0:00

How are we going to navigate out of

0:02

this mess that we're currently in and

0:04

navigating towards into a

0:06

more beautiful world? Jordan Hall

0:08

is on this show and he's one of the most profound, deepest

0:10

thinkers, probably has the most extensive

0:13

vocabulary of anyone I've also had on the

0:15

show. So even if you don't

0:17

understand some of these words, you'll be able to feel

0:19

the truth of the messaging and the conversations

0:22

we're having that really take

0:24

a look at reality, what is real, and

0:26

also the possibility of possibility

0:29

of

0:29

where we could end up into a more beautiful

0:32

world. So this is one of my favorite

0:34

shows and I can't wait to share it with you

0:36

with Jordan Hall. And

0:38

now a word from our sponsors. First

0:40

up we have Helix and the reason

0:43

why I'm continuing to have Helix

0:45

as an advertiser on the podcast is because I'm

0:47

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orders and two free pillows. Next

2:59

up, we have Mudwater. Now

3:01

you guys have probably heard me talk about Mudwater

3:03

for the past few years. And recently

3:06

I actually got to meet in person the

3:08

founder Shane Heath, an amazing

3:10

human being who makes an amazing product that

3:12

I still use all the time. Now, how

3:14

do I use it? Well Mudwater is a coffee

3:17

alternative. It has a bit of the

3:19

caffeine that comes from the tea, but

3:21

it also has a bunch of functional mushrooms

3:24

and a bunch of different other goodies like

3:26

cacao and all these delicious things

3:29

without all of the sweeteners that you find

3:31

in a lot of these different mixes as well. So what

3:33

I do in the morning is I put

3:36

in a little ghee, I put in a little cashew

3:38

butter, I sprinkle in some Mudwater, I

3:41

add my favorite protein, I blend it

3:43

up and it has become the famous

3:45

Aubrey morning drink. And they

3:47

also have non-caffeinated versions which

3:50

has become the famous Aubrey

3:52

evening drink. Mudwater is

3:54

a part of my life and it's part

3:56

of my life for good reason. It's just a

3:59

great

3:59

product.

4:00

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4:02

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4:05

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4:07

also Mudwater donates monthly to support psychedelic

4:10

research and it has since

4:12

day one. Mudwater's our

4:15

people and Mudwater's a drink

4:17

that I love and it follows me around everywhere

4:20

along with their cool

4:22

little frother blender thing when I don't

4:24

have a blender available And

4:26

you can get that along with samples

4:29

of their coconut creamer and sweetener

4:31

if you go to mudwater.com slash

4:34

amp. Now you spell that M-U-D-W-T-R

4:37

dot com slash A-M-P. Once

4:39

again, M-U-D-W-T-R

4:41

dot com slash amp. And on

4:43

that link, you'll get all the samples and

4:46

your frother for free. So

4:48

go to mudwater.com slash amp.

4:56

Jordan, good to have you here, man. Thank you. All

4:59

right, I want you to fast forward 10 years

5:01

into a future where somebody

5:04

is,

5:05

let's say

5:06

they're from another planet or

5:08

they're from another place where they haven't been

5:10

tracking things that have been going on and they're

5:13

asking you this question and

5:15

they say, wow, it

5:17

was a close shave. There were some close

5:20

calls. There were some tricky

5:22

moments, but you

5:24

guys all pulled through. How

5:27

did you do it? How

5:30

did you do it?

5:33

By

5:36

far the most important piece is humility. What

5:40

I've noticed in myself and

5:42

in all the relationships that I've been in is that

5:44

we have everything we need.

5:47

And we have a lot of wisdom.

5:50

We have a lot

5:52

of people who have been working on a lot of stuff for

5:54

a long time. Like it's crazy

5:56

when you go out there and actually look at how you

5:59

find some pockets.

5:59

the people, you know, 65

6:02

year old folks have been working on something in Maui

6:04

for 40

6:05

years.

6:06

They got some stuff.

6:09

It's not perfect, but it's interesting.

6:11

We got a lot.

6:12

Boy, we have a hard time working together.

6:15

That's what holds us back. So

6:18

what changed? How did people start working

6:20

together? What was this and how does

6:23

humility play that role?

6:25

Like what is, how does that, how did that actually,

6:28

how did, why did you name that as the first thing?

6:34

Let's see. You know, the sense of humility

6:36

and that word humiliation, which is important

6:38

to honor, right?

6:40

Because we have a bad feeling. We don't want to be humiliated.

6:43

And if we recognize that humiliation connects

6:45

to humility in a very deep way, which

6:48

is to be brought low, to be brought out of

6:50

a sense of our own self-importance

6:53

and to be brought into a relationship with the reality

6:56

that we are only part of something

6:58

bigger than ourselves.

6:59

So that's the thing. Once you

7:02

really hold that right now, I'm kind of feeling the AA

7:05

moment, right? The moment where it's

7:07

like, wow, I cannot solve this

7:09

problem. I am, this is beyond my capacity.

7:12

I have to have this relationship of humility

7:14

to something which is larger than myself surrender

7:17

to that and then allow that to guide me in my

7:19

choices. And let's use that

7:21

model,

7:22

the community, right? Like

7:24

I don't think AA works without

7:27

the AA community. You

7:29

got somebody who's your big brother. You got somebody

7:32

who's helping guide you. You got a

7:34

whole crew that's helping support you

7:36

in your mission. Yeah. And take that

7:38

almost fractally up.

7:41

The word community is something that we have a hard

7:44

time with because we don't really have any in our world.

7:47

We have assemblages of people,

7:48

groups of affinity. We have people who

7:51

live near each other. We

7:52

have people who hang out in different ways, in different contexts.

7:55

But that notion of really communal,

7:58

that notion of the people who will be at your own.

7:59

or your funeral,

8:01

or you'll be at theirs,

8:03

and you'll maybe take care of their family when they're gone.

8:06

Like, that's the thing we don't really have much of.

8:08

Well, how do you compose that?

8:11

Oddly enough, here's another one people don't

8:13

like, suffering. Think about AA,

8:15

right? Your sponsor,

8:17

your big brother.

8:18

They've suffered, meaning they've gone through.

8:21

The word suffer to undergo doesn't

8:23

mean to have shitty experiences, although I suppose in

8:25

some sense it does, but you know, no pain, no gain.

8:28

It's the characteristic of having actually truly

8:30

and fully undergone real

8:33

experience, like rich,

8:35

rough,

8:36

and have grown as a result and come together

8:38

on the other side in a new higher wholesomeness,

8:41

a new higher whole. That

8:44

gives them the capacity simultaneously to actually

8:46

empathize with you, and not just feel

8:49

bad for you, but to really say, yeah, I

8:51

know a little bit about what it is you're

8:53

going through, and I know that I don't understand it, and

8:55

I know enough to know that there's something to kin. And

8:58

I can tell you that I went through

9:00

something that I'm on the other side of, so there's hope

9:02

that you can get through. That creates a sense

9:05

of real connection, a sense of community, because it's

9:07

deeper, it's deeper than our individual

9:09

wants and desires and preferences. You've gone to

9:11

a deep, dark place. You've gone to that place

9:13

of grief and that place of brokenness

9:17

that takes you past all the nonsense of the

9:19

ego and all the characteristics of all the stories

9:22

that we like to pretend that we're playing into reality.

9:28

Can you really trust somebody, yourself personally,

9:31

just asking Aubrey to Jordan,

9:33

do you really trust somebody who hasn't been to a

9:35

deep, dark place, who hasn't really suffered?

9:38

No, you cannot. It's interesting, right? You

9:40

know, it's like, okay, this is beautiful

9:42

you're living in. You know, I know this is a model we're all

9:45

familiar with. You're living in the pre-tragic,

9:47

baby. Like, you're living in this pre-tragic

9:49

state where it's beautiful, and it's not my

9:51

job to shake you out of it necessarily.

9:54

However, there is some kind

9:56

of impulse to like, all right,

9:58

hey, y'all, you know, like The pre-tragic is

10:00

awesome but also we got to look

10:03

at the tragic which is the complexity

10:06

and confusion of the world we're in

10:08

and then we got to include and transcend

10:10

that into the post-tragic where we

10:12

return to that same innocence that you're feeling

10:15

now. So don't worry, you're still going to get back there

10:17

but you're going to have to embrace a larger field

10:20

of challenges, existential threats, issues

10:22

that are facing us that you just can't ignore

10:25

anymore and we can't ignore

10:27

this anymore. Yeah,

10:29

and to become the one who can

10:31

and has embraced, just to kind

10:33

of put the dot on it. It's

10:36

not a mental or intellectual exercise, it's

10:38

an existential process of becoming. And

10:41

that process of going through the pre-tragic, the post-tragic

10:44

is a shattering and a breaking open

10:47

and a recognition of the fact that you weren't

10:49

in control in the first place and

10:51

so you just have to be with what's happening. And

10:54

then you become one who can be in the world in that way.

10:57

That's the post-tragic like, yeah, you're right,

10:59

I wasn't in control in the first place and that's all right. Yeah,

11:03

that's a crucial

11:05

thing. So for me in my life, I've

11:08

started to organize my community

11:10

around the intentional access of

11:14

the deep places and the dark places and

11:16

the suffering places and the places where you have to

11:18

come together. So a huge part of my life is going

11:20

through initiatory practices which

11:22

is another community slash

11:24

tribe technology that we've lost,

11:27

but it's still there. So

11:29

when you go through like deep ayahuasca

11:31

journeys with your brothers and

11:34

sisters, you're not going to have the same

11:36

experience, but you know that you've touched something

11:38

that's deep, you've touched something that's challenging.

11:40

And then even though the content of their

11:43

journey isn't the same as yours, like you

11:45

can hug them at the end and go like,

11:47

I know, I know, I know

11:50

what that was or a sweat lodge or I

11:52

climbed a frozen mountain with Wim

11:54

Hof and I banned the brothers and like you

11:56

finish that thing and there's a bond that's

11:59

created and a tribe. that's created. Like

12:01

what happens at the top of that icy

12:04

mountain of Mount Shnishka when your fucking

12:06

ice spikes fall off your shoes and you're sliding

12:08

down the mountain and you got your brother

12:10

who downhikes because he slid down 50 feet

12:12

in there, cold as hell, and

12:16

we had our shirts off because of course it's Wim Hof.

12:19

And they're down there with a biting, freezing,

12:22

sleet hitting them and they're going, they're sitting

12:24

down with you, you have to take off your gloves

12:26

and put your spikes back on. And

12:29

to me that guy was humble to poet. He

12:31

was out there and he's not the strongest climber

12:33

of our whole group, but he saw

12:36

what happened and he grabbed it and he downclimbed

12:38

and he got me and he sat down there with me and he

12:40

put that on. And I'll never forget that moment.

12:43

It's like, oh no bro, I trust you.

12:45

Like if shit gets bad and I'm hurt and I

12:47

need help, you know, like

12:50

you got me. Yeah, the

12:52

listenership of initiation that would have just come

12:54

to me is something I've been

12:55

thinking about

12:57

only for the past couple of weeks or so. The

12:59

language that's been coming to me is the distinction

13:02

between false power and true power.

13:04

And false symbols and true symbols, but I'm not sure if I

13:07

can use them right now.

13:08

But

13:09

these experiences that we have and

13:12

their trying experiences,

13:15

but their experiences that punches

13:17

through the

13:17

fabric of false power

13:19

and reconnect us with the true power that does

13:22

in fact lie underneath it, always. And

13:24

so that notion of portals, notion of openings,

13:27

right? It's an opening into something

13:29

which is always here, but for whatever reason

13:32

we're separated from and not able to access and

13:34

not able to make our choices on the basis

13:36

of. But yeah,

13:40

that is a real and powerful, let's say technology,

13:42

that's proper term I think, and

13:44

necessary as part of the sort

13:47

of the whole bricolage that we're gonna couple together

13:49

in the next five years. I'm

13:51

thinking here in terms of like, if you're flying to the moon halfway

13:53

is there, then you have to turn around and decelerate

13:56

if you wanna land and not just crash into it. Right. To

13:59

get to that. 10 year mark. But

14:02

it's nice, it's hopeful to recognize that

14:04

at the bottom of those dark pits

14:07

are the openings into the true power

14:09

that is in fact actually just there. It's

14:12

more of our ability to come into relationship with it

14:14

and to become more and more sort

14:17

of facile in navigating

14:20

by means of that and less

14:22

and less attached to the false power is

14:24

maybe the key point.

14:26

So we had an opportunity it seems

14:29

with COVID.

14:32

We had an opportunity for that to be a collective,

14:35

a collective moment where we could all really

14:38

come together. But it

14:40

didn't work that way and part of the reason it didn't work

14:42

that way is we were being manipulated.

14:45

The truth wasn't actually given into the field

14:48

and so in the absence of that truth it created

14:50

actually more division than it created

14:52

a coming together. So Sebastian Jungers

14:55

thesis in Tribe being that

14:57

in these moments of existential crisis

15:00

people will come together. We see flashes

15:02

of that in a variety of different cases.

15:04

I mean he gives the story of the Blitzkrieg and the

15:07

bombs falling on London and everybody

15:09

then becomes a Londoner. We saw

15:11

a flash of that a moment of that for

15:13

whatever reasons and also there's lots of little

15:15

intricacies to this story but at 9-11

15:17

you know everybody was a New Yorker. Didn't

15:20

matter if you were from fucking Kansas like

15:22

you were a New Yorker there. If there

15:24

was a firefighter that you saw from

15:27

New York fire or New York police

15:30

department like you took your cap off

15:32

and you bowed and you said thank you because we're

15:34

all New Yorkers, we're all Americans at this point

15:37

and then of course then there was the wars and then

15:39

we're like what the fuck is this all about? And so

15:42

it feels like

15:44

these existential challenges

15:47

are actually potentially necessary

15:49

for our growth but they have to be they

15:52

can't be weaponized against us in

15:54

a way. Like we have to actually use

15:56

them and we also have to have leaders that

15:59

share them in an honest way. Otherwise,

16:01

the opportunity is

16:04

kind of lost and kind of hijacked.

16:07

And it seems like we're gonna have to have a different model

16:10

because we're gonna have to deal with some shit. And I'd love to

16:12

go into like, I know that you see some of

16:14

the shit that we may have to deal with. So I'd love to go into some

16:16

of that. And also double click

16:18

on this idea of false power. But I

16:20

just I can't help but think like, man,

16:23

we've had some of these moments

16:25

and this most recent moment being the

16:27

COVID moment, but it didn't generate.

16:30

It didn't some aspects,

16:32

there was some kind of communities that

16:34

developed, but they were polarized

16:37

against each other. So it ended up dividing the country

16:39

rather than unifying the country. And

16:41

what a shame, what a missed opportunity.

16:44

Yeah, that was definitely a missed opportunity in lots

16:46

of different ways. So many things were going

16:48

on in that period from like, November

16:50

of 2019 through to say March, 2020. Yeah.

16:56

The thing that

16:57

like this future that we want to get to, it was

16:59

beginning to happen. People were beginning to self

17:01

organize. People were beginning to just take

17:03

agency, they're beginning to take a look at how to do things and

17:05

all the new techniques, like this technique thing, and

17:08

there's a consciousness thing, and they both need to happen simultaneously.

17:11

If you have a way an

17:14

uplifted consciousness, you have your ayahuasca experience,

17:17

and then your ass drops right back into your nine to five

17:19

job in ship bill, you got trouble.

17:22

Both have to happen simultaneously, or

17:25

at least co-creatively,

17:28

co-produce each other. So yeah, I completely

17:30

agree with you. There was, well,

17:33

both missed opportunity, but

17:35

also a bit of a revelation. Let's not forget

17:37

the revelation aspect. A lot of

17:39

people's eyes have been opened that weren't as open

17:41

as they were before. Correct. And if we

17:43

can't see clearly,

17:45

then we can't navigate. So maybe

17:47

just eye opening was enough. So I'll take it from

17:49

that point of view. Yeah, that's a good point.

17:51

We were able to see how some of

17:53

the powers that be worked. I mean,

17:56

regardless of your opinion about it, and there's

17:58

a variety of different opinions, it's not our place to argue

18:00

about those opinions, but it's undoubtable

18:03

that we saw manipulation at

18:05

play and we saw corporate

18:07

capture of certain agencies and

18:09

certain media agencies. And

18:11

we saw a way in which like, oh wow,

18:13

you guys aren't telling it. You guys

18:15

aren't telling it true. You're

18:18

spinning things from

18:20

the reports coming from the FDA

18:22

that were hidden and tried to suppress and from

18:25

all of the different ways that things were described.

18:27

We're like, oh, there's something bigger

18:30

and potentially more sinister that's happening here

18:33

and also a very real and

18:35

scary situation that we have

18:37

to deal with. And of course, some

18:39

people took that fear and are still underneath

18:42

that spell of fear. I've been traveling

18:44

around a lot and there's still people walking

18:46

around outside with their masks on still

18:48

and that fear left an imprint of

18:51

psychological, like a psychological

18:54

trauma almost to a certain extent, that

18:56

also no leadership,

18:58

no true power,

19:01

which is someone who's carrying the power with the goodness

19:04

and clear honest intention of their heart,

19:07

like the good King archetype good, meaning

19:10

they come from the field of goodness, which

19:12

is a field of honesty to really

19:15

help like, hey, y'all, I know that

19:18

this triggered a lot of fear, but it's

19:20

no way to live your life to be afraid of the air

19:23

for the rest of your existence. Like if you're afraid

19:26

of the air for the rest of your existence, like

19:28

this is tough. You might survive, but you're not

19:30

going to be living.

19:33

Yeah.

19:36

So let's

19:39

see. We learned,

19:40

it's interesting. So what was coming to my mind right

19:42

there was the notion of

19:46

it's a spiritual war. That's

19:48

the sense that came in and

19:50

that in each particular phase

19:53

or the moment of the evolution of war, the

19:55

capacities that individuals and groups

19:57

communities have to learn to be able to prosecute

19:59

them.

19:59

that war properly

20:01

to emerge victorious. Change

20:03

in World War II was

20:06

a technological war. World

20:08

War II was where we harnessed the power of the

20:10

intellect to change our technical

20:12

capacities to engage in a wide variety

20:14

of different activities to militarize

20:17

intelligence. Whether you're talking about the

20:19

Enigma machine, you're talking about radar,

20:21

you're talking about operational

20:23

management, the application of the weaponization

20:26

of intellect to coordinate militarization

20:29

was World War II. Wait, what's the Enigma

20:31

machine? Is that Oppenheimer? No, no, this was

20:34

Bleschley Park and the breaking of the

20:36

German codes. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

20:38

cryptography. The Cold War

20:41

was where we're living right now still

20:43

and the tail end of that, right? This

20:45

is the war of sense making, the

20:47

war of propaganda, the war of manipulation,

20:50

the war of hearts and minds,

20:53

the war of how do you actually bounded

20:55

by the threat of mutually assured

20:57

destruction? We can no longer play the game

20:59

of throwing bombs at each other, big

21:01

picture. Big superpowers, Soviet

21:04

Union, United States can't play that game anymore. We've

21:06

convinced ourselves that's no longer a valid

21:09

thing so it creates bumpers on what we can

21:11

do. We're still going to be engaging in war,

21:13

so how do we do it? Well, we need to use subtlety.

21:16

I need to get to undermine

21:18

your economy, to undermine your politics. I

21:20

need to make it impossible for you to coordinate

21:22

all that kind of psychological psyops war.

21:25

And also

21:27

there's this interesting Cold War happening

21:30

in space too and I've dove into

21:32

that as well where Russians

21:35

are blowing up their own satellites to create

21:37

these debris fields to kind of capture

21:40

certain real estate and prevent

21:42

orbits, orbital patterns from different other

21:44

because it's like this, we're trying

21:47

to figure out who can spy on the whole world

21:50

in the best way. So there's little blips that you

21:52

don't notice because they're in space but

21:54

it's still an interesting thing. It's

21:56

not the traditional kinetic warfare where bodies

21:59

are lining up. Russia, Ukraine, there are

22:01

bodies, tons of bodies lining up and this

22:03

is obviously tragic. But nonetheless,

22:05

there is a sense like, well, we can't

22:07

use the big bombs because once we use the big

22:10

bombs, everybody uses the big bombs

22:12

and it's all over. So it's almost been

22:14

like a retraction of technology

22:17

because we can't anymore. But still,

22:19

there's these flare ups of both kinetic and also,

22:22

you know, strategic. And

22:24

then, but definitely the biggest one is

22:26

exactly as you said, it's a war of stories. It's

22:28

a war of the mind. It's

22:29

a war of consciousness. So for us

22:32

to actually get through it, to emerge victorious,

22:34

we have to actually learn how to properly

22:36

prosecute a spiritual war. And I think

22:38

this is what was going on in the context of COVID. People

22:42

became aware of, okay, what makes me afraid?

22:44

And how does my fear make it easy for

22:46

me to be led and manipulated? What does

22:48

it look like when somebody who I trusted is telling

22:50

me a falsehood? How do I actually

22:53

begin to notice that things like credentials

22:55

aren't actually a functional proxy for

22:58

competence or good faith? How

23:00

do I navigate a world where I can't trust any institutions?

23:03

These are all questions that are very

23:05

up

23:06

and

23:07

individuals known for better or for

23:09

worse, and more importantly, communities are

23:12

having to learn how to do that. We're having

23:14

to in real time cobble together

23:16

new capacities of interiority and

23:18

new capacities of relationality

23:21

that allow us to respond to those challenges

23:24

simply to survive or at least to feel

23:26

like we are actually living again, to recover that distinction

23:29

between survival and living and start to say,

23:31

hey, wait a minute, I'd rather live. Or

23:33

does it live on my feet than die on

23:35

my knees? That kind of thing?

23:38

Yeah.

23:39

That's coming back. And I think that level of the

23:41

term I used was infinitesimal courage,

23:44

right,

23:44

to distinguish it against the coarse-grained

23:47

courage, which is a very noble thing, but the ability of those

23:49

young men to charge the beaches at Normandy, that's coarse-grained

23:52

courage. We've been doing that for a long time. But

23:54

the infinitesimal courage that goes all the way

23:56

to the interior and forces you to

23:59

make the proper

23:59

choices even though nobody's looking and nobody'll know the difference,

24:02

that's a different kind of thing.

24:04

I think that's a big part of what's being honed right now. It

24:07

seems to me that we're also, with that,

24:09

we're moving from a pre-tragic

24:12

spirituality of either fundamentalism

24:14

or atheism, which is just kind of...

24:16

Everything makes sense, perfectly clear.

24:19

There's no God. It's all just,

24:21

you know, it's all just atoms that, you know, organize

24:23

in a particular way. We don't exactly know why, but they

24:25

did. So... There's no

24:28

God. There's no... And then therefore, there's

24:30

no true value. And then in the postmodern

24:32

idea, all value is kind of taken off the table.

24:34

It's all subjective. If you're doing

24:36

that, well, if your culture says it's cool, then it's cool.

24:38

There's no universal value structure in

24:41

that kind of atheist model. Or there's the fundamentalist

24:43

value structure, which is, God has

24:45

said 2,000 years ago or 3,000

24:48

years ago, God has laid down the law and that's

24:51

unchanging. And this is exactly how

24:53

it is. And all of the interpretations by

24:56

these organizations that we realize we can't

24:58

really trust either, you know,

25:00

like clearly there's been a lot

25:02

of fuckery going on with priests

25:05

and gauging and just for one example,

25:07

engaging in horrific crimes against children

25:09

that just kind of get moved around. And

25:12

we know this is a fact. So, let

25:14

alone the doctrines of the religion,

25:16

which have been manipulated and been

25:18

the cause of so many wars. So,

25:21

fundamentalism is also discarded.

25:23

So, this pre-tragic notion isn't

25:25

exactly working in

25:27

either way. Because one, you discard

25:30

value, the other you have stale values

25:32

that are not evolving and not actually accessing

25:34

the true field of value. And then it's reconfiguring

25:37

in a new concept of what

25:39

the divine actually looks like.

25:41

That thing that you're beholden to,

25:43

the thing that lives in you, as

25:45

you, and through you that kind of holds you in

25:47

a field of value, a field of goodness,

25:50

if you wanted to call it, like actual goodness,

25:53

which is also something that we struggle with, like

25:56

good goodness. You

25:58

know, so there's this, there's this interesting... interesting

26:00

thing happening where I think Nietzsche

26:02

correctly said, you know, God is dead at

26:05

that time. And now it's like, well, we

26:07

got to revive. We got to revive the concept

26:09

of the divine. Right. God is back. God

26:12

is back, baby. We're calling

26:14

it here. God is back.

26:16

Yeah, it's funny, Nietzsche.

26:19

I cut my teeth on Nietzsche. I had that experience

26:21

of being a young adolescent and a good looking

26:23

girl suggested something about Nietzsche. So

26:25

I'm like, all right, Nietzsche it is. I did the deep dive.

26:30

The muse is always guiding you. It's

26:33

like mother's milk. So

26:37

yeah, I think this is right. I think there's a,

26:40

how do

26:40

you say

26:42

it? There's an adolescence and pretty tragic

26:44

is nice. Pretty tragic has a certain adolescent sensibility

26:46

to it. And there's a notable adolescence

26:49

in both

26:52

versions of the story that you told, right? The

26:55

postmodern and

26:57

the fundamentalist characteristics have a brittleness

26:59

in it.

27:00

Silliness really be taken seriously.

27:03

Like that can't be a way to run a life,

27:05

much less a world. Just kind

27:07

of just connect some dots here. Like obviously that ain't

27:09

going to work. You could just imagine back if you're

27:11

going to sitting back and somebody came to pitch you on this, here's

27:14

the way we're going to do things. That's obviously

27:16

nonsense. Like I get why that's kind of

27:18

a fun way to pick up chicks in grad school,

27:20

but that's not a way to run anything really.

27:22

I'm on a postmodern side of course.

27:28

And

27:30

we've looked around and it's manifestly

27:33

obvious there are no adults in the room. So let

27:36

me shift a little bit to the sociological because

27:38

we live in a sociological moment that is

27:40

unusual, but the last adults

27:44

were probably the silent generation. And

27:47

the last people who actually went through the process of really

27:49

becoming elders, becoming grownups

27:52

in the West,

27:53

maybe GI, I'm not sure, but certainly

27:55

not the boomers. And that's what I'm looking at right now. And

27:59

unfortunately we've been... living in an era of extraordinarily

28:02

delayed maturity, both

28:04

physiologically and certainly spiritually.

28:07

And there's an assumption,

28:09

very unwarranted, that there are adults

28:12

somewhere to be found, that are ultimately

28:14

either manipulating things negatively at

28:16

the conspiracy side. Of course. There

28:18

are sophisticated adults that are running things for their best interests.

28:20

Or maybe actually will take care of us, like we can appeal

28:22

to somebody and they'll sort of figure it out and take care of

28:24

us. Because we've grown up in an environment where more or less

28:27

that has been the case, that there

28:29

has been a powerful structure run

28:31

by people who are meaningfully older than us, who

28:34

have powers that in many cases feel mythological.

28:36

Until you've actually met people first face

28:39

to face, you don't realize that presidents are just fucking

28:41

people. You don't realize that movie stars

28:43

are very unimpressive individuals. You

28:45

just don't get into men face to face. There's

28:48

a mythological characteristic to them.

28:50

And so we behave as if somebody else

28:52

is responsible for what's happening. But

28:55

reality over the past several

28:58

years, for me, decades, but certainly the

29:00

past five years or so for many people, has

29:03

again, revelation pulled back the veil. And

29:05

you look around and you're like, fuck us?

29:08

Like we're it?

29:09

We're the ones who are going to have to figure this stuff out?

29:12

We're the ones we've been waiting for, the old prophecy.

29:14

That's right. We're the ones, huh? That's

29:17

on the one hand, extremely alarming

29:20

because we have not got our shit figured out at

29:22

all. Yeah, yeah. And this is empowering

29:24

because I guess it's up to us. And

29:27

I know from my life experience that once you've

29:29

accepted responsibility and just stop fitting

29:32

about and dive into it, amazing

29:34

things can happen.

29:36

I

29:37

think we were talking about that on the front. It's like when you

29:39

live in crazy times, crazy

29:41

things can happen. Now we know

29:44

the crazy shit's happening to us, but

29:46

that also means that we can do crazy things. We

29:49

should take advantage of that opportunity. Amen.

29:52

Yeah, I've personally felt that

29:55

deeply, man, deeply.

29:57

I felt, not only have I felt

29:59

this. this kind of

30:02

expose of the darker

30:04

forces, the manipulative forces, the

30:06

revelation of oh, wow,

30:09

the authorities, what I would call empire.

30:12

Empire is not on our team. They

30:14

are not on our team. They want to debase, degrade,

30:17

control us. You know, one thing about

30:20

empire, they love wars, they love being

30:22

in perpetual war, but they hate warriors. They hate

30:24

the people who find that courage within

30:26

themselves, right? So they have all of these

30:28

different ideas and strategies

30:31

that are being deployed. And

30:33

then there's something else. There's

30:35

what we can see and feel,

30:38

what our brother Charles Eisenstein said, the more

30:40

beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We know

30:42

that there's a different way. This

30:45

self-organizing kingdom that

30:48

this does have structure, has some

30:50

of the structures of empire, but is led from a field

30:52

of goodness and that we can all participate

30:54

in and all have both bilateral

30:57

communication up and down and everybody's

31:00

listening to each other. And there's

31:02

this other possibility that

31:04

we're starting to see as well. And it seems like we're

31:07

heading towards one of two paths. To me,

31:09

it feels like the idea, and some

31:12

people are going to hate this, but the idea of

31:14

some form of one world government

31:17

is

31:18

ultimately a necessary inevitability.

31:21

Like it's somehow there's going to have to be greater

31:24

coordination for us to withstand the existential

31:26

threats which involve the entire

31:29

species. So the reason is this

31:31

is a necessity because there's things that involve

31:33

the entire species. It's not just about your country

31:36

or your state, it's the

31:38

totalization of the world. So

31:40

if we're going to deal with problems that involve the totalization

31:43

of the world, we're going to have to have some level

31:45

of coordination. Now, that doesn't mean that people have

31:47

to give up their culture, give up their states or give

31:49

up their countries, but there has to be a way that

31:52

things are organized. It's a lot more honest than the

31:54

United Nations, which still picks which countries

31:56

are involved and who they actually give a shit about

31:58

and is wildly corrupt

32:00

from everything that that we can see But

32:03

it's almost like the move is going to

32:06

be made and it's either going to be this dystopian

32:08

top-down control empire Version

32:10

or it's going to be the kingdom the good

32:12

Kingdom. Yeah, and

32:14

in the good Kingdom There are good Kings and there's

32:17

still structure and there's still ways

32:19

in which things move

32:21

But it's led from a whole different mindset a

32:23

whole different different concept So I think

32:25

it's probably worth pointing out to you nine that have never met

32:28

Right. We obviously have a couple folks in common.

32:31

Mm-hmm, but I bring this up because there's a lot of convergence

32:34

And I'm not my head

32:36

vigorously what you're saying. In fact, even the language

32:40

Empire versus Kingdom

32:41

Like I agree. I

32:43

agree very deeply and let me just you

32:46

said some people are gonna kind of hate this Let's just call

32:48

out the distinction because I think it's not if

32:50

you can get it It's not that troubling But if you can't

32:52

get if you're confused by it, then the

32:55

ones the warriors will want to resist right?

32:57

So let's let's give them some

33:00

There's a distinction between something what's called one

33:02

world Empire. Uh-huh And

33:05

there's something else we could call the spiritual

33:07

kingdom to make a distinction

33:09

kingdom of Gaia Yeah, something something

33:11

that is planetary in scope right

33:14

that includes the whole of humanity and the

33:16

whole of nature and the whole of technology

33:18

and Is able to coordinate

33:21

the choices that are made by the individuals

33:23

so that those choices are Consistently

33:26

in alignment with both their own

33:28

local best, right? We

33:30

are guided and supported by the world that we're in so

33:33

that our lives are the richest and most meaningful that

33:35

they can be And are

33:37

intrinsically in support of the much larger whole.

33:39

Mm-hmm. All right, that's the thing we're trying to head

33:41

towards Yeah, and the simulation

33:44

of that the false power or the negative

33:46

image of that that is Grasping

33:49

at us and trying to take that image and convert

33:51

it into the tools to be used against us. That's

33:54

the Empire Yeah,

33:54

and that's how the Empire operates. We can spend some time.

33:57

I think Diagnosing how false power

33:59

does what it does

33:59

does, so that we don't find ourselves confused,

34:02

because we're divided against ourselves by

34:05

the propaganda or the manipulation or the deceptions

34:07

that come from the false power.

34:10

Well,

34:10

then of course we've been divided, we fall.

34:13

And so this is a word that's

34:15

going out to the warriors, the ones who,

34:17

when you feel the empire called out, you feel yourself

34:20

rallied. The hair

34:22

of my arm stood out, like part of a huge

34:24

part of me and the fact my entire lineage exists

34:27

for the purpose to serve the kingdom against the empire.

34:30

And it is only because I'm aware of the fact that we're

34:32

in a spiritual war that I don't just gear up and go

34:34

rush directly at it, because obviously it knows

34:37

how to win that war. So don't do that. Well,

34:39

and also you can fall into the trap

34:41

of trying to locate

34:43

empire within people. Yeah,

34:45

that's right. And instead of it being

34:47

like Ragnarok, like the war of the gods,

34:50

the war of ideas, the war of stories,

34:53

where it's not somebody you shoot with a gun,

34:55

it's not somebody you punch with the fist, it's not

34:57

somebody you yell at and abuse on Instagram.

35:00

They may be participating in this

35:02

ideology of empire. And

35:04

so there may be some contention between

35:06

your story and their story, but

35:08

don't forget, like these are all our people. That's

35:11

right. They're all our people. And we have

35:13

to remember that. And this war is being played out

35:15

in the spiritual, in the consciousness

35:17

dimensions. Yeah, yeah. And that's

35:20

hard to hold on to because sometimes

35:22

it would feel nice to punch something in the face.

35:25

Of course. It feels really like the kind of thing that needs

35:27

to happen. But

35:30

that particular avenue has been largely

35:33

taken.

35:35

And that adds energy

35:37

to the way the adversary is doing what it does.

35:40

And keeping us fighting against each other. I saw a little thread

35:42

that came through, some people brought it to my attention where

35:44

on Team Red

35:46

over here in Twittersphere,

35:49

some, I'll say young woman, I guess I'm old

35:51

enough to say that I don't know how old she was.

35:53

In Ohio I think,

35:54

quoted, salvation is through

35:56

Christ alone, which is a

35:58

very uncontroversial state.

35:59

statement within Protestantism.

36:02

A very strong, pre-tragic, fundamental

36:05

statement. Yeah, and you just find

36:07

that. I don't know anything, I don't know her personally, so I don't

36:09

have anything to do with her background. And

36:12

then at least two individuals

36:14

from the Ohio State, one of whom was

36:17

definitely Jewish because he brought that forward, said

36:19

that's the most bigoted statement I've ever heard, and

36:21

then by the way, delete it or take it down, which

36:23

was very odd. I guess they must have known each other. And

36:26

this initiated a little bit of a firestorm

36:30

in meme space inside

36:32

Twitter. And I can tell you this, the

36:34

Empire was happy to see that.

36:36

Oh yeah. Yeah. Let's

36:38

get

36:38

that conflict. All the little fractures, all the doctrinal

36:41

differences, let's make sure that those are

36:43

the places where energy and attention are focused because

36:46

that'll keep people well engaged and keep

36:48

their energy and their desire to punch focused

36:50

in a particular direction while the Empire can continue doing

36:52

its business very, very unabated. In fact, fueled

36:55

by that. And that's a false symbol that allows

36:57

us to pull our energy, our actual

36:59

power into the wrong place. And every time

37:01

we do that, we're weakening ourselves and strengthening our adversaries.

37:08

Well, you know, so what

37:10

I think, all right, so then what is the

37:13

higher choice in the response to

37:15

that? And so my choice, somebody says that

37:18

to me, is like

37:20

the Christ. I know

37:22

about the Christ.

37:24

Christ is an incredibly powerful

37:26

force. It's the awakening of

37:29

this universal love,

37:31

this love that knows no fear, that

37:33

sees beyond judgment,

37:37

still can hold discretion, but comes

37:39

from this flaming heart. So many images

37:42

of our past artists inspired

37:44

by the different muses of their own,

37:47

whether it's the muse of the divine, showed

37:49

Christ with a flaming heart, just

37:51

a heart that was on fire. And

37:53

so to say that the Christ is going to play

37:55

a role, this Christ

37:58

energy is going to play a role in ourselves. You

38:00

know what? You're right. It is. It

38:03

is going to play a big role, but it's not

38:05

alone. And it's also probably not

38:07

exactly what you mean by Christ. However,

38:10

you know, like there's some power there

38:12

and I want to acknowledge that. And so that's

38:15

the way that you kind of build the bridge,

38:17

I think, to people who have these ideas to say,

38:20

Christ, hell yeah. You

38:22

know, like I'm down and

38:24

I'm from a Hebrew lineage myself. I'm wearing the Star

38:27

David on my chest right now on this

38:29

sword, right? Like I'm from the Hebrew lineage.

38:31

There's been a traditional split, but it's

38:33

like, oh no. Yeah, the

38:35

Christ, there's something there. There's

38:38

something there. Whether you use the Rosicrucian model or you

38:40

just have your own understanding, there's power

38:42

there. And I see where you're going with that,

38:44

except there's an expanded view

38:47

that you need to look at, that this is one way

38:49

to name one of the forces that

38:51

we need to bring to the table.

38:54

Yeah, my sense is one of,

38:56

when I encounter something like that, what I know is I don't

38:58

understand how to deal with it properly. Meaning

39:01

the only response I can usually have is humility.

39:04

Something's being shown to me.

39:06

I don't understand it.

39:07

So

39:09

time to listen.

39:10

Yeah. And what's happening

39:13

here?

39:13

I noticed that this

39:15

is word discernment,

39:17

that

39:19

at least in myself, I have a feeling of the ability

39:21

to distinguish from things that are in the right direction

39:24

and things that are more in the wrong direction. So

39:27

this would be an invitation. It's like, okay, tell me more.

39:31

And what I find oftentimes is when somebody is speaking

39:33

from their heart, it's in

39:35

the right direction. And if they're

39:37

speaking stories that have been put in their mind by people

39:39

other than themselves,

39:43

yeah, it oftentimes feels like it's more in the wrong direction.

39:46

So I want

39:48

to listen. I want to hear. What's really

39:50

coming from the heart? What's coming from truth, capital

39:53

T? There's capital T, truth.

39:56

I mean, just postmodernists are going to hate that. They're going

39:58

to hate that. And that's going to be all right.

39:59

I'll put you on that one until they work their way through it. I'm sorry

40:02

for that, but you're gonna have to grow up sometimes. Yeah,

40:07

we're way past grad school. So

40:09

what is it?

40:12

And then I have a friend, I'm not gonna name her, but

40:14

I actually had this conversation with her. I said, you know, when you speak

40:17

to me about your first person experience, what

40:19

you're feeling inside, and you're just

40:21

conveying, you're out of the way, and you're just telling me

40:23

what it is you're experiencing, it's truth.

40:27

Like it is clear water. And

40:29

I just wanna drink it down. But as soon

40:31

as you start telling me stories that you're making up

40:33

in your head to make sense of it, it goes off

40:36

the rails so fast. Yeah. And

40:38

we live in confusing times, and we got a lot of stories.

40:41

And people have been optimizing stories for a long

40:43

time. You'd be mindful of that. Optimizing

40:45

slash weaponizing. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like

40:49

the toolkit of taking advantage

40:51

of this thing we can do, we've been playing

40:54

with very awkwardly for the past 75,000 years or so, and

40:58

very sophisticated for the past 10,000 years or so, not

41:01

the charge for the past couple hundred years. That's

41:03

been going a long time. So we should be careful. Storytelling

41:06

is a potent, potent tool. And

41:09

nefarious forces are

41:11

quite skillful at weaponizing it. Empire. Yeah,

41:14

empires, that's what they do. That's

41:16

their shtick. Yeah, and they

41:18

got all kinds of strategies. They love hiding

41:20

in the holy too. Oh boy. They

41:22

love hiding behind some virtue, or

41:25

some value, or some quote, God

41:27

that they've created and manipulated, so

41:29

that they find themselves in a position

41:32

that they, it's

41:36

this almost invulnerable position

41:38

because they're claiming this authority of

41:40

value or authority of virtue that if you

41:42

challenge it, then oh, you want to

41:44

kill grandma, or you want to do

41:46

all. So there's all of these ways in which their

41:49

story allows them to access a

41:51

certain virtue, which they're unaware,

41:54

they're blind. They don't have the awareness to see

41:56

that they're actually being manipulated to

41:59

try and be.

41:59

better than somebody else by believing

42:02

this story. Ah, it's so brutal. Yeah,

42:04

so let's see. I mean, do this in two steps,

42:07

because I feel like I want to take the first part and just kind

42:09

of flesh it out, but the second part of respond to what you're just

42:11

saying, which is it's brutal. So

42:14

false symbols and true symbols.

42:17

False symbols

42:19

are simulations of true symbols

42:21

that render the most salient

42:23

aspects super salient. And so

42:25

what happens is, is I have a relationship with a particular

42:28

symbol and as a human being, I can

42:30

only experience so much of it. And some

42:32

portions of it stick out in the foreground. And

42:34

what happens is what a false symbol does is it takes

42:37

that aspect and gives me more of that.

42:39

And I mean, it must just be very,

42:41

very simple and very straightforward.

42:43

There was an experiment that I read

42:45

about a long time ago about some scientists

42:48

who took a bird,

42:50

a mother bird, and

42:53

they created a little hand

42:55

puppet,

42:56

a baby bird, and they

42:58

made the baby bird's mouth, let's

43:00

say redder,

43:01

more red,

43:03

their fake one than the real baby birds.

43:06

And they just kept playing around with it until they figured out what

43:08

was the mom and bird really using her symbolic

43:10

interpretation of complex reality. She

43:13

obviously can't really understand everything

43:15

that's going on. She has to simplify it to the thing

43:17

that a bird bird can handle. In

43:19

this case, it turned out to be a patch

43:22

of red against the otherwise non-red

43:24

background meant baby bird mouth put

43:27

food in there. And so the scientists were able

43:29

to produce a simulated baby bird

43:31

that was ever so more

43:33

red, more symbolically potent

43:35

than the real baby bird. Guess

43:38

what?

43:38

Mama started feeding the puppet and

43:41

all her babies died. That's a false

43:43

symbol. Now, there's

43:45

a lot of power in being able to figure out how to jack people's

43:47

symbolic landscapes and provide them false symbols

43:50

because then they'll give you the power,

43:52

the energy that they're endeavoring to give to the

43:55

world or to the things that they love and care

43:57

about because they can't tell the difference. You're

44:00

signaling to them the things that they use to distinguish

44:03

from reality from non-reality

44:05

truth from falsehood You're

44:07

right inside your signal jacking their own

44:10

sensemaking infrastructure. It's very

44:12

difficult to get past that

44:14

So back to the point you were making

44:16

brutal How can we ask people to

44:19

not be jerked around by manipulative

44:22

discourse like you're gonna kill grandma?

44:24

You know, that's very challenging. We're asking

44:26

people to offer Operated IQ like 140

44:28

and with an EQ of 160 we're

44:30

talking about Requiring

44:32

human beings to level up their capacities

44:35

in a way that feels frankly impossible

44:39

That's brutal how we're gonna pull that off this

44:41

is what I mean if I say

44:43

something like

44:45

Be careful of those who wear the

44:47

vestments of the holy

44:49

and do not trust them

44:51

What are you gonna do? What's the average

44:53

person to walk out right now? Who do I trust

44:56

right can't trust anybody? Well, that's not a very healthy place

44:58

to be this gets us into the kind of the QAnon

45:00

scenario Where we unplug all forms

45:03

of trust then people are looking everywhere and

45:05

you get apophania off the charts Which

45:08

isn't by the way fed by an illusion.

45:10

I went deep in the QAnon pain, right? We're living

45:12

in a world of massive deception So there's plenty

45:14

of true things that have been hidden from us that you can pull

45:16

up and go shit. Look at that Here's a true thing that's

45:19

been hidden from us I got a positive

45:21

dopamine hit for finding something true and real that has

45:23

in fact actually been hidden Keep mining

45:25

for you keep finding and that's gonna feed a whole group

45:27

of people who are like, all right fair enough

45:30

Layer on top of that whatever construct happens

45:32

to accumulate to it and you've got an ideology.

45:34

You've got a cult ultimately yeah, and

45:37

then it leads into places where they've grossly

45:40

overstepped and then I corrupted

45:42

you get the flat earthers you get dinosaurs

45:44

aren't real and then all of a sudden you're

45:47

No different than the creationists You're

45:52

just in this place where you can't trust

45:54

anything you can't trust anybody everybody's a

45:56

false everything's a false flag Everybody's

45:58

controlled opposition. Right? Nobody who's

46:00

actually good. So get yourself a bunker

46:03

buy a bunch of guns find yourself a piece

46:05

of land and fuck the rest of the world You're

46:07

gonna survive and that's not gonna work. Yeah,

46:10

but by the way, not the worst place to start

46:12

but I mean is something like

46:15

step back

46:16

and we be willing to step back and Where

46:19

do we reground? I found in my

46:22

experiences are really only two places that we can we

46:24

can reground and they're bizarrely antipodes

46:27

One of course is human relationship.

46:29

You know if you encounter a family

46:32

and you encounter the children are healthy

46:35

You can look at the face and you can see the activity the

46:37

child is a healthy child physically spiritually emotionally

46:40

four-year-old They know how to play. They're

46:42

not afraid of the world

46:44

They're not afraid of their parents

46:45

and you look at the adults the adults have a good relationship

46:48

with each other then with your child Like something right

46:50

is happening there. That is good signal All

46:52

right You do the same thing with just nature and

46:55

if you go out and you can drink from the water in

46:57

the ground You remember we're old enough to remember that

47:00

actually was a thing that you could do. Mm-hmm This

47:02

is before we poisoned everything. I remember reading

47:04

a book in the 70s. It was weird

47:06

almost like science fiction I'm sure this guy's like

47:08

an old like

47:09

What would you call him

47:11

the lost generation? Like one of those

47:13

guys we opened the 20s he wrote this book and

47:15

was almost this Prophecy about how terrible

47:18

it was gonna be in the future that we were all gonna drink bottled

47:21

water Like people aren't

47:23

gonna drink from streams anymore They aren't

47:25

gonna do from taps all the water will be so

47:27

toxic that we have to carry bottles around with it Where we

47:29

go and remember as the kids simultaneously going

47:31

that's absurd, sir That's

47:34

just crazy talk and the feeling in my

47:36

gut of like that would be a terrible world to live in I

47:38

remember watching is like

47:40

everybody seems to be buying bottled water all the time. That's

47:42

weird. This guy called it

47:45

Well, if you go to a place where people can actually drink

47:47

from the water in the ground, that's

47:48

healthy That's a good sign If

47:51

you have a place where people intuitively and collectively

47:53

gather because they actually like each other and

47:56

they recognize the conviviality is healthy And

47:58

where if somebody is having trouble everybody

47:59

else helps him. This is the word wholesome,

48:02

right? What's

48:02

that gentleman's name? Oh

48:04

gosh. He's a

48:07

British guy who creates videos, music videos

48:09

of people like Jordan Peterson talking.

48:11

Music videos. Yeah, they're amazing. Anyway,

48:14

he coined, for me at least, he coined the phrase,

48:16

wholesome is the new punk. And

48:18

so wholesomeness we can recognize. And

48:20

the more wholesome you get, the more you can recognize wholesomeness.

48:22

That's a very nice feedback loop. Grounding

48:25

in wholesomeness is a good idea. Yeah.

48:27

Deep. Places that have multi-generational

48:30

wholesomeness, places that have been able to maintain continuity

48:33

of real human relationship and healthiness for

48:35

a long period of time. And by the way, humility,

48:37

because you don't want to fuck it up if you're going there. You

48:40

can get ground there and that's good solid stuff. And this is not

48:42

by the way,

48:43

prepper separatism. Well, I experienced

48:45

something similar when I was in Kauai. You know,

48:47

so we were there with our friend

48:49

Alana who's a local live there and

48:52

Kauai deeply embedded in the community. And we brought

48:54

together a gathering for like a fundraiser

48:57

and a prayer for the people of Maui. We're in Kauai,

48:59

which was, you know, this Edenic place.

49:02

And then there's this hell going on on our sister

49:04

Island of Maui. So we brought the community together.

49:07

And it was really beautiful

49:09

to actually feel this community

49:12

of locals because Kauai doesn't have the same

49:14

level of tourism, still has a lot of tourism, but there's

49:16

a strong community. I'm sure there is in every island as

49:18

well. And from any,

49:21

everyone from, you know, native Hawaiians

49:24

of Hawaiian ethnic lineage to people who've

49:26

lived there and just been there and

49:28

been a part of it. And there's a sacred spring.

49:31

Everybody fills their water at the sacred

49:33

spring. And every single person told

49:35

us like, you got to go to the spring. You got to drink

49:37

the sacred water from the sacred spring. And

49:40

it didn't use necessarily sacred in this way, but

49:42

you could tell that that's what they fell about

49:44

it. Like this is our spring. Like this

49:47

is where we get water. And this is

49:49

important, right? So it's exactly that

49:51

thing. They had that. And as I was looking

49:53

around, you know, looking around this

49:56

gathering that we had at a local yoga studio,

49:58

Black Coral Yoga, and there

50:00

was just a certain quality to the

50:03

eyes of some people that were

50:05

there where I was just able to look around and go

50:07

like,

50:08

oh brother, oh

50:10

sister, like I don't know you but

50:13

I know you. We're in the same field of value,

50:15

we're in the same like if

50:17

we the longer we spent talking the

50:20

more we'd realize how much we liked each other but

50:22

we don't have that much time right now. We

50:24

all have our own agendas but I see, I fucking see you.

50:27

And I think it was connected to the community, was

50:29

actually connected also from the waters

50:32

to the earth and there's this

50:34

really interesting way where you felt

50:36

like, wow, here's a little pocket,

50:39

here's a little place where things are

50:41

in right order, you know, where like

50:43

the rainmaker doesn't have to come to set

50:45

things back in right order because there's actually

50:48

a right order that exists self-emergent

50:51

from this kind of, from this community

50:53

and it was really cool to

50:56

see that. Yeah. In a way and to actually

50:58

feel like, oh wow, there's still pockets

51:01

that exist and that's certainly

51:03

not the only one but there's many pockets

51:06

that exist where people are still accessing

51:09

this. Yeah and so

51:11

from a what do I do

51:13

perspective, the short

51:15

answer at least for most people is

51:18

find pockets like that and then become someone

51:21

who can participate in a healthy wholesome way with

51:23

those pockets. Notice how the steps there

51:25

and don't rush to Kauai right

51:28

now and break it, right, don't fuck it up.

51:30

Don't break your knowledge. Yeah, don't break it, don't break

51:32

your knowledge. But

51:35

I'm

51:35

going to tell you a little bit of story about that

51:38

because we're invoking the Hawaiian sensibility

51:40

so we know we have to talk story. So

51:43

I almost moved to Kauai

51:46

and the way that I understand it is that the Kauai

51:49

are specifically the

51:51

way I understand it is the way Ali brought me in to

51:54

teach me important lessons about

51:56

how to be in right relationship with the place

51:58

itself. and what

52:01

home feels like, both in terms of place

52:03

and people. And as you say, I know

52:05

exactly the experience you're talking about. In fact,

52:08

simple metrics like my

52:11

daughter was around two to three during the time

52:13

that we were there. And you show

52:16

up in a local car,

52:18

not a rental car. You ship

52:20

at a local beach. And

52:23

you have a kid who's butt naked,

52:25

running around, not brown on the beach. And

52:27

the other people on the beach look at you and they notice

52:29

that you're at least somewhat pono.

52:32

Okay.

52:33

More or less, you're family now, you're a hana.

52:36

My daughter can run over there and hang out with your family and eat

52:38

some watermelon with your family. And the notion

52:40

is that if one of your kids

52:43

runs over and wants to jump on my surfboard, I

52:45

got an eye out and it's all good. And that was a

52:48

revelation, right? Growing up, I grew

52:50

up living in the suburbs of Southern California at

52:52

the time. The notion of, wait, relationship

52:55

has an easefulness and a depth to it. And taking

52:57

care of you because there's children can

52:59

actually be a natural, ordinary thing. Oh,

53:02

and by the way, I noticed

53:03

local beaches, very clean,

53:06

no trash. Because

53:07

you take care of your place, right? And if

53:09

somebody leaves trash behind, that is super not

53:11

pono. And either they're making a significant

53:14

error, which case some local needs to come and tell them off,

53:17

or they're a tourist, in which case, they need to be gently

53:20

ushered to a different location,

53:23

which would be a hala. So I

53:25

was taught that. And then Wai'aliale

53:28

said, and by the way, this is not your

53:30

home. And this is what it feels like.

53:32

I'm bringing it all the way in to feel like it's home and how

53:35

to take things from the proper pace and how to

53:37

listen and to notice. And we got to the place that literally

53:39

putting an offer on a house. Capitalism

53:41

affords me the ability to convert mammon's

53:44

money units into owning a piece of property in somebody

53:46

else's place. It's very difficult to navigate that.

53:49

And following the path as cleanly as possible,

53:51

the very last second, literally the last day,

53:53

it got popped in a

53:55

very confusing fashion that the offer was

53:58

much larger offers came in on the day.

53:59

day that the documents are going to be signed. Cash

54:02

only.

54:03

Wow. Okay, I guess I'm not supposed

54:05

to be here. So we processed that for

54:07

a while and we've now landed in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

54:11

After a couple of hops by the way. And

54:13

the sense was, oh, aha,

54:16

the lesson of home was taught, but that

54:18

wasn't my home. This is important.

54:20

You actually have a home

54:22

and it's yours. You got to find it. Once

54:24

you found it and you understand how to know the difference,

54:27

then you can start going down. And then you

54:29

start grounding in this way. And the

54:31

Empire can't take that from you. I mean, the Empire can try to

54:33

kill you. Yeah. Once you found

54:35

a hill to die on, that's

54:38

where the kingdom can be born. Right. That's

54:40

where the warriors have a place to play. Oh, this is my hill to

54:42

die on? Hallelujah. I've been looking

54:44

for this my whole life. Now I know where it is. Yeah.

54:47

And I know where to defend. I know who to defend. And

54:49

you get that weird feeling. Like, again, I'm feeling in my arms.

54:52

That feeling of like, I see the kids walking around in Black

54:54

Mountain. I'm like, those are mine to

54:56

protect. The Empire comes for them.

54:58

Yeah. They called them for them. They called them

55:01

for them through me first.

55:02

That's right. So, the other side. And we got that

55:04

part. And that part feels really good. Right. And

55:06

by the way, if you're married, family,

55:09

wife, you know, that kind of thing, you want to make

55:11

your wife feel good,

55:14

bring her into her home

55:15

with her community.

55:17

And a place where all the other people have

55:19

the feeling of, yeah, they'll take care of your kids too. And

55:22

she's invited to co-parent. And I don't mean

55:25

like, we're talking about it a lot up here.

55:27

It actually is happening. And there's a felt

55:30

sense of like, grandmother's inviting her to come

55:32

in and actually steward the beauty

55:34

of the land. Like, that kind of stuff. That'll make

55:36

a wife feel extremely good. I can tell you this first

55:38

person. Now,

55:42

the other side is the weirdest thing in the world. The other side is this technological

55:45

thing. Because we've been doing that. We're going to

55:47

have to figure out how to come into mastery of it pretty

55:49

quick too. Because, yeah, guys have finally lit

55:52

the fuse. So it feels like the clock's ticking at long

55:54

last. I don't know about you, but

55:56

I was a nerd growing up. So I've been watching the tech thing

55:58

since as long as I was. Well, probably about seven or

56:00

eight. And

56:03

there's been a feeling of there will be a point

56:05

at which

56:07

the train leaves the station,

56:09

where the technology thing is

56:12

moving in a sort of an eschatological fashion.

56:14

And there's going to be an end of days that are going to be brought

56:16

forth by the simple exponential growth of technology.

56:20

And it seems like the the abboys have

56:22

left that fuse and the

56:24

train has left the station. So, we've got a very limited amount

56:27

of time to figure out how to integrate this

56:30

problem child of humanity known as technology.

56:32

So, all right. So, let's slow down and unpack

56:35

a couple of these things. So, when you're talking

56:37

about technology, there's many aspects of technology.

56:39

So, break down the specifics of what type

56:42

of technology you're talking about. I know you referenced AI.

56:45

And then also what that end

56:47

of days looks like. Because

56:50

we also and we all understand kind of the social dilemma.

56:52

We also understand the kind of techno-feudalism.

56:55

You know, the term that, you know, Zach

56:57

Stein who I know is a buddy of yours and

56:59

you know, they've kind of been focused

57:02

on. But it's not exactly end of days. It's

57:04

just a degradation of our

57:07

sovereignty and it's hijacking of our attention.

57:10

But I wouldn't necessarily call that end of days.

57:13

It's a shift that's going to be difficult.

57:16

But so, go a little slow and

57:18

unpack like what technology you're talking about. Is

57:20

this the social technology? Is

57:22

this weapon? You know, actual

57:24

kinetic weapon technology? Technology,

57:26

qua technology.

57:28

So, what I'm talking about is the ability

57:31

of the human mind to

57:33

abstract characteristics of reality,

57:36

to foreground the

57:38

elements that are purposeful, the ones that we

57:40

prefer. And then to design

57:42

mechanisms that allow

57:45

us to

57:46

optimize or select from

57:48

reality our preferences and

57:50

to reduce or eliminate

57:53

the things that we prefer not

57:55

to have. This could be in any domain. Agricultural

57:58

technology does this in the context of food.

58:02

military technology does this in the

58:04

context of other people's power. So

58:06

technology is simply that game of using

58:08

the mind to abstract,

58:10

to model reality. By virtue of modeling

58:13

it, we can actually pull forth things like principles and

58:16

characteristics that allow us to then engage in the

58:18

process of design. It allows us

58:20

to then reconfigure the reality

58:22

that we live in. Technology is nothing more than reconfiguring

58:24

the existing reality in furthering

58:27

alignment with our preferences, which is to say to

58:29

increase the power of our will in

58:32

relationship with how the reality actually

58:34

plays vis-a-vis us. Now,

58:37

the downside of technology, of course,

58:39

is where we are. We live in a world where we have air

58:41

conditioning in Texas in the summer, which I

58:43

recognize is a boon. And that

58:45

we can do things like record our conversations

58:47

that anybody else who wants to see them can

58:49

choose to, which mixed emotions

58:51

about that one. Here's

58:54

the downside. The downside is

58:57

our minds are very limited.

58:59

That technology is fundamentally participates

59:01

in the epistemological category that

59:04

a gentleman named

59:06

Ed, or Dave Snooten, brought to me called complicatedness

59:09

as opposed to complexity.

59:11

So complexity is complex

59:13

reality. It's nature, qua nature.

59:16

And it's the thing that is actually

59:18

infinite in its infinitesimal

59:21

and its nuance and its relationality.

59:24

We can't really ever understand it. And it will change

59:26

and grow and evolve. Novelty will emerge. Complicatedness

59:30

is our models. Map versus territory

59:32

is a pretty standard way of describing it. And

59:35

technology is strictly bound to our

59:37

models. Technology is strictly bound to the complicated.

59:40

And what that means is that as we increase

59:42

our power, we increase simultaneously

59:45

the presencing of that which we at least within our

59:47

narrow desires

59:49

prefer. And

59:50

we increase the degree to which we're throwing

59:52

shit into the natural environment that we don't actually see

59:55

or understand because we've alighted it from our

59:57

vision. Economics calls that externalities.

59:59

Now, of course, in

1:00:02

our narrow vision, we may not understand, let's

1:00:04

say, for example, our ability to foreground,

1:00:06

let's go with estrogen, for purposes

1:00:09

that are very particular, like to make skin cream. Well,

1:00:12

as soon as that skin cream washes off and gets into

1:00:14

the water supply, it now becomes an externality that

1:00:16

is going into nature in a way that breaks a lot of

1:00:18

stuff that nature operates with. Multiply that

1:00:21

by literally everything. And

1:00:23

by, by the way, a lot of people. And

1:00:26

by a long period of time. And so that's

1:00:30

the problem child of technology. Which

1:00:34

we have not really dealt with. The only way we've been able to deal

1:00:36

with technology thus far is more technology.

1:00:39

And I think any alcoholic can give you a sense of

1:00:41

where that ends up. All right.

1:00:44

And by the way, I'd love to have a conversation with Mark

1:00:46

Andreessen on this because I think he had an opportunity

1:00:48

about a year ago to go through an initiatory

1:00:51

process and pop through. And something happened

1:00:53

where he's basically just doubled down. I can't tell whether that's

1:00:55

a game or whether he's just decided to give up and accept

1:00:57

the fact that he's going to be the kind of the Oppenheimer

1:01:00

of this, of the zero. I don't understand. I

1:01:02

don't know who that guy is. Oh, Mark Andreessen. He's

1:01:04

the guy who created Netscape. Okay. And then

1:01:06

created a venture fund called Andreessen Horowitz

1:01:09

and has been funding a lot of stuff. And he's become

1:01:11

one of the leading kind of

1:01:14

Silicon Valley billionaire intellectuals

1:01:16

behind effective accelerationism.

1:01:20

AI is going to solve our problems.

1:01:22

Mm-hmm. Run. I'm

1:01:24

a particular ideology. You're right. Although

1:01:27

I have to admit, I haven't been following him closely enough

1:01:29

recently. There may be more nuance to it than I'm picking up.

1:01:33

So then what's the other side? The other side is this question

1:01:35

at the end of days. All right. Did you see

1:01:37

the movie Oppenheimer? I didn't, but I heard it

1:01:39

was fucking great. Yeah, it's real good. Now,

1:01:41

if you don't mind, let's just sort of lay out the last thing. Yeah,

1:01:44

please. Spoiler alert. And

1:01:46

the last scene. Beautifully done,

1:01:48

right? Because given no one's methodology, he slices

1:01:51

time apart. So we have a series of events that keep occurring

1:01:53

in the movie linearly in our experience, but

1:01:56

all kind of build to a moment at the end. So we have Oppenheimer

1:01:58

having a conversation with Einstein. at a

1:02:00

pond in Princeton. And

1:02:03

what we see from the outside is that, oh he

1:02:06

knows Einstein, oh my gosh, what's he, what are

1:02:08

they gonna talk about? Oppenheimer wops up, has a conversation,

1:02:11

and then we see that Einstein walks out sort of visibly

1:02:13

upset. We're not quite sure what he talked about. The

1:02:16

last scene, we get to find out what they talked about.

1:02:19

And

1:02:21

earlier in the arc,

1:02:23

when they first, maybe the first time they meet,

1:02:26

the folks working on the Manhattan project

1:02:28

had run up the math where they said, wait, there

1:02:31

may be a possibility of a chain reaction

1:02:33

that when we actually ignite the

1:02:35

bomb, it'll start an uncontrollable

1:02:38

chain reaction that will actually ignite the entire

1:02:40

atmosphere.

1:02:41

That's a very... Splitting, so and

1:02:43

that and as far as I understand that when you

1:02:45

split one atom, the energy created could split other

1:02:47

atoms, which could then create this cascading

1:02:49

effect of... In just the ambient atmosphere.

1:02:52

Indefinite, yeah, indefinite

1:02:54

nuclear reactions. You got it. And there's this sort

1:02:56

of a non-zero risk. And then the math's

1:02:59

like non-zero risk, how big? Well, non-zero. So

1:03:02

they brought a dime to that, at least in the story. I don't know if this really

1:03:04

happened. And Einstein looks at it and

1:03:06

goes, sounds like it's your fucking problem. Like, this

1:03:09

is beyond my math. You've got better mathematicians on

1:03:11

it. You know, you got it. And they

1:03:13

decided to go forward with the process. But

1:03:18

here's the closer. And this is my

1:03:20

interpretation of it. So Oppenheimer's

1:03:23

looking at the pond, watching the raindrops

1:03:25

hit and the ripples sort of ripple out. And

1:03:28

he's mindful of the fact that now we've moved past

1:03:30

the atomic bomb

1:03:33

to the hydrogen bomb. And because of course,

1:03:35

game theory, as soon as we had the atomic bomb,

1:03:38

that was eventually going to escape. By the way, it doesn't

1:03:40

matter by what means. In this case, a

1:03:42

particular spy that was in the Manhattan Project

1:03:44

sent information over to the Russians. Doesn't matter.

1:03:48

Information will get out. The

1:03:50

Russians had to have a bomb. They had to have symmetry

1:03:52

in the arms race. Well, as soon as the Russians

1:03:54

had the bomb, we had to have the H-bomb.

1:03:57

It was the escalation curve, right? The arms

1:03:59

race.

1:03:59

has an escalation curve to it. Now,

1:04:02

when you move from the A-bomb to the H-bomb and

1:04:04

you move to the H-bomb with multiple people having the

1:04:06

H-bomb, you enter into mutually assured destruction.

1:04:09

Mutually assured destruction is just

1:04:12

the simplicity that the power that we're dealing with,

1:04:14

the amount of power that we have embodied in

1:04:16

hydrogen bombs past a certain small

1:04:18

number is if we

1:04:20

pop over into using them,

1:04:22

we break stuff so badly that

1:04:24

it's the end of the world. And then

1:04:26

the end of the world, right? Human nature

1:04:29

combo, sure. The end of days. So

1:04:31

that's the first moment. And Oppenheimer

1:04:33

was living that very deeply, right? He was living that experience.

1:04:37

But what he noticed was that there was a cascade

1:04:39

effect. The arms races are

1:04:41

moving off in every direction.

1:04:43

And so when I look at it, he says to Einstein, he

1:04:45

says, remember Albert, when

1:04:48

we set off this atomic bomb, there was a possibility

1:04:50

that we would actually set up a chain reaction within the world.

1:04:53

And he says, yeah, but I

1:04:55

guess the math proved that it wouldn't happen that way. And

1:04:57

Oppenheimer says, I think we did that. Meaning

1:05:01

when I read it, he recognized that they

1:05:03

were now in a game theoretic arms race. They

1:05:06

had a terminus. And that terminus was

1:05:08

when we have access to a power tool, we will

1:05:11

eventually use it. We've been boxing

1:05:13

ourselves in, right? We created this box

1:05:15

of safety called the Cold War. So all

1:05:17

right, we're not going to cross these boundaries. And

1:05:20

back in the 40s and 50s, the boundaries, even the

1:05:22

60s and 70s, the boundaries are actually pretty simple.

1:05:24

Meaning two guys had to avoid pushing one

1:05:27

button each. As long as Kennedy and Khrushchev

1:05:29

did not fire the bombs, the world was safe.

1:05:32

Our power was catastrophic

1:05:34

at the level of nuclear hostility. But

1:05:37

as long as we didn't cross that threshold, we were okay. And

1:05:39

by the way, as I'm sure you know, we barely

1:05:41

crossed that threshold. There were several circumstances that may

1:05:43

have crossed the threshold. There was

1:05:45

one story, this is just a small bracket to open up. And

1:05:48

I have in fact checked this story, but the

1:05:50

story goes and as it was told to me,

1:05:52

and again, apologies that I haven't fact checked

1:05:54

and researched the details of this story,

1:05:57

but there was a Russian nuclear

1:05:59

submarine at some point. point that received

1:06:01

communication during some point, potentially

1:06:04

Cuban Missile Crisis, potentially some other thing, received

1:06:06

communication that the

1:06:09

US had launched a military strike, an

1:06:12

atomic hydrogen military

1:06:15

strike. And they

1:06:17

then lost further communication.

1:06:20

And so it was actually the captain of

1:06:22

this submarine that had to decide

1:06:24

like, well, my job is to counterattack

1:06:26

in this instance. That's what I've been

1:06:28

told. But he found some

1:06:31

aspect of a warrior inside himself

1:06:33

and some aspect of consciousness, whether guided

1:06:35

by external forces

1:06:37

that be or his own internal goodness

1:06:40

and sense where he's like, we

1:06:42

cannot do this. We cannot do

1:06:44

this. And he himself

1:06:47

made this one decision like not to launch

1:06:49

it because those are interesting places as well.

1:06:52

You have a communication lapse, you get a follow

1:06:54

signal and then one person

1:06:56

could have actually ended the world or not

1:06:58

ended the world. And of course, you made the right choice. There

1:07:01

were no nuclear strikes that are happening. So

1:07:04

that would be an interesting story to look up, make sure that's

1:07:06

a reality. But even if it's not, this is

1:07:08

the world we're living in. Sometimes there's some fucking

1:07:11

close shaves that we're not even aware

1:07:13

of. And there may be even more of these close

1:07:15

shaves that haven't even reached, haven't gotten

1:07:18

declassified. Well, let's hold that as an archetype

1:07:20

because the story continues from there. So let's hold that

1:07:22

as an archetype. That individual happened

1:07:24

to have been holding on to a

1:07:25

potency or a quantity of power

1:07:28

where his choice to act or not

1:07:30

to act was decisive. But

1:07:33

now let's shift back to this escalating arms race

1:07:35

in every direction. So let's think like, well,

1:07:37

let's go with COVID. Let's go with the weaponization

1:07:40

of viral technology. I

1:07:42

was convinced as of like January of 2020 that

1:07:45

this was a lab produced phenomenon. The

1:07:47

evidence for that was strong enough even then

1:07:49

to be 80% confident. My confidence

1:07:52

has gone up since then. Oh,

1:07:54

it's been fairly well acknowledged at

1:07:56

this point. Yeah. At this point, they're

1:07:59

like, man. More or less than the more. But

1:08:02

you were a conspiracy theorist for a little while. I sure

1:08:05

was. Yeah. Let me

1:08:07

just say, I paid attention to logic

1:08:10

and evidence and noticed who

1:08:12

was giving me very, very easy to disapprove

1:08:14

lies. Right. I remember looking at it, I

1:08:16

think it was in science, very like February

1:08:18

there was a sort of a very strong like lab

1:08:21

leak debunked, obviously his new zoonotic origin.

1:08:24

I got it was sort of spreading around. It was a major

1:08:26

journal. It's like,

1:08:28

how about if I read it?

1:08:29

I'll just read the news. I took a look at it, I read

1:08:31

it. It's like, this is specious.

1:08:34

The logic is weak beyond comprehension.

1:08:36

There's no way this could actually get

1:08:38

published as a real article. So

1:08:41

strong evidence that somebody's full of shit. Either

1:08:44

people are panicking and they're just trying to cover their ass or

1:08:46

worse. But team

1:08:49

zoonotic gets a debit because

1:08:51

their shit was clearly specious. Fair

1:08:53

enough. Just keep going down the sense making architecture.

1:08:56

But here's the kind of the closing key

1:08:59

point, which is,

1:09:01

okay, so we explore the frontier of

1:09:03

weaponizing viruses. Okay,

1:09:06

fair enough. We're also exploring the frontier

1:09:08

of weaponizing cyber war in a world that

1:09:10

is increasingly cybernetic.

1:09:12

And what happens is somebody pushes a

1:09:14

virus button, a computer virus button

1:09:16

that say turns off all the electricity

1:09:19

and we can't turn it back on for like three days.

1:09:21

Things get pretty bad pretty quick. Drones.

1:09:25

You know, what's going on in the Ukraine. Have you

1:09:27

ever read a book by a

1:09:30

gentleman named Manuel de Landa back in

1:09:32

I think 95, a long time ago, called

1:09:34

War on the Age of Intelligent Machines? And

1:09:37

he more or less called what we're looking

1:09:39

at right now, which is war

1:09:41

has the habit of causing people to take away all the safeties

1:09:44

and just start engaging in a Mars race. Drone

1:09:47

technology and the ability to actually use drones in

1:09:49

wars now going through the World War II

1:09:52

acceleration curve. And

1:09:56

drones can lead us into a place of mutually assured

1:09:58

destruction. We can have swarms of

1:09:59

drones taking out vulnerable supply

1:10:02

chains and locations in

1:10:05

logistics that break down complicated

1:10:08

late capitalist society. We live in a

1:10:10

fragile environment. Right. And

1:10:13

then one of the other risks and then another small bracket

1:10:15

is drones are like there's

1:10:17

a big curve

1:10:20

to get to actually atomic

1:10:22

or hydrogen bomb capability. The

1:10:25

technology there is extreme and

1:10:27

not impossible for some but

1:10:29

for a non-state agent to figure out but close

1:10:32

enough to impossible that it's very low on the

1:10:34

risk threshold that somebody in their basement is

1:10:36

going to figure out and have the access

1:10:38

to the tech and the science and capability

1:10:41

to make it. Swarms of drones

1:10:44

with enough money and

1:10:46

the ability to make explosive

1:10:49

devices or whatever else like it

1:10:51

becomes actually a real possibility.

1:10:55

And non-state agents could actually control these

1:10:58

drone swarms. Yeah, absolutely. And

1:11:00

we've been seeing this in the world of cyber. Back when I

1:11:02

was a hacker, we called them script

1:11:04

kiddies. These are like kids who can't

1:11:06

actually write the code to hack but as soon as

1:11:08

you write the code, they can run the code. So

1:11:11

they get the power of the code that's written by somebody else.

1:11:14

And all the technologies for SIOPs that

1:11:16

have been developed by let's say for example state

1:11:18

agencies and commercial agencies

1:11:21

for the 20th century, every generation...

1:11:23

That's a distinction. Yeah, a word distinction for sure.

1:11:28

Those become available. So millennials grew

1:11:30

up in such a super saturated SIOP environment

1:11:33

that they are sophisticated psychological

1:11:35

operators intuitively as like

1:11:38

the best SIOPs guys in the CIA

1:11:40

in the 70s because the techniques are just

1:11:42

the water, they're just drinking. And

1:11:44

the technology, the memetic technology

1:11:47

producing things that disseminate wildly

1:11:49

throughout the world are off the charts particularly now with AI

1:11:52

kicking off. With AI and deep fakes,

1:11:55

we're going to be very close to

1:11:57

a threshold where the mechanisms

1:12:00

collaborative sense making we've become used to

1:12:02

are just going to no longer be functional. We

1:12:04

won't be able to tell whether anything is actually real,

1:12:07

like a video from somebody. Is

1:12:09

that really from them? A scientific

1:12:11

article that has pages deep of linkages

1:12:13

and citations to completely made up documents

1:12:16

which an AI could produce literally instantaneously,

1:12:18

but it may take humans weeks or months to actually

1:12:20

get through to find out that they're bogus, by which

1:12:23

time the attention span is assumed the truth is

1:12:25

the headline is real, has lost

1:12:27

track of the underlying story

1:12:29

and has moved on. Whether

1:12:32

it's breakdown of collective sense making, the ability to

1:12:34

coordinate, whether it's breakdown of supply chains,

1:12:36

whether it's breakdown of energy chains, or whether

1:12:38

it's just straightforward kinetics, the point is

1:12:40

this box of mutually assured destruction, more

1:12:43

and more ways for us to fill that box have been

1:12:45

invented. Increasingly that

1:12:47

submarine commander is you. Increasingly

1:12:50

you're empowered to have to make a choice.

1:12:53

Increasingly it's not a choice of an

1:12:55

affirmative push a button and everybody

1:12:57

dies, but actually a every choice

1:13:00

I make now has to actually be impeccable.

1:13:03

Otherwise the negative externalities that I'm throwing off into

1:13:06

the world will actually lead to a collapse of this complicated

1:13:08

system. That's the problem that Oppenheimer

1:13:10

saw in the video that I was watching. That's

1:13:13

what I mean by this at the end of days. We're getting to a point

1:13:15

where our power is increasingly

1:13:18

so high and our wisdom is

1:13:20

so out of step with that power that

1:13:24

at some point we'll break something that we can't fix

1:13:27

and then a cascade effect will begin to

1:13:29

unfold, human and natural, the

1:13:31

cascade effect of people getting

1:13:33

panicked or angry or losing

1:13:36

hope and therefore acting in that fashion

1:13:38

which leads more energy in the destruction direction.

1:13:42

We certainly have enough power then to end the whole

1:13:44

thing. That's what I mean when you say that. I

1:13:47

understand. I

1:13:50

think you're two forks, empire and

1:13:53

kingdom. My sense of

1:13:55

it is that empire is a

1:13:58

very brief ...

1:14:00

A brief stopping point. I don't think

1:14:02

we ended Empire. I think if we head in the Empire

1:14:04

direction, there's a period of time that has

1:14:06

a feeling of deep, deep

1:14:08

constriction after which

1:14:10

everything falls apart.

1:14:12

Because empires fall. Empires

1:14:15

fall. That's

1:14:16

critical to get. It is intrinsic

1:14:18

to the nature, collapse is intrinsic

1:14:20

to the nature of Empire. Just a matter

1:14:22

of time. And the more energy and information

1:14:24

is processing, the faster that happens.

1:14:27

People don't really seem to get this. The reason why the Bronze Age

1:14:29

took as long as it took is because at the end of the day, it

1:14:32

was not metabolizing

1:14:34

very rapidly.

1:14:35

Slow metabolism. Current

1:14:37

environments metabolizing hyper-rapidly.

1:14:40

So it took thousands of years back then. It may take, I don't

1:14:42

know, decades or years. I

1:14:45

estimated China had about 10 years under

1:14:47

the arc that it was going under.

1:14:48

Very rough. But that's just a sense

1:14:51

of it. So

1:14:53

we have a double, that's a double whammy. Because if we go in the Empire

1:14:55

direction, our ability to restore something like

1:14:57

the time is even harder. So,

1:15:00

well, what, all right.

1:15:03

So, I accept that hypothesis

1:15:06

as one potential hypothesis of it. But

1:15:08

I can also see another potential hypothesis

1:15:11

in which, and this is

1:15:13

not what I'm rooting for but anyways, but

1:15:15

just to throw this out on the table is that Empire

1:15:18

actually creates a certain scaffolding

1:15:21

of coordination within

1:15:25

state agencies and government agencies

1:15:27

where actually this understanding that there

1:15:30

is actually a level of coordination that is

1:15:32

even beyond nationalism to

1:15:34

a certain degree and that there is a

1:15:36

greater level of coordination and scaffolding.

1:15:39

And then Kingdom, this consciousness

1:15:42

infiltrates the scaffolding and

1:15:44

infrastructure that Empire created

1:15:46

for top-down control. Because the point of Empire

1:15:48

is they're trying to control everything to

1:15:51

prevent this reality that

1:15:54

you're discussing this end of days. And they think the only way

1:15:56

we're going to do this is if we watch every single thing

1:15:58

that everybody makes. and control

1:16:00

every narrative, we get people so afraid that

1:16:03

we have everybody under control, we know what everybody's

1:16:05

saying, we know what everybody's doing, we're tracking them

1:16:07

wherever they go, we can watch everything,

1:16:10

we have people with guns and jack boots, they'll

1:16:12

come in, they'll fucking wipe anybody out. Okay,

1:16:14

that's gonna fall, it's gonna cause a problem.

1:16:17

But it is possible, I

1:16:19

think, that actually that

1:16:21

move is made and

1:16:24

then still the force of kingdom

1:16:26

works from the inside out and starts

1:16:28

to infiltrate and starts to actually

1:16:31

use some of the scaffolding that empires

1:16:33

created but use it in

1:16:35

a benevolent way. I

1:16:38

don't like that reality but I also

1:16:40

don't wanna get in a place where if empire

1:16:42

does actually pull this move

1:16:45

off that we're just like, alright,

1:16:47

we're fucked now. Yeah, fair enough. Completely.

1:16:50

I still think there's a way to like, even like

1:16:52

let's say you take a take pharma

1:16:55

or take big ag or take something, there's

1:16:57

a way that I feel like it can change

1:16:59

from the inside out and then all of a sudden McDonald's

1:17:02

could be the purveyor of the healthiest food on the

1:17:04

planet because they have the distribution network that's

1:17:07

available for it. So

1:17:10

I still have some degree of hope but

1:17:12

I do feel like another

1:17:14

strategy of moving further towards

1:17:16

kingdom and not getting to that place where we're

1:17:18

completely restricted and clamped down

1:17:21

is the move that we gotta fight for but

1:17:23

we don't stop. Well, I think we can even actually

1:17:25

make it a little bit easier which is not like it's

1:17:28

empire happens tomorrow and everything's hunky-dory right now.

1:17:31

We've been sitting in the midst of empire for a long

1:17:33

time. So no matter what we're already,

1:17:35

we're already what you're talking about. Kingdom

1:17:38

will be emerging in the context of empire one way or another.

1:17:41

And so actually very practically,

1:17:43

the concerns of reservations I would have about

1:17:46

a further ring of empire would be

1:17:48

one, they're building the wrong infrastructure. So even

1:17:50

if you actually manage to take from within, a large

1:17:52

part of work is gonna have to be done redesigning the damn thing.

1:17:55

Yeah, true. Let me think. we

1:18:00

are burning non-replaceable resource

1:18:03

and I mean this both spiritually and emotionally,

1:18:05

culturally as well as physically. So

1:18:07

we just sort of keep pushing ourselves to the point where things

1:18:10

get dicey and dicey.

1:18:13

And three, there is of course going to be some point

1:18:16

at which you're tipped over the top. Now, by

1:18:18

the way, tipping over the top,

1:18:20

again, looping back to the A metaphor, rock

1:18:22

bottoms, rock bottom.

1:18:23

It may be that it's

1:18:25

not until the actual moment of collapse where

1:18:28

the things are actually really seriously

1:18:30

obviously and undeniably falling

1:18:32

off that the consciousness raises to say, okay,

1:18:34

kingdom. And that it's actually the kingdom

1:18:37

sort of emerges in the midst of that. What we don't know

1:18:39

is we don't know how fast that can happen. That may

1:18:41

be very fast.

1:18:42

I was watching how rapidly things were happening in

1:18:45

early COVID.

1:18:46

One of the advantages of the world, the infrastructure

1:18:48

that we have built, this crazy digital

1:18:51

thing, this social dilemma that we've built is

1:18:53

that we actually can communicate with everybody on the planet

1:18:56

more or less instantaneously. And all this attention

1:18:58

that everybody are unhealthily pointing to

1:19:00

the digital does mean that if a signal

1:19:02

goes out in the digital,

1:19:04

the orient's attention is a certain direction. Everybody

1:19:07

can get it and kind of will. Well, and this is

1:19:09

also why someone like RFK who's fighting

1:19:11

against censorship or someone like Elon who

1:19:13

goes and clears

1:19:15

what's now X, formerly Twitter, from

1:19:18

a place of censorship actually allows the free

1:19:21

dissemination of information. And one of the problems

1:19:23

was that our actual infrastructure

1:19:25

itself was still being controlled by our in

1:19:28

collusion with government. So government

1:19:30

and corporate agencies, again, working together

1:19:33

to suppress information to allow

1:19:35

their narrative to be dominant. So

1:19:37

we need places where there's free exchange

1:19:39

and it feels like, oh shit. All

1:19:42

right. Well, we got at least one. We got

1:19:44

one way in which people can communicate and

1:19:47

yeah, there's going to be AI creating different shit

1:19:49

and there's going to be confusing the epistemic commons

1:19:51

is, you know, that's come from,

1:19:53

I think, the field of more your colleagues

1:19:56

and some of my friends, this idea of like, all right,

1:19:58

this is the place where you make sense. This is

1:20:00

how you know what you know is the library

1:20:03

of the world basically and that's

1:20:06

been degraded. There's a lot of other problems but at least

1:20:08

ideas can be spread

1:20:11

freely without suppression and censorship

1:20:13

and so, you know, that's kind

1:20:16

of part of what's been going on here

1:20:18

as well is like I think Empire realizes

1:20:20

like, oh, if like

1:20:22

the truth can actually spread virally,

1:20:25

memetically in a way, this could

1:20:27

really undermine our plans. Yes.

1:20:31

And that's by the way, double good news.

1:20:32

In fact, one of the things I told my friends about

1:20:35

the 2016 Trump election was

1:20:37

that, well, good news is we still live in a

1:20:39

democracy. I assure

1:20:41

you, if Team Blue could

1:20:44

have stopped that election from happening, they would

1:20:47

have. So, that means that we lived in a functional democracy

1:20:49

at least for a while and don't know if we still did but we did at the

1:20:51

time. It's a good sign. That's a

1:20:53

good thing. Yeah, yeah. The

1:20:55

Empire, it is hard for me

1:20:57

to imagine. I mean, people can definitely tell stories

1:21:00

of the degree to which Elon may in fact be a

1:21:02

double blind or captured in some way and

1:21:04

he probably is compromised in certain ways. He's

1:21:06

too powerful not to have to

1:21:07

be part of the big game but

1:21:10

it's hard for me to imagine that the... Maybe.

1:21:13

I actually think everybody is compromised in some way. If

1:21:15

you're powerful enough but

1:21:17

it may not be enough to matter. Yeah. That's

1:21:20

the key thing. If you're willing to just say, yeah, fuck

1:21:22

off, go ahead, release the tapes, I don't care or

1:21:25

delete 50 billion dollars worth

1:21:27

of my wealth or freeze my assets, I'm willing to go that

1:21:29

direction, then of course,

1:21:33

we cannot be held by false power if we're not

1:21:35

allowing ourselves to be held by false power. Yeah.

1:21:39

But in any event, it's hard for me to put together

1:21:41

a scenario where the degree to which Twitter

1:21:43

has enabled a renaissance of communication

1:21:46

and relatively unburdened speech

1:21:50

if they could have stopped it which is actually a good sign because

1:21:52

that indicates that the Empire... Yeah.

1:21:55

...is actually reasonably not powerful. Right. It's

1:21:57

actually within a relatively ordinary range of capacity.

1:21:59

And it seems just to double click

1:22:02

on the democracy thing. It seems

1:22:04

like you got to give it and you know, of course, I'm of

1:22:06

huge support. I've gone all in for Bobby

1:22:09

Kennedy. I know him as a man. I know his heart

1:22:11

and it's again one of those things where it's yes, I

1:22:13

agree with what he says but I also I love

1:22:16

the man genuinely like from my heart

1:22:18

like I love him and I've met his kids

1:22:20

and I love his kids. Makes

1:22:23

me emotional because it's like he's

1:22:25

a good man and I feel that. I

1:22:28

feel that every cell in my body, you

1:22:30

know, so I get asked and I've never been

1:22:32

political in my whole life. I haven't believed.

1:22:34

I've never believed in anybody. I thought

1:22:36

Obama was cool. He had a nice crossover

1:22:38

and a good like finger roll, you

1:22:41

know, and that mattered a lot to me,

1:22:44

you know, that was a symbol for me. That

1:22:46

really inspired it. He spoke and he was a great

1:22:48

orator, you know, you'd have made Cicero proud,

1:22:50

you know, with how he could speak. So

1:22:53

I had some hope. It didn't pan out the way that

1:22:55

I hoped it would, you know, way too many people

1:22:57

getting locked up for marijuana charges and a

1:22:59

whole bunch of personal things. I was

1:23:01

like, come on bro. But however,

1:23:03

that's not the point of it. But the point is for the very

1:23:05

first time, I've actually never even registered to vote but

1:23:07

I'm not only am I gonna be registering to vote, I'm out there

1:23:10

fucking giving everything I got, you know,

1:23:12

because I believe in this. But

1:23:14

so this is kind of a long way

1:23:16

around and also open for any of

1:23:18

your comments on any of that but it's a long way around me

1:23:20

saying, all right, I think

1:23:22

we're in a place where we have to agree, not

1:23:24

have to but most of us who are making

1:23:27

sense of things, that there is

1:23:29

a small or

1:23:31

medium amount of fuckery

1:23:34

that can happen with election machines,

1:23:37

ballots and probably there's always been

1:23:39

some fuckery, dead people who are voting.

1:23:42

I mean, that's probably occurred in the fucking 1800s, right? Dead

1:23:45

people voting, somebody coming in. Oh, no, for

1:23:47

sure. No, that's always been there. So what is so

1:23:50

so and it looks like that's probably increased

1:23:52

maybe it was 1% in 1870 and 1940

1:23:54

is maybe 1.5 or 2% and then by now in 2020.

1:24:00

It feels like all right like what

1:24:02

was that maybe four percent

1:24:05

may like So there's some

1:24:07

level but still it's still mostly

1:24:09

democracy With just some some

1:24:12

like fuzziness around around the

1:24:14

edges. Yeah, is that is that kind of how

1:24:16

you totally see it now? Absolutely,

1:24:19

so if I had to like pin you down and go like alright,

1:24:21

so what what do you think is the what

1:24:23

do you think? Is the is the Delta? What do

1:24:25

you think is the margin of margin of

1:24:27

fuckery? Yeah

1:24:30

What is the margin of the margin of fuckery? Well,

1:24:32

it's not evenly distributed and so the key element is actually with

1:24:34

the margin of fuckery

1:24:36

at

1:24:38

the places that matter the children points it's not an average and

1:24:42

Because the places of the matter have actually been narrowed

1:24:44

down to relatively small amount Because

1:24:48

certain states with certain electoral college even very specific

1:24:50

counties and cities. Mm-hmm

1:24:52

So if I took it a

1:24:54

place like Philadelphia Probably as high

1:24:56

as 10 15 percent Maricopa

1:25:00

County maybe five or six percent. Mm-hmm.

1:25:03

So high enough to really matter

1:25:05

that's big that's big because most

1:25:07

elections are

1:25:08

not won by Percentages

1:25:10

that are higher than that. Yeah, that's big and it seems

1:25:12

like The the

1:25:14

scary part is it seems like this is not In

1:25:18

both directions. It doesn't seem like it's

1:25:21

not In both

1:25:23

directions it doesn't seem like it

1:25:25

seems like it seems like it's there they're

1:25:27

picking a candidate and applying their fuck

1:25:29

because if there was actually evenly distributed

1:25:32

fuckery where and again

1:25:34

I think there's a huge evolution is

1:25:36

needed in our red versus blue team Dynamics,

1:25:39

right like we have to have an independent that actually

1:25:42

breaks this system So people are actually voting

1:25:44

for people rather than voting for

1:25:46

teams. Yeah, and these structures,

1:25:49

but It feels

1:25:51

like it feels like one

1:25:53

team is one team seems

1:25:56

to have But I

1:25:58

mean, I don't like to say that because I don't like

1:25:59

I don't like to reify the team ideology,

1:26:02

but it does mean... The thing we can say with certainty is

1:26:05

that Team Blue dominates cities.

1:26:08

No question about that. Nobody would argue

1:26:10

about it. It's very obviously true. And

1:26:12

we can say with confidence that it's easier

1:26:14

to apply Fakkuri in cities because

1:26:17

it's a much more complicated environment, a lot more moving

1:26:19

parts going on. Fakkuri in the rural

1:26:21

environment is harder because the people who live

1:26:23

in those environments, this population is thin enough

1:26:26

that if you apply Fakkuri, it's easier to tell, if you know

1:26:28

what I'm saying? Because it's Bobby or

1:26:31

Johnny or Tim or Susan

1:26:33

or whoever down the street, like, what

1:26:35

are you doing? And anonymity creates

1:26:38

a gap as it does in every case. If

1:26:41

our relationships are not real, they're mediated by

1:26:43

formality. That gap right

1:26:45

there is a niche for Fakkuri. Almost all Fakkuri happens

1:26:47

in that gap. And

1:26:50

so cities are easier to manipulate and have

1:26:52

always been. The notion of political machines

1:26:54

were invented in the big cities. There's

1:26:56

also more resources to graft,

1:26:59

to flow, just because they

1:27:01

have more wealth to play with, more concentrated

1:27:03

wealth. And so

1:27:05

the likelihood that Team Blue

1:27:07

is more able to play with machinery of Fakkuri

1:27:09

in the contemporary environment at the low level, like at the

1:27:11

electoral level, is I think a

1:27:14

pretty strong heuristic. Team

1:27:16

Red, back

1:27:18

in the Bush years, right, Rove and that stuff, they seem

1:27:20

to really optimize on like

1:27:23

aggressive memetic warfare back

1:27:25

in the late 20th

1:27:27

and the early 21st century. Although

1:27:31

I don't know the details. I'm not like sophisticated

1:27:34

in political machinations. Sure. But

1:27:37

let's focus on RFK for a moment because... So here's the thing

1:27:39

that I would say. So vis-a-vis Elon

1:27:41

and Twitter. Yes,

1:27:44

window of opportunity. Why don't we take advantage

1:27:46

of it? Here's the challenge, I think, in front of us. It

1:27:51

would become so, how

1:27:54

do I say, disempowered.

1:27:57

Cynical, skeptical. But

1:27:59

also late. Yeah, fucking

1:28:01

lazy. It's not good. And

1:28:04

stupidly, we're not lazy. Like, if the builders

1:28:06

build, but they build stupid shit that we don't need.

1:28:09

We don't need yet another app. Like,

1:28:11

we don't, that's not the thing to be building, right? Or

1:28:14

just getting fights online. Like, where you have energy, what

1:28:16

are you going to do? I'm just going to get, pretend like I just won a great

1:28:18

squabble because I, you know, dunked on somebody online.

1:28:21

So, how about we be less stupid and

1:28:24

we be less lazy? And we take advantage

1:28:26

of the fact that we don't actually need any of the

1:28:28

legacy institutions. We

1:28:30

don't need any of them. They're all very obsolete,

1:28:33

very old-fashioned, very non-functional. And

1:28:35

we could build new institutions that are radically

1:28:37

more effective if we gently coordinated.

1:28:40

And therein lies the challenge. So, if we

1:28:42

have a window of opportunity where Elon is

1:28:45

providing us the ability to tell

1:28:47

the truth to each other to some meaningful extent, we

1:28:50

should probably take advantage of that. We should build

1:28:52

two or three backups in case Elon gets erased

1:28:55

or he changes his mind. Why

1:28:58

not? Good backups, well-intentioned backups.

1:29:01

Like, why not be thoughtful and functional about it?

1:29:04

And by

1:29:06

the way, we should be coordinating, using

1:29:08

these techniques to think about how to build a battle plan

1:29:10

to build all the rest of the stuff. Like, too sweet right

1:29:12

now. And here's an example. Let's

1:29:14

take RFK.

1:29:16

Now, come on.

1:29:18

In all likelihood, and this is really

1:29:20

honest, in all likelihood, he's going to be running against Biden

1:29:23

or maybe Newsom.

1:29:27

Or whatever, perhaps, Michelle Obama.

1:29:30

And Trump from jail,

1:29:32

right? Well, I mean,

1:29:34

Trump from jail, that's a whole new game. Let's just

1:29:36

play the first game, which is he's

1:29:39

trying to emerge from the blue team. Which

1:29:41

fucking hates him. Which hates him, of

1:29:43

course. Which actually, when it comes down to voting, like

1:29:45

it was that voting on censoring the censorship hearing

1:29:48

he had, he had only Republicans voting

1:29:50

in his favor. And all Democrats voting against

1:29:52

him. It's pretty clear that even though

1:29:54

he's wearing the blue jersey, the

1:29:57

blue team fucking hates him.

1:29:59

Blue

1:30:01

Church, the way I described it back in the day,

1:30:03

Blue Church absolutely hates him. He is an apostate of

1:30:05

the need to be burned at the stake sensibility. A

1:30:08

heritage. Yeah. So let

1:30:10

me frame it just a little bit further out. Let

1:30:13

me just put it out. I've got an election.

1:30:15

I've got a Trump in jail and I've got a Biden,

1:30:17

you know, with, what

1:30:19

do they call it? Putting a lid

1:30:22

on it. Biden just puts the lid on it so we don't even know

1:30:24

that he exists. And Dropov, if you remember

1:30:26

that, the Russian dude. And Dropov,

1:30:28

Biden. I'm sure that he's still alive. Biden. And

1:30:31

Trump in jail. Right. We've got,

1:30:33

and Bobby Kennedy is running against those two. Just by hypothesis.

1:30:35

Let me set that up. Come on, guys. Really?

1:30:39

We cannot self-organize the capacity to simply reveal

1:30:41

the idiocy and corruption in this structure. And

1:30:44

I don't mean us to say even winning the election. How about we run our own

1:30:46

election? We have that election run in a fashion

1:30:49

where it's very, very

1:30:51

easy to prove that the votes cast are the votes cast.

1:30:54

And we actually get enough votes cast to be able to show that,

1:30:56

by the way, in a real honestly well-run election

1:30:58

that could happen in 48 hours in a digital environment,

1:31:01

but zero percent likelihood or miniscule

1:31:03

likelihood of falsehood, guess what? He

1:31:05

won enough to win. Or at least won

1:31:08

enough to be a meaningful course

1:31:10

in the race. Why not?

1:31:13

Why not just completely obsolete

1:31:15

the current infrastructure or create

1:31:18

a higher level infrastructure that plugs it down? So

1:31:20

here's an example that I came up with this a long

1:31:22

time ago and I pitched to Brett Weinstein

1:31:24

back in 2020,

1:31:26

which was I

1:31:29

can basically have an optionality

1:31:31

in this modality. So I go,

1:31:34

okay, I will sign

1:31:36

up to vote for RFK. But

1:31:39

I'll register so digitally. So I'll

1:31:41

be not verified that I have a legitimate vote

1:31:43

and I'll put my vote in. But

1:31:45

like Kickstarter, only if enough

1:31:47

people actually in my district vote

1:31:51

will I actually execute on that. And the day

1:31:53

before the actual election, we'll all get

1:31:55

our signal back and say, Kickstarter

1:31:57

project RFK, yes or no? You

1:31:59

can get one second. saying. So that risk if you

1:32:01

threw your vote away, if you vote for a third

1:32:03

party, or in this case, if you, let me

1:32:05

just use that as a frame for now.

1:32:09

You can completely eliminate that where

1:32:12

I say, okay, if everybody else agrees to

1:32:14

vote for RFK, I do too. And

1:32:16

if we get 51% of people actually voting,

1:32:18

then all of us, the signal goes

1:32:21

out and says, all right, guess what? Your team just

1:32:23

went thumbs up on RFK. So execute on

1:32:25

your pledge to go vote for RFK in the official

1:32:27

election. But by now, it's actually

1:32:30

preordained because we've actually assembled enough

1:32:33

people to have already won the election in

1:32:35

a way that can be very easily proven

1:32:37

was true. And then you can call the

1:32:39

number, hey, official infrastructure. Well, I mean, easily

1:32:41

proven also requires

1:32:43

some form of, and I think Elon's

1:32:45

actually working on this, some form where we each

1:32:48

have our unique blockchain identity.

1:32:51

We have to have a digital identity. Some kind

1:32:53

of digital identity that cannot be

1:32:55

fucked with. And so we have to

1:32:57

have that technological advancement.

1:33:00

So this goes back to the conversation we were talking

1:33:03

about of like, people can get all

1:33:05

up in arms about the empire kingdom distinction. So

1:33:08

I'll just sort of put it very straightforwardly.

1:33:11

A

1:33:12

high fidelity, strong digital

1:33:14

identity is a sine qua non

1:33:17

for any viable future,

1:33:18

kingdom or empire.

1:33:20

I agree. We don't want the imperial

1:33:22

version. Everybody

1:33:25

who's worried about CBDCs or social credit

1:33:27

scores and digital fascism,

1:33:30

that is a good worry. That's the imperial version.

1:33:33

There's a kingdom version over here that we can

1:33:35

do, highly decentralized, self-sovereign,

1:33:38

incorruptible. That

1:33:41

needs to happen. It needs to happen like yesterday, as

1:33:43

soon as possible. And I don't want to wait on

1:33:46

Elon to do it because he doesn't have the incentive

1:33:48

landscape to do it properly. And I've

1:33:50

seen the way he designs things. Sometimes his design choices

1:33:53

don't map up with the way it needs to be done. So

1:33:55

I want to get there, the people. Why don't the people actually say,

1:33:58

we claim our own identity? And

1:34:00

we're in the technology for doing that fortunately

1:34:02

has been largely developed so we can actually execute

1:34:05

on it That'd be a nice swarm like tomorrow. How

1:34:07

about we initiate a swarm tomorrow for everybody

1:34:09

to just say yeah that version of decentralized

1:34:12

digital identity I'm

1:34:14

in I'll sign up for it And

1:34:17

by the way, if I'm not good if the version

1:34:19

that's out there that we see like that's the one we should do isn't

1:34:21

good enough List the design

1:34:23

changes that need to happen for you to be ready to go So we

1:34:25

can all collaboratively do an open source project and

1:34:27

pop it over to the threshold where it needs to be So

1:34:30

in the period of I don't know a couple months this

1:34:32

giant collective intelligence known as humanity

1:34:35

can actually build the infrastructure At the very

1:34:37

bottom of the social stack does this digital

1:34:39

identity and have it owned by the people themselves

1:34:42

and not by anybody else

1:34:43

That'd be a very powerful thing for us to do Essential

1:34:46

and then then you could use that to then put

1:34:48

pressure on the official

1:34:50

election machine Really fucking

1:34:52

power they like all right all of these

1:34:54

all of these false votes You know like and then and

1:34:57

then find some kind of transparent system

1:34:59

where your digital identity is registered Yeah,

1:35:01

and like you actually it can actually be kind of

1:35:05

Reviewed yeah in a way so that actually there

1:35:07

is fidelity and you know about the zk snarks,

1:35:10

right? So this is very important

1:35:12

new relatively new I mean the crypto

1:35:14

community. It's relatively old, but that's like two years

1:35:16

older, so So this is

1:35:19

a zero knowledge proofs So

1:35:21

what it does is it gives you the ability to say let's

1:35:23

say for example You want

1:35:25

to be able to query whether or not I have

1:35:27

the right to vote in this particular election?

1:35:30

And I want to be able to prove

1:35:32

to you that I have the right to vote in this particular election

1:35:34

But I don't want to tell you who I am or

1:35:36

anything about me Mm-hmm zero knowledge

1:35:39

proof is a technology that now exists and is very

1:35:41

well Established designed and are

1:35:43

being implemented that allow us to do that So

1:35:46

I can show up at the polling booth Digitally or physically

1:35:49

and I can essentially give you a proof that

1:35:51

I absolutely Have the right to vote in this

1:35:53

election haven't voted before and I'm a real human Whatever

1:35:56

here all the stuff we want and then but

1:35:58

nothing else so perfect privacy,

1:36:00

but perfect

1:36:02

fidelity and transparency on the elements that matter.

1:36:05

And I'll give you an example of where this can be very useful. This

1:36:08

can help us slice the Gordian knot

1:36:11

that's got old Jordan Peterson wrapped up around

1:36:13

pseudo-anonymous identities on Twitter.

1:36:17

Elon can have his cake and eat it too. You

1:36:19

can use zero-knowledge proofs where I come

1:36:21

in and I establish

1:36:23

in some fashion in many different ways of doing it. For

1:36:26

example, I'm a real live human and I'm

1:36:28

not a bot. And

1:36:30

then I can use a zero-knowledge proof to tell

1:36:32

Twitter, yep, real human, not a bot.

1:36:35

I can even get deeper identity. If

1:36:37

Twitter asks me to say, who are

1:36:40

you, like what actual human are you, or

1:36:42

verify that you're an American, whatever it is, I

1:36:44

can issue proofs of those specific elements and

1:36:47

no more. So it allows me to have very

1:36:49

powerful capacity to control the particulars

1:36:52

of my identity and prove things, again,

1:36:54

cryptographically for real,

1:36:57

but

1:36:58

without revealing anything else. So

1:37:01

the technology for doing that A exists

1:37:05

has been implemented, is available

1:37:08

to be delivered at scale and

1:37:10

can be done in entirely decentralized fashion. So we

1:37:12

can have, you can have your anons and

1:37:15

you can avoid the, what did you call them, internet troll

1:37:17

demons? You can have both simultaneously

1:37:20

and it's ready. It's just a matter

1:37:22

of us getting the right consciousness and awareness and

1:37:25

beginning to move into this 24th century

1:37:27

form of coordination that has been such

1:37:29

a slow start to actually just beginning to make

1:37:31

it happen without having either venture

1:37:33

capital money funding it or some

1:37:37

oligarch deciding they're going to lightning bolt

1:37:39

it into happening.

1:37:41

It's, yeah, I mean, I love that

1:37:43

idea. I,

1:37:46

I mean, and of course I'm all for it. I'm

1:37:48

all in, right? I'm fucking all in. It

1:37:51

seems to me though, that the

1:37:53

way, the only way that I can play that story

1:37:56

where it makes sense is in

1:37:58

this story where I

1:38:00

don't know. Maybe this is just my lack of faith

1:38:03

in our maybe because of our laziness, maybe because

1:38:05

of a variety of our inability

1:38:07

to self-organize so far at this level

1:38:09

of consciousness that we're at and the necessity that

1:38:12

we get to this state ASAP

1:38:15

and as in ASAP even prior to

1:38:17

the sex election ASAP like really fast.

1:38:19

But prior to this conversation. Yeah, yeah. We're

1:38:22

way behind. We're way behind like so it would

1:38:24

be highly helpful if you

1:38:26

know Elon is I really actually

1:38:29

I don't know. I don't know Elon so

1:38:31

I don't have the same relationship that I have with Bobby

1:38:33

where I like because I know a lot when I

1:38:35

look in someone's eyes and I feel their energy and

1:38:37

you can call that all woo-woo and whatever but

1:38:39

I have a you know the

1:38:42

anthro ontology that feeling like through my

1:38:44

body I envisioned God like I have a sense

1:38:46

I can feel somebody I haven't felt the Elon I

1:38:48

don't know and I'm sure he's complicated.

1:38:51

I'm sure he is. I'm sure he's fucking complicated.

1:38:54

However it seems to me that if he made that

1:38:56

move it could get the critical mass of momentum

1:38:59

together and then it also clean up the

1:39:01

Twitter infrastructure because right now Twitter still has

1:39:04

enormous amount of bot pressure that could be controlled

1:39:06

by Russia or China or

1:39:09

not or non-stop completely non-state

1:39:11

just disruptive you know kind

1:39:13

of whatever there's a whole bunch

1:39:15

of different ways that people can weaponize

1:39:17

bots in this way. But if you had this put

1:39:20

into the Twitter or X

1:39:23

atmosphere then it could get enough critical

1:39:25

mass and then he has a proclivity

1:39:28

that he's shown to open source

1:39:31

this tech you know when he's shown

1:39:33

that with Tesla shown that with actually even open

1:39:35

sourcing the algorithms and a variety

1:39:37

of different things. It seems like that would be

1:39:39

the fastest move. Oh it would be by far

1:39:41

the best. Let's not know

1:39:43

ifs, ands, or buts. Let's from your lips to

1:39:46

Elon's ears. If Elon were

1:39:48

to implement

1:39:50

a properly designed digital

1:39:52

identity infrastructure, decentralized,

1:39:55

that Twitter is the first client on top of a decentralized

1:39:58

infrastructure,

1:39:59

it would be

1:39:59

best thing. Like literally

1:40:02

the most important best thing that could happen in the world right

1:40:04

now would be that as far as I can tell. And

1:40:07

by the way, he could. So the only

1:40:09

question is will he? Let's go.

1:40:11

Come on, bro. How

1:40:14

might we kind of