A spiritual war is a war of stories, propaganda, and emotion.
And we’re in it.

So what does empowered action and holistic sovereignty look like, as we navigate from the global existential mess we’re currently in, towards a more beautiful world?

Jordan Hall is one of the most profound, deepest thinkers I’ve ever had on this show and our conversation offers a deep analysis of the many ways we can individually participate in creating this better world before our time here is done.

Jordan has spent the last two decades building disruptive technology companies, and is the co-founder and CEO of Neurohacker Collective. Early in his career, he helped start the online digital video revolution and is a vocal advocate for collaborative and open models of information dispersal. You can find more of his ideas on his Substack.

AUBREY: Jordan, good to have you here, man.
JORDAN: Thank you.
AUBREY: All right, I want you to fast forward 10 years into a future where somebody is, let's say, they're from another planet, or they're from another place where they haven't been tracking things that have been going on, and they're asking you this question. They say, wow, it was a close shave. There was some close calls, there were some tricky moments. But you guys all pulled through. How did you do it? How did you do it?
JORDAN: By far, the most important piece was humility. What I've noticed in myself, and in all the relationships that I've been in is that we have everything we need. We have a lot of wisdom, we, meaning humanity. We have a lot of people who've been working on a lot of stuff for a long time. It's crazy when you go out there and actually look at how you find some pocket of people, 65-year-old folks who've been working on something in Maui for 40 years. They got some stuff. It's not perfect, but it's interesting. A lot. But boy, we have a hard time working together. That's what holds us back.
AUBREY: So, what changed? How did people start working together? And how does humility play that role? Why did you name that as the first thing?
JORDAN: Let's see, in the sense of humility, and that word, humiliation, which is important to honor, because we have a bad feeling. We don't want to be humiliated. If we recognize that humiliation connects to humility in a very deep way, which is to be brought low, to be brought out of a sense of our own self-importance, and to be brought into a relationship with the reality that we are only part of something bigger than ourselves. So, that's the thing, once you really hold that. Right now, I'm kind of feeling the AA moment. The moment where it's like, wow, I cannot solve this problem. This is beyond my capacity. I have to have a relationship of humility to something which is larger than myself. Surrender to that, and then allow that to guide me in my choices.
AUBREY: And, let's use that model. The community. I don't think AA works without the AA community. You got somebody who's your big brother, you got somebody who's helping guide you, you got a whole crew that's helping support you and your mission.
JORDAN: Yeah, and take that almost fractally up. The word community is something that we have a hard time with, because you don't really have any in our world. We have assemblages of people, groups of affinity, where people who live near each other, where people who hang out in different ways, in different contexts. But that notion of really communal, that notion of the people who will be at your funeral, or you'll be at theirs, and you'll maybe take care of their family when they're gone. That's the thing we don't really have much of. Well, how do you compose that? Oddly enough, here's another one people don't like, suffering. Think about AA. Your sponsor, your big brother, they've suffered, meaning they've gone through. The word suffer, to undergo. Doesn't mean to have shitty experiences, although I suppose in some sense, it does. No pain, no gain. It's the characteristic of having actually truly and fully undergone real experience like rich, rough, and have grown as a result and come together on the other side in a new higher wholesomeness. A newer, higher whole. That gives them the capacity simultaneously to actually empathize with you. Not just feel bad for you, but to really say, "Yeah, I know a little bit about what it is you're going through. And I know that I don't understand it, and I know enough to know that there's something that can. And I can tell you that I went through something that I'm on the other side of, so there's hope that you can get through it." That creates a sense of real connection, a sense of community, because it's deeper. It's deeper than our individual wants and desires and preferences. You've gotten to a deep, dark place. You've gotten to that place of grief, and that place of brokenness that takes you past all the nonsense of the ego and all the characteristics of all the stories that we like to pretend that we're playing into reality.
AUBREY: Can you really trust somebody yourself personally? Just asking Aubrey to Jordan. Do you really trust somebody who hasn't been to a deep dark place, who hasn't really suffered?
JORDAN: No, you cannot.
AUBREY: It's interesting, right? Okay, this is beautiful, you're living in, I know, this is a model we're all familiar with. You're living in the pre-tragic, baby. You're living in this pre-tragic state where it's beautiful, and it's not my job to shake you out of it necessarily. However, there is some kind of impulse to, alright, hey, y'all, the pre-tragic is awesome. But also, we got to look at the tragic, which is the complexity and confusion of the world we're in. And then, we got to include and transcend that into the post tragic where we return to that same innocence that you're feeling now. So, don't worry, you're still going to get back there. But you're going to have to embrace a larger field of challenges, existential threats, issues that are facing us that you just can't ignore anymore. And we can't ignore this anymore.
JORDAN: Yeah, yeah. To become the one who can and has embraced, just to kind of like put the dot on it. It's not a mental or intellectual exercise. It's an existential process of becoming. And that process of going through the pre-tragic to the post tragic is a shattering and a breaking open, and a recognition of the fact that you weren't in control in the first place. So, you just have to be with what's happened. Then you become one who can be in the world in that way. That's the post tragic, like, "Yeah, you're right, I wasn't in control in the first place, and that's all right."
AUBREY: Yeah, that's a crucial thing. So, for me in my life, I've started to organize my community around the intentional access of the deep places, and the dark places, and the suffering places, and the places where you have to come together. So a huge part of my life is going through initiatory practices, which is another community slash tribe technology that we've lost, but it's still there. So, when you go through deep ayahuasca journeys with your brothers and sisters, you're not going to have the same experience, but you know that you've touched something that's deep, touched something that's challenging. And then, even though the content of their journey isn't the same as yours, you can hug them at the end and go, "I know, I know. I know what that was." Or, a sweat lodge, or I climbed a frozen mountain with Wim Hof and our band of brothers. You finish that thing, and there's a bond that's created, and a trust that's created. What happens at the top of that icy mountain in Mount Shnishka when your fucking ice spikes fall off your shoes, and you're sliding down the mountain, and you got your brother who down hikes because you slid down 50 feet, and they're cold as hell and we had our shirts off because of course, it's Wim Hof. They're down there with the biting, freezing sleet hitting them, and they're going, they're sitting down with you as you have to take off your gloves and put your spikes back on. To me, that guy was Humble the Poet. He was out there, and he's not the strongest climber of our whole group. But he saw what happened and he grabbed it, and he down climbed and he got me and he sat down there with me and he put that on. I'll never forget that moment. It's like, oh, no, bro, I trust you. Like if shit gets bad, and I'm hurt and I need help, you got me.
JORDAN: Yeah. The notion of initiation would have just come to me, it's something I've been thinking about only for the past couple of weeks or so. The language that's been coming to me is the distinction between false power and true power, and false symbols, and true symbols, but I'm not sure if I can use them right now. But these experiences that we have, and they're trying experiences, but they're experiences that punches through the fabric of false power, and reconnect us with the true power that does, in fact, lie underneath it, always. And so, that notion of portals, that notion of openings, it's an opening into something which is always here. But for whatever reason, we're separated from, and not able to access, and not able to make our choices on the basis of. But yeah, that is a real and powerful, let's say, technology. That's the proper term, I think. And, necessary as part of the sort of the whole RICO laws that we're going to cobble together in the next five years. I'm thinking here in terms of, if you're flying to the moon, half the way is there, then you have to turn around and decelerate if you want to land and not just crash into it, to get to that 10 year mark. But it's nice, it's hopeful to recognize that at the bottom of those dark pits are the openings into the true power that is, in fact, actually just there. And it's more of our ability to come into relationship with it, and to become more and more sort of facile in navigating by means of that. And less and less attached to the false power is maybe the key point.
AUBREY: So we had an opportunity, it seems with COVID. We had an opportunity for that to be a collective moment where we could all really come together.
JORDAN: Sure enough.
AUBREY: But it didn't work that way. Part of the reason it didn't work that way is we were being manipulated, the truth wasn't actually given into the field. So, in the absence of that truth, it created, actually, more division than it created a coming together. So, Sebastian Junger's thesis in tribe, being that in these moments of existential crisis, people will come together. We see flashes of that in a variety of different cases. I mean, he gives the story of the Blitzkrieg, and the bombs falling on London, and everybody then becomes a Londoner. We saw a flash of that, a moment of that, for whatever reasons. And also, there's lots of little intricacies to this story. But at 9/11, everybody was a New Yorker. It didn't matter if you were from fucking Kansas, like you were a New Yorker there. If there was a firefighter that you saw from New York Fire, or New York Police Department, you took your cap off, and you bowed. And you said, thank you, because we're all New Yorkers, we're all Americans at this point. Then, of course, then there was the wars, and then we're like, what the fuck is this all about? So, it feels these existential challenges are actually potentially necessary for our growth, but they have to be, they can't be weaponized against us in a way. We have to actually use them. And we also have to have leaders that share them in an honest way. Otherwise, the opportunity is kind of lost and kind of hijacked. It seems like we're going to have to have a different model, because we're going to have to deal with some shit. And I'd love to go into, I know that you see some of the shit that we may have to deal with. So, I'd love to go into some of that. And also, double-click on this idea of false power. But I just, I can't help but think, man, we've had some of these moments, and this most recent moment being the COVID moment. But it didn't generate, it did in some aspects, there were some kinds of communities that developed but they were polarized against each other. So it ended up dividing the country rather than unifying the country. And what a shame, what a missed opportunity.
JORDAN: Yeah, there were definitely missed opportunities, in lots of different ways. So many things were going on in that period from November of 2019 through to say March 2020. The thing that, like this future that we want to get to, it was beginning to happen. People were beginning to self-organize, people were beginning to just take agency, they were beginning to take a look at how to do things. And all the new techniques, that there's a technique thing, and there's a consciousness thing, and they both need to happen simultaneously. If you have an uplifted consciousness, you have your Ayahuasca experience, and then your ass drops right back into your nine to five job and shit, Bill, you got trouble. They both have to happen simultaneously, or at least co-creatively, co-produce each other. So yeah, I completely agree with you. There was, well, both missed opportunities, but also a bit of a revelation. So let's not forget the revelation aspect. A lot of people's eyes have been opened that weren't as open as they were before. And if we can't see clearly, then we can't navigate. So, maybe just eye opening was enough. So, I'll take it from that point of view.
AUBREY: Yeah, that's a good point. We were able to see how some of the powers that be worked. I mean, regardless of your opinion about it, and there's a variety of different opinions, and it's not our place to argue about those opinions, but it's undoubtable that we saw manipulation at play. And we saw corporate capture of certain agencies and certain media agencies, and we saw a way in which, oh, wow, you guys aren't telling it true. You're spinning things from the reports coming from the FDA that were hidden and tried to suppress, and from all of the different ways that things were described, we're like, oh, there's something bigger and potentially more sinister that's happening here. Also, a very real and scary situation that we have to deal with. And of course, some people took that fear and are still underneath that spell of fear. I've been traveling around a lot, and there's still people walking around outside with their masks on still, and that fear left an imprint of psychological trauma, almost to a certain extent, that also no leadership, no true power, which is someone who's carrying the power with the goodness and clear, honest intention of their heart. Like, the good king, archetype good. Meaning they come from the field of goodness, which is a field of honesty to really help. Like hey, y'all, I know that this triggered a lot of fear. But it's no way to live your life to be afraid of the air for the rest of your existence. If you're afraid of the air for the rest of your existence, this is tough.
JORDAN: You might survive, but you're not going to be living.
AUBREY: Yeah.
JORDAN: Yeah, so, let's see. Yeah, we learned. See, it's interesting. So what was coming to my mind right there was the notion of, it's a spiritual war. That's the sense that came in. And that in each particular phase, or the moment, or the evolution of war, the capacities that individuals and groups, communities have to learn to be able to prosecute that war properly, to emerge victorious, changed. World War Two was a technological war. World War Two was where we harnessed the power of the intellect to change our technical capacities to engage in a wide variety of different activities, to militarize intelligence. Whether you're talking about the Enigma machine, you're talking about radar, you're talking about operational management or the application of the weaponization of intellect to coordinate militarization was World War Two.
AUBREY: Wait, what's the Enigma machine? Is that Oppenheimer?
JORDAN: No, no, this was Bletchley Park and the breaking of the German codes.
AUBREY: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Cryptography.
JORDAN: The Cold War was where we're living right now still, in the tail end of that. There's the war of sensemaking, the war of propaganda, the war of manipulation, the war of hearts and minds, the war of how do you actually, bounded by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. We can no longer play the game of throwing bombs at each other, big picture, big superpowers. Soviet Union, United States can't play that game anymore. We've convinced ourselves that's no longer a valid thing. So, it creates bumpers on what we can do, we're still going to be engaging in war. So, how do we do it? Well, you use subtlety. I need to undermine your economy, to undermine your politics. I need to make it impossible for you to coordinate all that kind of psychological psyops war.
AUBREY: Also, there's this interesting cold war happening in space, too. And I've dove into that as well, where Russians are blowing up their own satellites to create these debris fields, to capture certain real estate and prevent orbits, orbital patterns from different others, because it's like we're trying to figure out who can spy on the whole world in the best way. So there's little blips that you don't notice, because they're in space. But it's still an interesting thing. It's not the traditional kinetic warfare where bodies are lining up. Now, of course, Russia, Ukraine, there are bodies, tons of bodies lining up, and this is obviously tragic. But nonetheless, there is a sense well, we can't use the big bombs, because once we use the big bombs, everybody uses the big bombs, and it's all over. So it's almost been like a retraction of technology. Because we can't anymore, but still, there's these flare ups of both kinetic and also strategic, but definitely, the biggest one is exactly as you said, it's a war of stories, it's a war of the mind, it's a war of consciousness.
JORDAN: So, for us to actually get through it, to emerge victorious, we have to actually learn how to properly prosecute a spiritual war. And, I think this is what was going on in the context of COVID. People became aware of, okay, what makes me afraid? And how does my fear make it easy for me to be led and manipulated? What does it look like when somebody who I trusted is telling me a falsehood? How do I actually begin to notice that things like credentials aren't actually a functional proxy for competence or good faith? How do I navigate a world where I can't trust any institutions? These are all questions that are very up. And individuals for better or for worse, and more importantly, communities, are having to learn how to do that. We're having to in real time cobble together new capacities of interiority, and new capacities of relationality, that allow us to respond to those challenges, simply just to survive, or at least to feel like we are actually living again, to recover that distinction between survival and living and start saying, hey, wait a minute, I'd rather live, what is it? Live on my feet than die my knees?
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah.
JORDAN: That's coming back. And I think that level of, the term I used was infinitesimal courage, to distinguish it against the coarse grain courage, which is a very noble thing with the ability of those young men to charge the beaches at Normandy. That's coarse grain courage. We've been doing that for a long time. But the infinitesimal courage that goes all the way to the interior, and forces you to make the proper choices, even though nobody's looking, and nobody will know the difference, that's a different kind of thing. I think that's a big part of what's being honed right now.
AUBREY: It seems to me that we're also with that. We're moving from a pre-tragic spirituality of either fundamentalism, or atheism, which is this kind of, everything makes sense, perfectly clear. There's no God. It's all just atoms that are organized in a particular way. We don't exactly know why, but they did. And, there's no God, and then therefore, there's no true value. And then in the postmodern idea, all value is kind of taken off the table, it's all subjective. If you're doing that, well, if your culture says it's cool, then it's cool. There's no universal value structure in that kind of atheist model. Or there's the fundamentalist value structure, which is, God has said 2,000 years ago, or 3,000 years ago, God has laid down the law and that's unchanging, and this is exactly how it is. And all of the interpretations by these organizations that we realize we can't really trust either. Clearly, there's been a lot of fuckery going on with priests engaging, and just for one example, engaging in horrific crimes against children that just kind of get moved around. We know this is a fact. So, let alone the doctrines of the religion which had been manipulated, and been the cause of so many wars. So, fundamentalism is also discarded. So this pre-tragic notion isn't exactly working in either way. Because one, you discard value, the other you have stale values that are not evolving, and not actually accessing the true field of value. And then it's reconfiguring in a new concept of what the divine actually looks like. That thing that you're beholden to, the thing that lives in you, as you and through you, that kind of holds you in a field of value, a field of goodness, if you want to call it. Like, actual goodness. Which is also something that we struggle with. Like, goodness. So, there's this interesting thing happening where I think Nietzsche correctly said, God is dead at that time. And now it's like, well, we got to revive. We got to revive the concept of the Divine.
JORDAN: Right. God is back.
AUBREY: God is back, baby. We're calling it here. God is back.
JORDAN: Yeah, it's funny, Nietzsche. I cut my teeth on Nietzsche, had that experience of being a young adolescent and a good looking girl suggested something about Nietzsche. So I'm like, "Alright, Nietzsche, it is." So, I did a deep dive--
AUBREY: The muse guides, the muse is always guiding you.
JORDAN: It's like mother's milk. So, yeah, I think this is right. I think there's a, how do you say it? There's an adolescence. Pre-tragic is nice. Pre-tragic has a certain adolescence sensibility to it. And there's a notable adolescence in both versions of the story that you told, right? The postmodern, and the fundamentalist characteristics have a brittleness and a silliness really, if you take it seriously. That can't be a way to run a life, much less a world. Kind of just connect some dots here. Obviously, that ain't going to work. You could just imagine back, if you're kind of sitting back and somebody came to pitch you on this, like, here's the way we're going to do things. That's obviously nonsense. I get why that's kind of a fun way to pick up chicks in grad school. But that's not a way to run anything really, I’m done with the postmodern side of course. And we've looked around, and it's manifestly obvious there are no adults in the room. So, let me shift a little bit to the sociological, because we live in a sociological moment that is unusual, that the last adults were probably the silent generation, or the last people who actually went through the process of really becoming elders, becoming grownups in the West, Maybe the GI, I'm not so sure, but certainly not the boomers. That's what I'm looking at right now. And unfortunately, we've been living in an era of extraordinarily delayed maturity, both physiologically and certainly spiritually. And there's an assumption, very unwarranted, that there are adults somewhere to be found, that are ultimately either manipulating things negatively at the conspiracy side.
AUBREY: Of course.
JORDAN: There's sophisticated adults that are running things for their best interests, or maybe actually will take care of us. Like, we can appeal to somebody and they'll sort of figure it out and take care of us. Because we've grown up in an environment where more or less, that has been the case. That there has been a powerful structure run by people who are meaningfully older than us, who have powers that in many cases feel mythological. Until you've actually met people face to face, you don't realize that presidents are just fucking people. You don't realize that movie stars are very unimpressive individuals. You just don't get it until you’ve met him face to face, there's a mythological characteristic to them. And so, we behave as if somebody else is responsible for what's happening. But, reality over the past several years, for me decades, but certainly the past five years or so for many people, has again, revelation, pulled back the veil. You look around, you're like, "Fuck, it's us? We're it? We're the ones who are going to have to figure this stuff out?"
AUBREY: We're the ones we've been waiting for, the old prophecy.
JORDAN: That's right. We're the ones, huh. That's on the one hand, extremely alarming, because we have not got our shit figured out at all. And I suppose empowering because I guess it's up to us. I know from my life experience that once you've accepted responsibility and just stop fitzing about and dive into it, amazing things can happen. I think we were talking about that on the front, it's like when you live in crazy times, crazy things can happen. Now, we know that crazy shit's happening to us. But, that also means that we can do crazy things. So, we should take advantage of that opportunity.
AUBREY: Amen. Yeah, I've personally felt that deeply, man, deeply. Not only have I felt this kind of expose of the darker forces, the manipulative forces, the revelation of, oh wow, the authorities, what I would call Empire. Empire is not on our team. They are not on our team. They want to debase, degrade, control us. One thing about Empire, they love wars, they love being in perpetual war, but they hate warriors. They hate the people who find that courage within themselves. So they have all of these different ideas and strategies that are being deployed. And then there's something else, there's what we can see and feel, what our brother Charles Eisenstein said, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We know that there's a different way, this self-organizing kingdom, that yes, does have structure, has some of the structures of Empire, but is lead from a field of goodness, and that we can all participate in, and all have bilateral communication up and down, and everybody's listening to each other. There's this other possibility that we're starting to see as well. And it seems we're heading towards one of two paths. To me, it feels like the idea, and some people are going to hate this. But the idea of some form of One World government is ultimately a necessary inevitability. Somehow there's going to have to be greater coordination for us to withstand the existential threats, which involve the entire species. So the reason is, this is a necessity, because there's things that involve the entire species. It's not just about your country, or your state. It's the totalization of the world. So, if we're going to deal with problems that involve the totalization of the world, we're going to have to have some level of coordination. Now, that doesn't mean that people have to give up their culture, give up their states or give up their countries, but there has to be a way that things are organized that's a lot more honest than the United Nations, which still picks which countries are involved and who they actually give a shit about, and is wildly corrupt from everything that we can see. But it's almost like the move is going to be made. And it's either going to be this dystopian top down control Empire version, or it's going to be the kingdom, the good kingdom. And in the good kingdom, there are good kings, and there's still structure. And there's still ways in which things move. But it's led from a whole different mindset, whole different concept.
JORDAN: So, I think it's probably worth pointing out that you and I have never met. We obviously have a couple of folks in common. But I bring this up, because there's a lot of convergence. I nod my head vigorously at what you're saying. In fact, even the language, Empire versus Kingdom. I agree. I agree very, very deeply. You said some people are going to hate this. Let's just call out the distinction. Because I think if you can get it, it's not that troubling. But if you can't get it, if you're confused by it, then the ones, the warriors will want to resist. So, let's give them some, there is a distinction between something, let's call it One World Empire. And there's something else we could call the spiritual kingdom, just to make a distinction.
AUBREY: Kingdom of Gaia.
JORDAN: Yeah, something that is planetary in scope, that includes the whole of humanity and the whole of nature, and the whole of technology, and is able to coordinate the choices that are made by the individuals, so that those choices are consistently in alignment with both their own local best. We are guided and supported by the world that we're in so that our lives are the richest and most meaningful that they can be, and are intrinsically in support of the much larger whole. That's the thing we're trying to head towards. The simulation of that, the false power, the negative image of that, that is grasping at us and trying to take that image and convert it into the tools to be used against us, that's the Empire. That's how the Empire operates. We can spend some time, I think, diagnosing how false power does what it does, so that we don't find ourselves confused, because we're divided against ourselves by the propaganda, or the manipulation or the deceptions that come from the false power. Well, then, of course, divided we fall. So, this is a word that's going out to the warriors, the ones who when you feel the Empire called out, you feel yourself rallied. Like the hair on my arm stood out. A huge part of me, and the fact my entire lineage exists for the purpose to serve the Kingdom against the Empire. It is only because I'm aware of the fact that we're in a spiritual war that I don't just gear up and go rush directly at it. Because obviously, it knows how to win that war. So don't do that.
AUBREY: Well, also, you can fall into the trap of trying to locate Empire within people.
JORDAN: Yes, that's right.
AUBREY: And instead of it being like Ragnarök, like the War of the Gods, the war of ideas, the war of stories, where it's not somebody you shoot with a gun, it's not somebody you punch with a fist, it's not somebody you yell at and abuse on Instagram. They may be participating in this ideology of Empire, and so there may be some contention between your story and their story. But don't forget, these are all our people. They're all our people. We have to remember that, and this war is being played out in the spiritual, in the consciousness dimensions.
JORDAN: Yeah, that's hard to hold on to, because sometimes it would feel nice to punch something in the face.
AUBREY: Of course.
JORDAN: It feels really like the kind of thing that needs to happen, but that particular avenue has been largely taken, right? That adds energy to the way the adversary is doing what it does, and keeping us fighting against each other. I saw a little thread that came through, some people brought it to my attention. We're on Team Red over here in Twittersphere. What's that young woman? I guess I'm old enough to say I don't know who the hell she was. In Ohio, I think, quoted, salvation is through Christ alone, which is a very uncontroversial statement within Protestantism.
AUBREY: Very strong, pre-tragic, fundamental statement.
JORDAN: Yeah, you just find that. I don't know anything. I don't know her personally, so I don’t mean to know what her background is. And then, at least two individuals from the Ohio State, one of whom was definitely Jewish, because he brought that forward, said that's the most bigoted statement I've ever heard. And then, by the way, deleted, or taken down, which was very odd. I guess they must have known each other. This initiated a little bit of a firestorm in meme space, inside Twitter. I can tell you this, the Empire was happy to see that.
AUBREY: Oh, yeah.
JORDAN: Yeah, let's get that conflict, and all little fractures, all the differences, let's make sure that those are the places where energy and attention are focused. Because that'll keep people well engaged and keep their energy and their desire to punch focused in a particular direction, while the Empire can continue doing his business very, very unabated. In fact, fueled by that, and that's a false symbol that allows us to pull our energy, our actual power into the wrong place. And every time we do that, we're weakening ourselves and strengthening our adversaries.
AUBREY: Well, so what I think, alright, so then what is the higher choice in the response to that? And so, my choice if somebody says that to me is, the Christ, I know about the Christ. Christ is an incredibly powerful force. It's the awakening of this universal love, this love that knows no fear, that sees beyond judgment. Still can hold discretion, but comes from this flaming heart. So many images of our past artists inspired by the different muses of their own, whether it's the muse of the Divine, showed Christ with a flaming heart. Just a heart that was on fire. And so to say that the Christ is going to play a role, this Christ's energy is going to play a role in our salvation, you know what? You're right, it is. It is going to play a big role. But it's not alone. It's also probably not exactly what you mean by Christ. However, there's some power there, and I want to acknowledge that. So, that's the way that you kind of build the bridge, I think, to people who have these ideas, to say, Christ, hell yeah. I'm down, and I'm from a Hebrew lineage myself. I'm wearing the Star of David on my chest right now and a sword. I'm from the Hebrew lineage, and there's been a traditional split, but it's, oh, no, yeah, Christ, there's something there. There's something there. Whether you use the Rosicrucian model, or you just have your own understanding, there is power there. I see where you're going with that, except there's an expanded view that you need to look at, that this is one way to name one of the forces that we need to bring to the table.
JORDAN: My sense is one of, when I encounter something like that, what I know is I don't understand how to deal with it properly. Meaning, the only response I can usually have is humility, something that is being shown to me. I don't understand it. So, time to listen. What's happening here? I noticed, there's this word, discernment, that, at least in myself, I have a feeling of the ability to distinguish from things that are in the right direction, and things that are more in the wrong direction. So, this would be an invitation. "Okay, tell me more." And what I find oftentimes is when somebody is speaking from their heart, it's in the right direction. And if they're speaking stories that have been put in their mind by people other than themselves, yeah, it oftentimes feels like it's more in the wrong direction. So, I want to listen. I want to hear what's really coming from the heart. What's coming from Truth? Because there is Truth.
AUBREY: Postmodernists are going to hate that.
JORDAN: They're going to hate that and that's going to be alright. They're going to have to chew on that one until they work their way through it. I'm sorry for that, but gonna have to grow up some time, kids. We're way past grad school. So, what is it? I have a friend, I'm not going to name her, but I actually had this conversation with her. When you speak to me about your first-person experience, what you're feeling inside, and you're just conveying, you're out of the way, and you're just telling me what it is you're experiencing, it's truth. It is clear water, and I just want to drink it down. But as soon as you start telling me stories that you're making up in your head to make sense of it, it goes off the rails so fast. We live in confusing times, and we've got a lot of stories, and people have been optimizing stories for a long time. We need to be mindful about that.
AUBREY: Optimizing slash weaponizing.
JORDAN: Yeah, that's what I mean. The mimetic, the toolkit of taking advantage of this thing we can do, that we've been playing with very awkwardly for the past 75,000 years or so. And very sophisticated for the past 10,000 years or so, and off the charts for the past couple of hundred years. That's been going on a long time. So, we should be careful. Storytelling is a potent, potent tool. Nefarious forces are quite skillful at weaponizing it.
AUBREY: Empire.
JORDAN: Yeah, Empire, that's what they do. That's their shtick.
AUBREY: Yeah, and they got all kinds of strategies, they love hiding in the holy too.
JORDAN: Oh, boy.
AUBREY: They love hiding behind some virtue, or some value, or some "god" that they've created and manipulated, so that they find themselves in a position that they're, it's this almost invulnerable position, because they're claiming this authority of value or authority of virtue, that if you challenge it, then, "Oh, you want to kill grandma," or, "You want to do all..." So there's all of these ways in which their story allows them to access a certain virtue, which they're unaware, they're blind, they don't have the awareness to see that they're actually being manipulated, to try and be better than somebody else by believing this story.
JORDAN: It's so brutal. Yeah, so let's see. Let me do this in two steps, because I feel like I want to take the first part, and just kind of flesh it out. But the second part, I'll respond to what you're just saying, which is, it's brutal. So, false symbols and true symbols. False symbols are simulations of true symbols that render the most salient aspects, super salient. So, what happens is, I have a relationship with a particular symbol, and as a human being, I can only experience so much of it. And some portions of it stick out in the foreground. What happens is, what a false symbol does, is it takes that aspect and gives me more of that. I mean, let me just be very simple, very straightforward. There was an experiment that I read about a long time ago, about some scientists who took a bird, a mother bird, and they created a little hand puppet, a baby bird. They made the baby bird's mouth redder, more red. Their fake one, then the real baby birds. And they just kept playing around with it until they figured out what was the mama bird really using, her symbolic interpretation of complex reality. She obviously can't really understand everything that's going on. She has to simplify it to the thing that a bird brain can handle. In this case, it turned out to be a patch of red against the otherwise non-red background meant baby bird mouth, put food in there. And so, the scientists are able to produce a simulated baby bird that was ever so more red, more symbolically potent than the real baby bird. Guess what? Mom started feeding the puppet, and all her babies died. That's a false symbol. Now, there's a lot of power in being able to figure out how to jack people's symbolic landscapes and provide them false symbols, because then they'll give you the power, the energy that they are endeavoring to give to the world or to the things that they love and care about, because they can't tell the difference. You're signaling to them the things that they use to distinguish from reality, from non-reality, truth from falsehood. You're right inside, you're signal jacking their own sense making infrastructure. It's very difficult to get past that. All right, so back to the point you were making. Brutal. How can we ask people to not be jerked around by manipulative discourse, like, you're going to kill grandma? That's very challenging. We're asking people to operate an IQ like 140, and with an EQ of 160. We're talking about requiring human beings to level up their capacities in a way that feels frankly, impossible. That's brutal, how are we going to pull that off? This is what I mean. If I say something like, be careful of those who were the vestments of the holy, and do not trust them. What are you going to do? The average person is going to walk out and say, "Now who do I trust?" Can't trust anybody? Well, that's not a very healthy place to be. This gets us into the kind of the Qanon scenario, where we unplug all forms of trust. Then people are looking everywhere, and you get apophenia off the charts, which isn't by the way, fed by delusion. I went deep on the Qanon thing. We're living in a world of massive deception. So there's plenty of true things that have been hidden from us that you can pull up and go, "Shit, look at that." It was a true thing that's been hidden from us. I got a positive dopamine hit for finding something true and real that has in fact actually been hidden. Keep mining for it, you keep finding it. That's going to feed a whole group of people who are like, alright, fair enough, layer on top of that whatever construct happens to accumulate to it, and you've got an ideology. You've got a cult ultimately.
AUBREY: Yeah, and then it leads into places where they've grossly overstepped and corrupted. You get the Flat Earthers, you get Dinosaurs aren't real. And then all of a sudden, you're no different than the creationists.
JORDAN: You're stuck, you're confused.
AUBREY: You're just in this place where you can't trust anything, you can't trust anybody, everything's a false flag, everybody's controlled opposition. There's nobody who's actually good. So get yourself a bunker, buy a bunch of guns, find yourself a piece of land and fuck the rest of the world, you're going to survive. That's not going to work.
JORDAN: Yeah, by the way, not the worst place to start. What I mean is something like, step back, be willing to step back. Where do we reground? I've found in my experience, there's really only two places that we can reground, and they're bizarrely, antipathies. One, of course, is human relationship. If you encounter a family, and you encounter the children are healthy, you can look at the face and you can see the activity. The child is a healthy child, physically, spiritually, emotionally, four-year-old, they know how to play, they're not afraid of the world, they're not afraid of their parents. And you look at the adults, the adults have a good relationship with each other, and with their child. Something right is happening there, that is a good signal. You can do the same thing with just nature. If you go out and you can drink from the water in the ground, remember? We're old enough to remember that actually was a thing that you could do. This is before we poisoned everything. I remember reading a book in the 70s. It was weird, almost like science fiction. I'm sure this guy's old, what would you call him? The lost generation? One of those guys grew up in the 20s. He wrote this book and it was almost this prophecy about how terrible it was going to be in the future. That we were all going to drink bottled water. People aren't going to drink from streams anymore, they aren't going to be drinking from taps. All the water will be so toxic that we have to carry bottles around with us everywhere we go. I remember as a kid simultaneously going, "That's absurd, sir. That's just crazy talk." And a feeling in my gut of that'd be a terrible world to live in. I remember watching, I was like, everybody seems to be buying bottled water all the time, that's weird. This guy called it, alright. Well, if you go to a place where people can actually drink from the water in the ground, that's healthy. That's a good sign. If you have places where people intuitively and collectively gather because they actually like each other, and they recognize the conviviality is healthy, and where if somebody is having trouble, everybody else helps them. It's the word wholesome. What was that gentleman's name? Oh, gosh. He's a British guy who creates music videos of people, like Jordan Peterson talking.
AUBREY: Music videos?
JORDAN: Yeah, they're amazing. Anyway, for me at least he coined the phrase, wholesome is the new punk. So, wholesomeness, we can recognize. The more wholesome you get, the more you can recognize wholesomeness. That's a very nice feedback loop. Grounding in wholesomeness is a good idea. Deep. Places that have multigenerational wholesomeness, places that have been able to maintain continuity of real human relationship and healthiness for a long period of time. And by the way, humility, because you don't want to fuck it up if you're going there, you can get ground there. And that's good, solid stuff. This is not, by the way, prepper separatism.
AUBREY: Well, I experienced something similar when I was in Kauai. We were there with our friend, Alana, who's a local, lives there, and quite deeply embedded in the community. We brought together a gathering for a fundraiser and a prayer for the people of Maui. We were in Hawaii which was this Edenic place, and then there's this hell going on in our sister island of Maui. So, we brought the community together. It was really beautiful to actually feel this community of locals, because Kauai doesn't have the same level of tourism. Still has a lot of tourism, but there's a strong community. I'm sure there is in every island as well. Everyone from Native Hawaiians, of Hawaiian ethnic lineage, to people who've lived there and just been there and been a part of it. And there's a sacred spring, everybody fills their water at the sacred spring. Every single person told us, "You've got to go to the spring. You've got to drink the sacred water from the sacred spring." And they didn't use necessarily sacred in this way. But you could tell that that's what they felt about it, like this is our spring, this is where we get water. And this is fucking important, right? So, it's exactly that thing. They had that. And as I was looking around this gathering that we had at a local yoga studio, Black Coral Yoga, there was just a certain quality to the eyes of some people that were there, where I was just able to look around and go, "Oh, brother, Oh, sister, I don't know you. But I know you, we're in the same field of value. We're in the same..." The longer we spent talking, the more we'd realize how much we liked each other. But we don't have that much time right now. We all have our own agendas, but I fucking see you. And I think it was connected to the community, and was actually connected also from the waters to the earth. And there's this really interesting way where you felt, wow, here's a little pocket, here's a little place where things are in right order, where the rainmaker doesn't have to come to set things back in right order, because there's actually a right order that exists self-emergent from this community. It was really cool to see that in a way and to actually feel, oh, wow, there's still pockets that exist. That's certainly not the only one. But there's many pockets that exist where people are still accessing this.
JORDAN: So, from a what-do-I-do-perspective, the short answer at least for most people, is find pockets like that, and then become someone who can participate in a healthy, wholesome way with those pockets. Notice the steps there. Don't rush to Kauai right now and break it. Don't fuck it up. Don't bring your nonsense there. Terrible idea. I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story about that. Because we're invoking the Hawaiian sensibilities, we know we have to talk story. So, I almost moved to Kauai. The way that I understand it is, Kauai, specifically the way I understand is the, Ali brought me in to teach me important lessons about how to be in right relationship with the place itself, and what home feels like, both in terms of place and people. And as you say, I know exactly the experience you're talking about. In fact, simple metrics, like my daughter, were around two to three during the time that we were there. You show up in a local car, not a rental car. You show up at a local beach. And you have a kid whose butt naked running around nutbrown on the beach, and the other people on the beach look at you and they notice that you're at least somewhat pono. Okay, more or less your family now, your ohana. My daughter can run over there and hang out with your family, and eat some watermelon with your family. The notion is that if one of your kids runs over and wants to jump on my surfboard, I got an eye out, and it's all good, right? That was a revelation, right? Growing up, not growing up, but living in the suburbs of Southern California at the time, the notion of wait, relationship has an easefulness and a depth to it? And taking care of other people's children can actually be a natural, ordinary thing. Oh, and by the way, I noticed local beaches, very clean, there is no trash. Because you take care of your place. And if somebody leaves trash behind, that is super not pono. Either they're making a significant error, in which case, some uncle needs to come and tell them off. Or they're tourists, in which case they need to be gently asked to a different location. So, I was taught that. And then Ali said, and by the way, this is not your home. This is what it feels like. I'm going to bring you all the way and to feel like it's home, and how to take things in the proper pace, and how to listen and to notice. And we got to the place we're literally putting an offer on a house. Capitalism affords me the ability to convert Mammon’s money units into owning a piece of property in somebody else's place. It's very difficult to navigate that, and following the path as cleanly as possible. The very last second, literally the last day, we got popped in a very confusing fashion. Much larger offers came in on the day that the documents are going to be signed. Cash only. Wow, okay, I guess I'm not supposed to be here. So we process that for a while. We've now landed in Black Mountain, North Carolina after a couple of hops, by the way. And the sense was, oh, uh-huh, the lesson of home was taught, but that wasn't my home. So, it's important. You actually have a home, and it's yours. You've got to find it. Once you find it, and you understand how to know the difference, then you can start going down. Then he started grounding in this way. And the Empire can't take that from me. I mean, the Empire can try to kill you. Once you found a hill to die on, that's where the Kingdom can be born. That's where the words have a place to play. Oh, this is my hill to die on? Hallelujah. I've been looking for this my whole life. Now I know where it is. I know what to defend, and I know who to defend. And you get that weird feeling like again, I'm feeling in my arms. That feeling of, I see the kids walking around in Black Mountain, I'm like, those are mine to protect. The Empire comes for them, I'll die for them.
AUBREY: They have to come through me first.
JORDAN: That's right. So, on the other side, we got that part. That part feels really good. And by the way, if you're married, family, wife, that kind of thing, you want to make your wife feel good, bring her into her home, with her community, and in a place where all the other people have the feeling of, yeah, they'll take care of your kids too. And, that she's invited to co-parent. I don't mean like, we're talking about a lot up here, it actually is happening. There's a felt sense of grandmother's inviting her to come in and actually, steward the beauty of the land, that kind of stuff. That'll make a wife feel extremely good, I can tell you this first person. Now, the other side is the weirdest thing in the world, the other side is this technological thing. Because we've been doing that, we're going to have to figure out how to come into mastery of it pretty quick, too, because the guys have finally lit the fuse. So, it feels like the clock's ticking at long last. I don't know about you, but I was a nerd growing up. So I've been watching tech things since as long as I was, probably about seven or eight. And there's been a feeling of, there will be a point at which the train leaves the station, where the technology thing is moving in a sort of an eschatological fashion. And there's going to be an end of days that is going to be brought forth by the simple exponential growth of technology. It seems like yeah, boys have lit that fuse, and the train's left the station. So, we've got a very limited amount of time to figure out how to integrate this problem child of humanity known as technology.
AUBREY: Alright, so let's slow down and unpack a couple of these things. So, when you're talking about technology, there's many aspects of technology. So, break down the specifics of what type of technology you're talking about. I know you've referenced AI, and then also, what that end of days looks like. Because we all understand kind of the social dilemma, we understand the kind of techno feudalism, which is a term that Zak Stein, who I know is a buddy of yours, that they've kind of been focused on, but it's not exactly the end of days. It's just the degradation of our sovereignty and it's a hijacking of our attention. But I wouldn't necessarily call that end of days, it's a shift that's going to be very difficult. So, go a little slow and unpack what technology you're talking about. Is this the social technology, is this weapon, like actual kinetic weapon
JORDAN: I'm actually talking about technology, qua technology. What I'm talking about is the ability of the human mind to abstract characteristics of reality, to foreground the elements that are purposeful, the ones that we prefer, and then, to design mechanisms that allow us to optimize or select from reality our preferences, and to reduce or eliminate the things that we'd prefer not to have. So, this could be in any domain. Agricultural technology does this in the context of food. Military technology does this in the context of other people's power. So, technology is simply that game of using the mind to abstract, to model reality. By virtue of modeling it, we can actually pull forth things like principles and characteristics that allow us to then engage in the process of design, that allows us to then reconfigure the reality that we live in. Technology is nothing more than a reconfiguring of the existing reality, in furthering alignment with our preferences, which is to say, to increase the power of our will in relationship with how reality actually plays vis a vis us. So, the upside of technology, of course, is where we are. We live in a world where we have air conditioning in Texas in the summer, which I recognize is a boon. And, that we can do things like record our conversations that anybody else who wants to see them can choose to, which mixed emotions about that one. Here's the downside. The downside is our minds are very limited. That technology fundamentally participates in the epistemological category, that a gentleman named Dave Snowden brought to me called complicatedness, as opposed to complexity. So, complexity is complex reality. It's nature, qua nature. It's the thing that is actually infinite in its infinitesimal, in its nuance, and its relationality. We can't really ever understand it, and it will change and grow and evolve. Novelty will emerge. Complicated, and this is our model. Map versus territory is a pretty standard way of describing it. And technology is strictly bound to our models, technology is strictly bound to the complicated. What that means is that as we increase our power, we increase simultaneously, the presencing of that, which we at least within our narrow desires, prefer. And we increase the degree to which we're throwing shit into the natural environment that we don't actually see or understand, because we've alighted it from our vision. Economics calls that externalities. Now, of course, in our narrow vision, we may not understand, let's say, for example, our ability to foreground, let's go with estrogen, for purposes that are very particular like to make skin cream. Well, as soon as that skin cream washes off and gets into the water supply, it now becomes an externality that is going into nature in a way that breaks a lot of stuff that nature operates with. Multiply that by literally everything. By the way, a lot of people and by a long period of time. So that's the problem child of technology, which we have not really dealt with. The only way we've been able to deal with technology this far is more technology. I think any alcoholic can give you a sense of where that ends up. And by the way, I'd love to have a conversation with Marc Andreessen on this, because I think he had an opportunity about a year ago, to go through an initiatory process and pop through. And something happened, where he's basically just doubled down. I can't tell whether that's a game or whether he's just decided to give up, and accept the fact that he's going to be the kind of the Oppenheimer of this era.
AUBREY: I don't know who that guy is.
JORDAN: Oh, Marc Andreessen. He's the guy who created Netscape, and then created a venture fund called Andreessen Horowitz, and has been funding lots of stuff, and he's become one of the leading kinds of Silicon Valley billionaire intellectuals behind effective accelerationism. AI is going to solve our problems, run. That sort of particular ideology. Although I have to admit, I haven't been following him closely enough recently. There may be more nuance to it than I'm picking up. So then, what's the other side? The other side is this question at the end of days. Did you see the movie "Oppenheimer"?
AUBREY: I didn't, but I heard it was fucking great.
JORDAN: Yeah, it's really good. If you don't mind, I'd like to sort of lay out the last scene. Spoiler alert. The last scene, beautifully done, right? Because given Nolan's methodology, he slices time apart. So, we have a series of events that keep occurring in the movie linearly, in our experience, that all kind of build to a moment at the end. So we have Oppenheimer having a conversation with Einstein at a pond in Princeton. And what we see from the outside is that, oh, he knows Einstein, oh my gosh, what are they going to talk about? Oppenheimer walks up, has a conversation. And then we see the Einstein walks out sort of visibly upset. We're not quite sure what he talked about. The last scene, we get to find out what they talked about. Earlier in the arc, maybe the first time they meet, the folks working on the Manhattan Project had run out the math where they said, wait, there may be a possibility of a chain reaction that when we actually ignite the bomb, it'll start an uncontrollable chain reaction that will actually ignite the entire atmosphere.
AUBREY: Splitting. So, as far as I understand, that when you split one atom, the energy created could split other atoms, which could then create this cascading effect of--
JORDAN: In just the ambient atmosphere.
AUBREY: Indefinite nuclear reactions.

JORDAN: You got it. There's sort of a nonzero risk. The mass, like non zero risk, how big? Well, nonzero. So, they brought it to Einstein, at least in the story. I don't know if this really happened. Einstein looks at it and goes, "Sounds like it's your fucking problem." This is beyond my math, you've got better mathematicians on it, you got it. They decided to go forward with the process. But here's the closer, and this is my interpretation of it. So, Oppenheimer's looking at the pond, watching the raindrops hit, the ripples sort of ripple out. And he's mindful of the fact that now we've moved past the atomic bomb to the hydrogen bomb. Because of course, game theory, as soon as we had the atomic bomb, that was eventually going to escape. By the way, it doesn't matter by what means. In this case, a particular spy that was in the Manhattan Project sent information over to the Russians, doesn't matter. Information will get out. The Russians had to have a bomb. They had to have symmetry in the arms race. Well, as soon as the Russians had the bomb, we had to have the H bomb, which is the escalation curve, right? The arms race has an escalation curve to it. Now, when you move from the A bomb to the H bomb, and you move to the H bomb with multiple people having the H bomb, you enter into mutually assured destruction. Mutually Assured Destruction is just the simplicity that the power that we're dealing with, the amount of power that we have embodied in hydrogen bombs past a certain small number, if we pop over into using them, we break stuff so badly that it's the end of the world. The end of the world, right? Human, nature combo, the End of Days. So that's the first moment, and Oppenheimer was living that, very deeply. He was living that experience. But what he noticed was that there was a cascade effect, that arms races are moving off in every direction. And so when I look at it, he says to Einstein, "Remember Albert, when we thought that when we set off this atomic bomb, there was a possibility that we would actually set up a chain reaction that would end the world?" He says, "Yeah, but I guess the math proved that it wouldn't happen that way." And Oppenheimer says, "I think we did that." Meaning when I read it, he recognized that they are now in a game theoretic arms race that had a terminus, and that terminus was, when we have access to a power or a tool, we will eventually use it. We've been boxing ourselves in, and we created this box of safety called the Cold War. So alright, we're not going to cross these boundaries. Back in the 40s, and 50s, even the 60s and 70s, the boundaries were actually pretty simple. Meaning two guys had to avoid pushing one button each. As long as Kennedy and Khrushchev did not fire the bombs, the world was safe. Our power was catastrophic, the level of nuclear hostility. But as long as we didn't cross that threshold, we were okay. By the way, as I'm sure you know, we barely crossed that threshold. There were several circumstances that may have crossed the threshold.
AUBREY: There was one story. This is just a small bracket opened up, and I haven't fact checked the story. But the story goes, as it was told to me, and again, apologies that I haven't fact checked and researched the details of the story. But, there was a Russian nuclear submarine at some point that received communication during some point, potentially Cuban Missile Crisis, potentially some other thing. Received communication that the US had launched a military strike, an atomic hydrogen military strike, and they then lost further communication. And so, it was actually the captain of this submarine that had to decide, well, my job is to counter attack in this instance, that's what I've been told. But he found some aspect of a warrior inside himself, and some aspect of consciousness, whether guided by external forces that be, or his own internal goodness and sense where he's like, we cannot do this, we cannot do this. He himself made this one decision not to launch it, because those are interesting places as well. You have a communication lapse, you get a false signal, and then one person could have actually ended the world or non-ended the world. And of course, he made the right choice. There were no nuclear strikes that were happening. So that would be an interesting story to look at, make sure that that's a reality. But even if it's not, this is the world we're living in. Sometimes there's some fucking close shaves, that we're not even aware of. And there may be even more of these close shaves that haven't even reached, haven't gotten declassified.
JORDAN: We'll hold that as an archetype, because the story continues from there. So let's hold that as an archetype. That individual happened to have been holding on to a potency or quantity of power, where his choice to act or not to act was decisive. But now let's shift back to this escalating arms race in every direction. So, let's think like, well, let's go with COVID. Let's go with the weaponization of viral technology. I was convinced as of January of 2020, that this was a lab-produced phenomenon. The evidence for that was strong enough even then to be 80% confident. My confidence has gone up since then.
AUBREY: It's been fairly well acknowledged at this point. At this point they're like...
JORDAN: More or less.
AUBREY: But you were a conspiracy theorist for a little while.
JORDAN: I sure was. Which is to say, I paid attention to logic and evidence, and noticed who was giving me very, very easy to disprove lies. I remember looking, and I think it was in science, like in February, there was sort of a very strong lab leak debunked. Obviously, zoonotic origin, it was sort of spreading around. It was a major journal. So, like, how about if I read it? I'll just read it, took a look at it, and read it. I was like, this is specious. The logic is weak beyond comprehension. There's no way this could actually get published as a real article. So, strong evidence that somebody is full of shit, right? Either people are panicking, and they're just trying to cover their ass or worse, but team zoonotic gets a debit, because their shit was clearly specious. Fair enough, right? Just keep going down the sensemaking architecture. But here's kind of the closing key point, which is, okay, so we explore the frontier of weaponizing viruses. Okay, fair enough. We're also exploring the frontier of weaponizing cyber war in a world that is increasingly cybernetic. And what happens if somebody pushes a virus button, a computer virus button that says, turns off all the electricity, and we can't turn it back on for like three days. Things get pretty bad pretty quick. Drones, what's going on in the Ukraine. If you've read a book by a gentleman named Manuel DeLanda, back in, I think 95, a long time ago, called "War In The Age of Intelligent Machines." He more or less called what we're looking at right now, which is, war has a habit of causing people to take away all the safeties, and just start engaging in an arms race. Drone technology and the ability to actually use drones in wars now, going through the World War Two acceleration curve. Drones can lead us into a place of Mutually Assured Destruction. We can have swarms of drones taking out vulnerable supply chains in locations and logistics that break down complicated, late capitalist society. We live in a highly fragile environment.
AUBREY: Right. And one of the other risks, and then another small bracket is drones are., there's a big curve to get to atomic or hydrogen bomb capability. The technology there is extreme and not impossible for some, but for a non-state agent to figure out, but close enough to impossible that it's very low on the risk threshold that somebody in their basement is going to figure out and have the access to the tech, and the science and the capability to make it. Swarms of drones with enough money, and the ability to make explosive devices or whatever else, it becomes actually a real possibility that non-state agents could actually control these drone swarms.
JORDAN: Yeah, absolutely. And we've been seeing this in the world of cyber back when I was a hacker, we call them script kiddies. These are kids who can't actually write the code to hack, but as soon as you write the code, they can run the code. So they get the power of the code that's written by somebody else. And all the technologies for psyops that had been developed by the state, for example, state agencies and commercial agencies for the 20th century, every generation--
AUBREY: Poor distinction.
JORDAN: Yeah, poor distinction, for sure. Those become available. So, Millennials grew up in such a supersaturated psyop environment, that they are sophisticated psychological operators intuitively, as like the best psyops guys in the CIA in the 70s. Because the techniques are just the water, they just drink it. And the technology, the mimetic technology producing things that disseminate wildly throughout the world are off the charts, particularly now with AI kicking off. With AI and deep fakes, we're going to be very close to a threshold where the mechanisms of collaborative sensemaking we've become used to are just going to no longer be functional. We won't be able to tell whether anything is actually real. Like a video from somebody, is that really from them? A scientific article that has pages deep of linkages and citations to completely made up documents, which an AI can produce literally instantaneously. But it may take humans weeks or months to actually get through to find out that they're bogus, by which time the attention span has assumed the headline is real, has lost track of the underlying story and has moved on. So whether it's breakdown of collective sensemaking, the ability to coordinate, whether it's breakdown of supply chains, whether it's breakdown of energy chains, or whether it's just straightforward kinetics, the point is this box of Mutually Assured Destruction, more and more ways for us to fill that box have been invented. And increasingly, that submarine commander is you. Increasingly, you're empowered to have to make a choice. And, increasingly, it's not a choice of an affirmative push a button, and everybody dies, but actually, every choice I make now has to actually be impeccable. Otherwise, the negative externalities that I'm throwing off into the world will actually lead to a collapse of this complicated system. That's the problem that Oppenheimer saw in the video that I was watching. That's what I mean by this, at the end of days. We're getting to a point where our power is increasingly so high. And our wisdom is so out of step with that power, that at some point will break something that we can't fix. Then a cascade effect will begin to unfold, human and natural. The cascade effect of people getting panicked or angry or losing hope, and therefore acting in that fashion, which leaves more energy in the destruction direction. We certainly have enough power then to end the whole thing. So that's what I mean when I say that.
AUBREY: I understand.
JORDAN: So, I think your two forks; Empire and Kingdom, my sense of it is, is that Empire is a very brief, a brief stopping point. I don't think we ended Empire. I think if we head in the Empire direction, there's a period of time that has a feeling of deep, deep constriction. After which, everything falls apart.
AUBREY: Yeah, empires fall.
JORDAN: Empires fall. That's critical to get. It is intrinsic to the nature, collapses intrinsic to the nature of empire, just a matter of time. And the more energy and information is processing, and the faster that happens, people don't really seem to get this. The reason why the Bronze Age took as long as it took is because at the end of the day, it was not metabolizing very rapidly, slow metabolism. Our current environment is metabolizing hyper rapidly. So, it took thousands of years back then, may take, I don't know, decades or years. I estimated China had about 10 years under the arc that it was going under. Very rough, but that's sort of just a sense of it. So, that's a double whammy, because if we go in the Empire direction, our ability to restore something like the Kingdom is even harder.
AUBREY: I accept that hypothesis as one potential hypothesis of it. But I can also see another potential hypothesis in which, and this is not what I'm rooting for. But just to throw this out on the table, is that Empire actually creates a certain scaffolding of coordination within state agencies and government agencies, where actually this understanding that there is actually a level of coordination that is even beyond nationalism to a certain degree, and that there is a greater level of coordination and scaffolding. And then, Kingdom, this consciousness, infiltrates the scaffolding and infrastructure that Empire created for top down control. Because the point of Empire is they're trying to control everything, to prevent this reality that you're discussing this end of days, and they think the only way we're going to do this is if we watch every single thing that everybody makes, we manipulate and control every narrative, we get people so afraid that we have everybody under control. We know what everybody's saying, we know what everybody's doing, we're tracking them wherever they go, we can watch everything, and we have people with guns and jackboots, they'll come in, they'll fucking wipe anybody out. Okay, that's going to fall. It's going to cause a problem. But it is possible, I think that that actually, that move is made. And then still the force of Kingdom, that works from the inside out, and starts to infiltrate, and starts to actually use some of the scaffolding that Empire's created. But, use it in a benevolent way. I don't like that reality, but I also don't want to get in a place where if Empire does actually pull this move off, that we're just like, alright, we're fucked now.
JORDAN: Fair enough.
AUBREY: Completely. I still think there's a way to, even, let's say, take pharma, or take big ag, there's a way that I feel like it can change from the inside out. And then all of a sudden, McDonald's could be the purveyor of the healthiest food on the planet, because they have the distribution network that's available for it. So, I still have some degree of hope, but I do feel like another strategy of moving further towards kingdom, and not getting to that place where we're completely restricted and clamped down, is the move that we gotta fight for, but we don't stop.
JORDAN: Well, I think we can even, just to make it a little bit easier, which is not like it's Empire happens tomorrow, and everything's hunky dory right now. We've been sitting in the midst of Empire for a long time.
AUBREY: Yes.
JORDAN: So, no matter what, we're already where you're talking about. The Kingdom will be emerging in the context of Empire one way or another. Actually, very practically. The concerns or reservations I would have about a furthering of Empire would be, one, they're building the wrong infrastructure. Even if you actually managed to take from within, a large part of the work is going to have to be done redesigning the damn thing.
AUBREY: Yeah, true.
JORDAN: Let me think. Two, we are burning non-replaceable resources. And I mean this, both spiritually and emotionally, culturally as well as physically. So, we just sort of keep pushing ourselves to the point where things get dicer and dicer. And, three, there is, of course, going to be some point at which you're tipped over the top. Now, by the way, tipping over the top, again, looping back to the A metaphor, rock bottom is rock bottom. It may be that it's not until the actual moment of collapse, where the things are actually really seriously obviously and undeniably falling off, that the consciousness raises to say, okay, kingdom, and that it's actually the kingdom sort of emerges in the midst of that. What we don't know is we don't know how fast that can happen. That may be very fast. I was watching how rapidly things were happening in early COVID. One of the advantages of the world, the infrastructure that we have built, this crazy digital thing, the social dilemma that we've built, is that we actually can communicate with everybody on the planet more or less instantaneously. And all this attention, everybody unhealthily pointing to the digital does mean that if a signal goes out in the digital, that orients attention in a certain direction, everybody can get it, and kind of will.
AUBREY: Well, and this is also why someone like RFK is fighting against censorship, or someone like Elon who goes and clears what's now X, formerly Twitter, from a place of censorship, actually allows the free dissemination of information. And one of the problems was that our actual infrastructure itself was still being controlled by Empire, in collusion with government. So, government and corporate agencies again, working together to suppress information to allow their narrative to be dominant. So, we need places where there's free exchange, and it feels like, oh, shit, all right, well, we got at least one. We got one way in which people can communicate. And yeah, there's going to be AI creating different shit, which is going to be confusing, the epistemic commons that's come from, I think the field of more your colleagues and some of my friends, this idea of alright, this is the place where you make sense, this is how you know what you know. It's the library of the world, basically. That's been degraded. There's a lot of other problems, but at least ideas can be spread freely without suppression and censorship. So, that's kind of part of what's been going on here as well. I think Empire realizes, if the truce can actually spread virally, mimetically in a way, this could really undermine our plans.
JORDAN: Yes. And that's, by the way, double good news. In fact, one of the things I told my friends about the 2016 Trump Election was that, well, good news, is we still live in a democracy. Because I assure you, if Team Blue could have stopped that election from happening, they would have. So that means we lived in a functional democracy, at least for a while. I don't know if we still do, but we did at the time. It's a good sign. That's a good thing.
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah.
JORDAN: Same thing here. The Empire, it is hard for me to imagine. I mean, people can definitely tell stories of the degree to which Elon may, in fact, be a double blind or captured in some way. And he probably is compromised in certain ways, too powerful not to be part of the big game. But it's hard for me to imagine that the--
AUBREY: Maybe.
JORDAN: Everybody is compromised in some way, if you're powerful enough. But it may not be enough to matter. That's the key thing. If you're willing to just say, "Yeah, fuck off, go ahead, release the tapes, I don't care," or, delete $50 billion worth of my wealth or freeze my assets, I'm willing to go that direction, then of course, we cannot be held by false power if we're not allowing ourselves to be held by false power. But in any event, it's hard for me to put together a scenario where the degree to which Twitter has enabled a renaissance of communication and relatively unburdened speech, if they could have stopped it, which is actually a good sign. Because that indicates that the Empire is actually reasonably not powerful. It's actually within a relatively ordinary range of capacity.
AUBREY: Right. Just to double click on the democracy thing, it seems like you got to give and of course, I'm a huge supporter. I've gone all in for Bobby Kennedy. I know him as a man, I know his heart. And it's again one of those things where yes, I agree with what he says, but I also, I love the man genuinely. From my heart, I love him. I've met his kids and I love his kids. It makes me emotional, because this is a good man. I feel that, I feel that every cell in my body. So I get asked, and I've never been political in my whole life. I've never believed in anybody. I thought Obama was cool. He had a nice crossover and a good finger roll. That mattered a lot to me. That was a symbol for me. That really inspired, he spoke and he was a great orator. He'd have made Cicero proud, with how he can speak. So I had some hope. It didn't pan out the way that I'd hoped it would. Way too many people getting locked up for marijuana charges and a whole bunch of personal things. I was like, "Come on, bro." However, that's not the point of it. The point is, for the very first time, I've actually never even registered to vote, but not only am I going to be registering to vote, I'm out there fucking giving everything I got, because I believe in this. So, this is kind of the long way around, and also open for any of your comments on any of that, but it's a long way around of me saying, all right, I think we're in a place where we have to agree, not have to, but most of us are making sense of things, that there's a small or medium amount of fuckery that can happen with election machines, ballots. And it's probably there's always been some fuckery, dead people who are voting. I mean, that's probably occurred in the fucking 1800s, dead people voting, somebody coming in--
JORDAN: Oh, for sure.
AUBREY: So, that's always been there. So, it looks like that's probably increased. Maybe it was 1% in 1870. In 1940, it was maybe 1.5 or 2%. And then by now in 2020, it feels like all right, what was that? Maybe 4%? So there's some level, but there's still mostly democracy with just some fuzziness around the edges. Is that kind of how you see it now?
JORDAN: Absolutely.
AUBREY: So, if I had to pin you down and go, alright, so what do you think is the delta? What do you think is the margin of fuckery?
JORDAN: Well, it's not evenly distributed. And so, the key element is actually what's the margin of fuckery at the places that matter? The choke points. It's not average. And because the places that matter have actually been narrowed down to a relatively small amount--
AUBREY: Because certain states with certain Electoral College votes.
JORDAN: Even very specific counties and cities. So, if I took you to a place like Philadelphia, probably as high as 10-15%. Maricopa County, maybe 5-6%. So, high enough to really matter.
AUBREY: That's big. Because most elections are not won by percentages that are higher than that. So that's big. The scary part is it seems like this is not in both directions. It seems like they're picking a candidate and applying the fuckery. Because if there was actually evenly distributed fuckery, and again, I think huge evolutions needed in our red versus blue team dynamics, right? We have to have an independent, that actually breaks this system, so people are actually voting for people rather than voting for teams and these structures. But it feels like it feels like one team seems to have... I mean, I don't like to say that because I don't like to reify the team ideology.
JORDAN: The thing we can say with certainty is that Team Blue dominates cities. No question about that. Nobody would argue about it. It's very obviously true. And we can say with confidence that it's easier to apply fuckery in cities, because it's a much more complicated environment with a lot more moving parts going on. Fuckery in the rural environments is harder, because the people who live in those environments, this population is thin enough that if you apply fuckery, it's easier to tell if you know what I'm saying.
AUBREY: Yeah, because it's Bobby, or Johnny or Tim, or Susan, or whoever down the street, like, "What are you doing?"
JORDAN: Anonymity creates a gap, as it does in every case, right? If our relationships are not real, they're mediated by a form of formality, that gap right there is a niche for fuckery. Almost all fuckery happens in that gap. And so, cities are easier to manipulate and have always been. The notion of political machines were invented in the big cities. There's also more resources to graft, to flow, just because they have more wealth to play with, more concentrated wealth. And so, the likelihood that Team Blue is more able to play with machinery of fuckery in the contemporary environment at the low level, like at the electoral level, is, I think, a pretty strong heuristic. Team Red, back in the Bush years, Rove and that stuff, they seem to really optimize on, like aggressive mimetic warfare back in the late 20th and early 21st century. Although, I don't know the details. I'm not sophisticated in political machinations. But let's focus on RFK for a moment, because, so, here's the thing that I would say. So, vis a vis Elon and Twitter. Yes, window of opportunity. Why don't we take advantage of it? Here's the challenge, I think, in front of us. We've become so, how do I say, disempowered, cynical, skeptical, but also lazy. Fucking lazy, my goodness. And stupid. We're not lazy. Like if the builders build, but they build stupid shit that we don't need. We don't need yet another app. That's not the thing to be building. Or just get in fights online. Where you have energy, what are you going to do? I'm just going to pretend like I just won a great squabble, because I dunked on somebody online. So, how about we be less stupid, and we'd be less lazy, and we take advantage of the fact that we don't actually need any of the legacy institutions. We don't need any of them. They're all very obsolete, and very old fashioned, and very nonfunctional. And we could build new institutions that are radically more effective, if we simply coordinated, and therein lies the challenge. So, if we have a window of opportunity, where Elon is providing us the ability to tell the truth to each other to some meaningful extent, we should probably take advantage of that. We should build two or three backups in case Elon gets erased or he changes his mind. Why not? Good backups, well intentioned backups. Why not be thoughtful and functional about it? And by the way, we should be coordinating using these techniques to think about how to build a battle plan, to build all the rest of this stuff, like tweet tweet right now. And here's an example. Let's take RFK. Come on. In all likelihood, and this is really honest, in all likelihood, he's going to be running against Biden or maybe Newsom, or whatever perhaps, Michelle Obama. And Trump from jail.
AUBREY: Well, I mean, Trump from jail, that's a whole new game. But let's just play the first game which is, he's trying to emerge from the blue team, which fucking hates him.
JORDAN: Which hates him, of course.
AUBREY: When it comes down to voting, like it was at voting on censoring the censorship hearing he had. He had only Republicans voting in his favor, and all Democrats voting against him. It was pretty clear that even though he's wearing the blue jersey, the blue team fucking hates him.
JORDAN: Oh, yeah. Well, Team Blue Church, the way that I described it back in the day. Blue shirts absolutely hate him. He's an apostate of the, needs to be burned at the stake sensibility.
AUBREY: A heretic.
JORDAN: Yeah. So let me just frame it just a little bit further out. I got an election, I got Trump in jail, and I got Biden with, what do they call it? Putting a lid on it. Biden just puts the lid on it, so we don't even know that he exists. Andropov, if you remember the Russian dude. Andropov Biden, we're not even clear that he's still alive, Biden. And Trump in jail, right? Bobby Kennedy is running against those two. A hypothesis, let me set that up. Come on, guys, really? We cannot self-organize the capacity to simply reveal the idiocy and corruption in the structure? And I don't mean necessarily even winning the election. How about we run our own election? We have that election run in a fashion where it's very easy to prove that the votes cast are the votes cast. And we actually get enough votes cast to be able to show that, by the way, in a real honestly well run election, it could happen in 48 hours in a digital environment with 0% likelihood or miniscule likelihood of falsehood. Guess what? He won enough to win. Or at least one enough to be a meaningful horse in the race. Why not? Why not just completely obsolete the current infrastructure? Or create a higher level infrastructure that plugs down. So, here's an example that I came up with a long time ago, and I pitched to Bret Weinstein back in 2020, which was, I can basically have an optionality in this modality. So, I go, okay, I will sign up to vote for RFK, and I'll register digitally. So, it'll be verified that I have a legitimate vote, and I'll put my vote in. Like Kickstarter. Only if enough people actually in my district vote will I actually execute on that. So, the day before the actual election, we'll all get our signal back and say, Kickstarter project RFK, yes or no. You get what I'm saying? So, the risk if you threw your vote away, if you vote for a third party, or in this case, if you, let me just use that as the frame for now, you can completely eliminate that. Where I say, okay, if everybody else agrees to vote for RFK, I do too. And, if we get 51% of people actually voting, then all of us, the signal goes out and says, alright, guess what, your team just went thumbs up on RFK. So, execute on your pledge to go vote for RFK in the "official election". But by now, it's actually preordained, because we've actually assembled enough people to have already won the election in a way that can be very easily proven was true. Then you can call the number, "Hey, official infrastructure."
AUBREY: I mean, easily proven also requires some form of, and I think Elon is actually working on this, some form where we each have our unique blockchain identity.
JORDAN: We have to have a digital identity.
AUBREY: With some kind of digital identity that cannot be fucked with. And so, we have to have that technological advancement.
JORDAN: So, this goes back to the conversation we're talking about, like people can get all up in arms about the Empire-Kingdom distinction. So, I'll just sort of put it very straightforwardly. A high fidelity, strong digital identity, for any viable future. Kingdom or Empire.
AUBREY: I agree.
JORDAN: We don't want the Imperial version. Everybody who's worried about CBDCs, or social credit scores and digital fascism, that is a good worry. That's the Imperial version. There's a Kingdom version over here that we can do; highly decentralized, self-sovereign, incorruptible. That needs to happen and needs to happen like yesterday. As soon as possible. And I don't want to wait on Elon to do it, because he doesn't have the incentive landscape to do it properly. I've seen the way he designs things, sometimes his design choices don't map up with the way it needs to be done. So, I want to get there, the people. Why don't the people actually say, we claim our own identity, and the technology for doing that, fortunately, has been largely developed. So, we can actually execute on it. That'd be a nice swarm, like tomorrow. How about we initiate a swarm tomorrow for everybody to just say, yeah, that version of decentralized digital identity, I'm in, I'll sign up for it. By the way, if I'm not good, if the version that's out there that we say that's the one we should do isn't good enough, list the design changes that need to happen for you to be ready to go so we can all collaboratively do an open source project, and pop it over to the threshold where it needs to be. So, in the period of, I don't know, a couple of months, this giant collective intelligence known as humanity can actually build the infrastructure at the very bottom of the social stack, this digital identity and have it owned by the people themselves and not by anybody else. That'd be a very powerful thing for us to do.
AUBREY: Essential. And then you could use that to then put pressure on the official election machine--
JORDAN: Really fucking powerful.
AUBREY: To say, all right, all of these false votes, and then find some kind of transparent system where your digital identity is registered. It can actually be kind of reviewed in a way so that actually there is fidelity.
JORDAN: And you know about the zk-SNARKs, right?
AUBREY: I don't.
JORDAN: So this is very important, new, relatively new. I mean, the crypto community, it's relatively old, but that's like two years old or so. So, this is a zero-knowledge proofs. So what it does is it gives you the ability to say, let's say, for example, you want to be able to query whether or not I have the right to vote in this particular election. And I want to be able to prove to you that I have the right to vote in this particular election, but I don't want to tell you who I am, or anything about me. Zero knowledge proof is a technology that now exists and is very well established, designed and are being implemented that allows us to do that. So, I can show up at the polling booth digitally or physically, and I can essentially give you a proof that I absolutely have the right to vote in this election, haven't voted before, and I'm a real human, whatever, all the stuff we want, but nothing else. So, perfect privacy, but perfect fidelity and transparency and the elements that matter. And I'll give you an example of where this can be very useful. This can help us kind of slice the Gordian knot, that's got old Jordan Peterson wrapped up around pseudo anonymous identities on Twitter. Elon can have his cake and eat it too. You can use zero knowledge proofs where I come in, and I establish in some fashion, and many different ways of doing it. For example, I'm a real live human, and I'm not a bot. And then I can use zero knowledge proof to tell Twitter, yep, real human, not a bot. I can even get a deeper identity. If Twitter asks me to say who you are? like what actual human are you, or verify that you're an American, whatever it is, I can issue proof of those specific elements, and no more. So, it allows me to have a very powerful capacity to control the particulars of my identity, and prove things again, cryptographically for real but without revealing anything else. So, the technology for doing that, A, exists, has been implemented, is available to be delivered at scale, and can be done in entirely decentralized fashion. So, you can have your add-ons. And you can avoid, what did you call them? Internet troll demons. You can have both simultaneously. It's ready. It's just a matter of us getting the right consciousness and awareness and beginning to move into this 21st century form of coordination that has been such a slow start to actually just beginning to make it happen without having either venture capital money funding it, or some oligarch decided they're going to lightning bolt it into happening.
AUBREY: I mean, I love that idea. Of course, I'm all for it, I'm fucking all in. It seems to me though, the only way that I can play that story where it makes sense is in this story where, I don't know, maybe this is just my lack of faith, maybe because of our laziness, maybe because of a variety of our inability to self-organize so far at this level of consciousness that we're at, and the necessity that we get to this state, ASAP. As in, ASAP, even prior to this next election, ASAP, really fast.
JORDAN: Prior to this conversation. We're already way behind
AUBREY: We're way behind. So, it would be highly helpful if Elon is, I really actually, I don't know Elon, so I don't have the same relationship that I have with Bobby where I, because I know a lot when I look in someone's eyes, and I feel their energy, and you can call that all woowoo and whatever. But I have the anthro-ontology, that feeling like through my body, I've envisioned God. I have a sense, I can feel somebody. I haven't felt Elon, I don't know. And I'm sure he's complicated.
JORDAN: I'm sure he is.
AUBREY: I'm sure he's fucking complicated. However, it seems to me that if he made that move, it could get the critical mass and momentum together. And then it'd also clean up the Twitter infrastructure, because right now Twitter still has enormous amount of bot pressure that can be controlled by Russia or China or--
JORDAN: Yeah, no question.
AUBREY: Completely non state, just disruptive, kind of whatever. There's a whole bunch of different ways that people can weaponize bots in this way. But if you had this, put into the Twitter or X atmosphere, then it could get enough critical mass, and then he has a proclivity that he's shown to open source this tech. And he's shown that with Tesla, shown that with actually even open source in the algorithms, and a variety of different things. It seems like that would be the fastest--
JORDAN: Oh, it'd be by far the best. No ifs, ands or buts. From your lips to Elon's ears. If Elon were to implement a properly designed digital identity infrastructure, decentralized, that Twitter is the first client on top of a decentralized infrastructure, it would be the best thing. Literally, the most important best thing that could happen in the world right now would be that as far as I can tell. By the way, he could. So, the only question is will he?
AUBREY: Let's go, Elon. Come on, bro.
JORDAN: How might we kind of cause him to decide, help him decide for his own purposes, in his own way of understanding reality, it is actually the right thing to do. As far as that goes, I have no idea.
AUBREY: I'd be willing to be. Let's say, here, I get to put on my prophecy hat, which has no credibility, because I'm not a prophet. So, no credibility there for me. But if I had to just sense, I have a sense he's going to do it.
JORDAN: Nice.
AUBREY: I have a sense that he's going to do it. My closest, I know people who know Kimbal pretty well. Kimbal and Elon still have a pretty good relationship as far as brothers go, and I have this kind of sense that there's this consciousness that's at least close and surrounding the enigma that is Elon, that I have no personal knowledge about, but just a kind of sense of things by watching him, and a sense of things by the people who know the people close to him, that I trust, the people that I can have that relationship with. Oh, I trust you, I trust you to actually read the people that are close to him. That's what gives me the confidence that he's actually going to do it. So if I was going to put my money down, and there was a big Vegas bookie that came in and said, all right, put your money where your mouth is, here's your odds, will you place a six-figure bet on this? I would place it.
JORDAN: Wow. Well, it is my understanding, I'm no expert on this fashion. But the notion of whether you're a prophet or not is God's choice, not yours. And I expect that if you find yourself called to prophesy, you'd accept that vocation. So, if Elon calls you to the king's chambers, I'm afraid you're going to have to be Daniel in this particular circumstance. That might be very helpful, by the way.
AUBREY: Yeah. I mean, look, so one of the tools that I've been developing, so my field of expertise and my field of, if I dare use the word mastery, which mastery is always the perpetual recognition of being a student in pursuit of mastery. A master never actually calls himself a master, because the more you understand, the more you realize that there is to understand. So, my pursuit of mastery has been in the field of psychonautics and psychedelic medicine. 24 years, I've been diligently following the path, learning from the masters, the lineage holders of the Shipibo, of the Chavin, of the Bwiti. And then also, including all of that, and transcending it into a kind of a global understanding of how we can interact with these sacred medicines. Whether they're synthetic, or whether they're plant based, I think a lot of times people have a knee jerk reaction to only the plants are good, and all synthetics are bad. I think we have to get beyond that and understand that we're interacting, both of these things are interacting with our own consciousness in a particular way. And they reliably, and there's been studies from Johns Hopkins and a variety of things that allow people to access a spiritual dimension, a field of a felt sense of the Divine, or a felt sense of the good, or a felt sense of an ethos that actually can almost bind them in a certain way because you have access to it. I know for me, if I've done even the slightest shitty thing to a person, if I've fucked someone in the slightest way, even unconsciously, ayahuasca will bring that right to my face, and I'll have to look right at it. And it will not let me go until I go and I make that call and I make that text. I can't tell you how many times that's happened where I thought I was, alright, I'm really acting in the best way. But shit, I missed this one, I hurt this person's feelings. Or I was just spinning the cue ball a little bit too much here for my own advantage. And so, it'll call me to that. And also, radically open my heart. So, one of the things that's happening that also gives me hope is I think these technologies when used appropriately. Now, this is not to say that there are not a lot of different off ramps into fields of what you'd call Luciferic inflation, and fields of delusion, and fields of kind of really challenging areas. This is not a panacea. It's not universally applied with universal success. But as a generality, it's part of what's opening up these new levels of consciousness that are necessary. So, for example, my wife and I have developed our own facilitation that we've started to spread to key allies in what I would call the golden kingdom, which is just a metaphor for the good kingdom. And in the golden kingdom, trying to reach these key allies, introducing them to a variety of different medicines, some like the ayahuasca traditions that I am incapable of facilitating, nor would I endeavor to do so. It requires both a lineage and a deep, deep commitment to that particular path. But we've developed our own path. It has been wildly profound, and being able to open this up. We call this our particular lineage that's developed. 22 years after I've been on the path, learning from all the medicines, we've created our own lineage and we call that lineage, the God bomb, which is an interesting thing. If there's a bomb, like the H bomb that can actually destroy. This is a bomb that can actually blow up all the false constructs within yourself, and allow you to access something that emerges from the heart, and gives you clarity of mind, the clear light. The light that illuminates the truth without actually distorting it in any way. And so, if Elon gets word from these different people who have gone through this and say, "Alright, Aubrey, I'm into it." Oh, of course. Of course, here we are. Vylana will show up with her sound bowls. It's like, you're going to need a body work table, and I've apprenticed in a particular type of bodywork. And we know the medicine stack
JORDAN: I've heard that God bomb is the best first step in any training for MMA style combat. Just putting it out there. If you don't want to get your ass kicked on national television, by little Mark Zuckerberg, maybe you should take the God bomb first.
AUBREY: Yeah, get them in there. The irony of that is there has been many, many high performing athletes who, some have been willing to share some of these experiences--
JORDAN: Oh, makes sense to me.
AUBREY: UFC fighter, TJ Dillashaw. It wasn't the God bomb, but I let him through actually a DMT ceremony, where he was actually able to, it was limited to his sport. Also, it opened up a lot of things, but he was able to see himself winning the championship so visibly and so clearly. And, then through a variety of different injuries and whatever, got an immediate title shot against Renan Barão where he was like a nine to one underdog, but had seen something so clearly that he was able to be victorious. Now, how much did that ceremony contribute to that? I don't know. But the felt sense where he felt himself as champion gave him a certain level of confidence, and so much of competition is confidence. So, you were kind of joking there, kind of baiting Elon into this. But I also think that it does have universal effects where it can universally allow you to perform at the highest level. Let's not forget that in this 24-year journey with psychedelic medicine and all psychonautic practices, which include darkness retreats, and darkness therapy, includes breathwork, includes sensory deprivation tanks, includes ecstatic dance, includes all of these other factors, includes even meditative practices, all of these different things, these have a universal ability to allow you to perform at the highest level. Because during that period, I mean, we're talking 11 years in, I started a company called Onnit, and then successfully built and exited that company with a big nine figure exit. So, if you're talking about that game, and you're talking about performance, the medicine work that I did was invaluable in allowing me to perform at that level. And it's not like I had a huge head start. I was able to scrape together $110,000 from two friends, and we grew Onnit from that nut, and no particular, obviously I had a great partner in that business too, and you can say that Joe Rogan is an enormously powerful partner. That partnership wasn't because he was my family friend, or whatever, it's because I sought him out as a friend, we made a friendship, an alliance. And we built something together on basically a handshake with a little bit of money, and succeeded in performing in the game metric that we're actually playing in and all of the other spiritual dimensions were accessed as well. So, there's so much I think possible in the right relational use of the psychonautic practices. And I think that's a big ally that we're all aware of it, but it's still actually being under indexed as far as the potential value that it can offer to the world.
JORDAN: Yeah, well, I'm going to say another piece, which is, if I look back to the history of it, back in the 60s, when it first really kind of burst onto the scene. It's sort of, can be too easily captured by false power as well. So, the technology of being able to, I personally can say that I feel like it connects you to true power. It can pop you through the false symbols, shed the false symbols, as you say. Put you face to face with atonement. Not all of them, but some of them. You have wronged somebody, and guess what, you're going to now suffer that experience by living it directly, so you have an opportunity to really grow enough internally to be able to go forward and fix things in reality.
AUBREY: Atonement, also another beautiful way to look at this, just to play on words is at-one-ment. It's collapsing the myth of separation and realizing that you can't fuck somebody over without fucking yourself over, because it's you living a different life.
JORDAN: Yeah. You stepped on somebody's toes and it was your own.
AUBREY: Exactly.
JORDAN: And yet, the adversarial forces of false power have long ago figured out how to play with these tools as well, and lure people. So, just in that same sensibility of infinitesimal courage, and that initial spiritual warfare, the carefulness of, and you said it just right, actually. You said it perfectly, which is that you actually haven't got proper permission to take people through an ayahuasca journey, because that requires a certain level of, let's say, responsibility, and a certain level of having been called properly to do so.
AUBREY: Correct.
JORDAN: So, I think if we can raise that element, like raise the level of carefulness. By the way, the word sacred, that word sacred I think is just right. Ultimate concern for that, which is, ultimate care for the ultimate concern. So, the more powerful something is, the more careful we need to be, the more we can and should use the technologies and techniques of sacredness. And this is, okay, that thing right there, very powerful. Therefore, treat it with care. Treat it as sacred. What does that mean? Well, you can't take people through it, because you haven't been called to properly. These individuals have gone through the suffering and the growth and the intimacy. And by the way, just a straightforward calling. It's actually their responsibility in the universe to do it. Great, let them go ahead and do it. I think if we can mature, by we, I'm speaking now for the people who've participated in this aspect of the story, to the point where we had that level of care, and we sort of re-bring in that level of the sacred, then yeah, I'm certain these technologies are necessary.
AUBREY: I really agree with that. I think a lot of people have this kind of idea that it's cheating, if you're using these technologies. The real way is to spend 20 years in a monastery and meditating. No, that's a way, it's a beautiful way. However, the way that our lives are moving so quickly, and so fast, to expect or imagine that somebody is going to endeavor to go along that path, which is going to have very small incremental effect over time applied, and I'm not saying people shouldn't do that. Of course, mad blessings. But what people look at as cheating or some bad version of a shortcut is like, no, no, no, this is actually a necessary shortcut. This is a necessary way that we can move and evolve faster, fast enough to meet the demands of what's being called forward from our consciousness to actually abide in a new state of a new story. I truly feel that these psycho technologies are actually really necessary at this point, and they have to be wielded with ultimate care.
JORDAN: Ultimate care. Yeah, I think if we can... Just like any other sacred object, it's necessary and ultimate care. It's easy to say, it's hard to do. But if we can do it, then, mazel tov.
AUBREY: So you have an idea that I want to unpack a little bit. I believe the term you used is silvium. I'd like you to explain that. But for my understanding, it's the idea that the Kingdom will birth from an actual place in a way. That there's actually a home, a home from which this flower is and actually, not only just a digital home, but a physical home, but I don't understand. I don't want to explain something that is your kind of concept here.
JORDAN: So it actually came out of a scientific insight, that then I began to extrapolate wildly. So, I'll begin with the scientist, Geoffrey West, and his insight, or the group that he was working with and their insight, which has to do with the unusual occurrence of exponential curves in cities that you don't see anywhere else in nature. I'm going to caveat a little bit because social networks have the same kind of curves. So, what Geoffrey and his team were doing was they were looking at scaling laws throughout nature. What they found was that for the most part, systems either scale linearly, you just add more grains of sand to a pile and it gets heavier linearly. Or they scale with a sub linear scaling factor, which is metabolic, is the archetype. So, if I double the weight of a mammal, for example, I increase its metabolic rate by only 0.85. I don't double it, which means that if I have an elephant compared to a mouse, its mass is let's say 10,000 times as high, but its metabolic rate is only say 100 times its size. I haven't done the math recently. And so, has a look of an asymptotic curve. The metabolic rate tends to be approaching, not going up anymore. If you can imagine it's not physically possible, if you could imagine a mammal that was mass like a quadrillion pounds, its metabolic rate would actually look like it's flattened out in relationship to other animals on that curve. I noticed this was happening in trees, branches on trees, leaves on trees, but also forests, ecosystems, ecosystems, cross species, everywhere. Corporations too by the way.

AUBREY: And so, when you're saying metabolic, you're talking about the demand on external resources to actually sustain it.
JORDAN: Yeah, the amount of energy per unit mass. So, it becomes more efficient, a more efficient use of energy for the same for the mass that it's using. Corporations have a similar curve with regard to wealth per employee. When they went and took a look at cities, what they discovered is that cities had a very similar dynamic for lots of infrastructure, like roads per capita, length of roads, or lengths of utility lines, sewer lines, things that are kind of like metabolic. But then they discovered this other curve, with things like wealth per capita, innovation per capita, which is on a completely different curve, an exponential curve that they'd never seen anywhere. So, what they found is that if you doubled the size of the city population, the wealth per capita goes up by 15%. Which of course, means the gross wealth goes up by a lot more because you've doubled the number of people and increased the wealth per capita. The innovation per capita also goes up by 15%, and doesn't take many doublings if you're going from say a 100-person village up to a million-person city, that's actually a very big gap. A very big difference in wealth per capita. Okay, so that's the end of the real science. Now it's my extrapolations. The extrapolation that I looked at, what I spent time with, and it's been about a decade that I've been looking at that, was, that's the generator civilization. That's the driver, that the simplicity is something like, there's a vortex or a centripetal attractor that wants to put as many human beings as possible into the same city. Because if you put more people into the same city, you increase wealth and innovation in an exponential curve. And there are things that wealth and innovation produce that are attractive, so it's self-perpetuating. That attraction attracts more people. As more people come in, you increase the wealth and innovation exponentially, as the attractor gets stronger. So that's the attractive force. But there's also a repulsive force, which is that, as you put more people into cities, you've got more bodies that are living in the same physical space. That becomes an entropic or energetic problem to solve. You have to have places to put those bodies, I've got to find a way to get enough food to feed them. Water, I've got to be able to remove their waste. This is a whole bunch of problematics. So, the history of city is the history of these two forces fighting against each other. If our innovation says, okay, we have enough wealth and innovation to suddenly build concrete houses that are five stories high, we can build a row. We can build aqueducts to bring water in from way far away so we can put a million people into a single urban environment, and the wealth and innovation that comes out of that can innovate roads that can build out. And I would propose, by the way, that all of civilization is simply the extended body of that, of the city. So, all of Rome, the entire Roman Empire, is effectively the territory of Rome itself. The word territory I'm using as a term of art, which is that one of the things that a city does, is it territorialized. Meaning it takes a piece of complex reality, land, and converts it into a use. So, it does become agricultural land, makes it subject to a human purpose, that makes it complicated to use the previous language. So, every Empire is a civilization of this sort, and is ultimately ground on the logic of squeezing as many bodies as possible into urban environments. And ideally, all under one city if you can get it. Okay, now, why is that? What's happening at the boundary there? My hypothesis, the next hypothesis is that ultimately, what we're seeing is Metcalfe's Law. We're seeing the fact that there's something that happens in the, what I call the anti-rivalrous domain, when minds are able to communicate, that we're able to actually create a greater mind by communicating with each other. That is the essence of this exponential. And that the city is actually just an artifact of the fact that up until relatively recently, communication has been bound to physical proximity. And in this case, we're living it. I didn't do this via Zoom, I'm talking to you in real life, for obvious reasons. We get a lot of bandwidth in physical bodies. I can read your body language, I can detect your pheromones, there's shit going on that I can't convey to you in an epistle, or in a telegraph, or a phone call. So the bandwidth of communication in physical person is very high so we need to get those bodies into the same place. But the real thing we're trying to do is trying to get minds into collaboration, and that's the exponential driver. All right, all that is backstory. What we've seen in the same moment that we've had these technologies and efforts to be able to figure out how to solve the problem of embodied conurbation, including by the way, transportation, is we've also seen a development of the technologies of communication that ephemeralizes the body. Writing being the primary first example. So, I can read Nietzsche, I didn't have to meet him. He's long dead. Science can happen because I can publish a scientific study, somebody can read it, and they can publish another study that has different results. You can communicate without being in the same place. And of course, we now live in a context where everybody who's watching this video, while they are not in this room, can participate in this conversation in a fashion that's not that different from being an audience sitting in the same room. With things like Apple and these XR goggles or whatnot, we're crossing a threshold where the binding between collaborative minds and bodies being in the same space is being broken. So, this now gives rise to a very profound, from my point of view, shift, and the underlying driver that has been driving civilization for 10,000 years, maybe longer. I have a deeper story of the kind of the Dunbar problem and how you actually solve for the shift from indigenous Dunbar level constructs, into things that can connect with this city driver, but we'll ignore that for the moment. So, the hypothesis is that simply as a consequence of the fact that we've actually reached this tipping point, we're on the other side of something, or shortly will be, where this volcanic driver at the center that's been ultimately whipping us around its axis for 10,000 years is no longer at the center. And human beings are suddenly, it's like somebody turned off gravity in the middle of the solar system. We're all floating around going okay, which direction do we go now? So, now here's the silvium hypothesis. I'm actually going to do this hypothesis through the lens of Metcalfe's Law. So, the hypothesis is that on one side of the Looking Glass, once out the eye of the needle, the dominant driver has been metric, it has been quantity. Metcalfe's Law is purely quantitative. The more human beings I add to a communications network, the more valuable that communication network becomes. Just numbers. Add more people. Doesn't matter anything about the quality of the people or the quality of the relationships, just their raw number. That's how it's measured. And this drove things like big cities and things like social media, say Facebook and Twitter and just threw more people in. Now, here's the logic. The logic is that what Metcalfe's Law really describes is the possibility of communication, which if you think about it is exactly what it's describing. If I have a whole bunch of people in a telephone network, I have increased the possible number of conversations I could have, which is how they originally defined value of the network. But there's two more mesh metrics, there's the actual potential conversations, which is a whole process. It's selecting from the possible the actual ones that I might encounter, a whole new set of filters on that. That's what the algorithm does. Then I have the actual conversations and what value I get out of them. So those are three steps. So, the hypothesis is that something like, for a long time, metrics dominate. And I would say by the way, thematically, civilization is a metric dominated characteristic. Lots of things like money is a metric, right? Decontextualized things from their relational contexts, and produces something where you can just make numbers go up. And that means good, makes it very simple, very tractable. But past a certain threshold, increasing possibility doesn't really get you anywhere. We live in an environment now where the gating item on my experience of the networks that I'm meshed in is not the number of people who are on the network, it's my attention. It's the amount of my time that I can spend, the conversations I can have. Should I be talking with you, or should I be talking with somebody else right now, at this moment? The finite amount of possibility. So, the possibility is now gated by something which cannot be addressed by adding more people to the top of the funnel. What it can be addressed by is increasing the quality of the funnel that comes all the way down, which is to increase the actuality of the conversations that I'm having. That's a very different thing. That's a qualitative thing. So, we're shifting from the moment of the quantitative, to the qualitative. And let's take this back to the notion of cities. The cities were dominated by the quantitative. Doesn't matter the quality of life, doesn't even matter the quantity of people at the end of the day. Just throw more bodies into the city. This, by the way, was the finding they were finding at the Santa Fe Institute, and Geoffrey West. Didn't matter whether you were talking about medieval Japan, or talking about 20th century Iran, the numbers are still double the number of people and increased wealth and innovation. So, the argument that I'm making, the silvium construct is, now that we have decoupled these two dynamics, we have both an opportunity and a strategic advantage by orienting towards quality in both directions is what I mean. Move the bodies into a context which is actually designed to increase the quality of life of the human body, embodied human, back into a more indigenous context, back into, remember the things we talked about earlier, back into real relationships with human beings that you care about, and they care about you. Back to real relationships, the natural environment, where you can care for it, and it can care for you. I don't know about you, but I've actually discovered in my life first-person that memory lives in places. That if you live in a place for a long enough time, and you go away, and you come back, like "Oh, shit." It's not that it inspires memories in me, but the memory is in the place itself.
AUBREY: And the rocks and the walls, and the trees.
JORDAN: It's in the rock, yeah. Just imagine for a moment the possibility of what it would be like to grow up in a place that your father and grandfather grew up in. And in that magical period of your childhood, the sacredness that is only available during that period of time, was stewarded by people who remembered that magic and had cared for the place at the level of sacredness that is appropriate to those magical places and moments. Like the tree, or the rock, the swing into the river, or, I'm here in Texas, so I have lots of Texas memories. And it wasn't by the way predated by individuals or entities that didn't care. It was not profane, but held sacred. And that you could then grow up as an individual in a relationship with that place to steward it for your child, and your grandchild. Just imagine what that does to your heart and your feeling of wholesomeness and meaningfulness and connectedness, and the quality of the kind of human being you would be, and how that would nurture your capacity to care for anything else. If you can care for the place that you're in at that level, you can care for the people you're around, and for your actions in the world. It's just a different way of having agency. Hill to die on, that kind of thing. And of course, imagine that same environment, everybody else around you had a similar relationship, and therefore by the way, also had a lot of skin in the game with each other. No more, fuck them. No, no, that guy's going to be here in this place. His kids are going to be with my kids. We need to take responsibility for that person. We need to care for each other really. It's that basic, again, indigenous sensibility, which is the sensibility that we are naturally afforded in a tuned capacity to thrive in as humans, as biological humans, the biological beasts. Alright, that's one side. Now imagine if that's how we were actually able to construct our environment. We're no longer being bound by the inhuman attractive, just throwing our bodies into the urban environment so we can tap into that wealth and into that innovation. We can access that same wealth and innovation, but now in the virtual realm, and our bodies can have access to this entirely new qualitative experience, and become nurtured and whole. Now, imagine what those human beings are able to achieve in their conversations and collaborations with other nurtured and whole people in the virtual. This is the internet, one data of hope. This is what happens when we encounter each other in the virtual. But we're whole humans, we're mature humans. We understand how to communicate, we understand how not to take things personally. We have an ethos of how to actually operate properly. By the way, a lot of that is as a result of touching grass for real, knowing the consequences of your actions in reality, and knowing how to treat other people properly, right? It's so weird being at this age, encountering young people who've never actually been in relationships where treating other people properly was part of their natural environment. You know what I'm saying. You could just fuck people off and Call of Duty with your headphones, and nobody punches you in the face for being an asshole, then you don't learn how not to be an asshole. But if you actually had to grow up with the same group of kids in the same area, you may have had some negative consequences. Because the culture you're in is 10,000 years of catastrophe, we've got all kinds of ancestral, and lineage trauma that we gotta deal with. But you would have learned how not to be an asshole with the people you're going to be friends with. All right, so let's imagine we have human beings who are whole, wholesome, noble human beings, now connecting in the virtual. Then finally, the last piece, that notion of treating the virtual sacredly, treating the virtual with the level of care that it actually needs to have. Thinking about how do we design digital identity from the point of view of the good Kingdom out from the point of view of the Empire. And empowering the individuals who are called to do that, the same folks who, back in our archetypes of like the Steve Jobs era, like the technologists who were called to build that infrastructure, but vocationally. Like the mason who builds the cathedral. You're building something that is deeply, deeply powerful. Treat it with sacred care, and design it so that it is actually constructed such that people are not incentivized or empowered to engage in sociopathic manipulation of each other. This is not a hard thing to do, I just described that we can do this with digital identity. Many people actually have some basic idea of how to do it, some people actually know how to do it pretty well. We just don't currently resource and empower them to design the things that their heart knows and their mind knows is necessary. But just imagine that you did that--
AUBREY: Well, I mean, I don't have to imagine it. Because in some way, from just following my own impulse, I've started to create something that very much aligns with this. It‘s 2018, I started this group we called Fit For Service. This came from my teacher, Don Howard, who spoke simple wisdom. He's like my spiritual grandfather. And he said, in order to be of service, you have to become fit for service. So, it was actually a very simple ethos that bounded that you actually train yourself, initiate yourself to a level of fitness both physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, psychologically, socially. And you expand and develop this level of fitness for the purpose of service of the greater whole. There's smaller aspects of the ethos that goes in, but that's the driving principle behind it. And so, we have in-person gatherings in sacred places. And we have some places that I steward. One place in Lockhart, one place in Sedona, and we actually gather in person. And in person, people get to know each other. Then we'll do a survey. So of course, we have people who've had powerful experiences, but they get this felt sense of meeting a stranger who's not really a stranger because they're bound by this common ethos. Then we'll do a survey and we'll ask, alright, how many of you made a lifelong friend through this process? It's close to 100% of people made a lifelong friend. All right, well, how many people started a new business venture with one of the other members that you met? Like 40 some percent, which is showing some of what you're saying about when you gather together, then there's value across the board. So, this is happening. And now people have gone through different programs, and you get lifetime access to a digital environment that we created, the Fit For Service app that has now thousands of people who have gone through the program. Maybe they just went to one event, or maybe they went to many, a yearlong program, or however they did it. But now they have access to communicate and talk to each other in this group. It's actually shown that oh, wow, we're seeing across the board, whether it's relationship, whether it's finance, whether it's spiritual growth or actualization, whether it's friendship, people seeing this massive benefit. Also in the tangible places, because for a few years now, there's been the Lockhart kind of stronghold, and there's been the Sedona stronghold, which is not only used for Fit For Service, but also my own gatherings. I was recently at a gathering where a men's group was using the my Sedona kind of temple, if you wanted to call it, the temple of Sedona. What was beautiful is none of them had ever been there. But when they walked in, they go, "Wow, this place is special. There's been some special things that have happened here," because they can see the care. They can see that like in every walkway, and in every path, there was the right tree that was planted and the right thing that was stewarded over these 10 years. They had just this felt sense. And they're currently there going through their own process. But we met them there on the first day to kind of introduce them, because this is sacred for us. But we trusted them, and then got to introduce ourselves to them. So, also increase this kind of connectivity between myself as a representative of all the circles that I know, meeting this circle. And now knowing that it has one extra circle in this flower of life pattern, which is what I would call the golden web, again, going to this golden kingdom, golden web. I'm using gold as this just analogy of how it goes, being that yellow light energy coming from the sun, all, everything, all of us underneath and bound by the common Sun, which loves and warms everyone universally. And so, there's metaphorical ideas, stories that come from it, but whatever, it's just what I call it. But I can feel it, I can feel how powerful that is. And then within that, you organize the circles of the flower life. Have my own closest ohana, which is represented by this ritual practice of bead exchange and vow exchange where you're agreeing to a common ethos. And you're saying, I'll be there for you. And whatever fight you have, you're not going to fight alone. In my tough times, my dark times, I wear this necklace of all the beads. I'm not wearing it today, on many podcasts I do. But I'll actually just go through and I'll be like, you know what, I'm not alone. Because I know Huaira will fight for me, and I know Shawn will fight for me, I know Erick will, and Kyle will, and Caitlin will, and Vy will, and Alana will, and Soraya, and Blu will. I'll go through all of these and be like, they're here with me, they're always here with me. And so there's circles within circles, which again, is an Empire ideology, as well. It's how we think that the negative power structure is organized. But there's the Kingdom version of that as well, which seems to very much correlate with this silvium concept where there's physical locations, but then digital communication, because we're not always going to all be able to move into a conscious community and deal with the locational dynamics. Now, when it can happen, that's super powerful, super potent when it can happen. And we should try to do that as much as possible. But then also use the digital environment, and then gather in these sacred places, these places where we can go. And so, it's just interesting that we've kind of arrived at, and so many ways in this whole conversation. Again, we don't know each other, nor have we deeply studied each other's work in particular. I think it was a couple strong recommendations from a couple of our mutual friends, like yeah, you guys should have this conversation. But we're arriving to these similar ideas in a way, and recognizing that this is part of the necessity of how we move forward.
JORDAN: Yeah, well, necessity and possibility. The good news is that the whole, the unconscious whole, again, by my argument of this thing that has been just so powerful, it's not there anymore. And so, we have a possibility. And now, we also have a necessity. I like the dimensionality, meaning that one direction is the rootedness direction. If you can find these communities that are, your body is going to be somewhere. And if you're raising kids, you're raising them somewhere. To the degree to which you can bring it to a place where you feel good about that, and you can start taking responsibility for the place you're at, you should.
AUBREY: Yes.
JORDAN: By the way, that can be anywhere. It may be the beautiful north shore of Kauai, maybe Sedona, maybe a city in the middle of a city block. I remember an old professor I had, he was old when I had him as a professor. I'm sure he passed away years ago. He grew up in Brooklyn, I think, in the beginning of the 20th century, and he talked about block consciousness. As he grew up, there was a block that was his block. If you went to the next block, it was somebody else's block. He was Irish, it was an Irish block. It was like the Italians on the other block. And guess what, you cared for your block. That territory was a local place, and there were people, and the grandmother over there was a sacred grandmother. Nobody messed with her situation, that kind of thing. So, fine, anywhere can be taken care of. Then the second dimension, is the notion of the sacred spaces, or the notion of gatherings. And very powerful. This is powerful both because it can become a seed that gives rise to the first kind, meaning a group may come together and say, hey, we're all going to do this together. But even more powerfully, it creates these orthogonal linkages that we're going to need, right? It's no good if the two blocks go to war with each other.
AUBREY: Yeah, we can't have those rivalrous tribalism
JORDAN: Exactly. We want like the warrior kings on each of the blocks to actually be part of a safer gathering over here and they're brothers, and then bring the energy back and saying we're not rivalrous, we're anti-rivalrous. We're intrinsically collaborative with each other. This is the sacred narrative. This is the story that I'm bringing back from this adventure. And then, last thing is that virtual layer, the virtual layer of serendipity, the good algorithm. The algorithm doesn't have to be orienting us towards conflict, and towards maximizing sociopathic engagement. The algorithm can be tuned to make sure that my interests of having the best possible, joyful, enriching encounters are perfectly conjoined with the interests of the whole, which are me encountering the people where our conversations are the best conversations for everybody. Those two vectors can be the defining characteristics of the algorithm. And now, the virtual is servicing the things that are beyond my event horizon. I know who in my neighborhood I should be interacting with. If I'm called into a sacred gathering, obviously, that's got its own process. And then I have this third, alright, there's 8 billion people, 10 billion by the end of this story. In this field, this planetary wholeness that we're in, who should I be talking to about what in the virtual field? If we have an algorithm that is actually endeavoring to maximize, I'm thinking Spinoza here, by the way, the Conatus of those encounters, then we're good, right? The beauty is all the way back down. This is very practical. We're talking about a shift from the quantitative to the qualitative, and we're just talking about the dimensionality, is what it looks like to be taking care of the qualitative, and all the power, the beauty, the actual, oh, this is the actual life I'm having. Not the possibility of what I could have. This is not the $10 billion sitting in a bank that makes me feel like I'm rich, but I'm actually living in a totally impoverished life. This is the actual day to day life of meaningfulness and purpose that I actually have. Quality. And so, I would say that's at the essence of the notion of silvium. I spent a great deal of time thinking about, well, how does that show up in terms of design? How do you think about how the bio region speaks to the architecture and materials and design of the place, so that literally as a kid, you have your brick wall. As a kid, I used to lick the walls, because I liked the taste of the dirt. I liked the fact that if I grew up around the hill country, and there was limestone over there, that limestone is the same, in my wall in my house is the same limestone as in the ground. There's something about that appeals to me.
AUBREY: You were a weird kid.
JORDAN: Very weird kid, dude, I was crazy. Still, I've gotten weirder, just obviously. There's something I think extremely critical about saying, hey, if you're in the Pacific Northwest, there's a certain vibe in how we build our place, which is not the same as Sedona, different situation. In certain places, there's different kinds of food, different sources of energy. All those kinds of characteristics, that's also part of the construct. What's the economic model? How do we actually deal with this thing called money, which is very tricky. So that's all of the stuff that was done in there, like thinking about what this looks as we shift through, but that's the essence of it.
AUBREY: So what comes to mind for me is, imagine you're living in a building. You buy an apartment in a building, and the building has, I don't know, fucking 1,000 people in it. Big buildings, I'm talking big cities, big buildings, big apartment complex. It doesn't seem like it's going to necessarily easily be emergent from that building. Because the silvium is a level of consciousness, as well as a location. The location can inform the consciousness, but there's so many people who are in places where it's like, "I don't fucking want to know my neighbors." There's really nothing, there's no value there that I can see. These are not the people that I want to talk to. And so, one thing that comes to mind is Burning Man, for me was a very interesting experiment, because there was a common ethos that I hadn't seen in any other festivals. I was a festival goer, I went to all the electronic festivals. I got to be buddies with Skrillex, when he was kind of coming up, and we'd go to these shows. And, the place is just destroyed, just littered with trash. Nobody gives a shit about anything. Everybody is focused on this shared kind of communitas extasis that comes from the ecstasy of the crowd, and the ecstasy of the music. So there was some kind of common bond there. People are still jostling to the front. Still, it's like, that didn't really land in this way. But Burning Man, I started to see something different, where people would just give gifts without even needing recognition. The field of money buys you some privileges that some other thing can't get you, it starts to change the kind of dynamics in a certain way. Even though it certainly did cost a lot of money to go to Burning Man, I'm not saying that. But there was a shared ethos and a way in which this synchronicity machine could work. I met my wife there, for example. And I don't know if I would have met my wife, if it wasn't for Burning Man. We were both drawn there. And then that took some years to unfold. But I've met some amazing allies and friends at this particular place, which is just silicone flats, there's just nothing there. But we gathered there, and we built something there together, and we shared something there together. So it was like a mini temporary synovium kind of experience.
JORDAN: Yeah, very much so.
AUBREY: I saw it, and one of the reasons I'm not going this year is I saw last year, I saw some of that start to degrade into the win-lose metrics that you would see in a normal festival. And while there was still some really beautiful aspects of it, I was like, it's just not quite right. And then it also compelled me to be like, alright, well, if I'm not quite happy with what I'm seeing there, in this experience, even though I still love it, and I'm not saying I'm never going back, because obviously it's one of the most magical places I've ever experienced. I still have deep, deep love for Burning Man for what it was and what it is, and also a calling in saying don't get trapped. I know the money is big now, and there's politics amongst the larger cars and camps, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening that I'm like, yo, watch out. This is starting to become more like anything else that we've already seen rather than this radically new thing. So, I was like, well, I want to create my own little silvium, call it Arkadia, which is kind of named after of course, an old city in Greece, and also a mythic idea of this second post-tragic edenic kind of concept, and we call it festival of a more beautiful world. We bring speakers there and we bring an intentional ethos. It's not quite the same, it's in an urban environment. But still, we're creating an ethos and a shared ability for people to come together to temporarily experience it. What we saw in the first year was, it was very successful in that, just from one scene alone, which is the festival closes. And it was this really beautiful, powerful experience for people. I give the closing speech and I say goodbye, everybody. And instead of everybody leaving, they all come together in this spiraling, swirling circle where they're all holding each other's shoulders. They're all cheering and chanting and oming together. That wasn't prompted. It was just this experience of like we were together. For this one time we were together, and then we'll all go back to our separate areas and places. And so, I think, for me, it seems like a combination of a variety of things, finding that in the digital, finding temporary organizations and places that people can go, where you can experience something different. You can experience this willingness to share and support each other and change your normal mindset and step into an alternate reality. Then also, finding places, communities that you can kind of move to and locate with and know your neighbors and know who's around you and give a shit. Or even if you're in the existing place, you'll probably be surprised at how cool your neighbors actually are if you actually try.
JORDAN: Yeah, my sense of it is something like, you're going to die. Life is very short. You shouldn't be wasting any of it. It's really, really a bad idea to waste any of your life. It's hard to convey how bad an idea it is to waste your life.
AUBREY: I mean, that's the real fundamental regret at the end. It's like, oh, fuck, I had this whole chance to live and I didn't do it.
JORDAN: And that's that.
AUBREY: Damn.
JORDAN: Yeah, no respawn in this game. Many people have this experience. They go to Burning Man, they have the experience like, wow, holy smokes, life actually has qualities of experience that are possible. Then they go back to their apartment where they don't have any relationship with their neighbor, and they notice what they were missing.
AUBREY: Or they go to their park and there's just trash everywhere. Or they go to the beach and--
JORDAN: They say hit somebody in the park, and that person looks at them squirrely. That ain't good. So, okay. Obviously, again, let me step back. I've used this phrase, 10,000-year catastrophe. I just sort of arbitrarily pick a number back in the day. That's where we are, man. We live in 10,000 years of shit being really out of whack. We've had famines, we've had pestilence, we've had war on top of war on top of war. We've had people just fleeing the place they're at to go random into some of the places, finding out other people are already there and taking it from them. We get all kinds of shit, and it's deeply woven into our bodies, to our cultures, to our minds, right? It's no surprise that shit is not working out fluidly and elegantly in every location. It's not a surprise to me that that's how things are. Alright, fair enough. Which means that you are going to be where you're going to be. If you're living in that apartment in New York, you don't know any of your neighbors, your neighbors have no interest in being with you, I can tell you why that is. And, that's where you are. Okay. But when you have that experience, this guy just said Burning Man. And you feel dropped into the, what is light, which is by the way, it's not a transcendent thing. That's ordinary life. Burning Man is true power. That's the ordinary life that is just the way it should be, all right? Where you live right now is a far distance from that, surrounded by false power and false symbols in every direction. If you have a commitment to integrity, which is to say, you simply have a commitment to live the life that you truly yearn for, honestly and earnestly, then you're going to have real trouble continuing to stay in that apartment.
AUBREY: It's true.
JORDAN: You may be stuck there for a long time, it may be a 30-year thing. By the way, it may be multi-generational. You may have to do the thing that you recall your grandparents and great grandparents talking about, where you just put your ass to work to save enough dough so that your grandchildren have a chance to live the life that your heart yearns for. Fair enough. We're not going to undo this thing on Tuesday. Nonetheless, there's a big difference between contributing to the problem, and contributing to the solution, at an individual and a collective level. So, contribute to the solution yearn for an ordinary human life, the thing that is our gift, the beneficence, the benevolence of what it means to be human in the world. And then to the degree to which you can, make choices that are in alignment with that. If it's participating in Fit for Life--
AUBREY: Fit For Service.
JORDAN: Fit For Service. By the way, great name, absolutely. Then begin. And you could do that virtually. You can be called to go and have gatherings and you can find something closer to a proper vocation. And maybe you can move to a similarly priced, slightly different apartment where you feel the vibes a little bit more aligned. Or you just meet somebody and have a conversation. You go to a church, go to an AA meeting, go someplace where somebody who's connecting with you on a human level and you begin the process. And it's going to be a journey.
AUBREY: It's interesting, I think back to, so, my parents, I grew up in Southern California. There was just a general cultural zeitgeist in Southern California, which there was really no, the field of value in Southern California was just different from the field of value in Austin, Texas. My parents felt that. They felt that I had three older step brothers and they all went to high school. They all went to high school in Southern California. For middle school, I went to public elementary, and then middle school, moved to private school, and so we got a kind of sense of what the private school vibe was like. And through my brothers, my parents got a sense of what the public school vibe was like. And they're like, this just doesn't feel right for Aubrey. We don't want to raise him in either of these environments. Either the public school environment, which had a really kind of degraded sense of value and a sense of the way that kids. The attitude towards parents in general. Then the private school thing was its own complex dynamic. They were like, that doesn't really feel quite right either. Then they were like, we're going to check out Austin, Texas, based on a friend of the family who'd moved here and Austin is just different. And I remember, I was in the car with them and they were touring Westlake High at the time. And public school here in Austin.
JORDAN: I would know it, it was Austin Westlake.
AUBREY: Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's a Westlake actually, in Southern California. There's probably lots of Westlake all over the place, but Austin Westlake. I don't like using the word Austin and high together because those are our rivals, fucking Austin High, those motherfuckers, those maroons. Not as bad as those Buoy Bulldogs. But nonetheless, I recently had a Buoy Bulldog on the podcast, we had a good laugh about it, but that's part of it. That's part of the thing, you rep your school, and you go, and I was a basketball player. So you go to battle and you have your, you give it everything you got, because it matters for that moment. And then everybody forgets and then it doesn't matter. But, ultimately, they felt something. They would go, and they'd stop and they'd ask kids that were going to school a question, how do I get to the field? Or how do I get to the gym? And they'd be like, "This way." They would just use words like, Sir, or yes Sir, over this. There was a different thing, and it just kind of blew their mind because they'd interacted with high school kids in Southern California. And again, this isn't universal, but it's just kind of like an ethos that they found here in Austin. And they're like, "We're moving Austin," and I'm like, no. Fucking no, I have all my friends. I was really deep in playing this card game called Magic the Gathering. I was so deep in it. I had my whole--
JORDAN: So I'm not the only nerd in the room.
AUBREY: Yeah, for sure not. I had my whole Magic the Gathering crew. I remember my deepest complaint is, "No one's going to play Magic the Gathering in Austin, Texas." But very quickly, it was basketball and girls and I didn't care about Magic the Gathering anymore. But, ultimately they found a little bit of that thing that caused them to move the whole family to Austin. I can honestly say it was the right choice. There was something about Austin in general, as a collective, even though there's many communities within Austin, and Westlake certainly had its problems and still has its problems. It's not a perfect place. But they were drawn to something. And then they had of course, the luxury to be able and the affordance to be able to actually pick up, move, sell their homes in California, move to Texas, move the whole crew. I've lived here, 28 years since. I think, yo, parents, good job. That was the right choice. This is a fertile environment for me to build my community from. Even though I went to school in University of Richmond, and I've gone and traveled in many other places, there's still not another city that I choose as like the main home base. And Austin's changed and it's evolved. But there's something about Austin that I think it's drawn a lot of people to Austin recently. Tons. I actually welcome it because I think it is drawing a lot of the right people. And sure it's drawing some of the people who are like the people you're talking about in Kauai who are like, this is not your home. Don't make Austin not Austin. Austin has this kind of idea about what Austin is. Some people call it weird, and some people call it whatever it is, but there's something that we all collectively try to protect here in Austin. It's interesting, I'm not the best, I can't claim that I'm the best at going around and meeting my neighbors and my wife doesn't bake cookies. We're not doing the old small town thing. But the city itself has seemed to be like a better container for me to grow up, and evolve and thrive in. I still find that to be the case. So yeah, to your point, we have choices to kind of aggregate in places and then within those places, aggregating communities within those places. And then do our best to kind of grow and evolve within that place.
JORDAN: Now, let's talk about the economic exodus, because this isn't going to unfold over time. Not everybody right now has those choices. Some people do. And here's what happens. For the moment, I'll just use the example of a place like Colorado Springs or Boulder--
AUBREY: Or Nashville or something.
JORDAN: I'm going to use Boulder for the moment. Oh, no, that's not a good one. Let's go with Aspen actually, because it's a bad example. So, back in the day, back before interstate highways, relatively inexpensive aircraft and the invention of the ski slope, Aspen was a very inexpensive kind of shitty mining town. Beautiful, but no economy. Technology changed things. Suddenly rich people were like, "Hey, that's a nice place, I'm going to go ski and I can fly in and I can drive up." And so, that created a new economic center. Now, of course, doesn't take that many rich people spending their rich people's money to create a local economy that actually has people live there full time. The point I'm making is this, if those who can afford for whatever reason. Either because their job allows them to be a different location. Well, that's pretty much it. Their source of resources is not indexed to the location they're at. If they move to a good, wholesome community, and don't fuck it up, they understand that they're going there for reasons intrinsic to it, and they need to learn from it, and need to learn how to incorporate that into themselves, and then participate properly with it to help it actually improve in a way that it naturally receives, that increases the energy in the local economy. Our country has actually gone through, everywhere in the world has gone through evaporation into the big cities now for more than a century. A century and a half, two centuries. The movement back out into places that are actually by the way more affordable, and oftentimes, vastly more pleasant to actually live in because the neighbors still have neighborliness, changes the economic vector. That then makes it possible for other people. If I've got somebody who's, let's say, trapped in the suburbs of Southern California, but they'd really like to move to, let's go with Lockhart.
AUBREY: Lockhart. That's great. That's exactly what I was thinking about.
JORDAN: As the economy of Lockhart grows, jobs appear. That's what the economy growing means. And so, that individual now can get a job in Lockhart and then move to Lockhart, and bring themselves and their family with them. So, a period of years, decades, generations, the migration back out. Now, the hope, not even say the mandate, if I have such, the authority, is to not fuck it up. Take lots of care. I think this is the meaning of intentional community. Intentional community does not mean we all sort of fuck off to a little location with yurts in southern Kauai, have sex with each other for a few years and then evaporate. That's not intentional community. What I mean is
AUBREY: We've seen that story.
JORDAN: We've seen that on, that's not how it works. Intentional community is just being intentional about how you are in relationship with a real community. Real community means your grandchildren will break bread with their grandchildren. Think about a multi-generational and think about it in terms of ordinary life. It's not about the peak experience, it's about the day-to-day experiences, and how you take care of those kinds of things. If we're able to operate with intentionality around constituting real community in the places that we go to, and we don't try to bring in bad habits, don't bring in unconsciousness or narcissism, which of course, is endemic in every direction. So, we have to be intentional about it, but we do it, then that flow of energy will actually move into a different distribution, and everybody else will begin to increasingly be afforded the opportunity to make those movements. Certainly non-trivial. But I've sat in Manhattan and looked at, and had the vision, prophetic vision of what happens. I mean, look at this massiveness. Every building here was built by a person. All this was built by human labor. But what happens if people choose to build something different. If the center of our consciousness, the center of our intentionality moves from this to this, then in the fullness of time, all those human hands, and there's a lot of them, a lot of hours in the day, there's a lot of people who have actually not the least bit lazy who are very hard working, but their work is being wasted on all kinds of nonsense, are actually putting it into proper place, then we can build this kingdom in its physical form.
AUBREY: There's one place that comes to mind. So, I flew into Nashville, and then I drove out maybe 45 minutes or an hour to stay with somebody out there. It was beautiful, just fucking beautiful trees and streams and water. It was a gorgeous place. But then we went grocery shopping at the grocer, and it was some national or at least regional chain. I remember, I go there, and of course, health has been a huge part of my life and fortunately, been exposed to better choices, healthier choices for my body. Seed oils and chemicals and different things like that. So, I went to the local grocery store, and that was the option. This is where you go to buy food. There was Dairy Queen, if you wanted fast food and there was a McDonald's I'm sure somewhere around there, Burger King. And then there's a couple other restaurants that I didn't explore all the restaurants. So, I'm sure there's… But it didn't look didn't look like there was a lot there that was a place that I could feed myself, so we're going to go to the grocery store. So I remember going to the grocery there in the grocery store, and I'm looking around. In the nut butter section, I'm looking for almond butter, because if I can get a little sourdough and get some almond butter, regardless if I'm staying for five days, at least I'll have something. Or I can kind of fast, eat light. I'm looking for almond butter and grass fed beef. And they're like, well, no grass fed beef. They didn't understand why I even cared, first of all. I don't know, this is beef. I was like, I get it, I understand the principle of beef.
JORDAN: We're about to get into a whole consciousness raising exercise, everybody. Just grab a chair, sit down, I want to describe to you that what you put into your body matters.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, fair enough. Then I was like, "Do you guys have almond butter?" At this point, I mean, we're talking 2014-2015. I was under the assumption... I mean, Austin was headquarters of Whole Foods. So that consciousness had permeated. So even if you're not at Whole Foods, you're going to find almond butter. You find almond butte, all kinds of fucking places.
JORDAN: I remember moving to Southern California in 1997 and had my mind blown that men ate salads.
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, I go to this place, and I asked the clerk, I said, "Do you guys have any almond butter?" And she looks at me, she goes, "What's that?" I go, "Well, it's like peanut butter but it's made from almonds." And they're like, "I've never heard of that." And I was like, "Oh, wow." So, I guess there was two choices there. One choice is all right, move to this place, start your own little grocer--
JORDAN: Carry it on your shoulders.
AUBREY: Carry it on your shoulders, and start to spread the consciousness about food. And for somebody, I'm sure that's a project that they were willing to take because of the allure of this magical, truly magical place I was in. But for me, it was a significant deterrent where I was like, well, that place was dope, but I'm not going back there. Because I can't feed myself in a way, easily. I mean, of course now, you can order online and Amazon can deliver you almond butter. You can fucking figure it out for the most part now. But it's interesting. It's because we're going to have to push out in areas, whether it's food, or whether it's religious ideals, fundamentalist ideals, or whether there's homophobia, or whether there's racism, or whether there's things that you're like, "Fuck this place, this is amazing," but this thing is not quite right. And I think it'll take some, the infinitesimal courage, and also this responsibility to say, no, no, no, I'm going to go there, and I will find people who align with this, and this will emerge. But I have to kind of take it on my shoulders, to hold a different consciousness for this spot, to allow it to be a place where these ideals can kind of flourish.
JORDAN: Totally, and with humility.
AUBREY: So, your point about humility, super well taken. The idea that you're going to be the one that's going to be the only one that's going to hold this consciousness, there's this kind of self-righteousness that can come in and set in that all of us have to be vigilant towards, and really understand, with deep sensibility and compassion for the community that already exists, and not try to shame, in this example, shame the person who doesn't know what almond butter is, would actually be like, oh, no, it's not with the condescension. "It's like, peanut butter, but with almonds, you fucking idiot." That attitude, coming into that community, that's not going to work. You have to have maximum humility. So, that point, and again, that was one of the first things that you lead with, which is really an important concept. So, as we move to kind of close here, we've covered a whole variety of different subjects and topics. What would be your final kind of message? If you're just going to give one message, a transmission, imagine that this broadcast, just this part for the next few minutes, comes out, and you're able to broadcast this to all the world, what would you offer?
JORDAN: Well, the thing that I was noticing was very much that the sense of a call. Time's now. It's time to do it. We have everything we need. It's quite evident that something needs to be done. We can't just sit by and hope that the powers that be will take care of us. We have a pretty good sense of how to do it. We definitely have the capability of doing it. I think it's now time to actually get to doing it. That's what I'd put there as the Kota.
AUBREY: The preseason is over.
JORDAN: Preseason's over. It's game time.
AUBREY: It's game time.
JORDAN: It's alright to have some butterflies. But, yeah, it's game time.
AUBREY: Yeah, indeed. My brother, this has been such a pleasure, really. Another one of those beautiful, just from a meta perspective what podcasts can do. Because maybe we would have got on the phone, and maybe we would have had a three-hour conversation, but maybe not. But because of this podcast, and because of this, this has allowed us to connect in a way, in a level of depth where we know each other now. We'll always be a phone call away, and always an email away, and we'll always look at that and be like, oh yeah, all right, what's up? And that's a beautiful thing. So I'm just deeply grateful, and it's been a beautiful experience to be able to share these couple of hours here with you.
JORDAN: Yeah, yeah. Really appreciate the invitation. Yeah, it's good to get to know you.
AUBREY: Yeah. So if people want to go dive a little deeper into some of your theories, and some of the things, you've been on a lot of podcasts, where would you say people can go? And do you have any projects or anything you want to point people to?
JORDAN: I don't have any projects.
AUBREY: I doubt that.
JORDAN: I have far too many projects. I think I'm going to get back to writing. So, you may be able to look at me on my old Medium and/or Substack. I'll probably do both for a while. I feel there's like five or six essays that I get the feeling they're going to come out. Occasionally, I do YouTube videos, conversations like this. And occasionally I get conversations or invitations to be on podcasts and I say yes. But to be honest, I try very hard not to have an identity. I definitely don't want to have a following. So, you kind of have to want to. If you want to, you'll be able to find me. If you're only ever sort of lukewarm about it, there's better people to follow than me.
AUBREY: Are you ever going to write a book?
JORDAN: I hope not. Maybe a book of poetry.
AUBREY: Yeah, I love writing poetry. Poetry has been probably my favorite way to express my art. I'm not a great musician, but I can do a few things with words.
JORDAN: Yeah, nice.
AUBREY: Yeah. All right, my brother. From one warrior poet to another, it's been a beautiful show, my man, and beautiful time well spent. I hope you guys enjoyed this and we will see you next week. So much love.