Daniel Schmachtenberger is one of the most qualified (and genius level) people to speak on the catastrophic existential risks our species faces. Having seen beyond the veil of politics and big technology, he details the stark reality of the titanic threats that lie in our path. In this podcast, he lays out the fate of our trajectory if we continue without a significant course correction. But woven through the sobering realism of what we are facing is a golden thread of optimism. Though we are walking a razor's edge, we both have absolute faith we will make it. It is not a blind faith, but an active faith, requiring all of our participation to shift the culture and change our fate.

AUBREY: Daniel Schmachtenberger. It's great to have you back my brother 

DANIEL: It’s very good to see you my friend

AUBREY: Yes, indeed. And you were fresh off a very powerful podcast on the Joe Rogan experience with Tristan Harris. And you guys spent three hours really covering the basis of some of the challenges we're facing right at this very unique moment in human history. I would like for you to take a moment to just summarize in a cursory way, some of the issues that you explored on that. And from there, we're going to go a lot deeper into some of the solutions and how we can be active participants in creating those solutions and the necessity to hold this kind of right relationship with optimism through what could be seen as This Kobayashi Maru unwinnable situation. But of course, as Captain Kirk showed us, there's a way, there's always a third door. There's always another lane that we can take. And so I'm excited to explore these issues with you. 

DANIEL: Yeah, so you said there's always a third door. Maybe we'll take an exploration of what the two doors in front of us that both seem to suck currently are as a way of explaining what the one way of looking at kind of what an overview might be to then say what is the third door, the third attractor we're looking for. And we did get to discuss this at a bit of depth, with Joe and having some other places. So people can check that out. But just for a quick summary for whatever total human history is something like 300,000 years of homo sapiens, we never got to a population over half a billion until the industrial revolution. And then we didn't get to a first billion until about 1815. Before the Industrial Revolution, the number of people we had and the amount of power that we had in total military power and environmental harm, power. Like we just couldn't destroy the world. We just didn't have the capacity with the industrial revolution and starting to move into massive industrial scale capacities, we went from half a billion people to around 8 billion people in the what's really functionally the blink of an eye from evolutionary timescales and not only do we go from half a billion to a billion, the resource per capita being used went up many hundreds of fold. If we look at how many, what are called extracorporeal calories. My life depends on how much energy beyond the food that I eat. The average person right now, averaging the fact that there's so many people in poverty are still, I believe the current numbers around 300 X, the corporeal calories. So however much I eat, there's about 300 times more energy than that. That's involved in making my life work. And that obviously means for those of us in the affluent West, it's way more than that to average. So way more people, way more resource consumption per capita with industrial tech. We're coming up to a time period where the cumulative effect of a few hundred years of that is hitting planetary boundaries. Overfishing of the oceans, excessive pollution in terms of nitrogen runoff and dead zones. And so we have all these environmental issues, whether we're talking about total loss of biodiversity, loss of forests, loss of key species, and also running out of key resources on one side of a linear materials economy where we extract stuff from nature faster than nature can make it to turn it into trash faster than nature can process it. We try to do that exponentially because exponentiate our monetary supply, because you have to make interest. The interest means that I need more money next year and the total monetary supply than there is this year. And that's not even including growth of the economy beyond interest, fractional reserve banking and all that. But that means I need to exponentiate my monetary supply, which means I have to have an exponential growth of goods and services, which means an exponential growth of the linear materials economy in relation to a finite planet that you can't run exponential growth on forever. So, industrial era tech getting bigger and bigger and globalizing still couldn't extinct us immediately, but the cumulative effects actually break the planet down. So we're coming up to the place where around 300 years of the kind of cumulative effects are getting us towards planetary boundaries and fragility all over the place. Then add to that exponential tech, which is well beyond industrial era tech. And now, I guess we'll start with, go back to World War II and the development of the bomb. And that was the first tech. Post industrial, the beginning of the nuclear phase. That was the first tech where we actually had the ability to kill everything all at once. And it's really important to understand that for the whole history of the world and every philosopher who ever thought about human power and whatever, we didn't have to destroy the whole world. We didn't have the power of God, so to speak, to need to have the wisdom and love and prudence of God's to be able to guide it. So World War II comes along and all of a sudden we actually can destroy the whole world in a relatively short interaction. You're like, we are not safe stewards for this much power because the power that we did have, whether it was catapults or whatever, we always use that power to kill other people. And we use the power to harm the environment. Like we've been actually cutting trees down faster than they could reproduce for a very, very long time. We just could only do it at so much scale with industrial capacity. We started to be able to do it at a much larger scale, but you're like, okay, we've used our technological power to damage nature and kill each other and then create class systems that would suppress each other. We've used it that way for a long time. We've not been the greatest stewards of power. Now we have the power to actually mess everything up. How do we make it through that technological adolescence? So you look at the history of Europe in particular, but you can look at the history of the world and it's defined by the major empires warring with each other. And there's actually this beautiful animation that shows a time lapse of the rise and fall of empires. It's set to like some kind of classical music, we should put the link in the show notes. I'll send it to you. It's a sense of like, it's just a history defined by bloody war. And then the bomb comes the first time where the major empires can never fight again. And yet the whole thing is defined by fighting you like, how the fuck are we going to do that? So we had to make this entire world system to ensure that we don't fight, which is the post World War II system, which was the Bretton Woods monetary system, plus create the United Nations and all of the international governmental organizations and mutually assured destruction. It was like a whole world system. And the key was, okay, the major reason we fight is to compete over scarce resources. So in order to make sure that everybody can get more, cause everybody wants more, but we don't have to take each other's stuff, which becomes the basis for fighting. We just have to make exponentially more stuff all the time. So let's make a monetary system that allows us to just make exponentially more stuff. It's so positive. So abundance oriented that everybody can keep getting more without having to kill each other. Now, of course, the major nations will still oppress the minor nations and class systems within the major nations will oppress lower class within them. But nonetheless, the major empires don’t have to kinetically war. But that world system was based on globalization and exponential growth. You just can't keep running that thing forever because eventually you hit planetary boundaries everywhere and we're there. Also, it said, let's make the world so globally interconnected that you don't want to go to war with anyone because the computer that you're talking over is made on six continents. The supply chains. And so whoever you bomb, you end up messing up the thing that you depend on. So let's make us so interconnected. But then what that also means is the system becomes so fragile that you get a virus in one part of the world and you start getting cascading shutdowns of supply chains across the whole world. And so, you get to a place where the fragility means that the inevitable collapses that happen locally can start to have global effects. So you can't keep doing that thing. You have to create more resilience in the system. And the other key part of how we made it through the World War II nuclear tech is mutually assured destruction. If they fire, we fire. And so nobody can use the weapons, but that only worked when you had two parties that had one catastrophe weapon. Now with drones and bio weapons and cyber weapons that can do catastrophic levels of damage on infrastructure. You have dozens of catastrophe weapons beyond the bomb. And you don't have two actors that have them. You have dozens of actors, including non state actors. So you're like, how do you do mutually assured destruction? When you don't even know what type of weapon you're talking about, or who has it? You don't. So basically up until World War II, the world did not have to take responsibility for global destruction power. Humans never had to think that way. At World War II we had things that way. We built an entire world system that bought us like 75 years, but did it at the cost of planetary fragility, supply chain and planetary fragility, literal biosphere fragility, and driving the tech that moved us from one catastrophe weapon to dozens of catastrophe weapons. So basically that phase is over and now we're entering a new phase and there is no previous precedent for how to make it through this phase, which is, we can't keep running exponential growth of the materials economy. We can't keep doing the cumulative industrial thing, let alone the new exponential tech thing, the way we have. And so the two doors, let me come back. I took a tangent exponential tech in particular. It's not just exponential tech because it's the cumulative effect of industrial tech within exponential tech, AI computation, et cetera, sitting on top of it. Exponential tech is so much more powerful than all the legacy forms of tech and all the legacy forms of power that only the groups that are developing and deploying exponential tech will really define the future. Because everyone who isn't, we'll just lose. This is not a “it should be that way”, this is a real politic assessment of “it is that way.” So then we have to say, are the groups that are developing and deploying that power, doing it, like, what is the value system they're doing it oriented to? What is the underlying philosophy or civics and that doesn't look really good. The exponential tech radically decentralizes power in some ways and centralizes it in other ways. These are the two bummer doors that we're looking for a third door on. Decentralizes it means drones are way easier to get access to the nukes. Nukes are really, really technologically hard to make. Like enriching uranium is really hard and it's pretty easy to control, but weaponizing drones, not so hard, meaning tiny little non state actors can get them and can do really, really serious damage, same with cyber weapons, the same with CRISPR and biotech making like real advanced biowarfare abilities cheap in the next few years. And we already see versions of this, which is little actors being able to pollute the information ecology with nonsense and affect the minds of so many people. On one side, the exponential tech that is supposed to democratize things, actually is democratizing catastrophic capacity, meaning catastrophe weapons for everybody. How the fuck does the world make it through catastrophe weapons for everybody? So one of the doors that sucks is that we just collapse. Like catastrophe and cascading catastrophes of an increasingly fragile world with increasingly more decentralized tech with increasingly more radicalized people from the nature of the way the media environment is radicalizing, the world will just kind of break. That's one path. And there's a million different versions of that, but that's one path. The other path is to control that and make sure that doesn't happen. The only way of trying to control it right now is like the way China's trying to do it, which is totalized surveillance. Let's make sure that we know nobody's building drones in their basement or building cyber weapons or building AI weapons in their basement. In order to do that, you gotta know what everyone's doing in their fucking basement. And so ubiquitous surveillance means you don't have to have a catastrophe for everyone, but it means you end up getting totalizing dystopias exponential tech, AI empowered dystopias. Those are the two doors we have, right? So that the exponential tech can decentralize power. It can also centralize power. And it's already doing that naturally. Like when you see there's really one search engine. You have one search engine that's bigger than all the other ones combined. Google. You have one online store that's bigger than all the other online stores combined. Amazon. You have one social media network, Facebook that owns Instagram and WhatsApp and whatever that has more attention than everything else. The network dynamics themselves already create centralization of power. And so you've got decentralization and centralization, both of which are happening in ways that are not really guided by any values we would want for the world. And so you either have dystopias or catastrophes. Those are the two doors. All right. Well, how do we have a 21st century that is neither catastrophic nor dystopic? It means you have to be able to bind all the catastrophes without some top down state binding it or some top down power binding it. How do you have some form of power that can check and balance all of this exponential tech power, but that has checks and balances itself. So it isn't dystopic. I would say that's a fair way of defining the third door we want. How do we prevent all the catastrophes where the mechanisms that prevent them are themselves not dystopic?

AUBREY: So one of the things that I've really identified and felt for a long time is the development of consciousness. And the rewriting of our own understanding of who we are collectively as one world, one species, one organism called Earth, interconnected, has not developed at the rate that our technology has. It just hasn't. And you can look and blame a variety of different causes for this. Potentially, the prohibition and the war against psychedelic medicine, which is a powerful tool to help bring people into states of awareness of interconnectedness. I mean, you do enough of that and you realize that you are not so different from that person next to you or that tree or that animal or that environment, this happens over and over again. It's a reliable effect of this, but that has been prohibited. You can also go back even deeper to the nature based wisdom traditions that have been largely suppressed by top down religious organizations and different other forces, whether it's state or whether it's religion, that's actually suppressed a lot of this wisdom. Look at the burning of the witches, people who carry these wisdom traditions that have been suppressed. So a lot of these different ways in which we could have been evolving our consciousness along with our technology haven't happened. And we're making a rally right now to try and catch up real quick, but some damage has been significantly done and it's landed us in this position right now where our consciousness is still in that war mentality. Alright, maybe the proliferation of nuclear weapons has stopped the nation states from being able to kinetically fight, but we're still in the fighting mindset. We haven't changed that separation mentality that says, I am going to defeat you. We're just using different bot farms to destabilize nations and compete in other economic ways. And all of these different things that are happening now between the nations that are competing and between people that are competing within political systems, etc. So what needs to happen is a very quick catch up of our consciousness. It seems which in turn could then provide the avenue for the third door, which is people creating an emergent understanding of something of a new way of doing things that's different from the mentality itself that's brought us to this position.

DANIEL: Yeah. So when you talk about a new mentality, a new basis for choice. Because all the problems we're talking about are the result of human choices and technologies. A massive lever on human choice. I can attack somebody with my hands. I'm much more effective if I get to extend my hands with a knife, more with a gun and a lot more with a major nation States military or an ICBM, but it's a technological extension of a particular choice making type of process. First, it's important to note. That it's not true that technology has values agnostic. It's neither good nor bad. It's just power and how we wield it, is just based on our consciousness. It's extending our consciousness, but it's influencing it as well.

AUBREY: It's a very good point because I've often gotten stuck in this kind of reductionist argument that technology is agnostic. You don't like Instagram, just use it in a different way. And yes, you can use it for good. And there are ways to use it better, but it does have a built in value system. And I think that's something that the social dilemma and something that you guys covered in a really powerful way on that podcast was understanding like, Oh, okay. These tools aren't neutral because you can say that about guns as well, like, and I think that's actually a fair argument. Guns don't kill people. It's people pulling the trigger that killed people, but the guns are far more neutral than the algorithms, which are really designed to actually pull people apart and garner attention. It's like guns don't beg people to fire them. It just gives them the opportunity to fire them. But the social media systems are actually in some ways even more nefarious because they have a built in kind of incentive and a built in way about them that is actually more harmful. 

DANIEL: Well, social media is all of the technologies that influence patterns of human behavior and human psyche. It's the most powerful one we have evolved yet. Because it is a tool intentionally designed to do that. Like the intention of the tool is to take all of the world's content and curate it uniquely based off of personalized tracking of my behaviors in a way that optimizes my behaviors for purposes, for engagement and advertisers and like that. And so it's using exponential technology specifically, personalized data harvesting, decentralized content curation, and artificial intelligence to affect certain outcomes behavior models, and it's why it's important to understand these companies are different in kind than big agriculture or big pharma or even big defense is that those are not intended to be multi billion person AI empowered personalized behavior modification systems. This is actually a behavior modification system down to a personalized level that is powered at a scale that dwarfs nation states that's different. It is such a different category of tech that it really needs thought of, not just as a corporation in the market sector in the private sector, because like already, it has changed the nature of what the market itself is. To be able to be effective in the market, you have to be effective in marketing. Now that there are monopolies where everyone's attention is to be effective in marketing means you have to be effective in marketing on Facebook, which means appealing to its algorithm, which actually means that the Facebook algorithm has captured the invisible hand of the market and turned it into an algorithm. Which means there is no longer a thing called a market in an Adam Smith sense, there is now a fully privatized captured set of algorithms that determines what succeeds and what doesn't succeed very largely. So yeah, to think of it from the old lens of like, we believe in capitalism and private enterprise and blah, blah, blah. It's just nonsense. But now let's come back to technologies, not values, agnostic technology extends human choice, which is human choice arising from human motivation, which is our values and our understanding and our desires and all like that. But it doesn't just extend the power of it. It also influences it. This is true for every piece of tech actually. And cumulative tech, if I had made this shirt by hand, depending upon how deep I go, I raised the sheep and then sheared the sheep and made the wool and knitted the fucking thing. I would treat the shirt very differently than my ability to press one button on Amazon and get quite a few of them and to see which ones I like. So built right into the ease with which I get the thing and can replace it affects the nature of how I engage with it. That affects, multiplied by all human behavior and not just shirts, but all the things I want affects the nature of waste management and the environment writ large. Like my ability to get shit easily means I'm going to go through a bunch of shit. Whereas if it was much harder to get, I just wouldn't go through the shit in the same way. It means that I'm not even going to think about, do I really need this shit in the same way that I would, if I had to make it. So, the nature of the way that things get made easier affects human values. In almost invisible ways. So we go back to the first really classic example. I mean, we can obviously go to stone tools, but the plow is my favorite example, because that's the beginning. It's a good place to take as the beginning of what we call recorded history and civilization, where we started creating cities and empires. Once we were able to create a plow, which means we were able to create grain and store grains, we started having stores of calories rather than just hunter-gather. The hunter-gather to agrarian transition, but we got something like 300,000 years of homosapien history. Before that, to then have maybe only 10,000 after that, this not enough to have really affected our genetic makeup or anything, but before that there's the best evidence indicates that pretty much everybody around the world was animistic. The North America, South America, Asia, wherever. The spirit of the animals, the spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees. There was a sense of the spirit of everything. So if I'm a hunter and a gatherer, I might kill an animal, but I'm making this prayer as I kill the animal that says, “I am killing the Buffalo.” And then when I die, my body will go into the ground and create grass that its grandchildren will eat and there's this great cycle of life and we're connected and I do a prayer. So I can believe in the spirit of the buffalo and kill it because I need to eat. But can I take that buffalo and domesticate it into an ox, castrate it, put things through its nose to then be able to yoke it and beat it all day long to pull this plow and still believe in the spirit of the ox or the buffalo. Not really. Like the beginning of that. 

AUBREY: It's at least very uncomfortable if you have to do that. And that discomfort drives the separation. 

DANIEL: Yeah. 'cause either I have to just say it's just a dumb cow and man was given dominion over earth. Or I have to say, no, there's a spirit of what it's like to be it. And I'm an evil motherfucker. Who's just working this thing all the time. And so which is why in the American slavery system, which was so much worse than other forms of slavery for some important reasons which was, other places didn't have the declaration of independence saying all men are created equal. And all deserve the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness like feudalism didn't make that claim. There was a very clear class system. The nobility had a better deal than everybody else. But when you make that all men are created equal and they all deserve life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And then you want to keep slavery. You have to do some weird mental gymnastics to justify that. And it was at the time stuff like, well, the blacks are a subspecies, more like the animals, right? There was a lot of that kind of nonsense that happened to justify that immoral kind of behavior, but that was already what we were doing with the animals when the plow came. So, the plow ended animism. There's a lot of different scholars who will kind of debate fine points, but there's a kind of overarching assessment. And so let's say I have a tribe that says, no, I'm not going to castrate the thing and beat it all the time. I'm just going to continue to hunt and gather. Well, those people aren't going to populate nearly as much as the people who get the plow and can create a lot more calories and support a much larger population and make it through the famines. As a result, the non animistic ideas will proliferate and the other ones will die out and then get killed off in the tribal warfare between the ones that have much larger population and more resources. So the ideas themselves that caught on were the ideas that lent themselves to power. Not necessarily the ideas that lived in harmony with nature or were true, good and beautiful. And similarly, when you're talking about burning the witches to death, somehow in the name of this Jesus guy who said, let he who has no sins cast the first stone and who says father, forgive them for they know not what they do while they're nailing them up. Somehow in his name, we think that burning witches to death makes weird mental gymnastics to make that happen. And then the witches are people who maybe believed in herbs or whatever it was, but something that was, let's say there were matriarchal cultures that were generally more peaceful, but we offered them the Bible and they either got that or they got the sword. There was a place where the more violent cultures, when they interacted with the more peaceful cultures, killed the more peaceful cultures, took their stuff and moved on. So the thing that you're mentioning about the kind of cultural breakdown is the thing that was selected for, was the thing that was selected for in the process of resource competition and war. Now, then we get to a place where the wars become big enough that nobody can win them. But what's been selected for is the ability to win wars, economic wars, as well as kinetic wars. So you're like, okay, what's been selected for, for a long time will now self terminate, which means we have to consciously select something that can make it through rather than unconsciously just have it selected via domination capacity. And that's the unique turning point we're at. 

AUBREY: Very well said. And it's not only what we've been selected and almost bred through these thousands of years of this mentality. It's also the stories that guide the culture in which there's always the story of redemptive violence. That's the way that actually wins, and this was a really potent critique of Avatar that came from Charles Eisenstein when I was talking to him. Because I have an avatar pinball machine, I was really fired up about it. I was like, “yeah, fucking avatar, great movie.” And he's like, “well there's a huge problem with that.” And the problem is that it's still the same thing, somehow the na'vi people got enough power together that they were actually able to kill and destroy the other conquerors which is the same story. It's the same war mentality, it wasn't the new story. Like you could read about in Starhawk's fifth sacred thing where they actually changed the mentality of the conquering tribe at that point and rewrote their understanding of how to live in peace and in a different way. It was still the same old story, but just told in a really attractive way. And this dances with wolves attractive, kind of format, but it seems like not only do we have to rewrite our own selection, this natural selection that's occurred to select us for this environment, but we also have to rewrite the stories that are guiding us, so that we can understand, like, what's the new way of the third door? How does that even look? And one of the ways in which I'm optimistic is we're starting to see some stories turn out like that. Like there was a Disney movie Raya and the last dragon. And that story actually has this type of solution where the enemy was not ultimately defeated by a good that eventually got more powerful even though they were good and smashed them. The enemy was defeated by making the enemy aware that this lust for power and this need to destroy the other was actually a delusion. And to have them lay down their arms and live in peace. Like that's a different story. And I think those stories, hopefully, will start to get told more and more because of the futility of this system, it leads only one direction, and its destruction. 

DANIEL: I never heard Charles's critique of Avatar in terms of its narrative. I had a very similar one when I watched it because the movie was done so well that it was very easy to just like fall in love with the Omaticaya and I'm like, “fuck, I want to watch it again because I miss him.” But I was also equally bothered instantly by the narrative landscape even before the point you made is they were warriors, right? Some of them, the men were warriors and you're like, “well, wait, if they're all peaceful, what the fuck are they warriors for?” Like there's a little conflict. And who are they worrying about before the way folks in the ultimatum or whatever it was came.

AUBREY: Unobtainium. 

DANIEL: Unobtainium. But it's been many years since I saw it. But the other thing that I really, really disliked was, it was very much a classic and then magic happened, solution, because they were losing and then all the animals just came in and kind of magically turned the tide as a result of the prayer, whatever they did. I heard from a number of Native American elders. They're like, we fucking hated that show because obviously it was kind of glorifying a version of what the Native American process is. And we're like, we prayed around the goddamn tree and the animals didn't just start fighting the white men. Like that just didn't happen. And so it's like, that's not the right answer. The right answer is the dudes with the guns are going to beat the dude with the bow and arrows. We have to do something other than just, and then magic happens. And so one of the other things is like, it was fundamentally a Luddite narrative. It was an anti tech narrative. White guys with tech bad. Something that is kind of high nature, low tech good, but there's no way to bridge how the low tech thing will not lose to the high tech thing because the tech equals power. And so ultimately, I feel very convinced that there is no future work that doesn't require complete catastrophe, first that is low tech, they just aren't. Because anyone who goes, we can be more peaceful through low tech permaculture. Great. You will not direct the topology of the world as a whole, the dudes building the AI weapons will, and the other forms of advanced technology. So you've got to say, all right. We know that there were Buddhist cultures and Jainist cultures and matriarchal cultures that got slaughtered by warring cultures. We know why Tibet isn't there anymore. We don't need to try to build something that just definitely loses, but how do you not lose to something that is putting all of its attention at effective dominance without becoming better than it at that thing? That's a really tricky question, right? And I actually don't think it was really possible before the type of tech we have today. I think the type of tech we have actually makes it possible to create certain kinds of very adaptive and abundance generating power that are not offensively oriented and can actually facilitate collective intelligence and collective sovereignty and things like that. That doesn't mean that's how it's currently being developed, but could be developed that way. 

AUBREY: Yeah, there's a saying in permaculture, which is that the problem is the solution. If tech, if this exponential tech is the problem, well then likely it's also the solution as well. But it's a different application of it, which must come from a different consciousness, which must come from a different culture, which must come with different stories. And so these are the things that must happen that must weave its way through. Like a lot of people want to demonize McDonald's and say like, Oh, McDonald's is serving all of this. Well, McDonald's is feeding a lot of people. So instead of demonizing McDonald's, how about utilizing this network of ability to distribute food, but with a different consciousness about how they source their animals, where they source their food, what they're offering on the menu, the education around what is actually nourishing and what is not nourishing. But it's using the actual infrastructure of the thing itself rather than saying, “let's destroy that and just molotov cocktail all Mcdonalds.” Well then people just gonna be fucking hungry. But if we use that infrastructure and the technology that they've developed but train it in a different way, that's how you're going to actually affect change. And it's in my mind, the same with tech. It has to come from the inside, almost like the inside out rather than the outside forces squashing what's already in existence. 

DANIEL: Let's give an example of what that could look like for social media. Since that is as far as tech goes both at the very cutting edge and the thing that is most debasing the social and cultural systems we've had so far.

AUBREY: Let me take a quick detour there to explain you were one of the most intelligent, self aware human beings I've ever had the pleasure of encountering and conversing with and you told a story on that podcast about how you intentionally trained the algorithm to show you police brutality videos for a little while and then police being heroes and fighting for the good and trained yourself in both ways and even though you knew you were running the experiment you were still affected by it. And I think this is important to recognize, don't get confused, that you're gonna be somehow so much more powerful than social media that you're going to be immune to its natural effects, so if you want to just share that so people understand like what it's actually doing to the human psyche and how almost irresistible it is to fall into these traps.

DANIEL: There's actually an example that just came to mind as you're saying that I think many people have experienced, which is, let's say you're watching a good nature show and you're following the deer. Then the wolf is a bad guy and it's really terrible when the baby deer gets eaten and everybody's really bummed. But if you're watching another nature show and you're following the wolf and you see the baby wolf grows up and then the mom has to feed its babies and it already lost four hundred–

AUBREY: Wolves are hungry and they're starving and you see their ribs.

DANIEL: Then it captures the deer and it's a big celebration. And you're like, it's the same fucking thing, depending upon which one we were following. So it's so interesting to watch how our own emotions can feel so differently about that scene, just even based on the context. And if I take any war or any cultural conflict and I look at it from the interior propaganda of one side of it, I'll start empathizing with it. There was a project that was done many years ago on second life. It was done with women who were on either side of the Israel Palestine border who had very strong views on it. So like Zionists and pro Palestinian that were kind of on the caliphate side. For a week, it was something like this for a week. They took on an avatar in a made environment of the other side to see what it would be like if I went from being an Israeli woman on this side to being a Palestinian person with these experiences on the other side. And even though the tech was pretty low, it was enough that it changed their views within a week of having that vicarious experience in the VR environment. This is an example of all the really terrible things the metaverse will be. There are some good things that the same tech could do and the ability to take on different avatars and have different vicarious experiences. One of the pretty awesome ones. If done consciously. If done as an empathy training and a perspective seeking process.

AUBREY: Little threads of this are starting to weave its way into the stories. Imagine the old Star Wars, storm troopers were absolutely dehumanized. You just blast as many of those white fuckers as you can and you blast them and you keep blasting them and as many as you blast. The better off you are. And then in the recent retelling of Star Wars, there was one hero that eventually took off his white storm trooper mask and was like, this is fucked up. I don't want to do this. I was pressured into this situation in the first place and I had no interest in this. I'm going to join the other side. Now, of course, there's still the issues in Star Wars with redemptive violence and the good versus evil and them never actually coming to any kind of union and any kind of agreement of balance and respect for each other. But nonetheless, it was starting to show that these are not just all dehumanized evil. There's a person underneath that white mask or that black mask, and they're a real person. And that person has a real life and real emotion. And it was a rehumanization, at least impartial for this idea that, I think, helped support the new narrative that I think is really important for this third door.

DANIEL: Okay, so I'll finish the example you were bringing up about social media because it's so important for everybody, but let's come back to this redemptive violence thing because we need to address it. With regard to social media, we evolved in an environment where we could trust our senses to be in, give us a good sense of the world very differently than we can through telecommunicated media. Because I am just looking around in the area that I'm in. What I see is pretty actually reflective of the world that I happen to be in, at least in the bandwidth of light that I can see and whatever that's relevant for my survival and evolutionary purposes. And it happens to be that everyone else is going to see about the same thing.  It's not going to be that I'm seeing bears and they're not seeing bears. And so there's a shared basis of sense making, which is we have shared sensing. So then there gets to be a shared basis of choice making. We can talk through and see pretty much the same shit. And if someone says, “no, really, this thing is over there.” We can just go look and check it out. So, we evolved to believe our senses were giving us a good picture of the world, but it was a tiny little world. It was this very tiny geographic area, a very tiny number of people that we were able to directly sense. So then we start getting telecommunications and I can see the news and I'm seeing stuff happening and all parts of the world. And I've never been to those parts. And I don't have a sense of what are all the other ways they could have filmed and viewed that and all the other perspectives and what's happening about it. And then there's way more total information than I can process. Then let's say I am watching police brutality videos and I'm on a YouTube channel that just curates police brutality videos. And I watch a hundred of them by the time I'm finished watching a hundred of them in a row or even 10 in a row. I haven't watched a million interactions of police, not being violent. So what I'm getting is a curation of a particular kind of thing where my sensing of the world is curated in a very specific way that is not statistically representative of the whole world. As a result, my blood is boiling and the police are totally the enemy. And I have this sense, look, it's just fucking universal, it's ubiquitous, this is the whole thing that happens. And I read the comments and everyone else thinks similarly because they're watching the same thing. So I feel like, like everybody knows. But then if I'm watching another one that's curated for people attacking police, and the danger police are in and the heroism that they go through, I can have this completely opposite sense that is also not statistically representative. So for me to be able to look at the statistics, I gotta say, what are all of the police, non police interactions that happen? What percentage of them are heroic? What percentage are violent? Which percent are very low grade violent, like just slightly asshole ish and abusive, or kind of low grade heroic of them going above and beyond, versus mostly just boring interactions. And can I statistically average from all that, anything that's insightful. But that's not what I get when I'm watching social media. I get an emotional flood of, I'm having a direct sensory experience of the world, but it's cherry picked to be non statistically represented the world. No one emotionally is immune to that. Outside of weird neurological disorders, weird kinds of emotion in processing the lack of the process disorders. So what that means is if you're receiving a curated view of the world, which you are, because there are no views of the world that are coming that aren't curated by somebody's agenda. Then you're going to be having a sense that you understand the world, even though what you're getting is manipulated and not statistically representative, and you'll be having an emotional reaction that will both make you more certain than you should be, more outraged than you should be. And we'll just start with those both more certain and more outraged and probably more righteous or sanctimonious. And yet there'll be people just like the deer video from the deer side of the wolf side. The hunt video. There'll be people. Whose view of the same issues is curated on the exact opposite side. Let's say we call it social justice and CRT or vaccines, whatever it is, who have just as much certainty, sanctimony and outrage in the exact opposite direction. And everybody's wrong. Like there's a little partial truth, but everybody is getting a view that has been curated more than is representative and is under nuanced. So yeah, it's super important to understand if you think you're immune to it, you are not right. Like there are a number of us who have intentionally curated those experiments. And even while we know we're doing it to ourselves, we're being emotionally affected by it. So we're like, Oh fuck, there's a kind of humility I have to have because I am not immune to this.

AUBREY: There seems like there's a way in which that can be actually used to our advantage ultimately, because what I sense is I sense that pressure creates adaptation. That's always the way it happens. You put pressure on one particular thing, adaptation arises. I've seen in my own social media feed, which is going through the same algorithms and which is used to hijacking extreme polarizing opinions. People are so used to that. Now they've pressed that button so many times that when I come with, I've created the idea, the concept of United Polarity, which is built upon shared reverence and an understanding of both sides. When I make those posts, they outperform all other posts that I do by like a seven X. And seven X, multiple. And I think the reason is that people are now, the pressure that we've felt from this polarization is actually creating the opportunity for this middle path, this third door to actually flourish. It's gone to such an extreme. That and we're not quite there yet and I think unfortunately we may have to get even a little more extreme for it to actually take hold even more, but the pressure itself is creating this other desire, this deep craving for a balanced and nuanced conversation. Now, of course, there's selection bias. People who follow me, people who follow my podcast are more likely to engage with that, I understand. But nonetheless just in my own audience. Like those are the type of posts and discussions that people are really enjoying the most. And when that happens, the algorithms will start feeding those more often, because if we understand that these algorithms are not actually trying to destroy the world, they're actually just trying to maximize profit and attention. So if profit and attention are actually going to a more nuanced perspective, well, they will guide and deliver that more nuanced perspective, that more shared reverence understanding. And so, actually, the same mechanism could be used to create this other revolution of consciousness. 

DANIEL: Okay. So the phenomena you're describing is that, when there is a race to the bottom at a certain point, it often creates the basis for a new race to the top, and that's what creates boom and bust cycles. And this is kind of a well known market idea. So. I've got a bunch of whatever it is, fishermen that are all fishing in the same lake. Somebody figures out that there's a way of doing the fishing that is a little bit more polluting or a little bit more exploitive or whatever, but more profitable. They do it, then everybody else races to do the same thing more. Eventually the lake is so polluted, fucked up because of that race to the bottom that someone's starting to say, we don't do that thing. And we do this clean thing. They can charge more for it. Cause there's now a market basis for organic or free trade or whatever, or there's now a market for water purification devices or something like that. So now you have a new niche because the badness of the race to the bottom created a new desire. Unfortunately, though, it's all still just based on how I can get ahead in market dynamics, and there will keep being both. So then I start having some little bit of race to the top, and there still keeps being a good niche for race to the bottom. We have to close the race to the bottom niches. So it's like only once fast food has kind of gotten as much proliferation, fast food and junk food is as it did that you started getting ubiquitous obesity. Did you start getting the diet industry emerging so much, but then you have big consumer goods companies that are selling diet products and fast food products in the same investment portfolio. And it's great. Are you feasting? Are you fasting? We'll sell both sides of that thing. But if you have boom and bust cycles, you have race to the top and race to the bottom, but with exponentially growing tech in an increasingly fragile world, the busts start to become things that you can't make it through. There's too much harm from them. And so we have to actually go a step better than that because yes, some people will be really excited to get a more nuanced view that is not totally polarizing and weaponized. But that doesn't mean that there still won't be susceptibilities to push on particular views that get a lot of traction. And this is why like the Occupy movement, you started to get the Tea Party and the Green Party on the same side about something. We are the 99% and it was like class issues are deeper than our other issues. It's like, Whoa, that's a big fucking thing. And then the new cycle started to run stuff. Like I remember correctly, stuff about abortion rights and gun control and gay marriage and boom, they just separated very quickly because you could cleaving lines and push on them. Now what Facebook is, is unbelievably powerful AI that finds all the cleaving lines and up regulates both sides. Because it's optimizing for engagement and you ended up getting the most engagement where people feel the most passion. They feel the most passion where they feel the most threat. And that was a classic enemy hypothesis. Now this comes back to the redemptive violence because a lot of those comments are some sublimated form of violence. And so, when you were getting to the culture topic. What you're getting to is how do we evolve what people want? How do we evolve their basis for choice internally? Because the catastrophe side and the dystopia side, the catastrophe side is if people have access to increasing catastrophic power and they are psychologically oriented that they would use that, then the people can't self govern. And they have to be governed by something. It's too dangerous. Let themselves govern.  You can't just do some fully libertarian, whatever, they'll figure it all out. If the harm is not just that they kill somebody in the street, but that they release a bioweapon. So you're like, okay, no, when people have that much catastrophic capability, the libertarian ideas just become nonsense. So then if the answer is they have to be governed, well, who could have the power to govern all of that? And how would we possibly trust that thing? Now that thing becomes dystopic. Okay, fuck. We have to go back to how we evolve to have something that is more libertarian work? And I'm not saying we go full libertarian, but to even have something where the people engage in institutions that have the ability. So there's both bottom up libertarian type checks and institutional checks, but the institutions derive their power from the consent of the governed and a governance of form by the people, the people have to all care about each other's cares and be able to really sense, make all of the stuff. Well, otherwise there's no capacity, no basis for it. The whole idea in a democracy was that, these modern democracies emerging out of the enlightenment was the idea that there was a patriotism as a binding where I wasn't going to make my fellow countrymen, the biggest enemy, like just not realize that compromise is better than war. And that we're only going to do that if I have enough respect for my fellow countrymen that I will really listen to their ideas because I don't want to come up with something they hate so much. They have to war with me. And so how do we respect each other enough to listen well enough to come up with strategies that can work for everybody?

AUBREY: But I believe that in the same dynamic, I understand the cyclical nature of the race to the bottom creating the race to the top. But if the race to the top is the end game move. Which is the anti fragility where you don't have cleaving lines anymore because you don't see yourself as separate and that's the fundamental race to the top is back to unicity, back to union. So you're actually becoming anti-fragile in that same capacity. And that top will not only reach a top, but potentially theoretically could reach the top and stick. Because if it's designed in the right way the pressure that's pulling us apart, then creates the desire for this other thing. But if it's steered in the right direction, and we've talked about how all of the great religions, reducing them to their mystical roots, not reducing them, but kind of filtering away all of the different power grabs that have happened over all of these years and understanding that everybody's pointing to the similar thing. If we actually get back to that understanding, that is actually almost an invincible understanding. It's like, if you really get that, you're not going to be susceptible. You may still be in some small capacity, but it feels like that's the end game move that actually creates a race to the top of consciousness from which there is no retracement, there is no race back to the bottom because you can't unsee and unfeel what you've already come to know, and everything relies on that old structure that's pulling you apart. 

DANIEL: Okay, so let's explore this together. So when you say if the race to the top gets to be towards some kind of culture that has the ability to be a wise planetary culture. And because planetary, you don't have to keep having the selection for war on different sides. It can truly be not based on unifying against an enemy where you still have all those multipolar trap things. Okay. Well, you mentioned a kind of unicity and oneness. We know this as part of it, but we also know this is not the whole thing. So, we're not going to get into what is the full mimetic payload that is necessary and sufficient for an enlightened culture, but we'll start because you've had experiences in nature and in meditation and on psychedelics of some profound sense of interconnectivity with everything. Love thy neighbor as thyself wasn't love your neighbor as much as yourself, but as an expression of consciousness, that there is some sameness of consciousness in the eyes you're looking at. At the same time, you come out of those peak experiences that you can't stay in, and you don't want to share your bed with every single human. And all the homeless people in Austin and you don't want to share your clothes and all your shit with them. And there is a basis at which if they were trying to really kind of aggressively push that you did share all your shit, you'd knock the person out and be like, no, okay, wait, I don't believe in this perfectly, I don't experience it. I experience being an individual who wants some shit individually and has a differential orientation to my own experience relative to the experience of others. Now, how do I hold those together? Because if I try to pretend that there is no real deep basis of individuality, it'll just become a pathological shadow. We'll all bullshit about oneness. And yet still want our partner to be sexual, just with us and not with anyone else. And want some of our stuff to ourselves and we'll share the stuff we want to share, but we don't want to share everything. So we have to be able to say, what is the right relationship to the individuality as well as the oneness to the difference as well as the sameness. That has to be part of that mimetic package. Otherwise it's just a failed case of it. 

AUBREY: Right. And the metaphor I use for that, for holding those boundaries is the rose, like the rose, which gives it sense and its flower and its beauty to the world. Also has thorns and the thorns don't go out seeking other people to attack and whip and punish and whatever, but it holds its boundary. And because the boundary is necessary so that it doesn't get trampled. So that the flower, its love, its consciousness doesn't get trampled, the bush doesn't die because something just comes and mows right through it. I mean, obviously machines can and whatever, but the metaphor is that it carries the thorns to protect itself. But also offers its love universally, which is through its scent. And so I think these kinds of metaphors and these ideas need to be held where it's, because we are a multidimensional being, we are both individual and same and depend on, and both are true and it's a paradox. But that's the paradox of being multidimensional as we are going all the way back to source and oneness and all the way as far as we are now in separation, both being very real. So that has to become a part of the story, as you correctly pointed out, like we have to tell a more nuanced story than this. Oh, we're all one. Well, that's of course not true. It's only part of the story, but that part of the story is the neglected part of the story. Which needs to be brought back into balance with the individualism, which we got that shit down. We understand that, we got a pretty good idea of our individualism, but it's our interconnectedness and shared reverence and shared commonality and unicity that we don't get. And there will be some perhaps that'll go full Jesus and be able to go all the way into that dimensional reality where they're just seeing the unicity, and it is very important to not pretend to be Jesus. It's great to be Jesus if you're Jesus, but don't pretend to be Jesus, in your spiritual bypass and you're actually bullshitting yourself and it's not actually real. And again, you're living out your own shadow. So it is definitely a more nuanced story than that, but I think I point to the one side because that one side is just grossly neglected and underrepresented compared to the individualism story.

DANIEL: Okay. This is a really fun and fertile place. So when you say if one's experience authentically is a Jesus like cool. So if you notice most of the monastic traditions of the world had vows of poverty and chastity. And there was a reason they had those poverty and chassis. As we just said, the things you have a hard time sharing are your physical stuff. And because evolution selected for survival and mating. And so there's a very strong desire to get stuff that enables survival and to get stuff that enables mate selection. And interestingly in humans, having more stuff than the other guy is there's no upper bound to how much that stays relevant to mate selection. My 250 foot super yacht no longer seems as good when the 300 foot super yacht pulls in. And so there is no upper bound on the amount of resources, even though there is for survival. So, both the survival impetus and the mate signaling impetus create a competitive basis that drives this thing that we're talking about. Violencing happens. So you're not going to own anything. You'll just live in the monastery and you're not going to mate. And you're not going to have kids that have you more focused on your own progeny than focused on the good of everyone. That was the idea in so many of the monastic traditions. And usually even further, you're going to shave your head. And either like the Buddhist shave it fully or like the fryer shave, just the top. So it looks maximally goofy as an ego. So that you are maximally not connected to the individual, either your own genetic progeny, your aesthetics, your anything else, your stuff. Well, we see that that didn't even work in monasticism all that well. And definitely not outside of it. And so it's important to recognize that these beings genetically did evolve, where mate signaling and survival were very real impetuses that are coded into the structure of our neurology and endocrinology. So we have to deal with those impulses. We have to have an enlightened way, a more enlightened way of dealing with them. And they're not oneness oriented because I can survive and you die if there's not enough resources and I can mate and you do not mate. Like really physically, there is a differential basis there. And yet when I multiply that, not just by, we're going to fight with our fists over who gets to get the food or get the mating opportunity, but we're going to fight within weapons and then up to nukes. That same impulse multiplied by technology destroys everything. There's a lot of people who get stuck on this. Like, wait, what is the fucking cause of all the problems in the world? It's capitalism, but the USSR seems to have a lot of problems. And that wasn't capitalism. It's something like competition, but wait, competition seems to actually drive evolution in nature. Why is competition good for nature and not for us? But in sports, it seems like it's kind of good in terms of developing certain things, and unbounded competition. Competition multiplied by tech is different than competition, not multiplied by tech, different in kind. In the evolutionary process where the lions are fighting for alpha lion mating status or whatever it is to select for the genes that are best for lions as a whole. There is a symmetry between all the lions where the difference is tiny, and that's what's being selected for. And not just lion to lion, but also lion to deer that they're chasing. The deer gets away more often than the lion catches it. So there is a symmetry and the power. In all of those types of dynamics, which is why we have weight classes. You and I talked about this before. The idea that like, okay, we're going to show up to the boxing ring, but you show up as you and I show up with an Apache helicopter. Like that's not an interesting competition to see who has better skills.

AUBREY: The Romans might've been interested in it, but yeah.

DANIEL: Not from the point of view of competition and selection, just from the point of view of enjoying cruelty and spectacle. But the thing with technology is that we can have our competition drive arms races. So if we want to compete, but we go from just having a little bit more stuff to needing larger super yachts. And there's no upper boundary on that mate signaling kind of thing. And then also not just us, but nation States, which are these weird fictions or major corporations. And they have to keep evolving the tooling to compete. And they're competing on a single metric, but they're externalizing harm to other metrics. If you get unbounded competition, driving arms races, competing for narrow metrics, externalizing harm for others, that system self terminates on a finite planet. And yet the impulse to do that thing is coded in us. 

AUBREY: This is really important because I could suppose that if I could transfer my understanding of the world, to everybody at once and not saying that this is moral or desirable or any of those sorts of things but I could hypothesize prior to this discussion like people would be a lot cooler to each other. And I believe that to be fundamentally true. However, if everybody was Aubrey, I understand my own sexual desire and my desire to win. I'm a competitive person. I enjoy the finite games but I also have a deep understanding of the infinite game, but I'm still compelled within the finite game because of my deep, deep lure in and draw to sexual experience, I'm very satisfied with my beautiful wife Vylana, which I'm glad you got a chance to meet and I'm in a great spot there, but all of the other Aubrey's would be looking at the different Aubrey's and being like. How do I get what that fucking Aubrey has. And so it wouldn't necessarily ultimately solve the problem of a finite world with the infinite opportunity to accumulate and compete. 

DANIEL: So now let's say that this other asshole Aubrey, he's an asshole just because he got some head injury. Stuff happens even if you try and get culture. Well, he wants to do whatever he can underhandedly to take file on it. And so now you gotta actually try to protect. Now you create a security service, but he also is doing well. He's got a lot of money. So he's creating a more advanced attack service. Now you have the beginning of fiefdoms that have to put more and more of their resources into the military process over the scarce resource. 

AUBREY: And I would go to the fucking bitter end. If it came to protecting my Vylana, I would go to the bitter end. I would eat, get all the cans of proverbial spinach to make sure I was fucking Popeye, and that Bruno did not succeed in raping my olive oil.

DANIEL: And if every step that you make, he's making a comparable step, you're going to try to innovate how to do fundamentally better types of steps. You're going to try to innovate. Okay. Well, my security forces in the cemetery with him are problematic. I want to go asymmetric in the competition. So let me see if I can get a helicopter in here in the air force to deal with his becoming porous. Let me see if I can get some fucking surveillance on his team or whatever it is. And so you can see how an arms race happens and you start to say, well, why just wait for the fucker to attack me? If I know he's going to, the best defense is an offense. I should just preemptively defend myself. Which is an offense, but then he knows that. So then you see how the world gets to where it is. And now what we're getting

AUBREY: With a finite number of Vylana and an infinite number of Aubrey's, we're in a very dangerous world. That's a fundamental truth.

DANIEL: And let's say that there's some really beautiful spot on the Austin Lake that you want to live on. And it's right on a cliff. And there's just one of them. There's not lots of other cliff sites quite like that one. Somebody else wants the same place. And you kind of want for other people, so long as they don't want the exact thing that you have, because you don't want to share that thing. And there's a finite number of them. And so all of a sudden our oneness oriented empathy decreases radically and our individual oriented desire to win increases radically. So then it becomes that it's not just Aubrey with this, but Aubrey creates a relationship with a bunch of other people around because this is happening now at a tribal level. It's not just you having that point and you having that woman, but it's you and everybody, having the chance to have any women and not all be slaughtered by these other fuckers coming in where you and all your friends all decide to unify, to create a military, to deal with that. And then some of the other tribes actually unify to be larger. Now you gotta unify with some other tribes and start doing politics to be larger. You go from tribes to chiefdoms to fiefdoms and kingdoms to nation states to global economic trading blocks to, you get this fucking thing. And yet this thing self terminates. Because the thing that wins at the tribal warfare scale, kills everything at the global scale. And so we're at a place where what has been selected for selects itself out of existence soon. And our ability to understand that and consciously select something different is kind of the only path, but it's not a really simple one. Now, this is where we actually have to get not just the oneness, but the individuality and what is the right ethics around that? Because we haven't got individuality. Well, because our models of it are almost exclusively competitive, more than synergistic. And so where I'm the same as others gives me some basis for empathy, but where we have differences, how do we relate to that in a more healthy and enlightened way has to be just as important a part of the new religion or new philosophy or ethos. Friend who I believe you just met Marc Gafni, he has this whole Rabbinic thing on the unique self, which is a big part of the kind of Kabbalistic tradition is. So it's not just Buddhist oneness and we can all kind of meditate into that oneness because the moment you leave the meditation, that's not where you're at anymore. And that's not the whole story. That's a part of the story, but there's also that oneness embodied and incarnated in unique ways. So then, is there a way to be able to hold the difference where there is a uniqueness to you and what you can experience and what you can offer, but where that uniqueness, if you and me are both actually unique, we can't compete on the same metrics. If I say that we can compete, like we're a function of our money and the size of our cocks and whatever it is for our main selection thing. And there's four things we can compete on those, and who's a better package. That's actually not uniqueness, that's sameness. That's the sameness of a few metrics of selection at the heart of when you fall in love with someone deeply as something ineffable, it's unspeakable that is beyond a package. There is a taste or a quality of the uniqueness of the thing that you have a relationship with. And so if there is something where the difference of everyone actually has a uniqueness that has the interconnectedness, the quality of oneness, but with a totally unique form to it, then those unique forms can't fundamentally compete. There's no metric to measure or assess it on. And then there is, you can offer something to the world that is different than what I can offer to the world, but where the world is better at my own assessment, if you offer it fully. 

AUBREY: It seems like still though, there's the issue of finite resources, but I think the solution that I can see with that is we often think that we want things, but we don't really want the things. We want the sensations that the things give us. Like that's really what we're chasing. We don't want necessarily the car or the bank account or the place in the lake. We want the feeling of what that brings to us. The feeling of awe, perhaps when we look out at the view, the feeling of power and self worth and validation from the things that we accomplish. We want the feeling of love that our sweetheart gives us. We really want feelings. So it seems like in order to get beyond the necessity to compete over things is to break down the myth that it's actually the things we want and say, “no, no, no, you don't actually want the things you want, the sensations that the things give you, but there's a way to get those sensations without the things.” And that's like a deep, deep spiritual kind of practice that would be required to train everybody how to get sensations without the things that are giving them the kind of quick hit of the sensation that they're chasing. 

DANIEL: Well, here's a real easy answer. It's already underway. Just hook everybody up with their Oculus to the metaverse. And in the metaverse with Oculus, and Oculus will progressively turn into a matrix boot. I can give anybody any feelings that they want, and there's no scarcity of resources because it's all digitally created simulation. 

AUBREY: Well, that's on the hypothesis that there are some feelings that are reducible and replicable by a machine universe, which I think for those of us who've experienced the numinous like you and I, we believe fundamentally as a tenant of faith that there is something that's irreducible. I'm wearing this little toad necklace around my neck. I fucking guarantee you. Well, I don't guarantee you. I don't know anything for that shirt, that certain, but I'm fairly confident that you're not going to get a bufo journey in the metaverse. You're not going to be able to duplicate this feeling, which is pure love, God, there's no other real way that I have to describe it. So I think there may be some sensations that we could get by jacking ourself into it, but some that may not be even possible, and not replicable in the machine world and perhaps love itself, even in the more mundane sense, rather than the psychedelic rocketship sense is not reducible to that, nor is the feeling of awe, nor is the feeling of that deep kind of enlivening peace that you get in the meditative state. Maybe if you can alter your brainwave chemistry and some things can happen, it's possible, but I feel like there's things that are irreducible. And I don't know, that's just like a feeling that I have, but maybe I'm underestimating what technology could potentially offer. 

DANIEL: So let's say that in addition to the Oculus and visual auditory haptic input, and of course, as soon as I go three, I start three different axes of input, visual auditory haptic, I start getting the ability to simulate immersive experience in the brain pretty deeply. But let's say we start to figure out how to add chemistry to it. We've already known there are a lot of people in the thing with the heroin addiction is, someone is going for a particular kind of sensation independent decoupled from what evolutionarily would have given them that sensation. Like, why do I even have receptor sites for heroin? Well, because natural opiates do emerge in certain kinds of processes. In the same way that like, if I'm doing the math and I'm getting the dopamine or the cocaine, dopamine is naturally produced, but it's naturally produced in association with things that had evolutionary relevance. But if I can couple them and just get the sensation without the other thing, that is almost always destructive because the thing that wasn't the sensation was actually part of what was fundamentally meaningful. The sensation was just a part of it, which is why in the simulation story, if I could simulate it better, I can use transcranial magnetic stimulation on the right hemisphere to induce God experiences and whatever. And I know that I'm in that simulation. Do I want to blue pill and just jack back in and have the thing? Or do I want a red pill because there's some connection to reality that is meaningful for me beyond just the sensation of it? It's a very important question. 

AUBREY: It is an important question. The synergy, it seems like while people are pushing against this technology, it could actually be a useful part of the solution where people all of the sudden, when they realize that they can get a lot of the sensations they are craving in an unlimited virtual universe where that sensation is universally ubiquitously available to them, then it may actually decrease some of this competitive individualism, which is actively seeking to take from this finite world. It could be productive in some ways. I suppose this could be a part of this multifaceted solution in the kind of helping to tame our baser instincts 

DANIEL: Now it depends upon what it is being developed for. Because let's say we look at the heroin and the McDonald's, if the thing that is guiding the development of the tech, whether it's food tech or pharma tech or whatever, if the thing that's guiding it is a market process, and I can offer people sensations that they want. In fact, sensations that then they want so much, they get addicted to driving addiction is the best thing I can do from a business point of view, because I want to maximize lifetime revenue of a customer and I maximize lifetime revenue by driving addiction and ideally starting the addiction as young as possible, and then expanding the addiction to the largest number of people possible. Now, if you think about this nonsense idea in the market that demand is like when I say nonsense, there's an Adam Smith like idealized market where people want real things that will really enrich the quality of their life. And then wanting that and being willing to give something to it creates a basis for supply. And the rational actors here will choose the supply that is the best product or service at the best price. So people's desire creates a basis for healthy innovation. The whole world gets better. Except that the supply side becomes coordinated in a way the demand side doesn't. There aren't all customers working together in some customer union against Nike or Google. But Nike or Google is actually a company that is highly coordinated and the supply side starts to realize we've supplied the ship people want, but now we'll make more money if we can get them to want shit they don't currently want. So how do we change the style every year so people need to keep getting new shit? How do we either do designed obsolescence or perceived obsolescence or addiction driving so that we can manufacture demand artificially? The entire idea of the intelligence of markets dies with that, with manufactured demand and supply side drive in that way. And now it's just a self authoring extraction machine on the way to self termination on the finite planet. So if the thing that can provide the experience, cause there's no question when you're eating the hostess, you're having an experience. It is of a different nature of the total amount of dopamine than when you're eating a salad or whatever, you figured out how to extract salt, fat, sugar, and combine them in the ways that maximize that dopaminergic hit. And the same is true with whatever the porn and lots of things. So within the metaverse, if it is continuing to have the technology developed by supply side. That wants to optimize for manufacturing demand, which will appeal to the lowest angels of people's nature. No, that becomes a dystopian hell. What would the tech be that was actually healthy, where we say, how do we ensure that when someone straps the Oculus on, it's not creating such hyper normal stimuli that it makes people have a shittier experience out here because it's desensitized them to normal stimuli. Because every girl in there is AI Instagrammed and AI airbrushed and shit. So now all normal girls are not pretty and whatever it is. And my avatar in there is so dope that I don't want to be this avatar out here. And so let's say that one of the criteria of the digital world has to be that it increases the quality of life in the non virtual world. Well, then it could be a really awesome tool, but who the fuck builds that thing? Cause it's not going to be a market driven process. 

AUBREY: It would have to come from the pressure of the world, not being optimized, almost getting enough destruction that actually there's the motivation to do it. It almost feels like there needs, and I pray that this is as gentle as possible, but it feels like the necessity for things to fall apart a little bit to shake people out of this reality that we can continue on the path is almost necessary for people to actually start making the choices and build a new ethics that isn't bound to some white bearded God, who's going to punish you if you don't do this or if you do do this or whatever, but it's built on this again, mutually assured destruction, like where people really understand that this path is actually going to destroy the world. Not only for you, but for your children and everything is going to degrade. So we must make a different choice, but it feels like a little bit of pressure might be actually what's needed to kind of raise that level of consciousness and actually allow ethics to bind people to their desires. 

DANIEL: So I want to come in first on something really brilliant about the white beard God thing. Independent of whether, like whatever was problematic about it or whether it's true or not, just like a functional thing it did. And basically any system of heaven and hell or reincarnation, we're able to do this, which is a perfected system of justice for self organization. So let's say that we have not got people to deeply empathize with other people's experience and really care about their experience, independent of how it affects their own experience, and they're still mostly just selfish fucks who care about their experience. And there are ways that they could hurt other people and get away with it because they can hide it, they can pretend they didn't do it, they can whatever it is. Systems of actual justice are tricky because you gotta have policing in court systems and in jails and it's expensive and people still can get away with stuff. They can figure out how to hide it. But an invisible watcher that sees absolutely everything and not one jot, not one tittle shall go unnoticed before the day of judgment and that kind of thing that also is an absolute perfected authority. So there is no appeal. And with infinite reward and infinite punishment, it's really just like the zenith of behavior mod. What would the best reward be? Well, eternity of everything awesome. And what would the worst punishment be? Eternity of everything terrible, absolute authority and absolute surveillance. But it also sees your thoughts. Not just even your actions and you can go to hell for the wrong types of thoughts. And forever is so much longer than a short little time here. Even if you're just selfishly oriented to not burn in hell and to have good heaven or to not have a shitty reincarnation and to have a good reincarnation, you're still oriented to do whatever the moral things in that belief system are because it's all being seen and there's going to be consequence positive or negative for all of it. That's kind of awesome, actually, from the point of view of how do we get a whole big group of people to follow some kind of code when it's very hard to enforce them and where you have not yet necessarily figured out how to have them all care about everyone authentically. How do you bind? Caring about their own experience requires doing the virtuous thing. And so, we're really missing a lot without something like that. 

AUBREY: Honestly. Well, actually, so this is interesting because, alright, so I grew up and I was in a pretty much atheist leaning agnostic family and Jewish by heritage and genetics, but not really practicing kind of phoned in a Hanukkah when my grandma was around and did Christmas too. Because it was fun. And then moved to Texas. It's much more Christian. And I saw people racked with a lot of guilt. I saw a lot of things happening with my friends and peers, like people's first sexual experiences being incredibly traumatic. And I was like, what is going on? Like, this is some craziness. And then, move along, I go take a trip to Italy. I go to the Dungeons of the Inquisition, which was in one of the cities in Italy, and it was one of the most horrifying things that I've ever witnessed in my life. And then I started getting very anti religious. And so atheists to the point of crusading to be anti religious. I have to dismantle all of this superstition that's caused all this harm and is continuing to cause harm that I'm seeing in my peers. Okay, fast forward, I go do my first guided medicine journey. Combination of MDMA and psilocybin in the mountains of New Mexico. I feel my body evaporate this thing that emerges, which is consciousness, or I could call it a soul. That was really the only name that I could say, what is this thing? This unborn undying aspect of self. And then what I ultimately realized was that, there is a recapitulation of all of your actions and deeds and thoughts that happens with the perfect unblinded clarity of seeing yourself without all of the delusional, projective rationalizations and notions that we have that get us to do all of these things that are sometimes blindingly pernicious ways in which I treated girlfriends and different things. I mean, I was never like bad quotes, I'd done things that were selfish for sure. And I just had to look at those like somebody had things that are holding my eyes open and I couldn't look away from them and that feeling was akin to hell. 

DANIEL: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And then the forgiveness of that was then the redemption and then the feeling of heaven, which was waiting.

And so I had this real interesting moment where I was like, wow, the story isn't that far off in that there will come a reckoning where we have to look with perfect clarity at all of our deeds and actions. And that will be a hell if we've lived a life in ignorance or in denial of some of these real morals, and it will be a heaven and a celebration when we get to release this physical form and experience the divinity of these other dimensional realities. And then another layer, which has recently come into my awareness is that moment when you actually do it, cause I was just pretend doing it, with the psychedelics. I got to like touch it and taste it partially, but not completely. Well, that moment you're outside of the bounds of time. And this is, of course, predicated upon a multi dimensional understanding of our existence. And then these dimensions are not bound by time. So in a place that's not bound by time, what could be a moment is also infinity. There's no difference between a moment of this recapitulation of like, wow, what did I do? I can't believe I did. I'm feeling all of that guilt and the pain and the empathy for everything that you've done that stretches to infinity also, and is also a moment depending on how long it goes. And interestingly, my very first experience, 22 years ago, there was a synergy that I never really thought about the importance of this, but it's coming to light now. Like, wow. Maybe that's actually really important to recognize and highlight that this is a way to maybe potentially bind our own ethics is to understand that yes, there is a hell and there is a heaven and it's us that's the judge and it's the truest, fairest judge, because it knows not only our actions, but our intentions. And it knows the truth, the truth of all things it's aware of. It's not blinded by the stories and the indoctrinations of cultures. It's really bound to the truth. And it's us lifted from all of our delusions. So, I guess that's one way of saying that potentially this is reality in some just slightly different way and maybe that is an important piece to this puzzle is to bring this awareness back.

DANIEL: Yeah. It's interesting when you're in that experience. You're reviewing all of your actions. You're seeing them. So that the space of that experience is that kind of review and judgment. And the reward and punishment, whatever is in that space. But what's interesting is, there's transparency. Someone is forced to see themselves on the Ibogaine journey in a way that they aren't most of the time. And so this is that whole thing of like, how do you have, what is the basis of the kind of behavioral upgrade of people if there is no transparency. What's the basis of justice? You don't have justice. If you can hide the effect of the action. So there's a kind of transparency required for justice, which is required for the kind of cause and effect that motivates behavior to move in the right direction. And so the psychedelic or the or the self reckoning experiences, one way of that, the idea of a sky God who sees everything and will punish reward as another, the sky God had to come when we moved from a small tribal scale to a much larger scale at the tribal scale, literally the tribe saw everything because it was a small enough scale. You couldn't fucking hide it. And it's actually interesting to think about for the vast majority of human history and all of our evolved history, these small 150 people. You could never effectively lie and get away with it because everybody's gossiping about everything. Everybody's talking, everybody's seeing everything and you couldn't hide the pollution somewhere or make a mess and get like literally the tiny scale created a forced transparency where what was good for the individual was good for the tribe became bound. You weren't going to get ahead by fucking the tribe over. It just wasn't going to happen. If you tried, you'd get exiled and then you die. And it's interesting to note that like individual humans weren't selected for, individual humans would die. Tribes were selected for, but they were at a big enough scale. They could deal with bears and the cold, but they were at a small enough scale that what was good for the individual and was good for the tribe as a whole was bound because of the forced transparency, the forced cause and effect. And so as soon as we needed to get much beyond a tribal scale where I could actually do something where I could leave a mess somewhere and hide and nobody would know who it was, or I could fuck somebody else over or whatever, now I needed a sky god. Because as soon as you start to get to the empire scale, now either you have to have some king that's rewarding and punishing everyone, which you'd have as well, but it's hard. You have to whip a lot of people and monitor a lot of people, whatever, or you have that king as below the same as above. And you have some kind of religious idea. But it's now the thing that you're noticing with the psychedelic experience is okay. Can we self police? Can we self where our own sense of, I couldn't actually be fulfilled. I couldn't actually respect myself because there's mindfulness, there's monitoring. And I actually have my own sense of ethics that are deep enough that that is the directing and a binding force for my own behavior. And then the question is, through the combination of both numinous experiences and ethical development and cognitive and mindfulness development, can we develop people where they don't need a sky God and they don't necessarily even need a tribe to have internalized that type of function?

AUBREY: You mentioned Abhoga, and my first bwiti shaman that I spoke to, and perhaps there's different variations of the initiation tradition, but it's a very heavy dose of Abhoga, and what he described is they would have somebody look into a mirror, for like the duration of 24 hours or some obscenely long amount of time where instead of gazing out at nature or wearing a blindfold, you're looking at a mirror and you're looking back at yourself. And that was the initiation of with this clarity that Iboga is bringing you looking into the mirror so you can't escape seeing yourself this was the initiation that actually allowed the other people in the tribe to be able to trust you.

DANIEL: Now, let's come back to all those other Aubrey's. The conflict theory world, but when you're having that experience looking in the mirror on Iboga regularly. You see where the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other shoulder image came from. And that there are a certain kind of lower angels of our nature that really just has to do with survival and mate signaling and the desire to do better than the other guy at that. And there's also then a higher angels of our nature, where there are ways that I can do better than the other guy, where I can't actually be at peace with who I am. And then specifically the pressure that you mentioned, not only can I not be at peace with who I am, I realized that the other guy trying to do that as well and us escalating actually ruins everything for everybody. And so I'm now bound to try to help that guy in a way where we can find a better solution, because there is no good, like, I don't just win the war once and for all, I win the battle and engender more enmity and a counter attack and then all of our energies in this thing. So it's like, okay, ultimately I have to find a better way for all of us because they don't plan it. And so now we take the heaven and hell mythopoetics and actually bring it back to something pretty literal. One way I like to think of the rapture story is, and this is not the only right way to think about as you mentioned, you can have your own rapture experience in deep meditation or on a boba looking in a mirror. But the rapture story of the end is nigh, this phase is coming to an end. There's going to be a great time of judgment. There's going to be a purgatory where we have a chance to reconcile and rectify the wickedness of our ways. And if so, we get some much better thing, heaven on earth or the reinstatement of the garden or whatever or if not, we get hell or death or some kind of bad thing. There's kind of a hard fork and there's like a purgatory choice, hard fork. I think we're facing something that is very much like that kind of literally, which is, we've been kind of shitty stewards of power for a long time. We've used our power to extinct other species, destroy ecosystems, destroy other cultures and oppress people of lower classes. We've done some good stuff with it. We've been a very mixed bag, but the mixed bag that we are has used power destructively enough. And it's continued to select for better coordination and construction, but also destruction capacities that with the arms race of that continuing to exponential tech, if you continue to be equally shitty stewards of power with exponential tech, everything blows up, you ruin the planet and you have wars that nobody wins and can make it through. And so either we continue to be humans like the humans we have been, and the thing self terminates, or we are getting so much power through the technology we've created, we are forced to become good stewards of that power, so we don't destroy ourselves and good stewards of that power means what does it mean to be a good steward of power itself. And power means the ability to influence, affect, control others. Other humans and other non-human life. So what does it mean to be a good steward of those types of capacities? So what is the wisdom, love, values, prudence that would guide that? Either we have to step up into that kind of planetarily to safely steward the power, or we destroy ourselves with it. That's very much a rapture story. And I imagine, there's an atheistic version of it, which is just philosophically oriented people, social philosophers, in the Bronze Age, at the end of a war, seeing all of the dead people that were killed at a much greater distance than before we had the, whatever the new weapon was the crossbows or the whatever thing. And a large area of desert that used to be for us because we got better access and better saws and whatever it has, the technology, they could just sit there and think we keep building better tech. And we're about to move from the bronze into the iron age. And we keep destroying nature and killing each other better with it. We don't get to do that forever. Like at a certain point you can't destroy all the nature and kill at that full of scale. So this phase is coming to an end and there's a wickedness of our ways and how we deal with power that has to be reconciled. And either we get it and we get this garden or not. To me, that story and very much like the Kali Yuga to Satya Yuga Hindu story, or the end of the Mayan calendar, like they're just decent forecasting of the nature of continued technological power, if it is driven by the lower angels of our nature, itself terminates. And so if that power continues, it forces the higher nature angels of our nature to become the basis of culture or we self terminate like that's the forcing function. 

AUBREY: Yep. And I mean, going back to what I was saying earlier, unfortunately, as much as I would like to hope and pray and I still do this very smooth transition, this awakening that happens without the necessity for massive disruption. And I still will hold that prayer. And I'll add to that prayer with my own belief that that is a possibility and I don't know exactly how. It seems from my understanding of what is most likely that there is going to need to be a little bit of discomfort, a little bit of pain that we probably feel that actually propels us into taking these threats really seriously because, climate change, it's a couple degrees hotter here. And it's like, yeah, okay, we kind of understand it, but until we run out of water. Or until it's so hot that people are dying and shit's getting really gnarly. Are we really going to take it that seriously enough? And I hope so and I pray so. And I pray that this happens gradually and we wake up with great speed and awareness that happens remarkably. And I think with the psychedelic renaissance, there are factors that are coming into play that can accelerate things beyond what the normal capacity is. But it just feels like. All right, we might need to prepare ourselves for a little bit of a bumpy road here that's actually necessary for us to make it through to the other side.

DANIEL: Let's think about this for a minute. We already just went through a year and a half or so of people largely being on lockdown. Let alone, what happened in Nigeria and so many other places, much more violently as a result of effects of COVID and COVID response supply chain dynamics, whatever else. We talk about, are we going to need some pain to come and climate change? Well, it's probably the case. That climate change was the cause of the droughts in Syria that made all the subsistence farmers who had been there for such a long time, no longer able to farm. So they moved to the cities that led to resource pressures, that led to the war there, that already pretty much destroyed what the quality of life in Syria was, and almost brought about a fully armed conflict between the West and Russia, right on the border. And we don't have to talk about the planet getting so hot that no one can live on it to talk about heat waves in areas that destroy crops, in areas where there's food instability. So you have a huge population in India and in Bangladesh sharing watersheds with huge populations on either side of China, one side, Pakistan, on the other side, the water's running out of those watersheds, the heat waves in the summer are increasing, the supplies of food decreased during COVID because there was food shock that occurred because not having fertilizer and things because of the shutdown of transportation. So the 50 plus Celsius heat waves that are anticipated over the next few summers. We already had enough refugees that nowhere wants refugees anymore. So what happens when the next chunk of refugees that are much larger in number than the previous ones came, because people don't just die peacefully, and you have very tense political fault lines? So the heat wave turns into human migration, turns into resource wars, and can very easily turn into escalating large scale wars. We're in a situation where being able to say we need some pain, like it's already happening, basically, depending upon where you are in the world, it's already happening. 

AUBREY: So then we need greater awareness, greater awareness of the pain. 

DANIEL: And it can escalate so fast that it goes from like, “Oh, shit. That's really here too.” “Oh, fuck. There's nothing we can do about it.” Now we're in a large-scale war. And so we need greater awareness and greater action and responsibility coupled to that. And it's like most people will either be stasis oriented or just personal pursuit oriented and less pain pushes growth. Pierre de Chardin on the Catholic theologian, who kind of after Darwin started incorporating evolutionary theory into Catholic theology, if you haven't read him, you'd really love Pierre de Chardin. But he talked about rather than a creator agent God relating to the creative impulse God that moves everything towards more elegantly order to complexity and more capability and beauty. And that evolutionary process brought about humans that have enough complexity to think about the evolutionary process to feel all about it and to decide to consciously help mediate it, so that rather than just being parts of the whole, we could step up into being agents for wholeness itself. And what would it mean to be local agents for wholeness, consciously aware of all that. And he talked about what he called the lure of becoming rather than having to be pushed by pain because otherwise we're stasis oriented. We understand the inexorability and beauty of evolution and we are drawn to become more and not just in service of self, but in service of all that we wouldn't exist without. And this is the interconnectivity part of what you were mentioning, as soon as I realized that without plants, I don't exist. There's no atmosphere. I'm dead. So the idea of myself separate from plants is nonsense. And without soil, bacteria, and microorganisms, plants don't exist. So, I can't even define myself without plants and bacteria and fungus in a cogent way, because I wouldn't exist, but also without all of the people who make all the shit that my life depends upon where my identity actually is wrapped up in all this stuff. So I'm like, well, my sense of myself as a separate thing is only because I take for granted the rest of the universe I depend upon. But if I said that, which is required for me to exist has to be included in my definition of self, then my impulse of becoming is bound to support all of that. Now, this is interesting because someone can have the mushroom experience of oneness, but not also have the cognitive model of how all that works. And together, both the experience and the understanding of it, and then the understanding of, okay, there is individuality, but even when we're talking about individuality, as opposed to oneness, there's interconnectivity across the differences. There's things that are not me in the individual sense, but that I depend upon and that create a world that either I don't exist without or that I want to see. So yeah, there's no question that pain can drive evolution, but we need to depend upon pain to drive it less and proactively be pursuing it in the awareness of the total eminent amount of pain that will come otherwise more. Because especially in a world where so many people are on painkillers and anti anxiety meds and anti emotional pain meds and whatever else, and all the other forms of distraction from their own inner pain through social media and porn and dating and whatever else it is. Like pain doesn't even have the same effect.

AUBREY: We arrive at a place where we need to have a little bit of faith in this divine creative process that is going to awaken in a way that's stronger than what we've seen prior. And again, as I said, I think the psychedelic renaissance is a potentially incalculable variable that can assist in this, but the optimism that to go back to where we're coming from, the optimism is not a knowledge of exactly how it's going to go, but requires some faith, like there is this thing, which is true, which is an interconnectedness and an understanding of that. And this creative drive to protect and support the whole and the better nature that we have. Latent and nascent within all of us and to have a bit of faith that that can awaken and potentially that the awareness of some of the pain could actually facilitate this. Let's pray for as little as possible and as much on the affirmative side of the awakening of this divine creation impulse.

DANIEL: And it's interesting. Like one of the reasons that I think people take all of the painkillers, whether it's the SSRI version or the Benzo version or the opiate version or the alcohol version is because they don't pain as a signal that something is off. They don't know what to do about it. They don't feel like they can do anything about it. So just numbing it is the best thing, which then allows us to keep doing the fucked up thing. If I put my hand in the fire, the pain is an evolutionary signal for me to pull my hand out of the fire. If I morphine, I put my hand, keep burning off so much of the psychological pain we feel because we're living in ways that are really not meaningful and not fulfilling. And so as to be able to keep going and doing the cubicle job or whatever the thing is that I'm fulfilled by it. Now I'm going to numb out the pain of the fact that my life sucks so that I can keep doing that thing. I want to actually feel the pain, but I want to be able to have powered relationship to it. So I'm not just broken, but I'm taking it as a signal to then be able to say, what is this a signal that needs corrected? And then what agency do I have to be able to actually correct it and move in the right direction? And not just my individual pain, but also the collective pain. There's only so much I can do about the collective pain. If I'm bypassing my own. Because I've got to actually be able to feel it. So what do I clean it up and fix and address in my own life to then be able to feel more of the larger pain to then be able to do something about it. And I think this comes back to the sense of faith that you were talking about, you talk about faith and optimism and empowered ways. It's easy to give up on optimism and be negative or nihilistic. And I'm obviously not going to be part of any good solutions if I've done that. Nor will I have any meaning, much any fulfillment. It's possible to have faith that doesn't require me to act, because like I have faith that some other institutions or other people or God or magic will fix it all. And that's also obviously not useful. And it's easy to say I'll have faith when someone shows me a solution that seems like it makes sense and tells me what I can do about it, which is like– 

AUBREY: It’s not faith.

DANIEL: It's the consciousness of a child. That needs some parent authority figure to explain to them how to live. There's a certain kind of like, well, how would anyone ever come up with a solution to something that we don't know how to solve? Like how does any inventor or innovator do it? Is that they have a faith that a solution exists before they know what it is, that doesn't have them just chill. It has them work their ass off to figure out what it is. So there's a certain faith in possibility that orients you to be an agent of it, which orients you to actually work things that you don't know exactly how to do. And so then you end up having faith in the actual solutions as they're gaining traction, but you get those through a process of a more intangible faith, but that orients you to learning, discovery and action. 

AUBREY: One of the ways that you could describe MDMA is as an empathogen. And obviously the first time I did it was in conjunction with psilocybin and that's a very different experience than, and I was out in the mountains and it was guided by a shaman, and it was a different scenario than the first time I did MDMA, which was in Australia with my girlfriend, and we were walking around downtown Brisbane, and I understand the term empathogen, because for the very first time, I saw the city life, the nightlife, past midnight nightlife of bustling bris vegas, as they call it. But I saw it in a totally different way. That woman who was a little bit drunk but crying on the sidewalk probably went through a breakup or a fight with her boyfriend. I could feel what she felt and I was like, “oh my god! Like that poor woman.” And that homeless person who is hungry like I could feel his hunger. There was a very interesting experience where I felt love for people that were beyond the people that I normally a lot my love to. And so I guess, to me this a lot of people are going to be pretty soon here within a year or so, give or take, depending on FDA and a few variables are going to be going into MDMA psychotherapy for the healing of trauma. But many of us have trauma. So, I'm sure the indications are going to increase and then other different indications are going to be proven, it's going to be used off label, there's going to be a lot of different proliferation of this as an empathogen. And so, while it doesn't seem like there's going to be any end to the painkillers, although a more stoic philosophy and a different attitude towards pain could be a culturally relevant story of like, no, we must feel the pain, the pain is a signal, stop numbing the pain so that you can actually solve the pain, which is a very empowering message, which I think can carry some weight, there will always be a market for painkillers, but also at the same time, raising people's sensitivity to collective pain through empathogenic molecules. And I think MDMA is just the first of potential empathogenic molecules that actually can connect people to collective pain in a different way. I just released a documentary about my time in the darkness and I took off my blindfold for the first time and you see me, I mean, I'm weeping at an unbelievably, intense depth of the grief of having taken this world for granted and the beauty that I'm beholding. And you can't watch that. I mean, I guess you could, but I haven't had an experience of someone watched that and not feeling a bit of what I felt. We're wired also for that level of empathy. And I think it's about being able to switch that back on, whether it's through stories or whether it's through media, whether it's through chemicals or whether it's some technological way in which empathy is being trained. I think Andrew Huberman was talking to me about different empathy research that they were doing in the lab with VR goggles, where they were having you be a person of color and going into a racially charged situation and then feeling what that feels like and how impactful that was. It seems like there's a lot of different ways for the mind that needs, and I understand the feeling of a solution, just knowing that there is a solution. I think that's important, but for the mind that needs to say, well, I need some plausible limb to hang on to some vine. I can grab onto, give me some rational reason. I think there's a lot of shit that's happening that can give at least enough to support your faith and that the solution is available. And I think that to me leaves me with the sense of optimism, which I don't know exactly how it'll be, but I can see a lot of different channels of stories, changing philosophies, changing understandings, changing different ideas about our spirituality, changing these compounds that are coming online, technology being used in beneficial ways. All of that is enough for me to say, “All right, I believe because I believe, but there's a couple of good reasons to believe as well.” And I guess for me. That's enough for me to leave this conversation without going into my dark room and just crying softly into a pillow somewhere. 

DANIEL: Okay, a couple of things I want to say. One thing that you said is important is that there are things that you see that are inspiring in a lot of different areas. It's important to recognize that the basis of hope or solution is not a single thing. Because there's some stuff we see in material science that makes better solar panels possible and better batteries possible and things like that, and better recycling and manufacturing of goods possible. And there's some things in the application of AI to personalizing education that could make completely better types of education possible. And some things that we see in psychedelics. But that also doesn't mean that we can say we don't also see applications of those technologies that are super destructive. And so we can't just say the techno optimist version, it's all happening. It's all good. Just let the market do its thing and it'll happen or tech do its thing. It's not true. But it's also not true to say that there aren't the precursors to adequate solutions, but also it's not one thing. It's lots of things. So then there's a whole ecosystem of solutions. What do they have in common? We can get that, like, whether we're talking about tragedy of the commons or arms races, there's something in common to escalating competition for narrow success metrics that externalizes harm to lots of things where that thing has to change across the scope writ large. And that's why we're talking about culture and the mindsets of people that could build new types of social institutions and even better versions of what we think of as the market right now. I want people to not think about, like, oftentimes I'll hear about the crisis and be like, what is the solution? As if there's some singular thing someone could say that would make any sense. And that's nonsense. It's not going to be a solution. Not the second coming. Or just let the market do its thing or AI will solve everything. So it's like, well, what are the problems? There's a whole scope of things. And it's a lot of stuff that has to happen. Then seeing how it's all connected is important, but it's not going to fit into a tweet. And so it's expanding your attention span to not say, my hope, you've got 90 seconds to give me the solution of the thing I'll feel hope about. And if I don't have that, then I'm going to jump into either nihilism or some kind, like that's important. The other thing I was gonna say is, you were mentioning that people are oriented towards sensations they wanna have, not necessarily the thing, the thing is a path to it. And then you were talking about the spiritual experience and sensations that were occurring, that were decoupled from external things happening. You were rather than things you needed to get in the world, you were even more overwhelmed sensationally by how much you had taken for granted all the little things in the world even. That there is such a thing as color at all, as opposed to 

AUBREY: Or sight itself. 

DANIEL: Or a reality to see, or the fact that reality happens to be as fucking beautiful as it is. When you're having that experience, it's very recontextualizing to the other state of mind that can really obsess over exactly what stuff your house is made of. So it's interesting. There's something where you're saying, “okay, I want certain kinds of sensations. As long as those sensations are based on just what's happening in the external world, I will have a basis to need to compete with the other guy to rearrange my external world better than his or with those scarce resources.” One way you can think about what the heart of almost all spiritual traditions we're trying to do, was deal with that basis of conflict by being able to say, can you find something like peace and happiness, unconditional to external? Can you find those sensations internally? So that you are no longer driven to get sensations. There's this very interesting question that says like, okay. As long as happiness is really conditional, but I need it. I have almost no free will. I'm basically controlled by this tyrant of unconditional happiness to pursue whatever I think will give me those hits of sensation. But if I've already been able to cultivate an inner state that I'm happy with, then what is my basis for what I want? It's probably something other than my own state. So it's almost like, and this is the, why do you start your day with the right kind of meditation, whatever? It’s actually only when I have tended to my own state that real virtue can even emerge where I can want something other than what's in it for me. And so this is another real deep basis of spiritual personal development is virtue can emerge authentically more when I've tended to my own state. And I can tend to my own state independently of rearranging the atoms in the universe to be a particular way. The last thing I was going to say is what you were mentioning about psychedelics and the empathogens the MDMA. So imagine if you had this experience and you feel the hunger of the homeless guy and you feel the heartbreak of the woman, and all the people. And afterwards you come and journal about it and you ask yourself, how do I tangibly change my life starting tomorrow to be aligned with what I just realized? And you have to come up with some fucking answers. Otherwise the journey didn't mean anything. Like if it really changed how I'm understanding the world, how does it tangibly change my basis for choice? So we don't just do the journey, have an experience, and then it's a nice story. It's like, I'm now inquiring, I have a deeper understanding of reality. How do I live differently? And then I look at, how do I create a community of practice where then I share that as a commitment, I'm held accountable to that, with other people. And then the next time I journey, I take another step similarly. And then the other part is when you're like, okay, I would have an arms race with that guy, who wanted to compete with me for the thing that I want. What if the next time I go into my psychedelic experience and I do the mushrooms or the Iboga that's going to let me see myself. What if I journal first? What are all the places where I can be shitty? What are all the bases where I can go into otherizing people, losing empathy and just going into conflict? Or let's say I'm going to do the empathogen. I say, what are all the places? Who are the people that are hardest for me to empathize with? And then I go in and I only think about them on the empathogen. Or I look specifically at those places where I can have the lower angels of my nature kind of take hold, the psychedelics start to become much more interesting when the tool is used consciously where you think about, okay, all these problems in the world have to do with conflict theory multiplied by tech. So we need to deal with the basis of the conflict theory, but we need to not pretend that it's not there. So how do I inventory where that conflict theory arises in my own life? And how do I use those psychedelics to help me transcend how I deal with it? Like, how do I deal with it better? That starts to get very interesting.

AUBREY: No doubt, because there'll be some benefit that's gained just from the experience itself, but it's multiplied. It's multiplied, not added, it's multiplied by the intentionality behind it and the structure of doing those similar things, which sometimes can naturally arise in the nature of a traumatic experience. Usually there's a perpetrator of said trauma, and you will be often invited to go find the place of forgiveness for that perpetrator, which is the ultimate alchemy of the trauma, as I've watched this arc, I've been in the room during the MDMA assisted psychotherapy, I've been blessed to be a part of these different scenarios and you watch the rage, which is hiding the grief. And then behind the grief is the forgiveness and then the release of that thing. And that's the way that the process is guided, but it's very self guided as well. But to do that with intentionality, not just in the specific of this person did this thing to me, but in the universal. It's very powerful and a good little star, a little asterisk to put up upon this kind of revolution that we're on the precipice of.

DANIEL: And in a community of practice of other people who are doing more. So if I have a blind spot, I'm missing where I'm assessing, where I can be an asshole or go into unnecessary conflict. Other people can show me, “Hey, you're missing this place.” I'm like, “Oh, okay, good. That's helpful.” And if I'm really growing or not, there's other people that can help assess, actually, you keep talking about the same shit journey. So that we're not kind of narcissistically diluting ourselves and then just having the journey be another sensation we like to have. Are we actually really growing? Being able to help each other with that is a very important part of it. 

AUBREY: Well, as always, Daniel, these conversations are some of my favorite experiences that I am fortunate to have. I'm glad we get to share this conversation with the world and whether it's just us in a restaurant or broadcast to all the people over the internet. It's really a pleasure. And I'm just deeply grateful for you and your heart and your work and your mind and everything you're doing. I want people to know too, that I'm a significant contributor to the foundations that you're a part of, and I'm going to continue to do that because I really believe in the work that you're doing. As I believe in my own abilities to play some role in this cosmic orchestration. So if you want to just explain briefly, what those are, if people are interested in supporting your work, as we make our way through this thing together. 

DANIEL: Yeah, you being an ally in the way that you have has been hugely helpful to work that we've been able to do with talking to key government institutions about shifts that they can make and also work that we're embarking on now and helping education in these areas more widely culturally. Something people can check out now is the consilienceproject.org. Consilienceproject.org is the website. A lot of the issues we were talking about today regarding propaganda, social media, culture issues, there's a whole good series of articles on there. We're about to do a series that addresses article series that are like the most fundamental things about what the state of the world is and what it would take to come to a post exponential tech viable civilization. And so, yeah, really grateful you have helped us be able to do that work and would love to have more people check it out and be involved. And then in terms of like, where do I find hope? I guess the last thing I'll say is there's this model that I like. We're actually about to write a paper on this guy, Marvin Harris, developed a school of cultural anthropology called cultural materialism. Really profound, insightful work. I don't agree with some of the conclusions, but he basically said, you can think of civilization as a result of these three categories, infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure. Infrastructure is all the tooling, energy, transportation, waste management, modes of production. Social structure is like economics, governance, law, the institutions with which we mediate our agreements and the superstructure is more like what we think of as culture, which is what are the values that we're orienting towards? What is the definition of the good life that we're orienting towards? So religion and nationalism and various, various kinds of social ideologies live here, what he focused on was what we were starting to talk about at the beginning, which was that the plow was so much more productive than just hunting and gathering from the point of calories you could produce that. The plow basically meant anyone who would do the plow thing would get ahead over those who wouldn't. So it coded for a pattern of behavior, which ended up coding for a mindset because it meant those who were not animistic, we're going to get ahead from those who were animistic, even if being animistic made them more in harmony with their environment. So he focused on the way that tools, the infrastructure ended up driving social structure and superstructure. We can do a deep analysis. We'll show this in this paper of how all three of them inter affect each other. The nature of what is being economically incented determines which tools take off. Also, what's being regulated. The value systems can orient what we're doing science and exploration of. Those types of things. Ultimately, the superstructure, the values of what matter to us, like the causal arrows from technology to drive our social structures, to drive our superstructure, is destructive. Most of the destruction we have comes from that direction. This other direction, which is what are the values that we then encode into social structures. So how do we basically have a value system become the basis of law and rule of law that can then bind and direct the technology to be uses of tech that are not catastrophic and not dystopic, but actually in service of life. So our technology has gotten so powerful and it's kind of eroded our social structures and our superstructure. All that's left of the social structures of this kind of liberal democracy period is really like money on money returns and some very limited stuff. And mostly what's left of superstructure is like fairly self centered narcissism and nihilism. So the development of culture to then have people for, by the people create new institutions that we can actually trust, put faith in, have rule of law that can then bind, guide, and direct the tech, so that we can have a future that is high tech and high meaning, high nature is kind of the only path. And I see that what you've already been doing with your Podcast and where I see it going, conversations we've had being how do we really help the cultural revolution to be the basis of rebuilding social institutions that can have the power to be able to guide this God like tech that we have, where we're good stewards of it. Of all the places of all the things where I feel hope it's not the tech, the question is what's going to guide the tech and it has to be people that have evolved in these ways. 

AUBREY: But I'll be in the Taurus as Don Howard was fond of saying, for the good of all, and may we be put to good use. And I'm honored to walk this path with you, brother. As we said, when we were walking from the restaurant, we've all lived in such a rich and beautiful way in which there's been moments of our life that have been so phenomenal and stunning that we've lived well enough to be able to really dedicate ourselves truly to service. And sure, there's moments of selfishness and there's moments where I lose my hunger for service, but I do know that when I'm deeply in service and I know I'm in service, there's no better drug on the planet. There is no better fucking drug than service when you're taking it pure. And I think we both tasted that drug too. And I'm looking forward to a lot more of that drug. However, in which way ever, it takes me in this life. 

DANIEL: Likewise. All right. 

AUBREY: All right. Much love my brother. Thank you so much everybody for tuning in. 

DANIEL: Much love.