers, computer scientists on the web. They wrote the code, they owned the code. It felt janky, it felt clunky, but it was theirs. And they built this. And it was open, open forum, open season, Any, any discussion. Wild, wild, wild west, right? The Internet was this birthplace of freedom, of freedom of speech. Across the globe, Web two comes in, they build up these massive platforms, they give it to you for free, paid for by advertising, paid for by your attention. You're being sold. They build these beautiful UXS apps all over this like inherent awesome technology. And it almost became something more akin to communism because you don't own anything you produce, you don't own your content at all. Zero of it. You can be kicked off immediately, you can be taken down. You don't make money on it directly. You have to sell advertising either through your own content or they'll put you on an ad platform. You get, you know, at most like, YouTube's probably one of the best ones. And I mean, they're still taking over 50% of the revenue.

Well, and also we, we have been. I had a YouTube expert look at our channel. We have been shadow banned.

Yeah, yeah.

So we've done all we can.

Yeah.

And because of the topics we explore, it's like we, we are actually looking elsewhere. Of course, I'm still interested in growing YouTube because it reaches people where they are and what they need. But we have been shadowbanned. And shadowbanned isn't something you can wave a flag and be like, I'm shadowbanned. There's a complex algorithm that in this Web 2.0 experience, all of us are on YouTube, whether the app on the phone or on the browser. And it really is a sinister system where the advertisers are the ones that win. And also YouTube, YouTube wins too.

YouTube wins huge, bro. YouTube's one of the big Google. Google biggest app, like probably biggest advertisers in the world, right? Like Crush. They make so much money. It's one of the most profitable, like companies of all time. And yeah, dude, I mean I remember telling you, like, I didn't even need to go like go deep in it to know you'd been shadow banned because you had, you know, an Instagram. Your Instagram photo had a little ring like, not vaccine, not vaccinated. Anti vaxxer, something like that, right. I'm like, dude, yeah. You know who the biggest advertiser in media is, right?

Sure.

So why would you be allowed to exist? Like, they don't even have to look at your content. They just do a fucking image search. And it's like, does he ever have anti vax? And it's like, oh, it's a photo. Boom. Yeah, you're not going to be showed to a lot of people.

Clear. I'm not anti vax. I'm pro human sovereignty. Right. So if somebody feels like they want to get a vaccine, that's their decision. I'm not anti vax for sure. I'm really just.

I think it was like not vaccinated.

Was like, well, what I said was I'm proudly unvaccinated.

Yes, yes.

It really just sparked the conversation of Choice for sure.

100.

You would not be surprised how in that web two experience, how many warnings were put on my call? Yes, dude, the views went down by like 10,000 at the time. So 10,000 people? Less.

Yes.

For a post or for. Or for a clip where we're not seeing the content. I mean that is so wild to me. Yet I choose, I make a conscious choice to play in the web 2.0 space, which is why you're here.

There's no other options. We don't have any other options.

That's why we want to learn from you. Like how do we. How do I as a creator and how do us as a community get involved consciously in the web 3. Oh, space.

Yeah. So I've been thinking a lot. So again, it's not just Web3 because Web3 is going to advertising. It goes to this business model. What Web3. The vision of Web3 is a new business models without middlemen. That's the vision. Like that's the goal. That's the ideal. It's still early days if it's going to be realized or not. Like I could. I see a future in the next 10 years where like all of the altcoins just go to nothing and it's just bitcoin again. And at least we got the financial system figured out. The cool thing about Polkadot, about Ethereum, about some of these other changes, it builds this media layer on top of it that I think if we can change that business model again, we'll change. We'll change the world. How people get involved in this. And I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been writing this idea. It's like how like an. A propagandist view to like avoid propaganda. I don't like the anti term. Like I try not to be anti anything. Yes.

You were going to build a guide, the propaganda's guide to protecting yourself on propaganda.

Yes, yes. And so that's something I'm still going to pro. Like I'm working on it.

Okay, great.

Yeah, yeah, that'd be a good place.

To, to start, y'.

All.

We'll link that in the notes when this comes out.

Yeah, that'd be sick. Um, and then it'll probably end up probably just be a podcast because I'm like doing the podcast more, but I should probably write it too. Cause that obviously can get spread a lot more.

Or you can get it transcribed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with anything. And I think you've probably talked about this at length because it's very important for, for health. But just like with that mindset, I think fasting is one of the greatest things that you can do. For what? Right? Is it gonna like cure cancer is gonna do this? No, no. When I say fasting, I don't even mean fasting from food. I mean fasting from anything. The reason why is because when you fast, you force yourself to become more aware of what you consume, whether it be food media. So where I have people start is I say do an advertising fast without changing your behavior. See how long you can go without seeing, hearing, viewing an advertisement. People think a 24 hour food fast is hard. I mean, I think some people do. But this is impossible. The only way you will escape is if you don't have your phone on. Don't listen to anything. You're in the woods because the moment you walk down your door and drive down the street, you've seen a few ads.

Yeah. Even in the peripheral.

Even in the peripheral, like, which are.

Designed at an angle. People don't know this, but these ads that are on roads and the ads that are on billboards and Times Square is the worst.

All these Big Time Square is sickening.

It is literally one of the most funded Visual experiments that we've ever been involved in and people don't even know it's there. People just assume that if you glance then it's not absorbing. It's the same thing with pornography. It's the same thing with horror films. It's the same thing with gender dysphoria, campaigns, the ways in which. I don't know if it's pure evil. I think sometimes people with good intentions can be evil because they feel self righteous and justified in their actions. But a lot of times what happens is even if it comes in for a half second, it still gets stored. Our brain, our body, it's a living library, everything gets stored in there. So whether it's a half second, quarter second, 10 seconds, it's still coming in, it's still coming into our psyche. I can't imagine. I don't know if you've had any students you've worked with or you yourself have tried this fast from advertising. You would essentially just have to be blindfolded and then put out in nature. I mean, is that, is that the only way?

Yes. So it really is. So like first thing, cultivate awareness, right, because. And it's more of an experiment that's meant to fail because you become aware of how fast, how immediately you lose. It's impossible. And I don't think we should go, I'm a futuristic, I'm big in technology. I don't think we should all go live in the woods alone. Henry David Thoreau did it for a year that was sick. I learned a lot from it by reading his book. But I think that we are offered in technology so much and there's so much that we can do. So the point of it is go as long as you can time it. This is not a fast you try and do for a day, it's a fast you do for minutes. Like realistically live your normal life and do your best. And like any fast one, I think you know you can have health benefits in any fast that you do for different reasons, whatever your goals are, whichever fast you try to do. But in my mind, the thing that's most valuable of fast is it cultivates awareness. It gives you the opportunity to learn of your patterns that you were not aware of. So that's step one. Step two is now think, okay, how can I build systems around my life that help me with this? So some of the rules I set for myself and I've like worked with people setting is phone on airplane mode until 11. That alone, let's say if you wake up at 7, you now, like every time you sleep, your mind kind of resets. I don't know the science of it, but like you have energy and momentum when you wake up, if you go and immediately to your phone, all you're getting is distractions from what you've set out to do. And you know, maybe you're someone who more thoughtful, creative at night than you are in the morning. Okay, then from seven to when you go to bed, like airplane mode, as much as you can. Because then you start to own your mind again. Because what's going on is you're just being infected with mind parasites. Quick tangent, but this is, this is the moment that I realized how bad it was. Like, again, I've been in this space, done Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, blah, blah, blah.

At the highest level.

At the highest level, the biggest creators in the world. Yeah. And I realized how bad it was, was during the George Floyd riots when everybody did the black squares on Instagram except for the brands. It was every third image. So you went black square, black square at black square, black square ad. And I was like, I knew there's a lot, but my mind just zooms past it. Don't even think about it. Don't realize how many ads I'm being fed. Like, I almost wish we could do a collective blackout again so people could realize what was going on in that moment. That's how much you're being shot with advertising. So again, cultivating awareness. So then what are some tactics other than keeping your phone in airplane mode? The reality is, is you're not going to ever be able to do this fast. It's an impossible fast. How can you build systems to protect your mind, to develop resiliency, and to.

Really take away from the painful aspects of these parasites? The mind parasites.

The mind parasites, yeah. The next thing I do is my homie DK built an app. It's called he's dk, the Human Amazing dude. Absolute legend of a man. He built an app called Hide Feedback. And so when you do need to embrace into any kind of social thing, Facebook, Google, YouTube, your email, whatever it is, any place you would be getting advertisements, you have High Feed, Hide Feed installed as like a web app. When you jump onto your email instead of having. I mean, you probably noticed, but if you have Gmail, there are ads on your Gmail.

No, I use Superhuman.

Let's go Superhuman.

Yeah, Superhuman is the best. And I'm not an affiliate. Yeah, I love it because it's just black and white. No ads. Nothing's being Filtered from my inbox. It's incredible.

I love Superhuman. Great, great company. So what hype does, and it's free, which is sick, but what hype does is when you go to your email, instead of seeing all of your inbox, instead of seeing anything, you see a beautiful photo. And then you can just go, compose, write your email, send it, log out. You go to Instagram, you see nothing. You don't see your feed, you don't see what anybody else has posted. But if you're a creator, you want to put stuff in the world, you go create and you post your post. You go to YouTube, you want to look up a specific video to learn something. You want to watch a specific podcast, and you want to be sold ads or be, like, distracted by the algorithm. It's all blank. It's just a beautiful photo of an amazing, calming scene. It changes all the time. Sometimes it'll say, what do you want to do today? What's your goal? You can write that there and it'll. Then you can go. And you can post your YouTube video, or you can go specifically to the one you want to see. So again, every time that you log onto a social site, including email, you are being fed stuff that you didn't ask for. It doesn't have to be as like, it doesn't have to be advertising. It's what somebody else wants from you. Yeah, that's what it is. You create this stress response of like, oh, I need to do this. Which puts you into a more stressed state and keeps you away from your task. Like, the most human thing we can do is create art. Like, do the hardest thing. And you need focus to be able to do that. So what this does, it allows you to control your detention. And what this really does and what I'm in the guide, I'll go deeper, deeper, deeper into this. But what you're really trying to do, because you will not escape advertising with our current model, like, it's going to be 100 years. Even if, like, Stowe is successful as we can be, we're going to start with podcasting, go all the way to tv. Well, I mean, let's be honest. Media is just audio and video combined. So it's not gonna get that hard to get to, like, a YouTube ass thing. Right? But you're gonna have to coexist with. With this model for the rest of your life. Everyone listening to this podcast will have to coexist with this model for the rest of their life. And it's. How do you take your power back and it's by doing these small things. And when you have spent, you know, the first four hours of your day present focused on the things you want to focus on, whether your family or. Or your friends or your art or whatever that is, you just won. You won the day. You have momentum. And now let's say we get onto the Internet, but you use hide feed. And now you're like, sweet. I then creating. I'm watching only the stuff I want. And then you leave your house and you go down. You start to get hit with billboards and all the information. You're listening to a podcast. You hear the ads, like, all coming through to you. But you've already chosen how you wanted to live your life for the majority of that waking day, for those first few moments, first few hours like that is empowerment. And now you're more resilient to and aware of how much shit is coming in. So you can actually be aware of it, because you weren't, from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to bed, fed stuff that you had almost no conscious recognition that you're receiving.

I remember an interview with Dr. Judd Brewer we did, and you're bringing it to my consciousness very strong right now. And he wrote a book called Unwinding Anxiety. And in the book, he talks about, as many behavioral scientists do, the first four or five hours of the day, even if it's two hours of the day, they will not just literally set the tone of your behaviors, but they will cue your nervous system. So if somebody's dealing with anxiety or depression and they do open up the phone right away because they get a little squirt of dopamine, you know, serotonin is being released, all these feel good catecholamines and hormones. It might feel good in that moment, but it is training us to, almost like a frog in water, to be slaves to instant gratification instead of what our ancestors came on this planet to do. I mean, there's so much powerful wisdom when we look back at the ways that our ancestors lived. And of course, not everything they did was perfect. I'm not saying we need to, like, you know, club our women and drag them into a cave and barely cook a steak on a fire. I'm not saying we need to go there, but there is some pretty amazing wisdom when you look at delaying our gratification. Like, I have a cold tank. I have a sauna. I sometimes intermittent fast in the morning. I just like to do hard things and even have tough conversations. Not because I enjoy it. I don't enjoy doing these things all the time. Sometimes I do, but it's because there's a part of me that knows from all these conversations and especially what you're hitting on, that when we train ourselves to delay the gratification, it not only unwinds our anxiety, as Dr. Judd talks about, but it cues the way that our life, the momentum and the waveform of our life is going to be lived out. So this might be seem at first audio or first visual for someone hearing you. Okay, Yeah, I guess I should try, I should try to not do that. Like, no, I challenge everyone. Like, I challenge you guys. For seven days. For seven days, put your phone on airplane mode two hours, three hours, four hours. And then check in with your nervous system. Check in with your nervous system after seven days and realize that you are less likely to be a slave. That in itself, if people take one thing from this show, just take that one thing. Yeah, you know, we don't have to be a slave to this. What are some other ways that we are slaves to propaganda, to advertising that most people don't know about?

So this is another thing that you hit on a little bit earlier, which, where you are being divided is where you're being controlled. It's, it's a very old, old like art of war level manipulation tactic. Divide and conquer, keep divided, keep to keep conquered. So when you notice yourself feeling anti something, when you notice yourself feeling like the person's so dumb, they're so naive, they're so this, they're so wrong, they're so pedophilic. Like whatever you're feeling, you are being conditioned to feel hate towards someone you don't even know, who's probably your neighbor, you probably have more in common with than you have differences. And you're playing into this huge system. Like, this is where we get to the political stuff is that like, realistically, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are very similar. There are two or three topics that on the edges they get really disagreement about. But you are being conditioned to believe that one is immoral and one is moral. And, you know, they each think they are, they each think they aren't. But what you're being done is separated from your neighbors, from the people who you experience life with every day, who you shop at, the same grocery stores you work out with. And you said like, because of some things that you said, you lost family members, business partners because they were captured on this idea that you are a bad thing, you are amoral.

The way I live my life is a health or personal threat to their well being. Which from a logical observer, if we were to zoom out and look at the world, we would obviously say, well, that's simply not true.

It's not true.

Yet it feels true because of the conditioning. Yes.

And this was, this was the very dirty trick that I very much disagree with that happened during the vaccine stuff. And Covid was this idea that if you're vaccinated, the COVID won't spread. Which I read all of the COVID trials because I was, you know, in debate with my mom and my grandma if I was gonna be able to see her, if I was not vaccinated, if I was vaccinated, blah, blah, blah.

Many people went there through this, went through that.

Right. And I have a pharmaceutical background. So like I'm gonna see if I'm gonna take a vaccine, which one am I gonna take? Went through all the trials. One, when you set up a trial, there's no way you would ever do an endpoint that you don't think that you can succeed on because that means you'll fail. So the trials in, when they published the data, what they submitted for their endpoints was death or, or blank on the term. But it's category four adverse effect. That's all they were focusing on. They're trying to reduce category four adverse effects. So hospitalization or death, those are the end points of the trials. That's what was done. And then for some reason the media somehow came up and had all of these talking points and convinced people that. And doctors have come out very, very left leaning doctors have come out and said like that wasn't what they were doing, that isn't what happens. There is like some sort of decreased window because if you're symptomatic less. But it's not like that's a complete null, irrational, non true argument. But what it did is it made people hate their neighbor more because if you don't get vaccinated, you're killing my grandma.

I've seen many articles and we had someone speak on the show about this where a child was feeling so much guilt, they came home to their mom and dad and they said, I feel like I'm going to kill grandma. I mean that's just so sad. It's so sad that a child's mind, I mean it's, it's truly child abuse. It's child abuse to play puppeteer strings on the psyche of such a beautiful soul when really it's purely propaganda.

And it sucks because any society or civilization that Sacrifices the youth to save the old is a sick civilization. No grandma wants to see her son die before her. No mother wants to see their kid. Like, it's natural for us to. It's biological imperative is for our gene to continue, is for the youth to continue on. And we, in the last two years, shifted to a place where it was normalized to sacrifice the youth with a virus that had almost no impact on the youth. We sacrificed them. They lost two years of education, two years of, you know, especially young kids like visual recognition, emotion on people's faces. And this hit the poorest one of my. My pledge. So one of my best friends, he. He's a teacher for. He a teacher for America, so teaches like very underserved people in, In. In Phoenix and listening to his stories when they first went home and his students who went home and him just trying to call the parents, trying to get an education, trying to get them food. It was brutal. Like, we, you know, it's one thing if you work for a tech company and you get to work from home. You're like, why would people ever not go out? Like, what do you mean? Like, don't close the schools. Just go and like, go from home. It's like you, like, there's this idea that, like, the left is this, like, kindness party, this, like, moral party. And it's like you are so afraid that you might get this illness that you are sacrificing all of the things that you say you stand for for this. And like, I probably sound a little bit more heated on this topic than I actually am, because there are just very specific things where I'm like, this is insane. Yeah. Like, we are obviously hurting young people here, and those are the future. And I'm not saying it's right to be like, you know, fuck the old. And like, you know, being rude to your grandma isn't good for sure. But no grandma would want to sacrifice her biological future for something that might kill her.

I saw this graphic from Mike Rowe on Instagram. I don't know if you saw it. They were all wearing diapers. And it was Mike Rowe, who's a very. I mean, he's in the media, and the media is controlled by, I guess you could say, more progressive mindsets. And there was this meme, and we can put it on the screen right now. And he was like, all my friends are wearing diapers because just in case my tenth friend shits himself, I don't want to not wear a diaper. And it made absolutely no sense. But neither did the theater that we went through. And I think below all of this, because I've gone through the gamut sky on this of, like, when it. When it first came, we brought on 15 doctors on the podcast, Zach Bush, three times. Like, we really wanted to expose the truth about the experiment. It's a social experiment. And then I got to this place where. And I kind of reference Hawkins work on this with the emotional frequency scale. I got despair.

Yeah.

Because I was in despair a little bit in early 2020, and I think a lot of us were. I mean, write a comment below this if you were feeling despair. Anger is more powerful than despair on the frequency scale. But, you know, it's even more powerful than anger is acceptance and then compassion. And so I used to see people in cars with masks, and I'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? Three masks, windows rolled up alone.

Yeah.

And now when I see that. And even at the airports, you know, they just release the masks mandates from the airports. It's different. I might feel a little twinge of uncomfortableness, but now I'm just like, I want to go give the person a hug. I want to tell them it's okay. It's not my place to educate them. If they want to listen to the show, they can. But really, that's what we're being called to. And it goes to something you said earlier with the two parties and the divisional conversations, which has fueled the propaganda machine probably since day one, since the 1400s. And I think the solution that I would love for you to expand on is this. What are the practical ways that we can come together as human beings yet still consume content?

Yeah, man. So I honestly almost want to turn this on you a bit, because I feel like you might be more tapped into the answer, but it's exactly what you said. So start from, let's say this, like, first principle of where you were taught to hate your neighbor, where you're being compelled to hate your neighbor. That's where you're being controlled. So hate. So you mentioned Zach Bush earlier. I got the, like, don't want to be anti anything from him because it makes so much sense. Because you wit when you're on that. You know, the Dawkins, Hawkins.

The Hawkins.

Sorry, I always do. Richard Dawkins and then David Hawkins.

Totally different guys.

Completely different guys. When you look at that scale, like, it makes so much sense, and that's, you know, more in the spiritual sense, but it's like you're. When you are being compelled to feel an emotion, especially if It's a lower frequency emotion, like you're being sickened. And so you have to use all the tools that, like we talked about earlier, in order to avoid that, to control your mind, to defeat the mind parasite. But more than that, and this is where I want to turn it, turn it to you is, you know, how do you go from a place where that person in the car doing something that you see as ridiculous, how do you go from a place of judgment, anger, to love, to acceptance? Because that is the challenge. That is how we overcome this mind parasite. And that is how, you know, you heal yourself and then can help heal the world. Like, that's how we have this conscious awakening. And it's not. That's why I say, like, I'm not going to think that we're going to destroy the advertising model. I want to build an option that's better, that hopefully will win over time. And this becomes a thing of the past. But I'm not coming from it like anti advertising.

Yeah. You know, what comes to me is this metaphor of push and pull. If I am climbing a trail and someone needs help, it's much easier for me to pull them up on the trail. It takes less of my energy reserve. It's compassionate in nature, but when I push someone up a trail, it takes more of my resources. I'm kind of forcing their path and I'm also sacrificing my own energy systems. So the big one for me is, how do I just go up to that person? Maybe I see them when we get at the airport. Maybe I see them at a baggage claim or something, and I'll just look right into their eyes. And I would just say, you having a good day? How you doing today? Where are you flying? Just something that lets them know that even though they might be in the 3% or 2% of people in that airport that are double masked and maybe they're wearing gloves, who knows? There's a part of them that is in fear. And that's coming from my awareness, not my judgment. I'm not here to say your mask wearing is wrong. What you're doing is wrong. How dare you. Of course, some of that remnant still lives within me, but it's up to my, first of all, mental faculty and my connection to my head and heart. And this is what Hawkins talks about. A lot of the biggest space for all of us is this space between our head and our heart. So if I can consciously be aware of closing that space and not being a victim of my own intellect or my mind Then I can come to Nancy or Joe at the airport and I can just be kind to them for a moment. Just be kind to them for a moment. Maybe they have children with them. When I got back from the vision quest the very first year, there was all this mask wearing. This is in 2021. And I took off my mask at security like I always do, and I walked to my terminal, no one says anything. And I'm sitting there and this woman's wearing a mask and her child is playing and her child is tugging on my backpack and my heart was blasted wide open. I had just done a ten day quest with four days of fasting in nature with ego dissolving practices. I mean, I was raw and I looked at her and I said, oh, you have such a beautiful daughter. And she's like, yeah, I wish I could take this mask off. And I just looked right at her and I said, you can, you can take it off. But I wasn't like, you could take it off.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, because the come from is the most important for sure. So how do we build unity back with ourselves?

If.

If something is angering me so much that I have to project that anger onto someone because they should do something different based on a belief set that I hold, well, then I don't really believe in my belief set because my way of being and my beliefs is 20,000 times more potent than me projecting what I believe this person should do based on how they're being. And I really think we all just deserve a big deep breath, which is why I focus on breath work so much. We just did a 25 person breathwork, breathless prayer facilitation at Paleo FX here in Austin. And out of the 25 people, I want to say like 12 to 15 people had massive crying and catharsis. And there was a couple in their 70s that had never done in their 60s that had never done breath work before. And they were saying how open their heart felt. And this is what we need in the world. We need to breathe. We need to have conversations where maybe we disagree, but we practice the art of listening. And I'm not trying to get you to believe what I believe. I'm actually just using. Really, what this boils down to is nonviolent communication. And the core aspects of the nonviolent communication is that I, first of all, I'm listening, I'm present, I record either on a notepad or just from my own memory, and I reflect back to the person what they said to me so that they feel Heard for first two steps. Then I give them empathy. I say, wow, that must be really challenging for you to feel so scared that your own immune system can't protect you, that you need a diaper on your face, or that you need a piece of cloth to feel safe. Like, and I truly mean this, like, I have compassion for you, that you feel that your immune system can't protect you. And then from there, we offer some kind of healing practice or, hey, would you be open to doing breath work? Or maybe they're not open to that at all. But the final phase of nonviolent communication is where you just say, well, did I hear everything clear enough? Or is there anything more that you want to share? And then that's it. If we practiced nonviolent communication as a humanity, first of all, all the government systems would fall because there's no such thing as nonviolent communication in government. And then secondly, on a societal level and city and even interpersonal, how I speak to myself, can I practice nonviolent communication with myself? That's a huge. That's what journaling is, by the way. Journaling is nonviolent communication to yourself. So that's, I think, how we begin. And then I'll flip this back to you. When it comes to consuming content, how do we consume content? With that same lens. With that same lens of nonviolent communication. How do we do that? I have some ideas, but I'm curious how you feel.

Yeah, so that's a very difficult task because the whole content model is built so that you do it the opposite of that. Right. They want you to feel fear and divided.

They want the comments to flood with negativity. That's what goes. Grows the algorithm.

And then more eyeballs and more response.

It's fucking wild.

And you buy shit when you're afraid. Like, it makes you feel better when you consume. That's like the basis. Right. So we started the first principles getting all the way to here. There's a lady I know, you know her name. She wrote the work. Katie something. Byron.

Katie.

Byron, Katie. Yes. So Byron, Katie, the work. First question is, is this true? How do I know this to be true?

Second question, do you 100% know that it's true?

Yes. And that's. That's the thing is I really believe, like, truth is so fickle.

Yeah.

The odds of what you think is true actually being true at the fullest level of the word true is very little in anything. And this is where. This is where I do love decentralized concepts and ideas because we don't know what the future holds. So if we walk with a hubris as if we are right, like you can believe something. I love the quote. It's by VC Mark Andreessen. Like, strong opinions held loosely. Like, you have to have a strong opinion to navigate the world for yourself. You don't have to have strong opinions for what other people doing to navigate the world. And if you actually think you do and you think you are right for whatever reason with knowing nothing about that person other than what they're wearing on their face. You know what I mean? Like, you are acting in hubris and you're being anti something. So it's like the key really is when you become aware and you think that you know something to be true because you know you're scrolling and you see, you know, on the right, you see that I'm not in politics, so I can't really even know what would be. But something that irks you, gets you. Like really versus Wade conversation. Yes, that on both sides, right? Like both sides are pretty, pretty heated on that. And you feel like, oh, they're so dumb. They don't know. I feel so hurt by this. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And just go through the, you know, the work, ask yourself those questions. But again, you can only be in a mindset to do that if you haven't been conditioned from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. That this is reality.

Yes.

That your feed that you have constructed, has been constructed for you by advertisers is reality. Because that's what you're doing when you step out of it is you're actually claiming reality back to your experience that's not being propagandized like on yourself. And that will allow you, when you do choose, interact with it, to have the space and the grace. Like, oh, that made me feel something. Why? Oh, I believe this to be true. Do I know true? Well, I think it's true. Oh, maybe I could do more research. Maybe I could go a little bit deeper as opposed to like, well, they didn't read that one quote by that one person. Or they don't realize that Roger Stone, like, built lobbying. Like, they don't know this, this, this and that. It's like, but what do you know? And if you get to the basis and you get all the way down and you're like, I believe that this is a negative in the world. This is an evil in the world, and I believe there's a way to fix it. Again, you don't be anti evil. You do it through love.

A big piece of this too is being prepared for when you practice the NVC or when you practice Byron Katie's work or any system. I mean, a lot of different emotional intelligence professionals have different ways of, I guess you could say, guiding yourself through a conversation with love. And we have to be prepared as people that are practicing the art form of that to receive immediate rejection. Yeah, because that's the only thing that's going to stand the test of time. If you look at anything in nature, it has to go through storms. Look at what happens to a tree. And I always go back to nature. Algorithm, not algorithms. I always go back to metaphors in nature because man, nature is so wise and like you said, it's so efficient. Look at any living organism in nature. It always has to withstand outside brute forces so that it can grow, so that it can evolve and become the different 2.0, 3.0 species that it is. We're the same way. We're nature. You're half beast and half spirit. So we have to be able to have courage to that aspect. And I think a lot of times we, we lose our courage because we're not tending to our own garden. So if I'm not sleeping, if I'm not eating, if I'm not breathing, if my life is constant stress, if I'm not unwinding my anxiety, the best place to start is where you are. And the best place to start where you are is typically in community. We're not meant to do this on our own. And so I really am excited about what the potential of 3.0 could be. I know you say you don't know exactly what it's going to be and maybe none of us do, but the way that we can control our own data and we can be more sovereign, that to me is exciting.

It's a complete shift. Right? So one of the, again, the property rights shift, it's just complete shift of how we interact on the Internet. You were talking about violence earlier and like, you know, if we had perfect nonviolent communication, we wouldn't need governments. One thing that's crazy in connection with web3 is focus more on Bitcoin. We've essentially been in World War I since World War I. Like it's just been continually going. It's very rare. Like the Hundred Year War was like a very long war. It was like so big that it was this huge long thing. But it's very, very rare. And the reason it's rare that we have these continuous wars forever is because historically the rulers who were the people who were actually at war, right. It wasn't really the people who were at war, they run out of money because there was a limit because money was gold. Like they couldn't get any more, so they couldn't keep funding it until World War I. We start to break the gold standard and money becomes fiat. And now it's unlimited money. We can finance a war forever. And that's what we've been in my entire life we've been in war is a huge argument. It's a bit of like a tongue in cheek comment, but it's an argument. They've been world war since World War I. Like Hitler would have never happened if World War I didn't happen, if World War I wasn't perfectly financeable. And that's where having hard money, something like Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a little bit better than gold because it's honestly more transferable. It's easy. You can send a billion dollars in two hours across the globe. But that changes the ability for these huge governments to have this massive monopolization on violence that they can fund indefinitely and fund by taxing us through inflation. So that is a huge part of it. Right? Just like how that happened. And that's how Bitcoin solves that. That's where I think NFTs property rights solve the media aspect of this war.

So NFT's non fungible token. Fungibility is.

Fungibility is the ability to change one thing for one thing. So one US dollar is worth the same as one US dollar.

Yeah.

So a non fungible would be this US dollar is different than this US dollar which doesn't exist, you know, so Bitcoin, perfectly fungible. Every bitcoin is a Bitcoin. Every point 1. Bitcoin is a point 1 Bitcoin Ethereum perfectly fungible. And NFT is a non fungible. So you and I are non fungible humans, right? So like, I mean you're you. Our spirits maybe are fungible, I don't know. But like we're non fungible. Like there's just one you and me. So fungible. That's the difference. And again with that individuality then creates the right to property.

And from that place there can be true sovereignty. And I think, I think the real big push against Bitcoin or maybe just blockchain and crypto is that people don't understand it. And there is a massive informational war to slander blockchain technology and to slander bitcoin specifically from people that hold the most assets in fiat currency, like the Warren Buffetts. I remember Warren Buffett a few years back. He was like, bitcoin is rat poison. And I was like, well, what do you think the dollar is? The dollar ain't anything better. The dollar is arsenic. Then bitcoin is not rat poison. I invest some of my portfolio in bitcoin, right. Because I operate in the FIAT world, as we all do. But I think it's really important that everybody listen to the interview right below this. It was with Robert Breedlove that we had on the show and it was absolutely mind blowing. He went into the entire history of fiat currency, Rome and even like seashells and taxation and the Tea act and all these different things. And what I took away from that most was the power of NFTs and blockchain and all this new technology is that it is essentially, and you tell me either all of it is impossible to crack or to be plagiarized or to be infiltrated. Like it's military grade. It's actually beyond military grade encryption for the blockchain. And also it allows people to be sovereign and have ownership of real, actual things of real estate, not just houses. But, you know, if you own part of my podcast, like you own it forever, you've bought a piece of that.

Yeah.

Is it really uncrackable? And how does it, how does it, how does it operate from a security perspective? Because I think that's what most people are afraid of and I think that's what most of the fiat based ads are pushing against, is Bitcoin is not trustable. It can be cracked and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So thus far it has not been cracked. There's some arguments that quantum computing might be able to, to do it. Everything is crackable though, and it has been cracked. So kind of a contradiction, but it has been cracked in the sense of like, I'm going to brute force crack this. It's cracked in the sense of violence can crack anything. So I have a gun, I'm in your house, give me your wallet, give me your wallet, give me your keys.

Give me your cold wallet.

Yeah, yeah. So everything is crackable. Okay, but, and this is where, why I think it's such a pivotal change in, in the reality is one of the major innovations of bitcoin, outside of the hard money, outside of the supply velocity, like outside of all of that stuff, is it is a transparent system competing against an opaque system. And so if you can get the knowledge to be able to read blockchain data. You can see who has money and who's giving it to people. So a realistic example of this is recently an NFT project launched. And it was doing super well, which was sick for them. Super stoked. But I was like, it was literally the worst day in crypto in a long time, maybe ever. And it's specifically for NFTs. It was awful. Things are not good and it's crushing. So I was like, oh, is this real? So I went and looked through the data and I went back to see which wallets were actually purchasing these NFTs. And then I went back to see where did those wallets get those NFTs. And then I kept going, get that, get, get that. Ethereum. Kept going back, kept going back just to see if I could find a wallet associated with the creator to see if he was inflating it. And I couldn't, but I had the ability. It's not a very hard skill to develop, to just go back, go back, go back and see, like, you know, at least three or four wallets back. Was this person, like, pumping their own stuff, which is cool. Like that. That transparency allows for people to see reality clearer. Most of the financial system in the world is done behind a very opaque wall. So imagine like we're now in a bitcoin world and we see that the US Government wallet or the China wallet. Let's go with the China wallet. Goes to the UT wallet. I just, I just did a podcast with this guy, Joshua Eisenman. He was essentially fired, basically was not given tenure. His wife lost funding in what should have been like a very much just check mark getting funding for a third year in a research document because he was building a new China center on campus. He was working, writing books, teaching, and heard through the great find. There's this UT alumnus who spoke Chinese very tight with a lot of China stuff. And he could help him get funding. He gets. He goes to him, is like, yeah, you can help me do this. Like, I don't have time for this. Like, I want the center to exist. Would love your help, guys. Like, cool. Yeah, I got $2 million for us. And he's like, this is amazing. We're doing it. And he's in China. He goes to watch this guy speak. And while he's speaking, he's seeing there's like CCP party flags. There are people that he knows are heavily affiliated with the CCP there. He's like, this is not ideal. Goes and talks to him he's like, stop asking where the money's coming from. It's fine. Fast forward a few months. They're at ut. They have an event to start, like, kick off what's going on. There are Chinese. There's CCP people there. The professors tell the students, the Chinese students, like, be careful of what you say. It's not safe here. Again, they're in America, at a college campus in the heart of Texas. Be careful of what you say. It's not safe here. Censoring people who come here to get an education. Joshua was like, we can't accept this money. It's associated with the ccp. The dean of the school goes on this rampage to discredit him, to say that he's racist. He's this. These guys. His wife's Chinese. He's straight up, like, basically Marxist. And he's just like. They're just taking him through the ringer. Somehow it gets to Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz writes a letter to the president of UT saying this money comes from there. The whole funding gets washed. But he is dragged through the mud associated with Ted Cruz, which he does not associate with. And for a professor in a university to be associated with Ted Cruz is not a good place to be. You know, universities tend to lean a little left. And he doesn't get funding, loses his livelihood. So does his wife. Luckily, they get a job at Notre Dame. He's now a professor at Notre Dame. His wife's the assistant dean of the political science school at Notre Dame. You know, all is well that ends well for them. But that happens where the CCP does this thing called the United Front. They send money through all of US institutions, through the Confucius center, and they are now on the grounds, in our education system. And it just goes under the radar because people would rather have the $2 million than have the ability to speak openly.

I'm going to defer the audience to listen to the Mental Playground podcast with you because you cover a lot of very controversial, and I know you do deep research on these topics when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party. But just give us, as we round out the show, just give us a starting point as to the three things we should know about the Chinese Communist Party acting in America.

So there's one podcast I do that was about January 6th, and it's not about what happened in the United States. It's what happened in Hong Kong, which is a story nobody's ever heard. And essentially three things happened leading up to January 6th. The first thing is they enacted a national security law, 26 years ahead of schedule. So essentially what that meant is Chinese law now applied to Hong Kong law, and judges couldn't make interpretations of the law. It had to be done in mainland China, essentially making it under Chinese law. So it's happening at the beginning of COVID It's in June, 12 days later, and on that day. The New York Times has their top 10 things that happened that day. That's not one of the things wasn't even in the top 10. You search the news that day. What you get, mostly other other news organizations do have it in the top 10, but it's like 7 or 8, 9, 10. The number one thing that day across all news organizations is it was the day that the St. Louis couple, the white St. Louis couple, was like defending their house from the BLM protesters.

And then right below that was Kim Kardashian's new lipstick line.

Literally.

Yeah, like full on really important stuff.

Yeah. Not this. So that happens 11 days later. The Democratic faction of the Hong Kong party, they hold a informal primary, which under the national security law is legal. So they try to just have their voice be heard. These are acting legislators. This is the literal government of Hong Kong. They hold an informal primary. The reason they do that is because they're like, we need to get at least 35. The Hong Kong legislation is 70 seats. They need to get at least 35 so that they can do the same, do some mutual assured destruction. Essentially. They go out and vote 610,000 people. It's like 13% of the population, voting population of Hong Kong during a time where it's illegal for them to participate in this. They can go to jail. Covid, which they took very seriously, is fervent. It's like the peak times, the most hysteric, even in the United States, we were hysteric about it then. And they go out in 13%, but in person go through these things. So then January 6, 2021, the night before everything happened, the Capitol. Oh, in that day, Roger Stone was commuted by Trump. The day they had the actual election. And then. And Ghislaine Maxwell is given like a 5 billion dollar bond for her to leave prison, which is like hilarious. So, and that's all over the years. Again, New York Times, it's not even mentioned. And then on January 6, essentially what goes down is they go in and they arrest every person who participated at a leadership level in this. Thousand police officers, defense, descent. They don't have option to bail. All of the people who were going to run all in jail. And since then, Hong Kong has completely fallen. It's 100% Chinese taking over now. And all these restricted laws have been, like, insane. So to answer your question specifically, why is that important? How is it relevant to us? Truth, the vehicle of truth, the news of what's important today, Whatever their slogan is today slogan is, they didn't mention these things. It wasn't in their top 10 breakdown of what happened in the news that day. You know, NBA tweets about Taiwan shut down, they boycott the NBA. Like, horrible stuff. Zed liked that tweet. His tour is canceled. This is something that I'm sure people are familiar with because Rogan talks about all the time. John Cena says Taiwan has to fervently apologize in Chinese. Our media system is funded by advertisers. We see China as this beautiful money pit to buy our products. And we know the CCP is fickle and can easily turn that off. So the news that you're receiving is funded by this idea of how much power the CCP has in your life. And I want to be super clear. I am obsessed with Asia. Most of my, like, a lot of my close friends are of Asian descent, either Chinese nationalists, Japanese nationalists, or immigrants.

Part of your childhood or adolescence was in Asia.

I grew up in Hawaii, which I see as this, like, mini Asia, right? Because, like, that's the culture that you go into. And I, again, I just did a podcast on it with it kind of tongue in cheek is like, I identify as Asian. I don't identify with any of the. Any of the. Of the struggles they have gone, had to gone, go through in America. And it is crazy. Like, my teachers, parents, in my dad's lifetime, my teachers in. When I was in Hawaii, their parents were put in internment camps in the United States. So, like, it is. I'm not claiming any of that victim ness, Like, I don't have any of that. Right. The things that I do, though, is it is a culture that I've always loved. I convinced my parents to send me to China for the first time in fourth grade. They came. They hated it. I loved every second of it. We were there for three weeks. I didn't want to leave seventh grade. I convinced my parents to send me to Japan. I flew alone as a seventh grader to Japan alone. Met my grandma and my uncle there. Got to stay there for two weeks. Never wanted to leave. Japanese exchange students, every type of food I cook, whatever. It's all that, like, I am obsessed with it. It feels like home to me. And I Like the reason I did this podcast, like, this is what feels like home. So I hate that when we have these narratives and then we have more violence on Asian people in America. Like, that is not what I'm trying to say. Like the ccp. And a huge reason I did this podcast was to say there is a national identity. There are many national identities that are in disagreement with the ccp. And so we have to make sure we're really clean about who is our enemy. And I do not think it is in any way. Chinese people just want to put that asterisk on there. But again, how they're controlling America. They have access to buy into our systems. Man. It comes back down to like again the advertising stuff. What happened to Joshua is like they had funding for this and we just let them do it. And if you have a model where the media model where it's not the creator going to the consumer, but it's the creator going to the advertiser going to the consumer, the advertiser has more influence than the consumer. The advertiser is where who pays. Like what is funding the business, the lifestyle, the existence of the creator. So who does the advertisers client? That's, that's who's upstream of who controls the media.

And upstream is direct interest from the ccp.

Any organization. Like, you know, we have all the Russia stuff, right? They had all these, they bought all these pages, all these bots on Facebook. I can just go in and build this stuff because it's again, there's a lot of freedom in the United States and we can take money from a lot of people, which is awesome. But the fact that it's changing, it's creating mind parasites in how we think and our thought. So like, fantastic. Mr. B stuck just came out the new one. It's the most obvious section where Dumbledore actually being gay is a thing. The first 10 minutes are a very important scene showing the relationship between Dumbledore and the bad dude or whatever his name is. Chinese version that isn't there. Dr. Strange. Huge parts cut off. Because anytime it's Tibet, Tibetan leaders gone. Disney is sacrificing human rights. Like there are three genocides going on in China. There's Tibet, which Xi Jinping is picking the Dalai Lama, he gets to pick it now. Fully controlled. Tibetans went for their protest. Like, let's do a peaceful protest. So the easiest ones, whoop, got him Uyghurs. Then I argue that North Korea is a, is a CCP funded holocaust as well. So yeah, I go super deep into that stuff. But it all comes down to media. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the reason I asked you about that, and it might be uncomfortable to hear for a lot of people, but I trust your research ability and also your experience being in Asia a lot. And just the conversations I've had with you to not focus so much on that, because that is a dark, sad, really inhumane black hole to go down. But we need to explore the dark so that we can bring light. We have to at least know. I'm not saying we need to saturate and live there and talk about it and foam at the mouth, but it's super important that we covered this because that is the fuel. Money is energy, Right. And energy fuels, adds and fuels the entire system. So it was important that we went there. And on the other side of that is going back to the daily practices if you're upset with the values or the beliefs of ccp. And again, not Chinese people, right? CCP is ccp. It's not all Chinese people.

It's a billion people.

It's not. So this is more of a pro freedom conversation than an anti anyone conversation. And the reason I'm saying this is because it is so important to not mindlessly scroll on Instagram, to have that time in the morning where you're in your own sovereignty, and also to really take a deeper look, a deeper breath and a higher viewpoint on how propaganda has dictated the course of life and it's for sure dictated mine. I have, in ways that I don't know yet, been subconsciously controlled by propaganda for sure.

Right.

And I wonder, as we go down this path of where do we go from here? Which is the ultimate final question for you. I just have this sense that all of this is going to unravel at some point because we are in a big theater and we are in a big, I guess you could say game or simulation. And it might not be in our lifetimes, it might be in my son's lifetime, it might be in his son's lifetime. But at some point, no system that comes from evil can sustain forever. Love is the only universal everlasting force in the entire world, in the entire universe. That's where we come from. But love only knows love self from evil. That's it. So at some point, the house of cards is going to fall on a practical human basis. Where do we go from here? You've given us so much wisdom on this podcast. The show notes are going to be massive for this podcast. But where do we go from here? You know in our day to day lives without having to saturate ourselves in the black holes and get down into the weeds of everything. Would it start with this propagandist guide or would it more start with with people being owners of shows, having NFTs and shows? What's the practical first step as we.

Say goodbye practical first step. I mean we can go back to Jesus and stuff, right? Like love thy neighbor first one Decentralization I think is so important because before the hyper centralization that came out over the last two, 300 years, like there was not really an existential threat that humans could cause. Now there are a lot of. So that's one thing I think is important. If you can focus on community and the people around you. And even if you build community online, I think that's amazing as well. But pro community, not anti community, meaning not a community based on being antagonist to something else, but something pro for what you believe in. Focus on the things that you want to see in the world, focus on your art, on sitting at the edge of your skis and like being as creative as possible. And then to get to something more specifically tangible that each person can do who's listening to this podcast is there's going to be a time period where all these media systems are going to have to exist. And the one thing I ask of you and of everybody is until I can build this product that builds this gamify, it is worth it to go and subscribe to your favorite creators, get the no ad version like support their patreons that does so much because if the creators can start to see, like I don't have to read ads like that's annoying to a lot of people. It takes a lot of time and I'm making more because this is the crazy thing you do ads on a CPM cost per thousand views. Podcasting has the highest CPM in media on average of $20. So know that your minute that you give up is worth like.001 cents to the advertiser. The minute of your life. Could you imagine saying I want to get paid like.001 cents per hour?

I can definitely imagine it like that's what we're doing. Yes.

Like that's insane. So know what you're giving up and start to support like pay. Know that paying $5 a month, $9 a month is cheap relative to losing your attention and have, you know, honor yourself. Like a lot of this comes to alignment. Am I acting in alignment? Am I in alignment when I want to receive advertisers or am I in alignment when I want to support the people who spend their lives doing the research so that I can learn, so that I can be better, so that I can lose weight, so I can be happier, so I can be less anxious. And if we like, even just again, I don't think we're going to beat Facebook Patreon and say that shit all the time. But there isn't a better model yet. Like, I'm testing this NFT one. It's working, it's fun. I'm building a platform for it. I'm obviously like biased that way, but go, you know, ask. Even if your creators don't have an option for that, ask them to build a supercast, ask them to build a Patreon, support them, because you will at least be getting something in return, as in your attention back, not wasted time.

That's beautiful, man. And at the core of all this, we live in a 3D world. We have these aspects of self that I call the wellness pentagon. You know, the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and financial. And at the center of all this, there's our soul contract, there's free will, there's so much layers to being a human being. But really what we all want, what we're all craving, what we all have as a birthright actually is to live our life well. So what does that mean to you? You know, what does it mean to Sky King to have wellness, to embody that wellness? How would you define wellness?

Yeah, well, one first, I want to give like a huge shout out to you because I'm very grateful that one when, you know, I told you when I was struggling, you gave me access to your breath course and to be able to go through that and experience that was incredibly impactful for me. So just anybody who is listening, it's dealing with anxiety or too much stress. Like just their nervous system is acting the way that the media wants us to act and not the way that your body wants to act. Like, give it, give it a try. I would highly recommend it.

Thank you, man.

Thank you. For me, wellness is definitely in long lines with that though. I just want to live in a place where I'm not in fear, but I'm at the edge of my skis. I am just sending it like I am at full peak creation that I can be in fully present, not in worry, not in the lower energy levels, but you know, able to interact, able to sit and have conversations with people, you know, make love in a conscious, excited way, like build a family and pursue my art to Me, my highest craft has always been how do we build? Because the contract we have with capitalism is that you can build technology that can change the world and you can get paid for the value that you create. We've come in and we have just destroyed that idea of the free market, completely destroyed it, and it's now labeled capitalism, but it doesn't exist in that. And so I've always viewed, like, entrepreneurship as one of the highest art forms you could have, because you're creating a vision through a cult of people at scale to make it a reality. And so that is for me, like, what is wellness to me, is being healthy enough in my mind and body that I can be that person who has, without fear, the ability to take on the biggest business model in the world. Like, if I'm any amount successful, probably come one of those canceled people in the world, which I'm not a big fan of at all. Just because, like, the thing that we're taking on is the thing that runs attention. So I have to be very sound in mind and body in order to embrace that adventure.

It's really well said. Sky King, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, brother. Appreciate it.

A ton of wisdom and really great insights on wellness. Is there anything we missed? I mean, we covered a lot of ground today, which I was super excited about, but. Parting guidance for propaganda. Parting guidance for creating sovereignty and self. Is there anything you haven't shared on a podcast that maybe you want to share?

There's one thing that I will end on is I implore you to read Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller. You know, we talked a lot about. He talks about propaganda, he talks about Henry Luce, he talks about technology, he talks about. There's this one part of the book where he is written to by a 10 year old and he says, what should I do with my life? And the thing he says is there's two things. First thing, when you learn a new word, write it down in five different sentences. Because words are tools. Knowledge is literal power. Words are the tools that we as a Homo sapien have to be able to communicate, which didn't exist. This is a fundamental shift was our ability to create words. That is our most basis tool. And they have so much power. So do not forget that. Second thing is look to the world, see what no one else is doing that you are capable of and spend your entire life trying to do it. Solve the problem that you're capable of solving that no one else is doing. And like that. That. That is two things he says in that that is just like so powerful. But he also goes into how we can create technology that works with nature, that models nature, and how we can actually use technology to liberate us as opposed to it becoming a massive energy suck. And I think this book is just nuts and I would just like implore people to read that.

All right, it's below as well as Sky's podcast. Tell them where to go to the podcast for your mental playground.

Yeah, so it's skmp.supercast.com we only have a supercast. It's all on a private feed. Do that to walk my talk. We also you can listen as NFTs. So if you do want to listen for free to get a little bit of a taste, one, there's a one week trial, but two, you can go to Remark. So RMRK app. It's a NFT platform on the Polkadot ecosystem. And if you just search Sky King in any of the collections, I put all of my podcasts there as NFTs. You can own them, you can be among the many people that own them, or you can just go press play and listen. More people listen as NFTs than they do on Supercast.

So man, I love to be the least educated person in the room about topics and when it comes to a lot of what we explored today, I really feel like I learned from you. So thank you for sharing the wisdom with us on the show, man. I really appreciate you.

Thank you for listening to me. I really appreciate the show.

Yes. This was awesome, you guys. Wellnessforce.com forward slash community. We'll talk more about everything we covered today. And also I'm curious, would you be interested in a ad free experience? Would you want NFTs and wellness wisdom? Would you want ownership of the show? Like would you want to be on our team? Essentially? Let me know in the comments. Write me an email. I don't usually give my email, but I'm gonna throw it out. Joshellnessforest.com Pretty self explanatory. So let us know if you're interested in that. And until sky and I see you again, we are both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

Do you mind if I jump in real quick? I'm super sorry.

Yeah.

Just to reiterate what you just said.

Yeah.

You said during this podcast that when you were being honest, being yourself, you got 10,000 less views.

Yes.

So if you want to actually hear, like what? Like luckily like you're a man of integrity so you didn't self censor from there, but that would have been the most obvious decision. So if you are have gained anything from listening to Wellness Source, if you've gained anything from Josh, really think about about him building one of these about commenting this because his lifestyle is at jeopardy just by him trying to be himself and to bring you the information that you are looking for that you came here for because the entire system is telling him not to do it.

Thank you for jumping in, man, and thank you for y' all being with us. We'll talk to you soon. If you loved that episode, you'll love the episodes linked right here on this page. Also, if you have any thoughts, drop it in the comments below. Don't forget to hit subscribe and also get notified when new episodes come out delivered right to you.