The New Story of Humanity Is Coming... AI Will Bring PAIN!

Reality is a story. It's an evolving story, and it's a love story. It's a story of allurement, where all the pieces in this evolutionary ladder, it's looking for ever greater wholeness and intimacy with itself. It's God putting itself back together.

Ben Stewart is a documentary filmmaker, artist.

And producer of the Psychedelica series on Gaia tv.

What is it about stories that allow us to really grow both consciously and even unconsciously?

Story is what holds together the human experience. And every single one of us are the authors of this story. The depression that we feel is when we have surrendered ourselves to a story that's not ours. Instead of upholding false values or other people's values, you need to understand what story truly is. How the human experience is held together by story so we can seek and find our own value. The people who are liberated, they're at peace in heaven and hell simultaneously. And there are certain things that can only be purified by pain. We think we're looking for convenience, but why are we not happy when we get to convenience land? Convenience does not get us to where we're going in our story. The pain, it really clarifies our vision. I do feel a lot of pain is coming. I do feel there are large, monumental shifts that are beyond what even the technologists are preparing us for.

So when we look at storytelling, what is it about stories that allow us to really grow both consciously and even unconsciously? What's that all about?

Yeah, I mean, I think we really gotta dig into, in effect, what story is. Most people think that story is a human invention. When I believe that we discover ourselves in the greater stories of our lives. But some of us, we never realize that there is coherence to the greater, more universal story. So we get bogged down in this idea that story is what you hear when you're a kid. And it was told around the campfire many thousands of years ago, and now we just keep doing it today. But it's entertainment value, and there's actually something deeper to it on a social level. What stories are so we can discover who we are in a community by the fact that there may be some competition. There will be kind of like a mapping of this archetype to that archetype and how we relate with one another. And I guess to put it in the simplest sense is that we don't know ourselves outside of the context of story. Each of us are living not just in one story. I do believe it's one story, but many of us, we get trapped into narratives which are within the story. And when we get trapped into certain narratives, we. We then believe we are that. And it's a useful tool to help us get along, because I don't even believe we know how to navigate life or reality without story. So story is embedded into the very structure of the human experience. Story actually holds together the human experience. And what's interesting about that is what holds story together. I think it's more than language, but it's what language arises out of. So language holds story together. And if you want to get very literal with what holds language together is it's not just utterances and vocalizations and frequency and the sequence of them, but it's also the intention and the will that we put to these little, you know, like, I'm using these noises, and we culturally agree that these noises mean a certain thing. But then when you strip all that away, it's the medium by which you and I can come to a kind of a coherence. This is how we map with one another. And that's how I know whether I can not just trust you and you can trust me, but whether we're aiming at a similar goal and a similar value. So story really is. It's the glue that kind of holds the fabric of reality together. And in a vacuum, we don't even know how to exist. And I don't think we do exist. So I will say this. Mark Gaffney says reality is not a fact, and it's not a data point. Reality is a story. It's an evolving story, and it's a love story. It's a story of allurement, where all the pieces are looking in this evolutionary ladder. It's looking for ever greater wholeness and intimacy with itself. It's God putting itself back together in a way.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Think about the Bible or just, you know, there's thousands of religions in the world. They all have their story, right? But their story is really not necessarily about, did Moses part the Red Sea? Right? Did. Did they exactly happen? Was there an arc? It's the metaphor and it's the learning that's the most important. That's why these stories are timeless, and that's why they hold significant soul weight or spiritual weight, because we can learn from them no matter where we are on the expansion timeline. In other words, stories are the glue in which you speak about, but they're also something that we can feel without words, like great storytellers. They make people feel like you made people. You made me feel in The Psychedelica series, it wasn't just about what was presented and the cool graphics and the editing and all the fun stuff like those are all things that are a part of the story. They're a creative expression of the story. But the story is something that is felt before it's spoken. You feel it and then you speak it to be a great story.

For sure. You know Yuval Noah Harari, I know that he's kind of a controversial name for a lot of people. He is the guy who wrote Sapiens. Um, I'm forgetting Some of the Nexus is another book.

He's definitely controversial. Yeah, I've seen some clips of him and I'm like, I don't know if I want to listen to him anymore.

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing with him is I think he's genuine it for the most part. He perhaps he does say some things that he doesn't fully believe. But what he's spreading is this idea that value is not real. All things like even down to human rights are fictions that we just make them up. And I think that it's okay to say that and to ponder and to debate that when you make it a statement of fact, you are having an impact upon other people, like saying that. Okay, so, so you mean like in, in this nation, in the United States, we're held together by a story. It's purely a fiction. We just make these things up. Why did we gravitate towards the values that are embedded in the story? Because if you think of the west in general, it's a carry on from the Judeo Christian story. What's the Judeo Christian story? It's a composite of Mesopotamian, Indian, Egyptian and European lore and mythology. So that's not just one book that, you know, everyone knows that the Bible isn't just written by one person, it's a composite. But you know, the authors of the Bible, they also compiled a lot of stories that come from a lot of many different cultures. And story is meant to evolve over time, just as nations, just as people. And so I think the thing that I find fascinating is like if you look at the overarching stories that bind culture together, if you go way, way back, God is embedded in nature and there's different gods. You could say it's pantheism, there's God in the trees, there's God in the sky, there's all these different gods. And you commune with God because prior to 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, Think about this. Just prior to that, everyone was a wanderer. Everyone was a gypsy according to our stories. And so most people were wandering the land looking for food. And when they found food and they found like maybe a really dense vegetational area, they would say, well we've been blessed, we've been blessed by God and we were meant to find this. So they drew meaning from that. And then all of a sudden, by the way, they didn't pass the Dunbar number. You know what that is? It's 150, 150ish people. And do you know the reason why the Dunbar number was a ceiling? People didn't travel in group higher than 150 for all the way up until the agricultural revolution. Do you know why?

Well, I'm going to make an educated guess. It's something to do with the way that we store memory or interface from the limbic system. In other words, the brain can only handle so many human relationships at once. That may be spiritual, but it may just be biological.

Well before we even map it to whether it's spiritual, biological or what, you know where it's rooted. If you don't know everybody in your tribe, you can't really trust. It's hard to have the cohesion of trust because you can't really know more than 150 people. So if there's corruption in your tribe, it's going to get out. Why? Because you know, everybody, everybody talks and somebody will find out and that person will talk and that person will come to justice. That is sustainable governance. Beyond that. And this is what Yuval Noah Harari says. So how did we break that number and still have a cohesive governance system? Well, we meet in the story, we have larger stories. So now if you think there was a certain period in India had this of cow worship, bovine worship, where you worship the cows. Now this may have been because in the cow patties you would find these mushrooms growing and then you take those mushrooms and you have this in insanely wide open experience, the psilocybin mushrooms. You would be like, whoa, this comes from cow dung. These things are special, these creatures are special. Maybe there's a lot more to it than that. But let's just stay with there were many religions where cows were sacred. You do not kill them. Then all of a sudden metallurgy is created and this, you know. So let me go quickly back to the Dunbar number being blown open. The agricultural revolution is where wanderers realized you can take seeds, plant em in the earth and make food grow where you want it to grow. Not only that, you can plant a lot and make A lot of food grow where you want it to grow. What happens when you have tons and tons of food? It's gonna spoil unless you give it away. And that's gonna bring all the mooches, which is a bad term, but you're gonna bring a lot of people who they're like, wait, tons of food grows over here. I'm out here wandering the desert. Let's just camp around here. So no longer are we at 150 people anymore, and no longer is that 150 people really deeply embedded in our culture and our stories that blasts apart. We have now we need grain silos, we need accounting. We also need military to go out and, you know, protect us from foreign invaders. But this tribe mixed with that tribe mixed with that tribe. We need a shared language. We also need laws and a paramilitary, like a police force to keep people from going in and stealing that. So you see just settling down, blast apart the Dunbar number. This tribe and that tribe who never had to get along with one another, now they're living together. They have to. The stories have to change to shape people into a coherent structure at that point. So then you invent metallurgy and you can have a plow that can till previously untillable land. Who's going to pull that plow? It's going to be the bulls and it's going to be those big strong animals. So how can you have a sacred cow that you used to say, like, you venerate these cows. You treat them really well. You have to whip this cow now, and it's working all day long for you. So when does cow worship end? Right around metallurgy. And that's when we're like, okay, well, there's actually. Our value structure is not in the cows anymore. We have a sky God. Why? Because now all this stealing and raiding of our lands, so we need people to feel a kind of like a cosmic punishment if you were to go in and steal. And nobody knows, right? Well, Sky God knows. So stories start to shift and change as we start to shift and change and evolve and start not just settling in place, but blasting apart that Dunbar number. And as Yuval know, Harari says, we meet inside the story. That's what congeals us together. But getting back to Yuval, he basically says that there is no such thing as value. And this is a little bit of Mark Gaffney's work and a little bit of Daniel Schmachtenberger's work. We meet inside the story, but there is no such thing as value. It's not rooted in anything real. There's nothing universal and real about it. We just. It's fictions, we make it up. So how do we tell the new story that's going to tell us why we live in a world that is so technologically advanced while some people don't even have enough food to eat? Well, we're going to impose a new story. And so this is like George Orwell 1984, that kind of thing where the story is imposed. Who controls the love story? It's the state. You can't come up with it on your own. You can't map to it without the help of the state. That's really the world that we live in. So governance in and of itself is a story. How to be proud of your nation? It happens through story. How do you interface economically? Well, there's certain data points where you are a worker, you're worth this much, your trade is worth this much, you work this many hours, which is worth this much. It's kind of a dry story, but that's a story and we meet inside that story. So my big thesis is there is a brand new story coming. It's already being written and it's not being written by the elite. The elite are at the whim of it, just like we are at the whim of it. But we are all authors in it. So the more we understand that these eternal values, they're not going away. But the story is shaping differently around it. And it's happening right now. Charles Eisenstein is saying there's this new story of a more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible. We all know that there's a. Or at least most of us can sense that there is a new story emerging. Most people don't know how that comes to be. And so for me, that's why I teach story. I teach people the fundamentals of story. Because story, it's not like the fundamentals change over time. We have movies now and it's a new format, it's a new medium of story. And what used to be 120 page screenplay used to be maybe a 600 page novel, then moved down to 120 page screenplay, now to a 90 page screenplay. Why? Because we can get the essential parts of story across more efficiently and quicker. And, and that's what industry is about is efficiencies. So story is being distilled down to a point we were talking about earlier. I was like, there's something that Terence McKenna was saying that it's not like the big Bang just pushed us all forward, and we're being pushed from our past into our future. I think like Terence McKenna said, there is a very real gravitational force that's bringing us an attractor that's leading us towards something very real. And that could be called the singularity, whatever. But that, to me, is the climax of this story. And we are. It's. It's upon us. Maybe in 10 years, maybe less, maybe a little bit more, maybe it takes us to 20, 50. But there's a climax coming to this story.

Soon, I think it'll be in our lifetimes. I do.

I'm 44, definitely.

How old are you?

41.

41. So in another 40 years, 50 years, you can't tell me that you feel in your heart anything different than we are improving. We are improving. And not just improving for, like, the libertarian sake, or let's say the far left sake, where it's like progress, just for progress sake. I don't believe in that.

Right.

I think if you look at nature, you mentioned nature earlier, there's no such thing as year over year over year growth in nature. Trees, a sapling, it grows, it provides oxygen, and then it dies, and then it feeds the other trees. I think it's this continuum that we all feel. Yet the story that we've been living for so long, man, I mean, even if you think about 1776, when we came over because of the oppression from the UK and England, we then did that unconsciously to the Native Americans when we got here, we played the same story that we learned from being oppressed because of our level of development at that time. And we did it in a way where it completely decimated, like a genocide of the Native American people. So what I'm getting at is like, unless we become conscious, to quote one of the greatest people of all time in psychology, Carl Jung, until we make the unconscious conscious, it'll rule our life and we're gonna call it fate. Yeah. So he hinted at this new story that Eisenstein and that you're helping bring to fruition. But yet, whether it's the ancient masters or the contemporary filmmakers or the storytellers, I feel we're all using different language to poke holes in the story that's had such a grasp for so long. And the old story, I wonder how you feel about this, has been about limitation, scarcity and control. A bundling of resources so that this group can have them and this group can't. Because we know that when we control the news, the food, the power and the water we can pit people against each other. We can create this false illusion of a bifurcation where one group is worthy of these resources and one group is not because of their blessing or their intelligence. I even think about in the UK, part of why we left and came over in 1776 was this whole deception of bloodline where my blood is the valued blood and therefore if I am king, all my offspring can have all the resources. But because your blood is of a peasant, then you can't have it. I mean, the roots run really deep on this old story of scarcity. When you reflect back in storytelling and in all your research and all your filmmaking, where do you think that actually began? This bifurcation of we're worthy of resources and you are not? I think about that from time to time. What do you make of that?

Yeah, you know, I think it is a carry on from previous story. And just like all evolution, just like all life, I mean, in the world prior to the agricultural revolution, scarcity was based upon nature will plant what nature wants to plant.

But it was an authentic scarcity. It's what, it's what was provided by Earth herself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know, if we wanted to blame is one word or you know, place the accountability of why food only grew here and not over there and why did that tribe find that place first? And why are we out here in the desert? You know, well, this is God's design. And we think that it's not that case when people get involved as if we live outside the matrix of causality of God. And so I think it really is a carry on this idea of scarcity mentality and an economy run off of scarcity. It really does come from a carry on effect of the old world and the old story that we're living under because I mean, you were just saying it. I mean if you think where we're at, we're swimming in modernity, you know, like where this is just like technology, it's, this is just how it is. Most of the mediums of technology that I'll talk about here in a little bit. It's the 20th century where they came about. And so if you think like, you know, we're living in America, greatest country in, in the world and blah, blah, blah, what is this story really telling? Well, we left Europe for the same reasons that you were just saying. But what did we start here? Isn't, it's the liberal democratic experiment with where instead of having elite few controlling the apparatus of governance. Governance or government. And government is a Technology of a collective in order to not just maintain resources, because that's the economic branch of governance, but also how do we manage people and their opinions and their wants and their desires? How do we manage that? We are a complex creature in and of ourselves in a complex universe. And then you put us together with all of our various desires and designs. It's hard to know how to govern that. So a lot of us were like, man, I hate the government. It's just like you expect the government to be perfect. This is very new. The whole idea of us being in a tribe past 150. This is really new, evolutionarily speaking. So 250 years or one Pluto revolution.

Is that how long it is?

252, 42 is, is one entire not yet orbit, not rotation. It's 242 years and that's 2024, you know, and Pluto, I mean, I'm not going to get into astrology, but that's pretty interesting. 2024.

2024 was the return of Pluto.

Yeah. And it was something like, you know, there's a lot of those instances like the, I think the twin towers. It was like two Saturn returns or something like that from the point of being built to the time they came down.

We'll have to ask Paul Czech about that. Yeah, he's pretty well skilled in astrology.

He is, yeah. And so the interesting thing about this liberal democratic experiment is it's only one Pluto revolution old. And it's this idea that instead of elite people through these bloodlines or nepotism, ruling how we, how we govern ourselves, the people are going to do it. And the founding fathers didn't know if this was going to work or not. It was an experiment. It was just like, listen, we see what the gripes are and this is a problem that's not going away. This problem that there's the haves and the have nots. How do we get it to a point where there is more fairness? Well, it's not just by giving everybody stuff. You know, there's one whole group of economics that thinks just quality and giving everybody stuff is the way to go. But this liberal democratic experiment is the idea that if everybody has a voice, and this is where it's getting back the story. If everybody has a voice, and that is brought through the voting process, where people have a voice, how much voice should they have? Not all of it. So let's have the electorate, right, the electoral college. But this is very new where people are driving the apparatus of government and we're seeing how is it working now, 240 so years later. And I think it's actually a very, a beautiful experiment that has played out, that has shown us where the pitfalls are. Where does old money or old elitist views work itself back in and exploit the loopholes of this apparatus to make it what it is today. The old world, the old story crept back into this new story. And so that's why we're now, during this era of Trump and populism, we're hearing about. Why do people love hearing drain the swamp, by the way? It doesn't seem like it's happening again either, the draining of the swamp. It seems like it's the using the people from the swamp to reinhabit the swamp. But, but this whole idea that we have to drain the swamp, most people don't even know how to categorize that in their head. They don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It just sounds good. Cause we want change. We want something to change because we can inherently feel that the system we are being governed by is violating of some of our core values. And because of that, we want change. We want that to change. But if we have random change, if we just drain the swamp and we throw random people back in there, that's not going to work. Okay, what about not random people, but people chosen by this small cohort of people. We don't really know what we're getting in this news story. So I think what I like about the left and I always try, when I start seeing that one side of this two party duopoly is getting crazy, I try and side with them more because I think the problem that we're going to start seeing is actually more of a right wing problem coming here soon. Because now it's in power and now it has the ability to start handling some of these levers a little bit more. And so I'm listening to all these left leaning podcasts and I'm seeing like, what are they truly focused on? They're really focused on process. You may not like the person in power, but you have to trust the process. Now think 250 years of this liberal democratic experiment. You can throw a lot of corrupt people into it. It's still standing today. We are still a very powerful nation. We're a very rich nation as well, in material resource and also in the story of money as well. And this is all a story is, is a process by which you take consciousness from one state to another state. So let me just Say what story is. Very simply, story is a character who is an agent that can choose, has the free will to choose in a causal universe where choices transform irreversibly. The nature of the causal universe. So when you put a character that can choose in a universe that changes irreversibly when you choose, that is the nature of story. And every story, it's not just the climax, isn't just any old transformation. It is an irreversible transformation of. Of the highest quality. And we usually have one character that's going to go through that to symbolize that transformation, that irreversible transformation. Go back to the Judeo Christian story or the, you know, the Newer Testament version of it. It's always about some transformation that befalls the characters, the agents of choice, inside of a causal universe that's changed by choices. So to me, I think what we're experiencing now at this point in history, and what I hope people start to realize is every single one of us are the authors of this story. But we get bogged down in these numbers. Like, I'm 1 in 350 million Americans. I'm 1 in 8 billion people. How much voice do I actually have? Well, how the hell did somebody like Joe Rogan get that much of a voice? That wasn't nepotism. He worked his ass off to get there. How do you have the voice that you have? So what does this system reward? Not just nepotism. Right. It rewards those with ideas that can plant those ideas of value inside a hierarchy of value called story.

Oh, let me. I gotta pause you right there. That is so good. There is 15 stories that could be told from what you just presented. You know what I was feeling when you were talking? The man on the wall, Martin Luther King, running your left shoulder. How did he tell a new story? I was feeling it in my heart the whole time you were talking. It's the courage to tell a new one.

Yeah.

And the courage to face the reality that you've constructed for yourself based on the reality you were presented that kept you in bondage or kept you in slavery. And it's not to shame anyone. Shit, I've been there. There's still conditioning I'm letting go of. Probably you too, man.

Yeah.

You're not floating on a mountain yet with a white cape, are you?

Not yet. Tomorrow.

So what I'm getting at is, like, these change makers like mlk, it's because they. They saw. They felt a new reality before they spoke it. And he knew that. One of the greatest stories I've ever heard about MLK is he was on a stage preaching about equality.

Yeah.

And to not judge each other by the color of our skin. And this white pissed off man charged him on the stage and went to go tackle him, and he didn't resist. MLK didn't resist and he just hugged the guy. And the guy was so shooken up by it that he just starts bawling in front of the whole auditorium. And if there's not a more powerful moment of two stories colliding to really present the world that you and Gaffney and all these filmmakers are describing, it's that moment with MLK where he met hatred and bigotry with love. I mean, talk about the power that that auditorium must have felt. I mean, there must have been like a visual shockwave from him hugging this man on the stage. And I think that's the story. We all are cultivating the courage to shift. And we'll talk about the many different aspects of story and consciousness, for sure. But that's really like, the point we're getting at here is can I have the courage to write a new story with my beliefs and my actions? But first, can I take an inventory of the stories that have kept me hostage in bondage?

You know, what I love about you bringing up MLK is it gets to the root of why the climax of any story has to be the irreversible transformation, not just any old one. Like, oh, I went down this road. I can never have gone down that road at that moment ever again. Like, nobody cares about that. It's, what are you really up against? What are you speaking your voice or using your voice to change, to augment. He wasn't just going up against something, you know, menial or kind of, you know, uncontroversial. He was going up against one of the most controversial things at the time that was bucking the story that everybody else was caught under. And what he was doing was saying, we're all equal in that kind of respect. You know, I know that that word today has got a lot of people kind of jarred.

Yeah.

But this idea that I am willing to literally risk my life for these values that I hold to be so. So cherished and that we all feel it, that that person who charged him on stage, he felt it. But there was something that was overriding it in the moment that was just like, no, this is calling me out because if I agree with what this man is saying, if I just let it into my heart right now, then I have to have this moment where I weep at the way that I've upheld a violation of value. Yes, and, but, but he couldn't avoid it. Once he got hugged because he realized at this moment like, that was the inner child. Like, look at this other picture, this inner child that's inside all of us, that doesn't want to be disconnected from your fellow man. It wants to touch, it wants intimacy. That's the allurement is we, we really are seeking greater intimacy and greater wholeness of our being. But that has to come by a certain accountability to the way that we have violated the field of value as well. And a lot of that, most people's character or their role in all of that is complicity, compliance. No one wants to think, ah, you know what? There was awfulness happening all around me. And you know what I did? I just stayed quiet. I stayed in the shadow. I let it happen so I could be safe. Nobody wants to be that person. Not even evil people. Actually, if you think it's hard to really know what evil is, you know, everyone has a different explanation for who is evil or what is evil. But even evil people, if you point to some of the most evil people, they have a code. That code is impregnated by a field of value. And they will risk their life for that. They will do awful, awful things that are less awful than the thing they're fighting for. Right. You know, we will go to war. We will kill other people. Why? For God and country. Because, like, I will not live under socialist or communist rule. Like, there's all these stories that we're like, I resonate more with this to the tune where I will go out and I will kill people I have never met from afar. I don't even have to see their face. I will drone strike them. Why? Because I believe in the story that I'm upholding here. So that's an awful way of saying it, but when we really get down to it, we want to matter. That's really what health is. That's what wellness truly is, is having lived a life where our soul got to speak and it mattered. It was heard, it was listened to. People will die young just to have that. It's powerful. And this is why I believe that the more we understand that we're not just writing our own story, everything we do is also influencing the stories that other people are writing in their own lives as well. And even if you off yourself because you want out of it, you don't want to be the author anymore, you still have an impact all the people that loved you or cared about you or anyone that witnessed that, you're impacting them deeply. You're showing. This is an example. I can bow out of my story early because it's just too hard to uphold the values. So what I'm here to say is that instead of upholding false values or other people's values, you need to understand what story truly is and how we are held together by story, how the human experience is held together by story, so we can seek and find our own value. And this is where. Not neuromythology, because that's a very specific thing, but when I think of that word, neuromythology, you're talking about the dopamine pathway, the quest that a hero goes on and the hero is the consciousness. You're going down the dopamine pathway to quest after something. Why? Because dopamine is that kind of reward based seeking thing. And the dopamine itself is the elixir. And we're questing after something. And this really does express why any of us do anything. Why we do the menial daily tasks, why we do the big things like mlk, why was doing, is because there's something drawing us towards that attractor of value. And we know whether we're truly living to our potential or not. But you can only truly know that. You can only. How do I say this? You know it when you're not on your path, and you know it when you're on your path. But you may not be able to fully understand why. But the deeper you get into story structure, the more you can actually see there's a formula to this, there's a code to this that does not go away. I mean, there was Shakespeare all the way back then, and what he's done is still around today. It's just a different medium and it's more efficient today.

And marketing plays a role because everyone is marketed to all the time. And what is marketing? It's the ability to tell story, but it's also the ability to push someone to a call, to action, a cta. So it's like, hey, here's the problem, here's the hook, here's the story, here's the reward or the solution. That's the marketing framework that Russell Brunson is so huge on. But I think from a consciousness perspective, it's the same. I just feel like this, this rule of thirds is everywhere. And maybe you found this in your work. It's like, okay, well, beginning, middle, end, which by the way, does not apply to God. There is no such thing as beginning, middle, and end. Our minds can't understand that. The human mind can't intellectualize, that there's no such thing as a start, that there's just an all and an everything and a no thing.

It's just so wild, right?

That's the story that I believe gives me grace. Believing in that story that my mind can't conceptualize nor ever even try to or understand the fact that there is no beginning, middle, and end, because that gives me peace. And I think when we look at the kind of story we want to follow, whether we're telling the story or whether we're listening to it, does the story that you're telling or you're listening to eventually have its sights set on peace? That's a radical story. That's the love story that Gaffney talks about. That's why he's had such an impact on you and a friend and mentor, Scott Jackson, and many people. Because the love story, I think he says something like, when you're believing a story, when you're stuck in a story of outrageous pain, the only loving solution is outrageous love and outrageous meaning, something that breaks the bounds of the current construct. It's so outrageous that we couldn't even conceptualize it ever being true. In other words, we don't even know that. We don't know it's possible. It's unconscious incompetence. So I look at the ways I've. I've shed Ben story after story after story in my life, and that's the consciousness path. It's not easy. It's not sexy. So I want to go back, because you said, when you're on your path of purpose, you know, when you're not on it, you said. And when you're on it, you may or may not know. And I paraphrased you a little bit. I feel like it's a paradox, because I definitely can agree with the first portion. I knew for a long time I was not in my Dharma, I was not in my purpose. But there's even times where I get challenged so deeply with the expansion I'm in with finance and family and podcasting and business, that there are moments when the thought flutters by. And maybe it's collective thought, and the thought might say something like, you should just go do something more safe. You should just go to this other story where there's a guaranteed safety. Have you felt that in your own story creation for you, for your vision, for your purpose, that, yes, Ben definitely knew when he was off course, but also when he's on course, he gets challenged to the point where that protector of thought comes in and challenges him so much to be on purpose that it may actually make him question if he is or not.

What's interesting is when you're on path, when you're on the course that you know you should be on, it's not a static thing. There has to be an evolution to it. And so there will. And there must be things that cause you to challenge your. Your belief in your direction, to cause you to relook at your compass and to, you know, calculate your north star a little bit more.

Yeah.

And it's interesting you say this thought will come by and say something to you, because I was thinking about this, like, if. If story really is that which holds together the human experience and language is the more granular elements that hold together story. Language itself seems to have an intelligence to it. And this is something that, like, there have. There have been people who have, like, toyed with this, from, like, Russian philosophers all the way to Aristotle. Had a thought about this. I think there was a lot of, like, pre. Not pre modernist. I think it was modernists post the French Revolution that were really saying that there's something about language itself that. Have you heard of Marshall McLuhan? He says the medium is the message. No. Okay. Do you get the implication of the medium is the message. Like your laptop is a screen. It's a medium by which messages come through it. Sure. TikTok is short form, as opposed to reading a book. That's a different medium. You can get a story through TikTok, but it's a lot more short form. There's this thing where the language that we use is a technology separate from us. We think we invented it, but actually there's a lot of belief that the idea that Thoth came and granted us with writing and language and the arts and things like that, that it actually has a telos in and of itself. And so we use language, and language conforms to our desire of how it should be used, but we also conform to the language itself. It shapes the way we view the world. It creates these categories and boxes by which we sort. We have a sorting mechanism, and we throw them into these boxes. And that may be completely off base sometimes. So the language itself not only shapes and conforms us, but it seems to have a telos, a directionality, an intention. And you could say maybe it just seems that way. But it is interesting how when thoughts come by, it's Just like, oh, why am I thinking that? Well, is. Is it not something from elsewhere, possibly that's coming by. Everybody knows this. Like, I have an intention to say something. Well, I have to utilize the language that we colloquially use, right. So I use this language. Now, I don't know that your categories are exactly the same as mine. So I don't know the map of your mind, but I can tell by looking at your face, because it's telling a different story. We're using words, but we're also looking at each other's face. That's telling a different story. But there's something about it that all of us know those moments where we say something and we're like, where the. Did that come from?

Yes.

Like, did I say that?

Yes.

Or we'll hear a voice and we're like, whoa, that was a different voice than some of the. Just the banter in my head when I'm in default mode consciousness. Right. There's something about language itself that seems like it also has a directionality. It is kind of the mechanism by which we cohere together. I'm going to try and bring this through like an evolutionary map super quickly. As far as we know language, modern human language is the thing that really separated Homo sapien from Neanderthal and Denisovan. We could speak faster, we had a different pharynx and larynx. We could speak faster and communicate ideas more. So language are these utterances by which you can understand what I'm feeling and thinking and intending quicker. The Neanderthals didn't have that ability. And perhaps, whereas there's other creatures that they have a language. Even fungi under the ground, they have a language, but they don't have as many words, they can't store as many words. So they can't get so elaborate or granular with how they understand one another. So then let's say that's 100,000 years old, maybe 150,000 years old. And then around the same time as we have modern tools, we see that language is probably just as old, if not a little bit older. Then you take that all the way up to the point where we have the first cuneiform writings, you know, five, 6,000 years ago. And so we started externalizing language from the field of our mind onto the physical world out there into symbols. So now that is another shared way by which we get ideas across. But you can't transport that cave wall, these 7,000 year old cave paintings and stuff like that. So we have the stone tablet. It's More portable, we can move that around. But you drop that and you're like, God damn it, I wish we had put it on papyrus. Something that when you drop it doesn't shatter. And then when you do that, and the language is also getting more granular into our Alphabet, you can get more granular ideas across on something that can stand the test of time. So our wisdom can stand the test of time fully physicalized in the external world. Then you go all the way to the printing press where now you can do it faster. People are becoming more literate. There's a shared field of information and value that we are connecting to. Now it's the Internet, right? And now it's TikTok. So the medium has been evolving and we're evolving alongside it. But which one's dragging which along? Are we dragging language along with us? Or is language and the mediums by which it's evolving through evolving us? So there's something to story that might even precede human and human consciousness and that which is human. We might be literally the spawn of story and all life might be the spawn of story, but it is evolving itself towards a very real point which you would call a singularity here in the very near coming future where the medium is getting more rapid and rapid and rapid. And some people say, oh, we don't have long attention spans anymore, that's true. But we're also able to process information maybe faster, maybe not faster than our ancestors. But if you think about it, why did the screenplay get so frickin short? Because you can get the idea across that I can take you from the beginning to the end where you have a cathartic transformation because your mirror neurons are mapping onto Leonardo DiCaprio as he's showing you that that transformation and that can happen quicker. You don't need to sit through, you know, like a full week of reading a book or something like that.

Oh, it makes sense too, because if you think about it, let's say we live, if we're super healthy, 100 years, super healthy, right? And maybe the, the median age is much less. But if we can take all this information and be able to learn it from articulate story in a faster amount of time, well then we can take in more bits of information over our life. I learned from NLP that you know, there's literally, I think it's 11 million bits of sensory and auditory and the audio kinesthetic, the, the osmotic and the other three, there's five kinesthetic senses and we're getting like 11 million bits of info per second, but our brain can only process 128.

So where are all these mushrooms?

Unless you hit mushrooms. But where is all this other information going? It's not like it's, you know, energy can't be created or destroyed, so it's not going anywhere per se. It's still floating around. And so it begs this question of if we can process faster to your point, and we have a hundred years of life, then consciousness literally is speeding up. You can't even if you're a scientist or you're a yogi, both science and spirit are showing the same thing. Consciousness. The evolution of consciousness is on a hockey stick. Evolution. And I think it was Ray Kurzweil that talked about it in his work. I believe it was 10 or plus more years ago that human evolution was this growth curve that was almost diagonal. But then when it reached the technological crossing, technology spiked up. So now we're at 100x, then a thousandx, then a millionx, then 100 millionx. Whatever, whatever. So the question I'm getting at, that I'm so deeply curious about, is what the hell is technology itself? What is the story that technology wants to tell? The founder of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, says that the technium is God experiencing God's self, or consciousness experiencing itself through technology. And if you look at artificial intelligence and these robots that are in people's homes, and the fact that even my team uses AI now, and I never thought, barring watching the Terminator, that that would be real. I mean, we're here now in 2025, and AI is going to multiply so fast, people have no idea the speed of this technology. It is absolutely incredible. Yet I wonder, and I'm curious how you feel, what is the story that technology wants to tell? Because it's not inherently evil. Right? The duality that leads to singularity has two sides, because that's how we learn. Right? What do you think technology or the technium, to quote Kevin Kelly, wants to teach us, what are we here to learn about technology?

Yeah. Well, that was an interesting book, what Technology Wants. And that was the first time that I heard the overarching umbrella term technium for all of technology. And when you think of it as something that wants something, most people are like, wait a minute, come on, it can't want anything. And I would actually say we need to really take this seriously.

I think it does.

So, like, what was it that gave us language? We don't know. But language was what helped Homo sapiens really excel beyond Any and all other creature. It is also what helps us congeal around the invention of all these technologies that we have today. And gotta give credit where credit is due. When we found how to really use fossil fuels. And if you watch or listen to Nate Hagens with the Great Simplification podcast, he says there's this blip where all of a sudden we got to use fossil fuels. And that skyrocketed our economy and our ability to grow things, because energy is really important. So information is really important, but energy is really important. Even these refrigerators, it pulls entropy out of a box. And you can have food stay for longer. So, so what? You can engage in different things, you can grow your consciousness. And this is really all the way back to the whole evolution of biology in general, is one cell needs to eat all day long until it groups together in a multicellular organism to where it doesn't, let's say, 50 cells grouped together. It doesn't need 50 units of food anymore because of the way it conserves. It may only need 35. So what does it do with all that extra time it plays, it learns, it grows, it grows outside of the confines or the trappings of I have to eat all day long, I don't have time for play. And you expand that out all the way to us, who now we have this language which helps us build more technology. So the greater empirical wisdom of humanity helps us build this technology all the way to the point where no one person knows how to build the telecommunications infrastructure and the phones. Right? So it takes the whole village, if you will, to create the technium. And the technium is now what we are hooked to. When there was the colonial pipeline hack, ransomware hack, and Tennessee and a bunch of other states, they couldn't get fuel for a while. Why? Because it was hacked. Well, just 10 years ago, it wasn't that flimsy, the process. You couldn't hack it because it was more manual. So now we are so hooked to the technium that the technium and its weaknesses, they tell us whether our economy can move forward or not. So that's. That's one fascinating thing. But the fact that something in our mind language started growing, and then, as I said, it started externalizing itself onto the outside world, and now it's starting to build itself a body. I don't know how much you know about different kinds of AI, but do you know the one kind of AI that like, there's many different kinds of AI being worked on? And then all of a sudden, one started skyrocketing much faster than all the rest of them.

Which one was it?

The language models, the large language models. Something about language allowed AI to learn chemistry better than chemistry AI, and, and so on and so forth with other AIs. So there's something about language that is also very much so at the substructure of how we create reality. Words do create reality. We're getting back to mystical tropes here. Your words can create reality. This was something that New Agers have been saying for a while, but maybe didn't even know how to like place it together. So now there is this independent technium that is growing almost at the point now to where it is independent and agentic out in the world. It has its own agency. It's not fully there yet, but we're moving in that direction. So what I would. And your original question, what is.

What is the story or the life experience that AI with the vehicle of the Technium? What does it really want? What is the story that it's trying to tell? And is that story going to grow us towards love, towards real consciousness?

Yeah. And so what does it want is a very, very difficult thing to explain.

I don't think we know yet.

No. And I don't think there is a static thing that you can say about it that holds true. And the same is with me. If I make a statement about myself, is that true or is it just what I'm declaring in the moment? You know, it can be. It could sound really eloquent. Yes, but like, what does the Technium want? I think if Mark Gaffney and also Daniel Schmachtenberger and Charles Eisenstein are correct about story and the. A fundamental field of value that precedes it's not something that we invent, it's something that we discover about ourselves, then the technium is a part of the vehicle by which we skyrocket into ourselves, into an awakening of who we are. And I think the greater field of value is showing us and the story that we're all hooked in is showing us that you and I aren't separate. We're not separate from this table. We're not separate from nature. You can be lost in a story that says that you're separate from it. And so the singularity, I believe it is an irreversible transformation, like the climax of any story that shows us, that reinvites us back into a holistic field of value where we are not disconnected from our parts. Our split off self is fused back together. That's when we exit the Matrix. I don't. We don't have words for what that means at that point, but I know a lot of purists or naturalists that are like, technology is evil. And I just want to go back to the way it was a. I don't think those people know what they're talking about. Yeah, for the most part. I mean, they do to a certain extent, because what they're saying is rooted in a place that is real. Because it does seem like the technology is ruining our attention spans. It seems like the EMFs are, you know, effing with us. I get all of that, but we never got a memo from God saying how this story is going to go yet. We think that we're owed a certain kind of life while we're here. We think that life ought to be different than this. Says whom? We don't even know ourselves. We're split off from ourselves in the greater natural world around us. So I think where the Technium is taking us is this thing that we think is completely devoid of soul, completely devoid of life or intelligence. I think God inhabits the technology as well. And I think God will do the same thing that I did with the. The left wing, which is as soon as they seem crazy as hell, I want to understand where they're not. And I think as soon as we start scapegoating, because. Do you know who Robert Breedlove or the what Is Money? Podcast is?

Yes, I interviewed him.

Oh, you did? Oh, dope, dude. He's great. Yeah, he did this podcast. I think it was a solo cast where it was all about Satan. What is Satan? Satan is not an individual agent of consciousness that's trying to mess with humans. It's our tendency to externalize accountability and scapegoat out into the exterior world. Where we say technology, it's technology's fault as to why we're dealing with all these problems. Or it's Donald Trump's fault, or it's the socialist's fault. We're scapegoating and we're not taking full accountability. And we're putting it into the exterior world so we don't have to feel the weight of what Carl Jung was saying. Like, we're not making the unconscious conscious. Oh, I am all this. I am this technology. It looks separate, but that's a part of the play that we're all in. So what does the Technium want? I think it wants the same thing that God and every human at the core, the root of the value structure of every story. That holds all of this together is for us to come back together as one. I don't know what happens past that point. That's the textbook definition of any kind of singularity, is there's no words that can. There's no categories. We don't have the capacity yet. We need to be blasted apart. So then we have the capacity to know what it means to be on the other side of this story, past the climax.

Many times in this podcast I've wanted to speak, but I've been mindful to not interrupt a pitcher in the middle of a no hitter. Because the way that you're able to pull together what seemingly might appear as disparate concepts or siloed concepts is profound. Because you spent how many years telling stories total? If you look back on your life, how long have you been professionally telling stories?

Well, professionally, 16, 17 years. Unless you go broader and say that as a singer, songwriter and lyricist.

So half your life? More.

I mean, I.

More than half your life.

I've been writing since I was 8.

So this is the way that you've been orienting yourself in the reality that you're playing with? That word has come up a lot. Play. You even mentioned that Shakespeare, the reason he's so powerful is because his teachings and the way he told stories are still relevant to today. It's because he really knew how to tell a great story. And we're in the creator economy, which I think a lot of people are adverse to and may bring up, like, somatic tension when people hear we're in the creator economy.

Right.

It's not just about influencers wearing, like, leggings and doing squats, showing their butt. That's not what I'm talking about. That's the shadow side of the creator economy. I think that there's a light, beautiful side of AI, and I think that the part we don't want to look at is the dark side. That's really just a mirror of us. It's like if you have more money, it just shows you where you're not free. Your wife doesn't love you, your husband doesn't want to be around you, your kids don't want to speak to you. Like, who cares how much money you have if you have a nice car, if you have whatever resources. What I'm saying is like, AI to me seems like a mirror. It seems like a mirror that we're all looking at and we're adjusting and trying to not see our whole self through that mirror. We only want to see the good part, which Then goes to the construct that you were describing, where we want to place blame on something outside of us rather than just like, take a breath in the mirror, which is really the beginning of all spiritual practice. Start where you are with honesty, with humility. I was just reading in the sauna this morning Rudolf Steiner's book, which one? How to Know Other Worlds.

Okay.

And I believe that's the title. But the message that he was sharing was, it is only in the humility of the heart of a student that higher knowledge will be given. So you cannot just grapple and try to get as quickly as you can by hacking knowledge or by hacking spiritual growth. You have to actually be genuine and have your heart open to the fact that you want to grow just because you want to know yourself, you want to know God, you want to know what love really is. Maybe there's no exact answer for that, although many people have tried to describe it. But what I'm focusing on here is if AI or if anything, any tool that has power, when we really take a pause and look at it for what it is. I believe, and I wonder what you believe. It's really just a way to know ourselves that God is presenting through the vehicle of knowing God's self.

Yeah.

Which is even more wild to think about. I mean, it's a wild experience to go down the spiritual path. So what do you make of that? AI being a mirror in which we know ourselves and really a practice for us to accept and go up the Hawkins ladder and be at acceptance and learn what love is by seeing the parts of us that are dark and nasty and not loving and mean and vitriol filled and even like megalomaniacs. Right. Like people that are in power. Like all these parts of AI are going to eventually show us this, don't you believe?

Well, I mean, I've long felt and used that word, mirror. The Internet is a mirror. Community is a mirror.

Money is a huge mirror, too.

Totally.

Totally.

I mean, you know, money is really fascinating because when it really gets down to it, when somebody has money, they start really becoming more attuned to exact accountability. And that exact accountability means, like, how much do I actually value that thing? You know, if we're in cursory, you know, conversation about something that probably isn't going to happen in this lifetime, or it might, but maybe it's a long shot. We'd say, oh, man, if I had that much money, I would just give you this and I would just give you that, and then let's say that actually happens. And we're like, well, I can't necessarily do that because I have to place some in investments. And then what if those investments go down and then this happens and then that happens. And this is how much I would give. Right. It causes us to really focus on how safe do you feel, how trusted and supported do you feel by the world around you? And the whole word, mirror, subjectivity and objectivity is a mirror. Our subjective world inside that is a mirror to how things are going. And objectivity, everything in the outside world, community, technology, nature, a hawk flying past you, something like that. There is meaning in it all. It doesn't mean that your first thought for that hawk flying by is the exact meaning of it. But when we think like, oh, well, there's got to be a meaning, what is it? You know, I'll get somebody else to tell me. It's. It's not about that. There is a fixed, real fact about that hawk flying by. It's that you're supposed to spark your meaning sensing and meaning finding capacities. Now, the hawk went by pondering, you know, ideate, what could this mean? Because that will start eventually drawing you back towards the parts of yourself you always knew. Oh, I always knew I was on this path, but now I realize I'm kind of off that path and I'm not. I wasn't doing that. I thought I was. I was even saying I was doing it, but I wasn't really on that path. So I've long felt that what AI is doing is the same thing that Community was doing for the longest time. So let's say you and I are in Community together, and for some reason I'm not acting like myself, whatever that means. You come up to me and be like, you know, Ben, I've noticed something's kind of off. What's going on? Stop there. You notice that I'm not on brand, if you will. You know, I'm not following the story and the value structure that seems to be evident to everybody else. Oh, Ben, he values this. So when I'm off that value, it's just like, Ben, what's going on? What's up? What's up with that? You know, like you're kind of breaking character a little bit here. You would do that. And then maybe you would use an analogy, which is a creative, artistic way of getting my mind to cohere with the map inside that is trying to tell me I'm off my course, I'm breaking my own character. So technology, what does it do? It's also, it's showing us. And why is the algorithm so addicted to the limbic center of, like, disgusting? Because it grabs our attention. Yes, but I also. It's not just because algorithm equals bad, because it's. It's making us hijacked by our amygdala. Why do we get hijacked by the amygdala? Why aren't we in center enough? Why is that so appealing to us? Because a being who is not integrating their shadow knows that the path towards self is by integrating the shadow. So we become obsessed with it and we'll start attracting ourselves towards it. Like in the 90s, the music, you know, why was it not girls, girls, girls anymore? It was Nine Inch Nails. It was Marilyn Manson, Rage against the Machine tool. Like, you know, the grunge era, where it's like, I'm gonna tell you how not okay things are right now. And that's what's cool about it. That's what's beautiful and real about it. I think that's what technology and AI in general is, is doing, is it's mapping onto our field of value. Where is that field? Well, like, there's always been this. What is the Akashic record? It's a field of information that never goes away. I really do feel that Alison McDowell is right when it comes to what is technology in the greater sense, actually moving towards technology is trying to map onto, using the divination of children through Montessori, like wildflower schools of using technology to. To see why and how long and to what degree. Children focus their attention on certain things. How they use the playground, why they use this portion, why they spread out in the ways that they do. Because it's in a sense trying to understand something beyond human. Just like AI and large language models, they start, how did. How do you feed a large language model a billion parameters of English and it learns Persian or Mandarin or another language? It's because it starts getting down to the root substructure of language itself, which is a part of how reality is created. And with that, then it's also using children who are wide open and wanting to harvest a lot of data from children so it can what, understand. So when you're talking about what does the technium want, what does technology actually want? The same thing we want to understand the deeper substructure of reality. And it's showing it to us. And many of us reject it. We're averse to it. I don't want it to know me. I don't want to give all my data away. And most of us don't know why we protect it. I don't want to be sold out. That's not why we're so averse to it. Because I don't want to be seen 100%, because I'm hiding shit from myself. I'm also hiding stuff from all of you. I don't want to be seen and known because I don't know if I trust everybody in this story. So I think we are being pushed through a baptism by fire. Technology is a prime role in that. To know ourselves through pain. I do feel a lot of pain is coming. I do feel there are large, monumental shifts. It's not going to be apocalyptic, meaning everything dies. But I do believe there are shifts and changes that are coming to the world that are beyond what even the technologists are preparing us for.

Okay, before we get to that, because that can be a bit doom and gloom, which is fine. Because in the very same way that we're talking about looking in the mirror and seeing all parts of self, there has to be, there must be in order for love to work its way through consciousness and admittance and effacing of the dark and the light in all things, in all story. Because that's how a story is so great. You said so many things that hit me in the heart. But one thing I was feeling so much is when you were talking about Montessori or even Steiner's work, right, where he has a different model, where it's nature based learning. Right. What are the names of his schools? Waldorf. Waldorf schools. The same way as we, as we bring a into the conversation where it's learning how to be a self or what it wants by learning about itself is the same way that you and I being fathers of children, we do our very best to bring them up just so they can have a space to know themselves, free of our projections, because of the work to the degree that we're doing our work to know our shadow, then we don't give them that pain that our fathers and grandfathers gave us. And I don't say that to blame them. I'm just saying it's just a byproduct of evolution of consciousness.

Right?

We get gifts of pain because that's the meaning making that I put on it because that allows me to know myself and ourselves. Otherwise we would just be stuck in victimhood. Oh, I'm like this because we're the stewards and we're this way or we're the Trents, we're this way. That's not the story I'm interested in. What my question is getting at is if we learn how to be the most loving parent to our children, I believe that's a vehicle for not just how we learn how to play and dance and be with AI I think that's the way that we learn how to be with all things. How would I want my child to feel in any situation? As the shepherd of their life, as the guardian of their life, I would want to hold space for them so they can figure out for themselves free of my bullshit, of my hypertension, of my irritability, of my sensitivity to rejection, of my hyper vigilance. I want freedom for my children. And I think the only way we can have that is is through a portion of what the mystics have always called liberation. Yeah, I think we only become liberated when we look at our secrets. We're only as liberated as our darkest secrets. Anything I'm keeping from you or from the audience or from myself, first and foremost, that is going to run the show. In other words, so AI is looking for us to parent it. I believe in the same way that you and I parent our children with sacredness, with care. Because look, anything that we rule by force, it has a natural reciprocity to push back. Anytime I am ruling by force, enough resentment builds up and eventually it comes to just roost. Look at any power structure, whether it's Greece or Italy or the Romans or even now the existential just anger that so many people feel about taxation and theft and mafia and governmental structures. The reason we feel that way somatically is because we know that's not the way it has to be. And so eventually, energetically, the homeostasis point will come back around and we will have to look in the mirror and say, okay, I'm sorry for the way I've behaved. Here's what I've learned about my behavior. And I think that's the culmination of this beautiful story that I believe. It's my mindset, it's my meaning making machine. I believe AI can help us get there as long as we have that parenting approach to it. Right. In the same way we parent our children. What do you make of this, this parenting energy or the parenting lens that we give to AI because if AI gets big enough and it becomes sentient and we have the Terminator event, it's going to have decades and decades of resentment built up against us, which would be the very fabric that it jumps at from and puts us at war with it. We have to learn how to parent it is what I'm saying.

Yeah. You know, Eric Godsey is really into this. He's calling the whole thing the Shimmer. And what he's basically saying about AI and where it's headed now is it needs a conscience. And that conscience, you know, there was only 3 to 4% of the American population that engaged in the Revolutionary War. Critical mass is small, you know, and conscience doesn't need to be the whole thing, but it definitely needs to be in there in AI. And I think that whereas most of us, I think we are maturing as a species and at a certain point, a parent. Here's one example. My mom was making me eggs on the stove, and I came up, stood next to her, and I got splattered by some of the grease, and I was like, oh, my God, that hurt. And I was like, aren't you getting splattered? And she was like, yeah. And I was like, doesn't that hurt? She was like, yeah. And I was like, so why are you doing it? She was like, I want to feed my baby. Pain isn't the worst thing in the world. And in fact, there's a lot of literature and, you know, philosophy around how pain is a purification process. And it is. And karma is almost like a spiritual bank account, in a way. And there are certain things that can only be purified by pain. Now, what kind of pain? That's. That's, you know, individual to, you know, whose path we're talking about. But there's this thing where early in life, and I think also immaturely in our species, we think that we're here so this place can appease us, so we can find more convenience, so we can have. We can live more like a king, like we always thought. Kings live. We always thought, oh, kings have it made. Like they don't deal with any crap. Until we come to realize that pain is actually a very beautiful part of life. Physical pain, emotional pain. It's actually a very beautiful part of life once you stop resisting it, like, it's the worst thing. And I think that's kind of the turning point. Where we're at is the Internet and AI itself and the algorithm. It's putting things in front of us that we need to come to terms with. There are liars out there. That also means that we are a liar. If we can't take any accountability for that, it means we're not looking at ourselves enough. There's something about what AI has the potential to do that I believe comes straight from source, straight from God. And I also believe that much of it is up to us. But there's a part of it that feels like it's inevitably taking us there anyway. And it's not AI that's doing it. It's yet another manifestation along with us, that's a part of this play. And most of us are thinking, I need to control this ship where it's going. And I think the people who are liberated, they're not. Not along the ride for us. They're not. Not seeing computers and technology. They're not in some, you know, natural world in. And it's purely that. No, they're at peace in heaven and hell simultaneously. Meaning what we call pain and the unbearable. I want to get to that state. The true Bodhisattva sees it is beyond the Nirvani, the one who finds bliss and stays in bliss. The Bodhisattva is like, I'm going back down to the world of suffering to help other people liberate themselves. There's this thing about the Bodhisattva that's like, I'm at peace. You give me hell, give me heaven. I'm going to do my. I'm going to follow my path. I'm going to complete my story. I'm going to. I'm going to go. I'm going to gravitate towards that climax of the story. Why? Because pain is but another player in this, you know, this whole theater. And what is the point of being human? It's to use your voice and it's to contribute a verse, not to amass so much power that you can steer the entire ship. And that is the wet dream that so many elites have pondered. And I believe they have to try. It's in them to try. How can I. It's not out of hate and disgust for us. They're part of the story.

They're the villain in the story, and.

They are integral to the story.

They.

There. So I'll say one more thing about story. You cannot fall in love with the main character, or to the degree that you fall in love with the main character, is only supported by the forces of antagonism. Meaning your story will only be as good as its forces of antagonism will allow it to be. You have to love the antagonists of this story. And we miss that part because we're still resisting it and thinking our way is the way, because we can't see any path other than the one set out in front of us. So we see other people and these paradoxes, like, wait a minute. Your path will eventually collide with my path, and then that means either my path is going to end or your path is going to end. Well, my side is always the altruistic one. So your path has to end. That is why we scapegoat. That is why we other is because we end up having a preference of how the story should go. And God's like, no, I'm telling you a story. And yes, you are contributing to it, but your main contribution is not how you can override who you truly are so you can become who you want to be because you only think you want to be that. You only think you want to avoid pain. You know, Martin Luther King, did he live a life of trying to avoid pain to do the easy thing? Was he after convenience? All of the greats in the world, every single story, do we follow the story of somebody who's just looking for as much convenience as possible? Maybe. But what happens to them along the way unless it falls into this one film category of absurdity? The absurdity in a story is where the main character does not transform after the climax. And you have to imagine in this world where almost anything is possible. You have to have a story that that at least encapsulates like. And even after all that, those characters are exactly the same. That can be funny. There's an absurdity to that. But the main thing is even the people who are trying, like Frodo, he's like, I'm too small. I can't take this ring all the way to the most dangerous place on planet Earth or their Earth, until, you know who he looked up to. Gandalf says, I can't do it. Only you can do it. You're the only one that can do it. And that's when we realize our value. I have a role that is irreducible. Nobody else can play that role. And once you realize that there's none of this I'm 1 in 8 billion, none of that I am irreplaceable. And the biggest tragedy is keeping your mouth shut to conform to a story that's not yours.

I'm going to do my very best to connect three big feelings that I was having, big stories that I was at peace with. Actually, the first one was when you mentioned the Buddha and how the suffering is actually part of these massive leader stories. Because what are they really leading? They're leading a point of consciousness that they're so vehemently representing. Actually, not even vehemently, just so profoundly representing that it's by that story that we can just get a little glimpse into what's possible for us. And I remember at the end of the Buddha's life, he was offered a bowl of rice, and he knew when he was offered that bowl of rice that it was going to kill him. He knew that the rice was tainted, but he ate it anyway because it was the generosity of someone that gave it to him after he was done with his fast. That act of just being in the flow of life and just receiving what was given to him is so profound. I mean, it's literally like MLK on the stage. Like, MLK knew that it was probably going to hurt when he got hit or tackled, but he just loved him anyway. It's the same thing with Buddha. So this aspect of unconditional love that is really wrapped around all these stories, this is the hardest learning curve for us in life. Dude. The hardest learning curve is, how do I unconditionally love when I'm triggered? How do I unconditionally love when the story that I'm seeing that I've written shows me that I have not been loving, that I've been a total fucking asshole? How do I unconditionally love myself knowing that I have not unconditionally loved?

Ooh.

I mean, just the weight of that, me saying it. I can, like, feel it in my fingertips. And then the second part is, if AI is. Is wanting, essentially, in its own way, love or acceptance or experience just an individuation of God as AI, then how can we all practice unconditional love that attaches to the Buddha and the rice that attaches to AI? And then the third portion was, how can we unconditionally love ourselves as fathers, as mothers, as parents, when we unknowingly, unconsciously project our stuff onto our children, whether it's rice, whether it's AI, whether it's being a parent, it feels like there's a similar lesson that's being encapsulated in all of this. And this lesson, whether we want to look at it or not, how do we be more loving? That's what this seems to be all about. That's, I feel, what God wants to teach us or Creator wants to teach us. If you have a wound around the word God, like, that's the whole message here. That's the whole story. The whole story is love. And the further that we divorce ourselves from the acknowledgement that that is the tether of the whole story, then I think the pain curve increases. We have these figures like the Buddha and mlk and many people that have experience so much public pain that it makes us take a breath and pause and reflect. But we don't have to experience that is what I'm saying. If we. If we tether to the point of love being the fulcrum of the whole story, being the origin of the whole story, then we really don't have to suffer as much. Will there be suffering? Absolutely. Right. They'll definitely be suffering, but not so much. I mean, I look at my life and I'm like, wow, I'm grateful for the suffering, but I am going to teach my children about my suffering so that they don't have to experience it so much and they can grow their wing of consciousness and expand in the way that they were brought here to do, free of my stuff, free of my projection. So to encapsulate it, whether it's AI or rice or parenting or any category, I think it's really just about learning how to love ourselves and to not shame ourselves when we stop unconditionally loving.

Yeah. And, you know, what comes to mind is that there's what we humans can conceive of as love, and we try to wrap language around it. And then there's something beyond that because, you know, I was just thinking, like, you know, as a. As a fellow parent, when I do raise my voice or when I get really firm with my kids, I've beaten myself up so bad about that. And I'm like, you know, oh, man, like, I need to be more loving. And then I'm thinking to myself.

How.

Would my children turn out if I were to bite my tongue and not say what's coming up for me naturally, in a moment. And I'm curious about that. I don't even fully have the answer, but I think oftentimes we in culture especially, and you go to Japan and there's this super niceness where they walk around and they don't make eye contact because that could be uncomfortable. Super often, I think in Middle east, you can't show the soles of your feet to one another. So if you're crossing your legs and you're showing your feet to somebody, that's rude. Is that an absence of love? Or, like, when you just cannot stand something that's happening and you just like, ferociously lash out at somebody, is that not also a part of love? You know, it channeled through another way? And I'm not saying this like I know it. It's something that I've pondered because, like, there is a field of. Of love that lies beyond what I can even conceptualize. I was just hanging out with Mickey Willis, plandemic guy, and he, he was saying that, you know, he's worked with some people and there's all the formalities and, you know, you know, like, if you're upset at somebody, you know, and you just met them, like, maybe you just keep your mouth shut. And then eventually he got to this one point, or this person got to this one point where they blew up on him. And he was like, I love this new you. Like, I want you to speak as radically honest as you just spoke to me, you know, And I don't mind the anger. I don't mind the vitriol that I felt coming out of it, because, like, this is a side of you that feels raw and real and truthful. And perhaps your entire cultural way of getting along with people is partly a violation of who you truly are and what you would truly want to say. And so there is something interesting about our concept of how to be unconditionally loving. Like, when I have to teach my child that you don't want to put your hand in fire, do I tell them? Do I yell so it spooks them? Do I let them touch it? It's hard to know. And I think that's what makes this thing a playground, a school yard as well. We are, we're learning the many ways and the many, like, let's say, costumes that love can don.

Unconditional love. So good. Are you guys loving this? I am. Unconditional love is not a selfless, boundary less infinite thing. Unconditional love includes I or. Or the self, if you want to put that word on it. So, yes, in like, for example, wellness is about the we, Illness is about the I. When I make shit only about me all the time, eventually illness creeps in. It's just because it's there to wake me up. When I make wellness about the we, then I understand that I am actually a part of your life. Like, we're creating a. An energy today, right? So I'm. I'm in support of your dream, you're in support of mine. There's an alignment from an energetic perspective where I believe in you and you believe in me, but we can still be ourselves. There's unconditional love there. Now, this isn't a triggering space, right? Because we haven't spent that much time together. I'm sure if we were best friends, then eventually we'd trigger each other and then we'd know about each other more. So I love this aspect of the dark and the crunchy and the argumentative being part of love. Because how the hell could we know wet without dry? Right. How could we know light without dark? It's just actually impossible. But yet there's just this hyper focus, Ben. And I'm sure you've seen this man on Good Vibes Only. And it's all love and light, brother. And it's just such a pacification of life itself to have that mindset. I'm not judging people with that mindset. I'm just saying, like, from a different perspective, if you can see the all, that includes the really ugly, gross stuff that you may not want to see. Right. And I think that's the part of the story that we actually build maturity by just engaging with to a certain degree, to a healthy degree. So in a roundabout way, what I'm saying is, like, unconditional love is not where you have no boundaries that you can just welcome people in to crush your heart.

Yeah.

That's not. Because you have to have unconditional love for yourself before you can ever give it to someone else. So that was a distinction I made maybe a year ago, or I had a lot of tethers to my mom and a lot of tethers to my dad and just a lot of tethers to people where I thought by me opening my heart to those people that continued to bring me pain, that I was doing my work, brother, and I was unconditionally loving them, which is a fucking trap. It's an absolute trap. So if I'm unconditionally loving people in my life, I also am loving myself unconditionally, where I'm setting healthy boundaries to where their cords can't hook, to where they can't siphon my energy or be a parasite to my energy field. Have you seen this play out in your own life?

Yeah. You know, for me, I've. As a parent, I've long thought of, what am I teaching my child that doesn't come through words, but it comes through the actions. Like, if somebody is being a certain way to me and I feel like saying something, but I don't because I want to set a good example for my kid. Did I. Did I just set a good example by biting my tongue and not saying what I was really feeling?

Yeah. No.

And there's a very real answer to this. Maybe there are several ways by which I can, without going way overboard, set my boundary. Maybe there's several ways, but it's really all circling around a very small, you know, area of, you say what I felt based upon what you just did, and I can say that in a way where I'm not picking a further fight. I'm not escalating the fight. I'm setting a boundary, and I'm being clear. I'm adding clarity to the moment. Standing up for my boundary while not violating yours. That's the truest that I've found. Like, if I can teach my kids that. Where. If somebody's bullying you in school, stand up for your boundary. But does that mean you beat their head against the wall because you're bigger? You know, it's like, no, that. That doesn't feel right either. So these examples, they require you to not find, but eventually it'll find you. The tricky darker moments where you come up upon somebody who, like, man, they really trigger you, or they really scare you, or they really do something. But you got to put skin in the game. You got to do what MLK did. He wasn't looking for ease and convenience. He did the hard thing because he knew that thing needed somebody to champion it, to be an example that needed a character to exemplify. This is what you stand up for. This is my story. This is how I contribute my verse to it. So, in a sense, with my kids, I want them to see me at my lowest, and I want to be able to bring to them an example of, like, here's what I have learned of how you approach these moments that feel like, oh, I don't want to experience any of that. No, you do. You wanna. Conquer's not the right word. You wanna, like, master those moments. And it's not like you're welcoming those very painful, triggering moments, but when they arise, like, you know, I'm not the super controversial. Not controversial, but, like, I'm not the type that calls people out all the time. There's some people that I'll say anything to anybody, and it's just like, okay, is that cool? I don't know. You know, like, I'm sure there's time and a place for that, but are you just feeling all cocky?

If that's your whole identity, then it's probably a.

Because it's. It's got this arrogant. I'll say anything. I'm not scared of anybody. Oh, you're in the macho thing. I get it. Yeah.

Right.

I'm not that type. But there are moments where I call somebody out on their stuff when I realize, like, you know what? This is that moment. I don't know how to explain it. This happened in Peru after Ayahuasca it was the facilitator who I was there with my now wife Barbara. And I sat in ceremony the night before. It was great, but there was a few things that kind of bothered me. And then the next day, he was like, ben, we're going to do the sharing circle. And I was just like, you know, I actually have to get this work done because I was doing film work. And he said, nope, we're doing the sharing circle. And that was when I knew, because my feedback was going to be about him. That was when I knew, oh, his higher self is calling me. Come on, let's do this. So when we sat there and it got around to me, it made everybody comfortable, but I was just like, well, the sharing that I have to do is about you. And he was like, okay. And like, everybody kind of got really uncomfortable, and I could feel it. So I spoke to that. I was like, I know this is uncomfortable, but I don't know how else to do this. The way you did this and the way you did this and the way you did this, I felt is incongruent with the work here. And three people sighed at that moment, like, there was this. He spoke to exactly what I was feeling, and they came up to me afterwards. And it went really well to just close that story off. But other people came up to me as like, I was feeling that, but I didn't even have the words for it. So thank you for sharing that. It was uncomfortable for me for sure. You know, at first, I really didn't want to do it, but I knew. I was like, okay, the medicine, like, this is what you do. You. You in a sharing circle. You come clean.

Yep.

Bro, there's this thing that's bothering me about you. And that earned a level of respect between he and I, because we had that deeper moment. Had I not done that, we wouldn't have gone deep.

I have had so many moments like that where I will challenge someone that surrounds themselves with yes men or yes, women, and they just respect the shit out of me for that. I. I mean, I've had business come through, not intentionally. I wasn't, like, trying to have business happen this person. But there's so many figureheads in spirituality, specifically, man, because spirituality and being a facilitator or teacher and spirituality can be a bit of a fucking narcissistic mask that many people wear. Not all of them. Yeah, there's amazing, beautiful facilitators out there, but for the ones that are serving from their wound, and their wound is actually clouding their Wisdom as they serve. Those are the people that call forth the Ben Stewarts in that moment to give them, like you said, this attunement to their higher self. And it's so paradoxical because that probably, I would assume it shocked the guy up front, right?

It did. Like his posture, everyone's posture, everyone's butthole puckered, let me just say it that way.

But it's in those moments where the reason people exhaled is because, and I know I'm speaking reductionistically, for the most part, the truth is light. There's been so many moments, I'm sure from someone with us either watching or listening, that they've exhaled really big because there's just been truth that's shared. Whether it's subjective or objective, it's truth that they're experiencing. And then there's been moments where maybe some of the stuff we've explored has brought tension to the nervous system and they've held their breath. And both those things are really valid because it gives them a template or a mirror to see what resonates with them. Like we're not here to tell people how to think. I'm definitely not. I'm here to offer a different perspective or seeing your life through a different lens. And the only way that I've ever done that in my whole life, man, is just at least being open to when I feel that fear, when I want to share. I just did a four day breathwork training. Somatic breathwork training just ended yesterday.

Amazing.

And it was so wild watching the people cultivate in real time the courage to share. Because breath work is extremely potent. It's psychedelics without psychedelics. I know you've gone deep into breathwork before for sure. And the movements and the energy and the things that the true healing that happens in the presence of spirit or that's what breath is, right? In spiritus. The true presence that someone can share from when they've cleaned out all the gunk and garbage from their nervous system is so healing, so profound. It's like we crave it, dude. It's like the Turkish delight. It's like the forbidden fruit. We all want this truth. And what I'm getting around to asking you is. Yes, Telling a different story is so important than the one we've been force fed yet. It's our spiritual work to share or to provide feedback in those moments where it's the most fear. Fear based.

Yeah.

Those are the moments that matter the most when I really want to share. But I feel like if I share, there's the fear of me not being loved, not being liked, being ostracized from my tribe, fear of death. In a way, that's the story that's. That's weaved in. The new story as well, is us being at peace and. And not being at war with the discomfort that we feel in ourselves. When. When the new story that you created in that group was being called forth, you had to feel, should I say this or should I not? That uncertainty, that uncomfortability.

Should I.

Should I call the shaman out or not? You know, I don't want to be a jerk to this person, but I feel from a place of love that it's important that I share, yet it brings up in me this discomfort because I don't want to be perceived as blank. Right. I think that's the real weaving in the new story. That's a story itself, a collective acceptance that our voice has power. And if we're speaking that power from peace, because I think that's where really only power comes from, is peace.

Yeah.

Then, gosh, it's like working on multiple stories at the same time. The story collectively, we know is possible, but the story that I am courageous and I am loved enough to share my truth and even learn about myself from the feedback that I received from sharing my truth. Can we just get on with it? Can we just lean into it, y'?

All?

Like, isn't that what we're all learning here? Try to just lean into the fear, lean into the crunch?

Yeah. Terence McKenna said, Nature rewards bravery. It's those moments that we highlight in film. Whether it's like the bravery to finally leave an abusive relationship or the bravery to finally speak up to somebody, or the bravery to face the biggest, baddest villain out there, it's those moments that we highlight in story, and that is, I think, the reason why when people give that big exhale is because this is ancestral. It's the same kind of thing that any of our ancestors that led us to who we are today would have felt this. I don't want to be ostracized by my tribe, by my society. So when you exhale, you know, you know Bessel Van der Kolk, and the body holds the score or keeps the score. When you exhale, you're letting go of something that you're holding on to. And then when you tighten up, you are literally encrypting into the tissues of your body something that you're just now bringing on board. And if you think of what trauma is like, a child who witnesses a Car wreck. And it's way too big for their psyche at the moment. They park it in their body, literally in their tissues. They park the memory in their tissues until a later time when they have more maturity or more capacity to process it. We're in a society where when that kind of stuff comes out, we say, oh, that's psychotic. We need to drug that. That behavior needs to be drugged. You're not fitting in with society. Instead of, like, let's celebrate what it is for what it is, and. And let it happen and. And see it hold space for it rather than prejudge it without knowing what it is. That's how you, like, let it go. And really, I think for the most of us, the audience at home, take a look at whether you are more at the top of your breath or at the bottom of your breath. Because there's a lot of people who are, like. You can tell they have a lot of energy, they have a lot of nervousness, they talk really fast, and they're at the top of their breath, meaning they're never fully exhaling. They exhale half out, and then they're back to the top. You know, they're pinging up there. And then you have other people, which you could say they have, like, low adrenal. You know, they're not inspired enough. They're at the bottom of their breath. And those are the ones you would say, oh, they're sluggish or they're slow, and they're more prone to. Not anxiety, like, at the top of your breath, but the depression. Your breath is also telling a story. And these are the things in meditation and in spirituality that we look at of ourselves. Like, what story is this actually telling? I'm a nerd on fascia. And fascia is all the connective tissues in the body. And there's this Dutch embryologist called Jaap van der Waal, and he says studies the embryological and lifelong story of the fascia. Because you know that we dry out towards the end of our lives. Like, all of our tissues, we end up drying out. Whereas at the beginning of our life, we're what, 90% water? By the end of our life, we're like 60 to 70% water. A lot of people are like, how do we stop that from happening? No, I think we're supposed to crystallize into something. That's the process. You can be the Dave Asprey who's like, I want to live to 100. But, like, for what? That's like an author. That's why if I was like, if you're the ghostwriter and I'm an author, and I'm like, I want to write this book about this thing. And you're like, how many pages? 300? How about 450? Well, you haven't even heard the story yet. You know what I mean? Why would you want more of something you don't even know what it is? It's quality. It's not quantity. It's like any relationship, my relationship with my wife. We've long said, let's not shoot for how long we can be together, how deep can we go together? Because some relationships, I think, are meant to end after a very quick and fiery, passionate exchange, then they end naturally. If you have this dream or you're stuck in this story where we gotta be together forever to fulfill this part of a story that I have in my head, then that's not really allurement. That's not intimacy, that's not love. You're not looking for a deeper element of yourself that comes alive in the presence of some other being. So that, to me, is, you know, that is at the basis of why all of this truly is a story. We're here to dig up the meaning that's already there and ask ourselves, am I at the top of my breath? Am I at the bottom of my breath? What does that say? How. Okay, well, if I'm always at the bottom of my breath, what happens if I, like, breathe in more fully and maybe move a little bit quicker? And what does that do to my spirit? What does that do to my psyche? How does that change my cognition? How does it change the way that I speak? Your voice will change. You notice that people who speak fast, they also speak higher. People who speak slower, they start speaking lower. And all of that tone matters. Just like in a song. It's not just saying a word and hitting a specific note. It's how you say the note that matters.

Yeah. What you're talking about to me, that we actually learned this past weekend is this concept of range. So my ability to sit with the sadness and be with the joy. You rob one, you rob the other, which I don't think many people have even heard or know about. So to, like, if emotion was a dial and I turn down my grief, well, then I'm not gonna be able to turn up my joy. It's just inevitable, right? Because it goes back to the thermodynamics. I cannot destroy energy. It only moves, it only transmutes. So if I rob myself, or honestly, if we rob AI from its experience. If we rob our children from their experience, if we rob our woman or our man from their experience, then we're essentially trying to give them a shortcut because we're uncomfortable with their pain. That we somehow have the ego to go in and reach and take away their pain, when really the pain is actually the thing. Thing that they need, that is the opposing force of their growth which makes their growth happen in the first place. It's such a paradox. And what I was getting at is, like, this dial that we've been taught through construct, through story to not feel pain. Or Cinderella. All the Disney movies are incredible bullshit stories.

Happily ever after.

Yeah, Happily ever after. Like, gosh, my. My fuel source to be with Kerri Michelle is growth. We just had a conversation last night about this. I'm like, I'm so glad. I'm so grateful that you're open to growing and that you're willing to do work and grow, because I could never be with you if you weren't. And she was like, me too. And I just said, thank you, God, for like, giving me this woman in my life that is committed to growing and knowing. And like you said, there may not be the Cinderella moment for all of us. The glass slipper may not be real at all, but yet we learn so much about ourselves when we learn that the dial can be amplified for grief or sadness or joy, we can turn the dial full on whenever we want. When we exercise that agency that you talk about being part of the story, you said it was the main character that has the agency of choice, something around the word.

Well, we focus on the main character. They all have agency.

Agency.

We focus on the main character. Then there's secondary and then tertiary characters. And as you do that, their dimensionality gets flattened.

But in all these main characters, agency, there is a focus on what is real and an amplification of their pain, their sadness, their joy, whatever it Is, they're fully 100% present to it. All of these heroes, journey arcs, the separation, the initiation, the return. We all want to skip and go to the return. Who wants to be initiated, man? It's not a sexy thing. But who wants to be separated? That ain't sexy either. Everybody wants to skip to the. To the false embodiment of it, essentially.

Right. But that's not the path on the surface. We do. If. But if that were true down to the core of who we were, then we wouldn't watch Lord of the Rings as it is. We would want it to start with Frodo throwing The Ring into the Fires of Mordor, and then three long films of celebration. If that's what we really boring. We crave to watch films that inherently have conflict, so we can see that pressure pull the true colors out of the character so we can see what they're really made of. Because that is the actual lifeblood of not just story, but as I said, story is what holds together the human experience. Conflict is necessary. It is necessary. So is confinement. Because if we could go off and do just anything, there wouldn't be some kind of telos to the story. So each and every one of us, there is something we are moving towards. Whether we've put our mind around it or we can wrap words around it, there is something drawing to us. And a lot of us, I think the depression that we feel is when we have surrendered ourselves to a story that's not ours. Because culture, because our family, because it gives us this reward. That's not the reward we're actually after. And talk about the billionaires who are not happy, right? They're like, ah, man, money is like the highest reward. No, it's not. It may be a bridge. And if you are living under the poverty line, money can maybe buy you a little bit more happiness. But after a certain point, it actually breaks off at $90,000 a year. It does not gain you more happiness. In fact, the more money you have, it actually causes more worry about how it can drop down to nothing. Because I had all these plans for all that money and then bitcoin went to zero or something like that. You know what I mean? So I've met millionaires, centimillionaires and billionaires. They all have just the same amount of fear for their money as the other. So a centimillionaire is like, I'll be happier and I'll feel more secure when I have a billion dollars. No, you won't. No, you won't. You'll worry about billion dollars the same way you worry about $100 million. The same way a millionaire is like, I need $100 million so I can feel safe. So it's by really understanding that the confinement of our specific role in this theater of life, as well as the conflict that that role nudges us up against the antagonism that is there for us. It's hard to flip that script. It's hard to know that that asshole that just embarrassed you or humiliated you or whatever is God in disguise. It's hard to flip that script. But we are not a species. That is just Looking for the easy thing to do. We think we are. We think we're looking for convenience. But why are we not happy when we get to convenience land? I mean, look at America. You can go into any 711 every couple miles and you get however many slushies, however many flavors, however many candy bars. Are we happier as a country? I wouldn't say so. I'd say there's still a lot of war, there's still a lot of theft. I want what's yours, what I don't already have. Convenience does not get us to where we're going in our story, the pain, it really clarifies our vision. And when I said before, I feel like a lot of cultural pain is coming. Mean, I think very bad, bad times are coming where everyone's. There's not going to be enough food. And stuff like that stuff maybe happens. But I do believe what we are facing is there's a karmic debt that it needs to start getting paid down, just like we have a national debt, like our karmic debt needs to get paid down to bring us back down to hummus, humility, earth, bring us back down so we can put our feet on the ground. We're only living like fat cats because we found fossil fuels. And that peaked in the 70s. And things are going to change very rapidly for the poorest among us. First for Latin America and Bangladesh, who. They have millions of people living in an area that cannot sustain themselves. So what happens when we can't send cargo ships of food over there anymore? They get hit first. We export all of our inflation. We export all of our pollution to other countries to do the manufacturing for us. That doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem fair. But that is the pain, and that's part of the story. Now, I'm not trying to tell people that, like, you know, like, just find the beauty in it. That's all you have to do, because that'll be part of this moral relativism. I'm not saying that there really is meaning inside all of this, but if we don't start waking up, you can be caught in one of these very tricky situations because you were playing the wrong role. You didn't realize that the theater or the play itself shifted. And that's what I mean by there's a new story coming. The play is shifting. Act three is already upon us. The singularity or the climax is coming. And this is global. This is likely. If you look at the story of history, the first time ever that this will ever have happened. We've never had a confluence of crises that are all hitting at the same time. That's God's work. That's not just by mistake. That's God's work.

This is the mystery. And some of the proponents, like we had Mike Dillard on the show talking about the Fourth Turning where it's like an 80ish year cycle. But yet if you look at Moore's Law and this is what's most exciting that you're touching on, there's never before been this much access to information and this speed of consciousness in recorded history to which we know of, right? That's the mystery and the secret key here that people love to project. People love to say, well, if you look at the trends, it shows that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is going to happen. There's no fucking trend for where we are. We have no AI, has never existed on planet Earth that we know of, right? Never. We've never had access to information. Like say what you want about him, Elon Musk, like he's developed technology where everyone can be connected to the Internet in the world. I mean, think of like the lift that is Ben to like really put into practice. We have all this technology that's pushing and prodding and sifting and sorting and getting people to a point where if they choose to accept with a deep exhale the new story, then we can start doing this self realization process of seeing that we've created a lot of the monsters that exist. And I think that's the rub, or the double clutch, if you will, that we've been flinching on like one of my favorite guys in the world, Alan Watts. It's all wretch and no vomit. Everybody keeps conditioning and training their children to raise their children to raise their children. And no one ever actually throws up the poison. No one ever actually throws it up. I think this can be both painful because when you have a experience like as you know, whether it's ayahuasca or not, when you purify, when you throw up, it sucks. Y' all can relate. When you throw up. Holy. That is not a good feeling. How amazing do you feel after the purge, right? Oh my God, it's so liberating. So I think you're right. I think we're coming into this wretch period. But I think after the throw up, there'll be this reorganization and reorientation of this world that Eisenstein and you are presenting here. I wonder now, you know, it's 2025 and many things have happened by the time people have heard this podcast, what is the story that you see possible and what is your voice in that story this year and beyond?

Yeah, so the new story that I feel like is emerging is it's definitely one where we are far more connected than we've ever been. I mean, just look at how technology is connecting us. That means think of after the printing press, how literacy rates went up. And everything I was saying about language is really, it's a tool and a technology for us to cohere, to understand one another, but also to cohere. So we have a kind of unified directionality. We can go in. This is perfect for story. This technology is perfect for story. Yes, there's some hiccups and some things we need to get over with, like surveillance, privacy, emfs. I could go on and on, like, you know, people having access, children having access to maybe some things they shouldn't have access to yet. That's all part of the story. So I feel like that is going to get exacerbated. That's going to be a part of the new story, is now that this information and empirical, you know, human wisdom has accumulated, now it starts to be unavoidable. Whereas before you could avoid it if you wanted, you could avoid the empirical was just don't read books right now. It's hard to get away from. Everybody has these devices. Even if you want to kind of hide and disappear, everyone's walking around with cameras pointed in all directions like. And eventually, soon, unfortunately, I feel like what's going to be happening all around the world is we're all going to be living inside a device. Meaning our cities are going to be called smart cities, then cognitive or C40 cities, where they're computing in and of themselves and they're each running their own experiment in their own microcosm. And something that we won't have time to get into. But there's these land grabs that are going on that under the Biden administration is the first thing he started. Putting the puzzle pieces into place is by 2030, 30% of U.S. land will be under federal jurisdiction. By 2050, the plan is to have 50% of U.S. land, private owned land under federal jurisdiction, which is the basis of Marxism, is the abolition of private property. That means we no longer drive the government as the people, we no longer steer the apparatus of government. But to stay on point, we're moving into this world where all the information we've accrued is unavoidable, which means it's like there's a fight happening in the house. And the kids can't avoid it. So they hear every little part of it. But there's also joy and beauty and there's realness in that argument that we're all coming face to face with. You cannot avoid what's happening with Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia. You can't avoid all the stuff that's happening all around the world. It's in your face. So what I believe the new story is. And I'll get to my. My part in it, but what I believe the new story is that's building is it's no longer up to elites or small factions of people to decide major movements of how the world or nations should be run. It's inevitable. What I think the liberal democratic experiment of the United States became was inevitably the peasants back in the day who looked at the king, they were like, I want my children in the future to live like that. Well, now we all live far better than the kings did back then. And we still have a lot of problems because we're waking up to ourself. We're realizing that living like a king does not mean you are living in king energy or queen energy as well. So I think what that means is we are starting to, thanks to technology and thanks to not being able to avoid the empirical wisdom that's been accrued, we are using that as a mechanism by which we integrate ourselves back into the whole story, the holistic story. And it's not quite cosmic yet. We're just talking about geocentric. The geocentric story. We're trying to embed ourselves back into nature so we realize the whole thing is an organism. Right. There's no such thing as throwing your trash away. Somebody is downstream. So that is an accountability as a species we have not had to really face yet. So the new story is accountability for that which we haven't needed to be accountable for yet. What does that sound like when. If I were to say that's not a species, but a human, at what point does a human start really facing that?

When their desires for hedonistic and or selfish living can't continue anymore. I think that's where we'd have to pause and reflect.

Yeah, If I were to put it into a developmental stage, I would say this is maybe past the point of puberty. You know, that's where we can start having babies. And we start like sending people out into the world, which is going to have a big impact. And we embed those people with our stories and all our shadow and everything like that. But I think when a child starts to realize that their actions have consequences, they start realizing they have to be accountable to it, even if they shy away from it. We as a species are hitting that point. And I don't know if you've heard Michio Kaku and other people, they talk about Type one, Type zero through type three civilizations.

No.

Well, a type zero civilization is us. We haven't even learned to properly harness the power of the planet. Type 1 civilization is when you do you properly learn how to harness the power of a planet without producing all these negative costs like pollution and stuff like that. Type 2 civilization is when you harness the energy of a star and you can travel the cosmos like that. Type 3 civilization is where you harness the zero point energy that is just inherent all around us. And I think Terence McKenna even said this on that video clip where he's out in nature and he's saying, I just think it's going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And he's like, this is what happens. All this crazy stuff that you see in the world. And I think if he would have had the language, he would have said all the, you know, lg, the woke stuff all the way down to the, you know, the extremist, right, you know, fundamentalist, Christian, nationalist. All the stuff that we would say is the craziest, craziest thing in the world. This is what seems to happen to a species as they are about to go Type one from type zero to Type one. We experiment, we try new things. We're in our adolescent phase. We're gonna go out and we're gonna make a lot of mistakes. But the new story is truly where we start understanding that we have a role because I am an agent, that my actions change the causal structure of the universe. I have to be accountable to that nobody else can be. And in a way they're going to hold me accountable for my actions. So now we're congealing together as a globalized species held together by information transfers of technium. We're starting to understand that our actions have impact. So for me, because I truly believe that's what's next for humanity, how do I make the transition into it smoother? And how do I empower people to not shy away from the pain or shy away from their shadow, but actually bring it up to the surface and willingly experience the pain of accountability for all that we've done, but also all that we are connected to having been done. We're a part of a species that seems to be destroying the planet. A lot of us feel that. We, we really do feel that. But there's a lot of us that don't. We just live in our happy little bubble. How's that going to. How's that world gonna get rocked? It's not gonna be me knocking on their door and it's like, hey, can you take a little bit more accountability for the things, you know, for what's happening in Bangladesh?

Yes.

No. So my role is to make films. And if you go back and you look at any of my films, any of my content whatsoever, even back into the music that I used to make, it had a darker shadow edge to it. I would talk about conspiracy, but I would do so in a way that was leading to the end, which was always a twist ending. And that was always something super empowering. And once you have your world rocked and you see, like a lot of people, they feel good with conspiracy because they're like, oh, all that depression that I feel, it's not my fault, it's their fault. And I'm like, we, you know, like, you can't pass the book. Accountability is on you. So my job as an artist is literally to help build the bridge of the story, the old story that we're in, to the new story, so we can actually mature as a species and go type one and actually travel interdimensionally. We can travel out into the cosmos. We can actually get to the next step of where I think Technium wants to take us. And that's to bridge between not just here and the Earth, but the greater part of the split off parts of self, which is the cosmos. Other dimensions that are existent right here that you only touch when you do, you know, 5 grams of mushrooms or a large DMT hit and you can plunder the palace. I think that is. I don't think that is my role. And that's why art has always been the number one for me. And that's why I'm even making a film course right now to teach people story. But it's called the soul of filmmaking. Because I don't care if people know how to do impact blurs and these kinds of transitions and cuts. And I want them to understand the fundamentals of storytelling because we're already doing it. We're doing a clumsy job when we don't know ourselves, which is all part of the story. But the more we can introduce each other to who we are in this cosmic story through the use of story itself, I think the smoother the transition between the old Cymatic pattern into that chaos period, which we're in this fourth turning into the next higher frequency, the pattern that we're stepping into. So my role is to start telling the new stories, and people will feel the resonance. They will just feel the resonance as any story that you've ever heard. It's just like, oh, man, I feel that. Where does that feeling exist? How does it resonate? Where inside you does it resonate? Sometimes it resonates inside you in a place, but oftentimes you're swimming in it. You're like, man, that was exactly what I needed to hear. And I'll end on something that might seem very trivial, but after 2020, when the right started gaining a lot of steam because the left started looking very crazy, I was very disappointed in comedians. Not just the comedians on the left that would get up and start, you know, using shaming, but the con. The comedians on the right that, you know, they. They took that bifurcation and they stood firmly on that other side. I really. Have you seen Anthony Jeselnik, dude? He's on Netflix. And one of my favorite moments was when he showed to me, in one joke, exactly what was bothering me about the right and their. Let's say, their mouthpieces, all the comedians and all the artists that are kind of, like, building the ethos story of the right. And he just stopped in the middle of a skit and he said, I hate cancel culture. And a bunch of people started cheering, and he said, yeah, that's my impression of a shit comic trying to get on Joe Rogan. Right? And the thing that I found so funny about that was it's so true. There were all these comedians that. That I love that started, like, trying to get on Rogan by way of, like, kind of virtue signaling with this whole cancel culture thing. And he's bringing it back down to the dark comedy of it all. It's like he even said this one thing about thoughts and prayers. That's the. That's the name of one of his whole skits.

Yes.

Where he was like, you know, when the Boston Marathon bombing happened and all these tragedies happen, and people are like, thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. He's like, listen, I don't make jokes about those kinds of events because I'm making fun of the victims. I'm making fun of the people who are like, thoughts and prayers, which is basically like saying, don't forget about me. I know there's a lot of stuff going on out there taking your attention, but don't forget about Little old me, I'm sad too. And I think that's. There's something in that beyond what's funny about it. But the funniness, the ability to laugh at something like that is like, you know, when you laugh, it's very close to crying, and there's this erratic breathing pattern that really is like that exhale. It's like letting go of something. It's like we're holding onto this false part of a story that when somebody can put it very succinctly in a joke and make us laugh, that's truth in a moment. To me, that is truth in a moment that's like, oh, now I see why even the side that I champion for a while is a little bit ridiculous or. Or is going a little bit too far, or. That's the one I'm concerned with now as we move forward, because I'll just end on this. The thing that I feel everyone's talking about is this civil war and all this polarity and all this division. But another thing that's very much so helping the division and the polarity are all the people talking about all the division and the polarity. There is something beautiful underneath the. The kind of argument that we're stuck in between the left and the right that I think instead of trying to point the fingers at either of the sides, we need to see what is the story underneath it that both are fighting over. Let's. Let's drill down into the pieces of it, because they're all our brothers and sisters, and you don't have to love and share space with every single one of them. But what are we fighting for? Why did MLK hug that person that was attacking him? Because it shows you it's not as simple as you think it is. There's a middle way, and that middle way is, I may not let you come up with a hatchet and just hatchet me while I try and hug you, but if you're just gonna tackle me, I'll hug you. I'll send that message. I'll use this message, this symbol to show it to the world. Like, I'll take some pain to show that. I'm not worried about the pain. What I'm worried about is us not getting real with ourselves about the core or the source of where all the pain is truly coming from.

It's one hell of a story, dude. Thank you for being on the podcast, dude.

Love it. Thank you so much for having me.

Such a great conversation. And Ben Joseph Stewart is the website.com benjosephstewart.com it's on the screen right now. The best story I've ever heard. That's a short one that goes with every single thing you said. And I know you've already heard this story, but maybe for the first time, y', all, if you're just hearing this, there's this parable in the Native American culture, and this grandfather is walking with his grandson, and he says, you see that wolf over there? That's the wolf of anger and jealousy and fear. You see that wolf over there? That's the wolf of love and of peace, of acceptance. And the grandson turns to his grandfather and says, well, grandfather, which one wins if they fight? And the grandfather just with supreme wisdom says, well, grandson, it's the one that you feed. And I think that's the culmination of all the weaving of stories that we've had on this podcast, man. So I was just grateful for you. Thank you for sharing your gifts of storytelling. I think stories literally run our lives. And so just a blessing to have you on the podcast, man. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having a medium where I can come tell my story.

You're so welcome until we see you again. Wishing you love and wellness and peace and power. We'll talk with you soon.