Entropy, Energy & The 4th Frontier: Chris Martenson on DarkHorse
Bret speaks with Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity on the DarkHorse podcast. Find Chris on X: https://twitter.com/chrismartensonFind Chris at Peak Prosperity: https://peakprosperity.com/*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon. Please subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast Clips for short clips of all our podcasts. Check out the DHP store! Epic tabby, digital book burning,...
Anything we've done, like, oh, we have these sustainable wind towers.
No, we don't.
We have these positive net entropy devices that are going to just wear down, and we're going to have to rebuild them.
So they're not alternative energy, they're rebuildables, as Nate Hagen says.
That's all they are, right?
So we haven't yet used our big brains to figure out how to fashion something so that it rebuilds itself over time, right?
That's what nature does.
Everything it does, it's creating pockets of negative entropy, right?
And that's the rule.
So I can tell you, whatever the trees are up to, the tree has figured out a way to do what it does.
And in 10,000 years, you know, all things not going supernova in some spectacular fashion, there'll be trees here, right?
So we have to start thinking about how we create things that are truly regenerative.
It begins to me, Brett, we have to really appreciate and understand energy.
And how energy actually moves and flows, that we've been given this amazing once-in-a-species bequeathment, right?
You know, there's complicated reasons why we have these things called fossil fuels.
Like, we have coal.
You know why we have coal?
Because plants developed lignin before the fungi figured out how to break it down.
There was this awesome period of several hundred million years or so where, you know, in the competing chemistry of life, one branch of life had figured out how to make stuff that nobody had figured out how to eat.
Holy moly, is that true?
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
I have the distinct pleasure and honor of sitting this morning with Chris Martinson, who is a good friend of mine.
I do not know how, what fraction of our audience on Dark Horse is aware of Chris Martinson, but if you're not aware, this is your lucky day, because Chris is an incredible person.
In fact, Chris, you don't know this, But you are, I'm not a religious person, but you are one of very few things in the universe that makes me wonder if there is a God, because during the madness of COVID, we were granted a kick-ass toxicologist in the form of you.
And the idea that the dissidents of COVID would have a kick-ass toxicologist there to address the difficult toxicological questions surrounding repurposed drugs and vaccines, that was a gift from above.
So, in any case, Chris, welcome to Dark Horse.
I am thrilled and a little frightened about where we might have to go today in light of events in the world.
Well, thank you for such a magnanimous introduction, and it's a mutual admiration society, and it's a world... You know, I'm really glad for COVID because it allowed me to find you.
I don't know if I would have, necessarily, otherwise, in the way that we have, and it allowed me to find other people who really are able to, in the term you use, the heterodox thinking, but it's more than that.
There's a certain fidelity And an approach to information that's really important.
Not that we get it right all the time, but that we have this, this, what I consider to be the science I was raised on, that I loved, that I was offended when COVID came along and it all went out the window, which is science is, you know, yeah, it's a noun, but, but it's an approach.
It's a way, it's a way of going about things, which by its very root depends on things being falsifiable, which demands that you ask questions.
Right.
And so that's what I felt you did exquisitely well in taking people through how you get to that thinking process.
And, and I don't, I don't know what the truth is, but man, I've got a BS detector that's good, you know, if not, you know, exceptional.
So I just put that to use during COVID.
That was my, I was, I was fueled by a little curiosity and a little anger at what happened to my beloved science or what I thought it was.
Apparently I had a myth about it.
You did a brilliant job during COVID and just to put a little more flesh on these bones.
I don't remember exactly when during the COVID madness we found each other and met.
We very quickly after I, I think I heard you on one of your Peak Prosperity podcasts.
That's how the public is most likely to be aware of you.
But I heard you say some things, and I have just a little rubric I use to find truly important thinkers.
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It's like this, you know, I'm a, as you know, I'm somebody who thinks about a lot of different issues.
There are places where I know very little in my thinking is undoubtedly crude.
And there are other places where I know a lot.
Um, but enough of it is just not, it's not borrowed from anywhere.
So if I have overlap with somebody, if I hear somebody talking on a topic where I've spent, you know, a few months pondering the various puzzle pieces and trying to put together some model of what's going on, I can often listen to somebody else who's done that independently, and I don't know whether what they're telling me is right, but if it is consistent with whatever model I've built, I can say, this person's for real.
I know that they didn't get that from somewhere, and I know that they are putting puzzle pieces together in a difficult realm in a coherent way.
And you just set off that detector like gangbusters across multiple topics.
So anyway, we got in touch.
I don't know how you would describe it, but I would say we found that there is a tremendous overlap between us in our I would say values across many domains.
You know, we both have a deep relationship with nature that goes way beyond the analytical.
Just a real desire to be surrounded by it, for it to be healthy.
It is non-stop thought-provoking to both of us.
We are disturbed by Changes that we have seen in our lifetime that we can personally attest have occurred that indicate that the world is getting broken biologically.
So there was tremendous overlap at that level.
And then there's a discovery that actually you're a very different human being in terms of how you have lived your life and accomplished the things you've accomplished, right?
Almost no overlap in terms of The mechanism of doing things in the world, you know, I managed to get through a PhD program because I had an advisor who thought highly of me and was powerful in the department, but I don't have the skills to just get through these kinds of systems.
And I think you're expert at it.
Well, I did make it through a PhD program, but that was just a huge amount of work.
And I know how much work it took, and I get that.
And I remember it, I think, pretty clearly.
But the amount of work I've put into, say, this work called The Crash Course, where I skip across some surfaces, do a systems-level analysis of economy, energy, environment, looking for how these Things interrelate.
I didn't know anything about systems, systems analysis, complex systems, exponential growth, monetary systems, but I'm just curious, right?
So, so the tools I learned and how you go about achieving.
Something in a PhD program.
And by the way, you can get to the frontier of knowledge in the biological sciences in, what, four months of study?
There's a lot we don't know.
I'm glad I didn't try it in humanities.
I doubt I would have made it, right?
Well, there is no frontier.
There's a hologram.
There's shadows on the wall.
Yeah, it's not the same thing.
There is a real frontier in biology, but unlike the other hard sciences, because it's a complex adaptive system, it's very early in our accumulation of knowledge about it.
So the frontier isn't as far away as you think.
Yeah, and this is how I think we're alike, despite the differences in background.
We're both very curious, and we both know that there's no such thing as a singular point of study.
You can't study biology without studying chemistry.
It's not possible, right?
It's all about electrons going from a higher oxidative state to a lower, whatever.
And then once you understand chemistry, maybe you have to know a little bit about physics, right?
And then it gets into material science, like everything touches everything.
And so I've noticed that in you as well.
It's like, you know, if we're going to have a conversation, you have these phone conversations where it's like, there's It's a really amazing, beautiful world that's just full of fun and adventure, and it's just wildly complicated, and... No, it's complex.
Well, the older I get... I'm gonna correct you on that one, because that distinction ends up... it sounds like a synonym.
Yeah.
Complex.
Right.
It has emergent behaviors, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Which means you just have to observe.
Evie and I were having this conversation just last night, as we do, about what is consciousness?
What is it?
Because we use it, but what is it?
And the closest I can come to is consciousness is the act of observing.
It's awareness.
So consciousness is awareness, because otherwise I mistake the thoughts I have in my head as consciousness.
Computers have thoughts in the sense of 1 plus 1 is 2, and the capital of Mississippi is whatever.
You know, those kinds of thoughts.
No, no.
Consciousness is observing.
So that's what life has been to me, and that's what my blessed science was.
It was observing.
All right, hold on.
I would like to leave consciousness, and I would like us to come back to it, make sure that we don't miss it entirely in this podcast.
But I want to, I think, sort of feels to me like a topic for the end, not the beginning.
Good.
The... I want to go back... something just clicked for me in hearing you discuss the connections between fields and science, and it's something... it's kind of been on a back burner for me for years, and suddenly I think I know what it is.
I usually use the analogy of a tropical forest.
I'm a tropical biologist by training, and I always tell people that the thing the tropical forest is trying to tell you, there's nowhere to actually start the discussion.
You can walk into a tropical forest and you can say, you know, the way to understand this place is trophic levels.
And you can use trophic levels to analyze what you see around you, but it's not the only rubric.
You can also, you know, talk about the proximity to the canopy.
You know, all of the energy that drives the system comes in at the top.
And it very quickly gets absorbed by all of these ferociously powerful competitors for light, so that when you get to the forest floor you've got 1% of the light.
So you could use, you know, where you are in the race to capture energy that has been thrown off of the Sun.
That would be another rubric you could use.
You could do it phylogenetically.
You could start talking about these creatures and which ones are basal.
In other words, there are lots of rubrics you could use.
None of them are Incorrect.
They all reveal different things, and they all fail to reveal other things, and what you really want is some piece of all of them.
But the basic point is, look, I have a principle, which is all true narratives must reconcile.
If two things are true, there's some way that they live in the same universe at the same time, and if you can't see how they could coexist, there's something you don't know yet.
Or you've got one of them wrong.
At least one.
But anyway, my point is, what you really want, if you want to understand a tropical forest, and we don't understand them yet, but if you want to understand, as you point out, at the frontier, you want to understand everything we do understand so that you can figure out what we might learn by going a little farther.
Well, there's no right place to start.
Any place you start, as long as it's valid, is going to be connected to the thing that you might ultimately want to learn.
The punchline of this whole exploration is what you need and what you, Chris, have in spades is a non-linear model.
And I do not believe that a non-linear mind is inherent to all sciences.
In other words, sometimes to do certain things in chemistry, you may need a very linear mind.
Right?
To understand the way orbitals build up on top of each other and their implication for chemical reactions.
That is a series of pieces of nuances that build on each other in such a way that you get a model that is predictive out to some level where we can say what happens if we put these reactants in this set of conditions.
Right?
So I think the world is in part failing.
Because we have not properly understood that complex adaptive systems, we group them with the other sciences because the method is technically the same for studying them.
This hypothetico-deductive falsificationist approach.
But the subject matter is very different than chemistry or physics.
And it's different because the stuff of biology has an objective.
Right?
Evolutionarily, the creatures are actually trying to accomplish something.
They don't know that they're trying to accomplish something.
The thing that they're trying to accomplish is not, in and of itself, interesting.
But things that are trying to accomplish something behave differently than objects that don't care.
An atom doesn't care whether it becomes integrated into a compound, but a creature does care whether it escapes its predator.
In any case, what I would say is I think a lot of people have a linear scientific mind.
It may be a very good one, but very few people jump the gap to a non-linear scientific mind that can remain rigorous in a highly complex landscape of things where most of the information you would like to have is not available.
And anyway, you do a brilliant job of this, and I have appreciated you greatly for your capacity in this regard.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
I've tried to devolve what I do and break its pieces down, but one of them is I don't have my identity wrapped up in my conclusions.
It's actually a very powerful place to be.
And I'm easily, I can red team, blue team anything.
You want me to take somebody else's position, I'll argue it for them.
You know, maybe off times better than they will, right?
You want me to be Peter Hotez for the day?
I'll do it, right?
So in doing that, I discover where my own cracks are.
So I actually really like debate.
I like being challenged.
You know, there's only a few challenges I've sort of given up on, is there's nothing more to learn there.
The flat earth people, right, I don't have anything to gain there.
Yep.
The no-virus crowd, I'm not gaining any more honing of my argumentative abilities there.
So there's certain places where I've sort of put it off, but almost everything else is up for grabs, you know?
Well, I will actually let me let me steel man, the flat earthers and the no virus people, despite the fact that I, I have reached more or less the same conclusion as as you have, right?
I can establish the world is not flat.
It's not that hard.
Anybody who's faced time zones has at least a beginning of the mechanism for understanding that there's no there there in flatter.
But I have become aware that The foundation of what people believe they know has gotten thin to the point of tissue paper.
That is to say, if you take an educated person, a person who appears to know a great many things, their understanding of how it is that they come by that knowledge is almost non-existent.
In other words, what would have to be true for that conclusion that you believe is a fact To change for you.
What would you have to know that would cause you to reverse your position on whether or not people went to the moon?
They don't know.
All they know is that basically everything comes down to an appeal to authority.
That people smarter than me have told me that this is true and I'm sure they would have spotted it if it wasn't.
And that is no comfort whatsoever.
It really shouldn't be.
In other words, an intelligence that is composed of facts that are entirely received from authorities is not the same kind of object as an intelligence that can bootstrap its way in a total absence of knowledge through observation, through the scientific method, or some analog of it.
And I call the place we are in history a Cartesian crisis, because I believe that Descartes actually explored this problem explicitly, and in fact left us an artifact that tells us something about what he concluded, and it's a crude artifact.
But Descartes, upon realizing That he could not establish most of what he thought were facts on the basis of some personal test that he had run.
That he was apparently proceeding from authority almost across the board.
I think he kind of panicked.
And he said, well, what?
Is there anything I can establish myself?
Just me?
And what he came up with was the most important proof of all, which is really not a good proof.
Right?
I think, therefore, I am.
Cogito ergo sum.
I find it almost embarrassingly circular.
But the reason I say it's important is that if you cannot accept that one on faith, You're done.
The right way to proceed is to recognize, hey, there's a flaw in my thinking at the very ground floor.
I can't even establish that I exist.
How do I know I exist?
Because I'm thinking.
Okay, that's weak sauce right there.
But the basic point is I've got two choices at that branch of the tree.
I can either spend the rest of my life failing to do better than that proof, And not, in the end, establishing that I exist in any way better than Descartes did.
Or, I can say, you know what?
Weak as that is, probably right.
If it's wrong, I don't really have a shot at anything useful anyway, so the waste is small.
Because even though I will waste my life, I'm pretty much guaranteed to do that anyway.
So I might as well assume I exist and I am capable of observing the universe around me.
This isn't a trick.
It's not a simulation.
I'm not a brain in a jar being fed info to see what I will do, right?
I must actually exist in the universe and I can go about checking stuff out.
From there, I can make a lot of progress.
So, anyway, I feel like I'm talking too much, but my point is, humanity has lost touch with how you establish things, and almost everybody is proceeding almost entirely from received wisdom from unreliable sources.
And it has made us foolish at a level that is putting us in grave danger.
So I appreciate anybody who can bootstrap their way from no knowledge to something useful, predictive, something insightful.
And anyway, again, this is something I find you very strong on.
You are capable of walking into landscapes where you're not expert and figuring out, well, where would I want to start?
And you teach yourself, which is really what we should all be doing.
Well, on this one subject, and thank you for laying it out this way.
I'm deeply interested in how people come to believe in the flat earth thing.
I'm interested in this Cartesian crisis we're in the midst of because I'm suffering through it right now, which is, I don't know what to trust anymore.
Trust has been just comprehensively across the board.
Broken for people, right?
At all different levels, right?
I mean, you have Harvard University scoring the lowest on free speech out of all the major universities, right?
And that's supposed to be our, that's supposed to be our, our ultimate, like, experience.
You have, uh, Harvard still sort of demanding that people take vaccines, which is a, a cognitive error so profound, like these, this is, they're training our future leaders.
This bodes badly, right?
Isn't that their way of telling you, don't send your kid here to get smarter because the opposite is going to happen.
For sure they ought to pay you 80 grand for the privilege of ruining your kid.
Making your kid stupider, yeah.
Yeah, something like that.
But when it comes to the flat earth piece though, I have two problems with it.
The first is that it's very easy to observe that it's not true.
Aristines did this, what, you know, how many thousands of years ago with a stick in the sun, right?
And having somebody walk a long way.
So modeling that out's easy, but if you've ever been on a sailboat and watched another one disappear over the horizon, if you've ever gone high enough up in a plane or a Or on a mountain, you've seen curvature, right?
There's lots and lots and lots of input feeds to this brain in a jar that would suggest I can falsify this, right?
And yet it's still there.
And so my concern is that this is one of those ideas that gets put out there and is sort of enabled by somebody who's interested in tracking how these things spread and thinking, you know, how they can push stuff.
Cause that, you know, in the, in the aftermath of say the Lahaina fires, I had a lot of people coming in with blue roofs and energy weapons, all this.
And I was trying to explain to them that no, no.
The effects of wind go up with the cube of the speed.
It's a thing.
30 miles an hour wind is totally different from 40, which is completely different from 50.
And by the time you're at 70, you can get some weird effects, right?
This is burned, but this isn't because the wind was blowing that way, right?
Um, but through all of that, I was convinced of something though, Brett, which was that, that incident, watching and tracking how these people's ideas came in, somebody was pushing some buttons.
I know that there was somebody in a cubicle at some psy-op place tracking all of this, monitoring how things spread, watching the memes propagate, pushing little nudging, all of that.
Cause it is too juicy of a moment.
I'm, I'm of the belief structure now that every single major event that has that focus of the system to like this focus on this that it's not it's not organic anymore it's it's increasingly less organic well now you've completely screwed this up because what you've done is you've said that people's tendency to take a natural event and impose on it
dark forces and uh secret weapons is them overfitting a bad hypothesis and they're doing it because dark forces are hoping to map their sense-making capacity in the way ideas spreads So you've basically, um, you've moved the conspiracy that people see into a layer that they're not thinking about.
And, uh, you know, I must tell you there are, I don't know, I don't know what gets you into trouble anymore.
But look, I got questions about Lahaina based on things I think I can observe that don't make sense to me.
I don't know what to make of, you know, I'm fully aware that fire behaves in a nonlinear fashion based on things like wind and that the wind was a dominant factor.
And no, that was nobody's plan.
I don't know what the hell happened.
But There's also some metallurgical stuff that doesn't add up to me.
I'm waiting for somebody to just simply lay it out so I get it.
Maybe you're the person to do it.
But anyway, let's put that aside.
I do have one quick thing on that if you want to finish that thought process that a lot of the things where we saw cars experiencing thermal events that felt too hot.
I don't know this for sure, but I would want to check the brands and models of those, because a lot of those have aluminum-magnesium blocks.
Those are fine, but if they catch on fire, aluminum and magnesium together gets very hot.
Got it.
Got it.
There's still weird stuff, and it could be that somebody's playing me, and they're trying to see whether I'll, you know, pop and say something stupid.
But let's go back to the Flat Earth thing for a second.
I like the flat earth because it's almost the one of these things that I can chase down to bedrock.
As you point out, there's a bunch of stuff that you as an individual, a modern individual, who, you know, not everybody has mountains within walking distance, but everybody can get to a mountain these days, and everybody can take an airplane.
I mean, not everybody, but almost everybody can take an airplane.
Time zones and telephone calls allow you to establish things.
And the fact is, it's just the most parsimonious explanation that we live on a Globe and not a disc and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I think it is tremendously valuable to put yourself through the exercise.
That's the thing that is missing.
And so I wanted to steel man a... I'm almost hesitant to mention this, but there's a very troubling person that I interact with sometimes.
A guy named Owen Benjamin.
You aware of him?
Comedian.
Smart guy.
Uh, claims not to believe any of this stuff, right?
Including flat earth.
Uh, he is a, he is an avowed flat earther.
Um, but he's, I don't know that he's serious about it.
I think his point and mind you, I have, you know, he, I am told he is a dangerous person to interact with.
I interact with him anyway, because I think part of what he's doing is valuable.
What it is, is that he is forcing people.
To confront the degree to which they cannot even defend beliefs that they would swear they hold for analytical reasons.
His point, I think, and he's not said this, so maybe I'm imposing something on him that he's not actually doing, but I think his point is, I, Owen Benjamin, as a smart person, am capable of defeating your argument for something you're certain of, and that's on you.
The fact that you can't defeat me in an argument about flat Earth doesn't say anything one way or the other about whether the Earth is flat.
It says something about the weakness of your belief structure.
Um, so in any case, I don't know what to do with this, but if I'm thinking we are in a Cartesian crisis because everybody has accepted almost everything on the basis of authority, which is not, it's not that we have any choice about that.
There's not, no individual can go around establishing all of the scientific principles you would need in order to reason, but the fact that most people can't establish anything is a major vulnerability.
It makes us superstitious and manipulable at a level that is intolerable given our power.
So, the Cartesian crisis is a problem.
Your pointing to dark forces that may wish to take advantage of our feeble analytical capacity is well taken.
And I think that those who are, to the extent that anyone, is attempting to call our attention to the defects in our belief structures, I don't know that that's a bad thing.
I think that that's probably a good thing, and I wish Owen Benjamin would mature and do this in a more responsible way, because it comes across as petty and trolling, but we all have to become aware I don't remember what observation it was.
Oh, it was the observation of what the eclipse reveals about the splotches of light that we see every day through the trees.
The eclipse reveals that those are all images of the sun.
And what that caused me to think, was it yesterday or the day before, was that it's like a fractal Plato's cave.
Yes, there's the cave in which the shadows on the wall are being used to lead you to understand a world that isn't, but then you get out of the cave and you're in a different cave, right?
It's still shadows on the wall.
It's a different kind of shadows.
And anyway, people need to think more about what the basis of their comprehension is in order to become cautious enough to proceed intelligently.
And they just, they don't do it.
Well, this is a fascinating conversation because it gets to the very core of what I think I'm doing.
So originally, I was in the business of sharing data with people because I'm one of those people data works on and I'm a quick learner.
Eventually, it took me years to figure out that's not how other people are wired.
So I was like, oh, OK, what is this about?
And then I realized, OK, I should have figured this out quicker.
It's that we're narrative machines, right?
And we used to sit around the campfire and tell stories, and those stories are immensely powerful.
And they encapsulate stuff, you know, to the point that thousand years later, people could have not have seen a tsunami, but it's encoded in their, in their story structure.
So they know what to do when the water goes out and they run up a pill, right?
So it's amazing how powerful that is.
And so that led to another, you know, so narratives are one layer.
And I thought we were at the narrative layers about the story.
So I worked on how do we tell the stories, right?
So that's what I do in this book.
I tell stories about, you know, exponential growth, just trying to embody it.
And that was genius, but I didn't realize where it was, and I finally stumbled across a book by George Lakoff, and it's about metaphors.
And I'm only halfway through it, so I'm no expert, but it's just ringing all my bells that, in fact, we operate at the level of metaphors, and the narratives are a verbal cognitive layer on top of that.
But what's a metaphor?
And so metaphor is a concept, but really it's an, they make a very strong argument.
It's an embodied concept that in fact, it comes through whatever this other sensory stuff is.
And so we have these metaphors as concepts, right?
And the concept is, is vague, but really powerful.
It drives a lot.
So one of the, one of the pieces that they, um, put in there was about, well, the metaphor for an argument.
What is our metaphor?
You know, in Western discourse, an argument, it's metaphor is war, right?
We're going to have a battle of the minds.
I'm going to, you know, defeat your, your, you know, silly stance or whatever it is.
It's, it's war.
And so it creates this, this whole thing where a lot of people will shy away from it because we don't like conflict, right?
An argument is conflict.
It's war winners and losers.
There's blood.
Um, and he said, but what if you're, there are cultures out there where they had, um, argument was the metaphor for it was a dance.
And the idea of a dance is that two parties are trying to come up with the best possible choreography, given the tempo and the music and the air that night, right?
It's a whole different metaphor.
But I realized that our core metaphors, these are the things that I, and this, I'll link this back to the Cartesian crisis.
This I think is the thing, the soul sickness that we're facing is that our core metaphors that we've lived by for thousands of years are now broken.
Be fruitful and multiply.
Have dominion over the earth.
These are all good things!
Until you hit 6 or 7 billion people, then it starts to become a little asymptotically, uh-oh, kind of stuff, potentially, right?
So, you know, our whole economic model is based on infinite growth.
Our whole dominion over the earth has clearly run its limits, if you care about things like insects and 400 million-year-old food chains and things like that, right?
It's clear We have problems.
In order to get ourselves cognitively organized and rallied around them, we have to have a way of Of articulating them and talking about them without it tripping all of our amygdala brainstem landmines where you can't do that because it's too challenging.
Right?
That I think is one of the prime tensions we have right now.
And then as an overlay on top of all of that, we do have people monkeying around with our cognitive landscape, conducting fifth generation warfare specifically to target our ability to make sense of things.
So we're already at a sense making like, um, Bottleneck?
You know, we have some important decisions to make, and we have people trying to hobble us even further.
I completely disagree with what they're doing at this moment in time.
I want to introduce two things.
That's a lovely exploration there, and I so totally agree.
First of all, metaphors loom large for me.
I don't know if you do or don't know, but I have this model called metaphorical truth, which I use to explain to people why religious belief is what it is.
Basically, there's lots of stuff that you cannot fully understand But you can present a narrative that causes people to behave as if they understand.
So, for example, the Lord does not tolerate people shitting in camp, right?
He finds that disgusting, and you do not want to anger the Lord, so don't do it.
That's a 2,000-year-old mechanism, more than 2,000-year-old mechanism for getting people to behave as if they understand the germ theory of disease, right?
So, it's a metaphor, and so I say it's literally false.
It's not that there's actually a deity who actually has disgust and that, but if you behave as if there is, you do better than if you behave as if that's just an old wives' tale.
Anyway, metaphorical truth looms large to me, and I know that language, if you actually, if you look at what linguists tell us, that our languages are basically entirely built of metaphors.
Some of them so long dead that we don't even spot them as metaphorical.
The encoding is just remote to us.
They're just words, but they started out as metaphors.
So we do think metaphorically, and those metaphors are not inherently literal.
They overlap literalness, but the place that this goes crazy is when I look at the biology textbook It's also composed of metaphors some of them there are places where we understand biology well enough that you have a Almost a literal description in front of you.
It's cartoonified to make it simple enough for a student to understand it.
You know, the picture of the neuron has 20 dendrites instead of a thousand, because it's very hard for the mind to process what it would mean for a neuron to have a thousand dendritic inputs.
But, you know, what you need is a heat map.
You need to be able to read the biology textbook, And you need to have a color coding that says, how metaphorical is this which I am currently reading?
Right?
And it would range across the entire map.
There's gobbledygook in that textbook that just is not right.
It's the best we've got at the moment, but it's just not even close enough to correct, to treat it as factual.
And then there's other stuff that is so close to factual that it's, you know, it's basically there.
And if you understood that that was what the book was doing to you, the book is like, look, here's the best model we can give you in order so you can move forward and discover what we don't yet know, right?
Some of this is going to be nonsense, but sort of accept it, you know?
And some of this stuff is really the real thing, so you should actually put more weight on that ice.
Don't put so much weight on this ice, but that ice can take it, right?
If you did that, you would create much better minds, but because the book reads like an encyclopedia of biological truths, it just confuses people.
They don't understand that we are very early in this process of comprehending, especially, you know, much more so than with chemistry.
Chemistry, there is a point at which we can't predict what takes place, but that's a pretty, you got to get pretty exotic reagents and conditions before you reach that place where we don't have a pretty good understanding of what's likely to happen.
Right?
You've got to get into nuclear interactions, for example, you know.
But in biology, no, it's most of it.
What fraction of what we might ultimately know of biology do we know now?
I don't know.
5%?
You know, it's early days.
It's not 95%.
So anyway, metaphor matters a lot, but here's the other punchline to that little riff.
So in my book that Heather and I co-authored, in our book, the title is The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, but as much as I really like that title, I sort of regret not titling it Hyper-Novelty.
The idea of Hyper-Novelty is that Human beings, our specialty is dealing with novel circumstances and coming up with mechanisms to profit in them, in the midst of them.
It's what we do, and it's the reason that more than any other creature that has ever lived, our evolutionary information, our evolving content, is not housed in our genomes.
It is housed in our Cognitive layer, which has passed along as culture, which is innovated through consciousness, which we will get back to later.
But the point is, hey, what creature adapts really, really well to new stuff that its ancestors never saw?
That's human beings.
That's our specialty, right?
That's what we're good at.
But our rate of change is so high that we cannot keep up with it.
Even our amazing capacity to adapt is outstripped by our rate of technological change.
And so we are constantly Using tools that are inappropriate for the environment we find ourselves in.
We're just, we're a fish out of water perpetually, like flopping from boat to boat.
And anyway, the point is, I love the idea that you borrow from Lakoff, that war is a metaphor that is deeply rooted in our discussions of circumstances where we have conflicting interests, but not dance.
Dance is not always the right metaphor, but sometimes it's Exactly the right metaphor.
Why?
Because dance actually does contain the ability to explore the tension between the cooperative and the competitive, right?
Who are the ultimate dance partners?
They are romantic partners.
Those romantic partners One of the greater insights of evolutionary biology that we picked up in the latter half of the 20th century was about these places where we see two creatures who have great alignment but not perfect alignment, and it predicts all kinds of things from
You know, uh, conflict between siblings to morning sickness and pregnant mothers, right?
This is something you need to be able to talk about situations in which, um, I mean, let's put it this way.
Let's we, we are going to come to the Middle East here at some point, inevitably, I believe.
Um, but as, as, uh, Morally wrong, as some will take it, that I would even say this following the events of two Saturdays ago.
The The Palestinian people and the Israeli people have a terrible conflict of interest.
They also potentially have a great alignment of interest.
If you look at these two populations and you say, what actually, if we were to look at their well-being, not just in the present, but for a thousand years going into the future, They have an interest in finding a stable way to coexist and surely to collaborate.
Now that's a hard thing to say at this moment.
This is not a moment to be thinking in terms of collaboration because the crime against the Israeli public was so diabolical that talking about collaborating with these people is almost...
It's a kind of heresy in some ways.
It's disrespectful of the dead.
But it is also a fact that we face a future in which we may not find a mechanism for these two populations to work out their conflict of interest and proceed forward through time, hopefully collaboratively, because it's better for everybody.
It's better for planet Earth.
It's better for the Israelis.
It's better for the Palestinians.
So I love your point.
Are we missing a metaphor that allows us to even think about the puzzle properly?
And my sense is, because of hyper-novelty, we have a language that is hobbling us in our ability to even articulate what it is that we face.
I think that is exactly correct.
I love the way you frame that.
Um, let me, let me connect a piece in there for that for me, which is here's a myth we have, and this is one I battle all the time.
I'll tell people about, Hey, here's the latest data on oil.
Here's how much coal we have here in natural gas.
Here's some uranium.
Here are the needs of the world.
Here's the fastest growing.
And people go, you're forgetting about this.
They hold up their smartphone, right?
And the metaphor for them is that this represents human ingenuity and progress.
And there are things, Chris, that you haven't thought about that we're going to invent.
You don't know about yet, right?
I call it technological hopium because I'll be right there as soon as we figure out how to wrestle free energy out of zero point energy.
Fine, you know, but until then, I'm a Missouri guy.
You got to show me right, but they hold it up like this is some article of faith and I sit here and I have I'm like, well, let me tell you a story.
I love GPS.
If I go to Boston, or some city I don't know, I wouldn't think of doing it without my GPS.
I love GPS.
It's great.
GPS ruined our oceans.
Because it used to be, some guy and his crew would take off from Gloucester and they'd dead reckon out for six, maybe seven hours, depending on tide and wind, and they'd drop their nets and they'd drag around for a while.
Well, now as soon as GPS came along, they would leave off six inches to the left, literally of where they left off last week and just keep scraping and they destroyed the whole thing.
So the technology exceeded our human capability to really master it.
And that's just GPS, right?
You know, now we have these tools of persuasion and they're all excited and look at these things we can do.
And I will submit to you, they will discover, or we're going to, I guarantee you, we're going to discover that these actually screwed an entire generation.
I am thankful.
Brett, that I grew up at a time...
That these weren't available because these would have wrecked my childhood.
I guarantee it.
I'm no better.
You know, I, I'm not here to cast judgment.
I'm just telling you.
I'm thankful.
I grew up at a time where my life consisted of being kicked out of the house.
It's when the sun was up and coming home, hopefully when the sun went down for dinner and that was, you know, otherwise I was out there with my buddies doing stuff.
Right.
And, and so again, the technology, it is a two-edged sword, but I think our mythology, our, our metaphor for it is progress is good.
And this is progress.
And it's a broken metaphor.
It doesn't work.
I mean, the evidence is everywhere and I'm surprised at how many people literally can't see it.
And that's one of the fun things about metaphors.
When you hold one, it can prevent you from seeing something that's right in front of you.
Don't I know it.
First of all, I feel the same way about the phone and many other things.
I love digital photography.
I'm a photographer.
I love to capture nature.
It's an addiction.
And digital is There's just no comparison, right?
The difference between trying to nail that shot on a roll of 36 expensive pieces of silver coated, uh, whatever, right?
I don't, I don't miss the, uh, shooting on film.
I don't do it anymore ever.
However, I am grateful for every minute I spent under those constraints because it taught me a hell of a lot about the way the world works, including stuff that went on to inform my understanding of biology, right?
The trade-offs in a camera that shoots film taught me how to think about trade-offs in a way that I then extrapolated into the realm of creatures.
Anyway, I get this, and the phone.
I even find that the capacities I did develop as a young person in a world without such devices are growing crude.
On a day when I somehow don't have a phone because it's died or something like that, it's amazing How much I'm depending on it and I don't even realize I'm doing it, which is very frightening.
But yes, developmentally, it has been a disaster.
But I want to point one other thing out.
I've never been to Burning Man.
I have been almost unwilling to go.
Because I'm so annoyed by the myopia that people who think it's a great thing appear to have about what kind of great thing it might be.
It's not that I'm against a festival.
It's not that I'm against people taking a week or whatever it is and throwing off the rules and putting art first or whatever.
I'm not against any of that.
I think there's potentially great value in it and I would ordinarily be interested in at least seeing But there's a sense that because of what they've done to sideline economics in the immediate context of Burning Man, that they are demonstrating something about what is possible.
They're demonstrating something about what is possible in a habitat where nothing grows and everything has been trucked in.
Every last thing that they are eating has been trucked in and they are there for a prescribed finite period of time and they are all wealthy.
This proves nothing about what is possible in any context.
And the idea that a bunch of people, many of whom are tech utopians by their nature, look at this as if it has implications about the way humans might get along, if only.
And the answer is no, no, that's That's bad sci-fi.
There may be some good art at Burning Man, but what you're learning about the way people interact is bad sci-fi.
What you're doing only works for a brief period of time.
It only works if you have a bomb-proof birth control with a surefire backup program.
It only works if you've planned carefully and brought in enough food.
And even just this recent one where what they had was rain and mud.
Right it began to show how absurd the belief structure that had grown up around it was so anyway I do think people.
If the power went off on planet Earth for a week, I don't know that we'd survive.
A lot of stuff would go wrong, including, you know, how many nuclear reactors would... the backup systems that involve diesel fuel work.
Hopefully all of them, but that's not guaranteed.
But anyway, I do think people need a wake-up call that tells them just how far they've gotten from knowing how to be a human being without... I don't think people know how helpless they are.
I, too, did not miss the irony of this beautiful avant-garde experiment and what's possible for humanity when it comes together under the aegis of a peace and love festival, almost going Mad Max because an inch of rain fell, you know?
Yep.
Yeah.
It got a little dicey there, you know?
But this larger, it's a perfect encapsulation metaphor for actually where my work is, which is around this idea of saying, look, because I'm a biologist by training and almost all of my work in the lab was under microscopes, very high power differential interference contrast microscopes, which allow you to image living cells in very high fidelity while they go about their business, you know?
And that's where I rediscovered
A faith as it were it's just it's it's so magnificently complicated one cell looks like a city from 10,000 feet with trucks and things moving and it's just doing it's just busy you know it's just astonishing watching all of that um but as we come into this next period of time around uh biology at its core all of every single you know this way better than i every single organism every moment of every day is primarily concerned with
Where's my, where's my energy coming from?
Right.
And we've forgotten that.
Thank you, Pico.
Thank you, oil.
It was great.
We have this, you know, several hundred year departure without having to think too much about where our next meal is coming from, you know, on, on balance.
Um, and, and you made, I'm going to bet you look back, we're going to say, well, we squandered.
That was awesome.
We could have done some great stuff.
We could have all become enlightened with that much free energy kicking around, and we chose to do other things with it.
But this is my larger framing architecture, which I know I'm early on, but I tried this on an audience the other day.
It didn't go too far.
But it goes like this: We evolved to know where our next meal is coming from.
No different than when, you know, a herd of wildebeest see the grass is getting thinned by whatever sensory apparatus they have.
They wander off in search of.
New grass, right?
Another Valley.
And so we humans, we don't have any more valleys to go to.
We we've mapped it.
We pretty much know where every oil basin is, where every there's no surprise 60 million square miles of, of arable land that we forgot about.
Right.
We know, we know what we're up against and we're at 8 billion people.
And we now at least 10, but I've heard estimates as high as 20 calories out of every food calorie that I eat.
It's just got fossil fuels embedded in it, right?
So you said something that can't be right.
20 calories out of every what?
Every single calorie that lands on my plate has up to 20 calories of fossil fuel energy embedded in it.
The return on investment has been one food calorie for 20 fossil fuel calories loaded in.
Up to about 1920, farming was net positive, which is how we built civilizations.
It gave you a 10 to 1 return.
Farmer plus a mule would put out one calorie of energy, but 10 calories of potatoes or wheat would come back off of that story.
We've been upside down on that, right?
We've been subsidizing our calorie production, right?
To a huge extent.
That's fine.
What's not fine is we don't have a single plan anywhere I can identify, and I've been to every corner that I can find where they've said, oh, and here's how we're going to conduct agriculture in the future, when, not if, but when, this This source of fuel goes away, right?
And we don't just use oil to run the tractors, that's obvious, or make the pesticides, that's obvious, but we use natural gas with the Haber-Bosch process to capture nitrogen, which is a triple bonded molecule out of the atmosphere, very stable, does not like being split asunder.
We use that energy to give us free nitrogen.
We use it to transport, to cool, to ship, to distribute, on and on, right?
To your point, though, back to, you know, people may not, this may have softened us up greatly.
I have a farm.
You know, Evie and I, we got cows, we got chickens.
Brett, growing food takes a lot of work.
And I mean a lot.
I'm embarrassed to say how much.
No, look, this is one of the places where I know you took the right path and it's too late for me to take it, but what you're telling us about farming is something that people do not understand.
They have a relationship with food that gets super vague beyond the grocery store.
They just don't get it.
And, you know, the Haber-Bosch thing ought to loom large.
The idea that most of the food, most of the protein in you actually comes from a process derived from bomb-making technology from the First World War that allows us to take nitrogen out of the atmosphere that is not biologically available and make it biologically available.
We have radically transformed the Earth.
We have changed the population of the Earth.
Radically.
By a chemical trick that takes energy, which we derive from fossil fuels, and turns it into biology.
And what you were saying, you said it very clearly, but I'm going to repeat it because it's so important.
It is one thing to do this, knowing that it cannot be sustained forever, if you know what you're going to do when it stops being possible.
It is another thing entirely to do it, knowing that it cannot be sustained, and have no plan, and assume something will turn up, because there is absolutely no reason to think that something will turn up.
And it could!
I mean, for me, you talk about zero-point energy, I spend a lot of time thinking about fusion.
Fusion which has been 20 years away for the last 60.
As I count it.
Right?
It's always just out of reach.
If we ever do get there, and I hope that we do, it liberates us.
All these energy concerns potentially go away, although I will say to you what I always say on this front, which is that if we discovered it tomorrow, if we discovered viable fusion energy tomorrow, without having set the groundwork to keep the value of what we have discovered so that it serves the public, I believe it would make things worse and not better.
Although it would potentially solve a great many of the problems that are existential threats, the economic system would cause it to become effectively weaponized against the public.
And I think it would function as an accelerant to many of the very bad processes that threaten us.
But nonetheless, there are things out there that could free us, but the idea that anybody is banking on the fact that something's going to show up at the right moment, well, what if it doesn't?
Right?
I mean, I do want to talk to you about peak oil, which I know is a drum you have been beating for a long time, and no doubt changes in our energy environment have probably caused you to rethink what you once thought about peak oil.
But the overall picture can't be terribly different.
There's still a finite You know, the earth did not store an infinite quantity of hydrocarbons in the past.
It stored a finite quantity and they have gotten ever harder to reach.
And yes, we have liberated a bunch that weren't available to us through technologies like fracking and deep ocean drilling.
But, um, you know, it's a fixed quantity.
And even, even if the answer is, yeah, we got to burn all that stuff.
There's a point at which there isn't any more, or there's a point at which the what remains is so expensive to reach that there is effectively no more.
There are some wonderful nuances to this conversation, and potentially the most important of them is this idea of net energy, right?
So back in the day, spindle top, early turn of, you know, the 1900s, when people were finding this, they would find oil typically because it was like literally bubbling out of the ground, Jed Clampett style, right?
They'd be like, oh, well, let's drill here.
And typically they would have to drill down.
It was a nuisance.
Yeah!
Oil was a nuisance until people figured out how to fractionate it and utilize the components in various different ways.
And the components are, you know, things we're familiar with.
Kerosene, for example, is one of the components.
Asphalt is one of the components.
So we've basically figured out how to separate the goo Yes!
into a bunch of different useful things.
And we pave roads with it, and we fuel jets with it, and we fuel cars with it, and everything else.
Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt, but yes, it used to be too much of it.
It was annoying. - It was annoying, but it was easy.
It was relatively easy to find that first stuff.
I mean, the first well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, 1859, they drilled for it, and the drill rig was this derrick that could lift up a large piece of ingot of iron that was sort of sharpish at the point, and they would just drop it.
Right.
They were sort of smashed through the shale layers until they got down far enough that they get, I don't know what they did, bucket the stuff out.
Cause they didn't really have pumps back then that worked that way.
So, so that was the first, you know, they didn't even know what to do with it when they had it, you know, and then an industry came up around it.
Um, but even as recently as, um, you know, the forties and fifties, sixties, we were still drilling down.
Like if you go to the Gowar field, it's in Saudi Arabia.
This thing's, this is massive, 138 miles long, 50, 60 miles wide.
It varies, but depend, you know, on average.
And it's down about 1,100 feet.
That's amazing.
They have wells that they put down in the 40s that are still producing 3,000 barrels a day, right?
One well, 1,000 feet down.
All right.
But these were all the oil.
This is what we call conventional oil.
This is oil that was trapped in a pocket where some unfolding had happened.
Maybe it was a salt dome or it was an anticline, you know, some geological formation, but it had a capstone on it that was impermeable.
Because most of this oil was formed in a 400 to 100 million year ago range for reasons.
And if you had something that was even leaking one drop per second, you know, just one drop out of this, you'd lose, you know, a billion barrels in that time frame.
It would all be gone.
So it has to be fairly impermeable.
And but this is these were these pockets, Brett, where the oil had drifted up and the gas would go on top.
And then there was, you know, the oil and then water underneath just by density.
And so that's great.
So we found most of those.
Those ran out.
And then we started drilling this shale oil, which is part two of the story.
But this is what we call the parent rock.
Right.
These are flat shale layers that had, you know, people like, oh, is that dinosaurs?
It's like, no, no, it's algae, you know, because lipid bilayers, all that, you know, that's where the oil came from.
And then, you know, now we're down in what's called the parent rock.
And the mistake is to think, well, you know, we move from conventional to shale.
We'll just go to the next thing.
There's no grandparent rock in this story, right?
There's no, there's nothing deeper than that.
Like this is it.
Like we're, we're, we're tapping this stuff.
Brilliant technology, amazing people doing it.
It's unbelievable what they do.
But if you're in the Bakken up in North Dakota, I went there and visited one of these drill rigs.
And it's just, it's astonishing the power of what they're doing.
But first they have to drill down like 10,000 feet and then they tip the drill bit sideways.
Beautiful technology.
And then they'll drill sideways for up to another 10,000 feet, right?
Through a thickness of shale that might be as deep as a two story house, right?
To even find that, do that again.
Brilliant, right?
How they do that and measure it and all that.
So, and then they do that and then they might do these days up to a hundred, a hundred stage frack, right?
Where they plug it and explode it with this massive, they have these chains, 700 horsepower diesel.
compressors that are pushing down unbelievable amounts of power down there.
And then they explode it and move the toe and explode it and move the toe 100 times.
And then they get this well that might start out at 1000 barrels a month, but typically it's 800, that within three years is putting out maybe 20 barrels a day.
So they have this ferocious decline rate.
So it's not the same as drilling down 1000 feet and getting 40, 50, 60 years of 3000 barrels a day.
These things are pushing, you know, you drill it, frack it, and the energy required to do that.
Just the energy equation.
We're just doing an energy budget.
How much energy does it take to drill 10,000, another 10,000, frack it, case it, all that stuff.
And you might get total 200 to 300,000 barrels out of that well over its entire life, start to finish.
Um, it's a very different equation.
So let me get back to net energy.
You and I are talking and you and I have a business and you and I lead our lives and everybody listening to this leads their lives because somebody somewhere got energy for a net gain.
Cause if it was a one, if they put one barrel in to get one barrel out, there's no barrels left for you and I to do what we're doing right now.
Yeah.
Right?
So that energy surplus matters a lot.
And in the story, this is one of these nonlinear stories.
So we used to get a hundred to one and then it was 50 to one.
But when you track out this curve of energy and energy out, it doesn't go down.
It goes along merrily till about 10 and then it craters.
Right.
If you, if you plotted it out, because you know, at five to one, we're getting 50 out 50%, you know, I mean, sorry, at one, one to two, we get 50% out, but at, at one to three, we get 30% out and on and on, but it goes very, it's an eight, it's a very steep curve.
And we're already down that curve a little bit.
Right.
And by the way, fuel ethanol, where we take the last six inches of Midwest topsoil to put in our gas tanks, that stuff has about a 1 to 1.4 return.
You couldn't possibly run a society on it, you know?
It's just brain dead.
And that's the thing I'm offended by, is that these are very easy concepts.
Shale oil, there's only so many drillable acres and we can see it and we've got, you know, there's more there.
Don't get me wrong, but we ought to be having this conversation where it says, well, when we run out of drillable acres, then what?
Then what?
Well, okay.
So this brings me to another quadrant where I spend a lot of time and it's gotten darker and darker and darker.
The more I, the more I explore.
We are not having a conversation that makes any sense with respect to ROI.
Return on Investment.
Return on Energy Investment.
R-O-E-I.
Is that it?
Yep.
Why not?
It's obvious, right?
It takes you, you know, you three paragraphs and you've talked us into a state of knowledge in which we could now intelligently discuss the distinction between ethanol and fracked shale oil, etc.
Where we are on this curve and what it implies about our future.
That's an intelligent conversation.
Not everybody be up to it, but enough people who would potentially be able to then understand the world of geopolitical forces and biological and chemical and nuclear opportunities.
We could have that conversation and obviously we should.
However, there is a process.
I keep swearing that it's a bad name and that I need to find a better one, but people keep telling me it's actually all right.
Time Traveling Money Printer.
Time Traveling Money Printer is my placeholder name for the following observation.
We all know how you make money if you have a time machine.
You can go forward in time and find out what's going to happen and then come back and bet on it, or you can go back in time and you can buy Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, whatever.
You can turn small piles of money into huge piles of money with a time machine.
But there are no time machines.
There are, however, things that function like time machines.
You can do the same trick by slowing the public down in its awareness of what is taking place so that you effectively have information because people are artificially foolish about what's going on.
And the reason that I say this gets very dark Is that there comes a point at which you realize that a general program of bewildering the public, of destroying the mechanisms by which the public might become informed, by sidelining the people who are trying to tell it like it is, putting information in the public domain, destroying the universities where truth-seeking is supposed to be the core mission, but it is now a social justice mission.
Taking journalism and making sure that everybody is living by the question of which side their bread is buttered on rather than a desire to win a prize by unearthing a story that powerful people didn't want told.
All of these things leave us in the public blind and our blindness is monetizable by anybody who doesn't suffer from it.
But to the extent that we are slowed down in realizing what is taking place, other people will have placed bets, and they can transfer our wealth to them in the market by knowing what historical events are going to take place.
So, what I'm getting at is, you can present in a matter of three paragraphs a story on which our future depends, and we could at least now have a conversation about what rationally we should think about that predicament.
This is not widely understood, not because it's difficult to convey, not because it isn't obvious how important it is, but because our myopia is a source of wealth for others.
We are being held in the state of what economists might call being greater fools.
Keeping people from understanding what's going on turns them into a source of wealth for people who know more.
I don't know if I'm seeing a mirage, if that's just an accident that we're becoming foolish and misinformed, or if our being foolish and misinformed is a source of a different kind of energy for a different class of people who understands what they must do in order to keep the spigot flowing.
But it is impressive how many topics we are confused on simultaneously.
Well, I would submit that a warning sign that maybe one of those misinformation campaigns is running is that the story lacks coherence in some way.
You can quickly judge that this is an incoherent mess.
Okay, let me go to climate change real quick.
I'm told in no uncertain terms that this is the most powerful, most important thing.
I have jet-setting billionaires telling me all the time that I need to take cold showers and travel less, right?
We have people experimenting with 15-minute cities and floating the idea that maybe you should only take one or two short-haul flights per year and on and on and on, right?
If this were true, That they really cared about this.
We would be seeing a wholesale effort to rebuild our nuclear industry in this country.
And there's no effort whatsoever being undertaken, right?
We would see efforts to put, like if you fly into Israel or you fly into China, a lot of places you fly and you see solar thermal collectors on the roof because it turns out those are brilliant.
The sun loves heating stuff up.
Almost no magic.
It's not very sexy.
It's a box with pipes in it and in a single circulating pump.
Brilliant.
Hot water represents 25% of the use of energy in any given home.
Right.
So places that are sensible go, maybe we should do this.
Right.
I can fly into almost any city, including in places like Phoenix, where it makes all the sense in the world and see none of these as we, as we're coming in over the houses as we're landing.
Right.
So there's total incoherence in our story about climate change, which is fundamentally incoherence in our story of energy.
I've read China's energy policy.
They're not confused at all.
They understand all of this intimately, right?
They have a beautiful five-point plan they just unveiled this year.
It is robust.
It understands the role of alternative energy and how it has to be layered in slowly, but that it's never the center of the system because how could it be given, you know, scalability and storability problems, et cetera.
They understand that they have to make nice with their neighbors so that it's a win-win because they're going to have to be importing, right?
They have coherence in their policy and they're executing it and it makes sense.
Our policy is completely incoherent.
And I think people make money because of that incoherence.
They're going to make a lot of money.
So I've been working on some projects to surface some ways of thinking to get around these problems.
One of them involves getting people to an awareness.
Pie charts are not something that I saw very much in the study of biology.
They're treated as You know, the stuff of business.
And I'm not saying I never saw them, but I think they're dramatically underutilized when thinking about population dynamics and ways in which society functions.
Because one pattern that we see again and again Is people increasing the size of their slice of the pie, not by innovating, which is the cover story, but by destroying other slices of pie.
In other words, the overall volume of the pie shrinks, but your slice gets bigger.
This is something that society should Stamp out by making it unprofitable.
You should never make a profit by destroying wealth.
Creating wealth is one thing.
Destroying wealth is another thing.
It's a net loss even if you got a bigger boat.
So what you're describing sounds to me like a total failure of any patriotic allegiance to the population.
We still have flag-waving and the pretense that there's a nation, but what we also have is people in a position to slow us down in our awareness of things who are destroying our future and getting rich in the process, and presumably they will not go down with the ship.
That's a critical problem.
A failure of patriotism is really, in some sense, the issue there.
You wouldn't do that to a nation that you cared about.
You wouldn't do it to a population that you felt was an extension of you.
But you would cynically do it to people who meant nothing to you.
And we see an awful lot of behavior that is best explained by that exact failure.
And your point about China is perfect.
It'd be bad enough if you did that to your population in the absence of a major competitor who was doing precisely the opposite.
But effectively, you are handing us over.
you are subjecting future generations from the West to values that are currently on display in China that we should want no part of.
And I don't know how we call people's attention to this fact, but I think the core message here is you and I are both practitioners of what I would call first principles thinking.
First principles thinking is almost the only thing that still works in an era where you're being fed garbage and the authorities are all at least tied up in a system that has them confused, if not outright on the take.
First principles thinking is how you bootstrap an understanding of a system without reliable anything.
You just simply compare.
You figure out what might actually be a fact.
You compare those facts to each other and you say what ways might they actually fit the same story and what happens to people like you and me?
Is our bullshit detectors are constantly going off, because we're constantly being given stories, the purpose of which is not to inform us.
So that then causes us to say, hey, wait a minute, and to try to educate other people because we are public spirited.
And that also makes us I don't know how seriously they take us, but it makes us enemies of the powers that are profiting through these mechanisms.
So we are derided as conspiracy theorists or whatever the stigma of the hour is.
And the question is what to do about it.
Really, what we need is more people to say, actually, you know what?
I sure wish I had followed the first principles thinkers through COVID because they did much less harm to themselves.
I just know that if I look back on the people who were doing this particular trick, those people spotted bad thinking earlier and ended up healthier.
Same thing with the story unfolding in the Middle East.
Same thing with all of these stores.
It's not the first principles thinking done by lone individuals isolated except by virtue of a polluted internet through which we interact.
It's that there really is nothing else.
You know, there is no journalism somehow, amazing as that statement sounds.
There is no university system.
There is no institutional structure doing this job.
And so all we've got are people who somehow bootstrap this capacity in isolation and insist on continuing to do it.
I agree.
And let me try a hypothesis out.
It goes like this.
Humans have always been about power and control.
And once upon a time, you exerted that by having slaves and or serfs, right?
But oh my God, what a pain, right?
You have to feed them.
You have to clothe them.
They're trying to run away.
They do uprisings.
You've got medical costs.
It's a pain.
And then we stumbled across this great idea of fractional reserve banking, which is awesome because I put Brett into debt and now he's my bitch.
He does whatever I need him to do, right?
And you will self-own yourself.
You will be in your own prison going, well, I took on this debt and I'm going to lose my house or my boat if I don't You know, so you work really hard.
It's just when you strip it away, it's really just a better form of slavery, right?
Because the slaves own themselves.
It's great.
It's a great model.
The keepers of the system manufacture the money out of thin air, right?
And you, it's a very different thing in your life and my life.
It's a tangible thing where things get hard when you run out of it, right?
If not desperate.
So we have that.
I think what we're seeing now is this switch to a third order ...arrangement where actually the power is in the cognition itself and it's in narrative control.
So it's even better, Brett, if I can be controlled by somebody who can control how I think and what I think.
So freedom of speech means nothing to me if I don't have freedom of thought.
I see people now who have lost the ability of freedom of thought because the control systems are really good.
So this to me, I think information is the new power.
It's the new battlefield.
You and I fight this all the time.
I'm just every day now, I'm like, how many of these things on Twitter are just bots?
How many of them are government bots?
How many of them are Many of them, I just want to put on the radar of people because I think it's looming very, very large.
Many of them are organized armies of paid trolls.
And when we say bot, it calls up the wrong thing because a bot is inherently stupid.
A person who is paid to create a particular impression, especially if they are doing so in conjunction with 20 other people who've been assigned a task, is a very powerful thing because what it does is it uses the human API expertly.
That is to say, we all have a sense of what it means when a person says something hostile or challenging to us.
We react like human beings do, and when the thing that you're interacting with is one of 20 representatives of an organization whose name you do not know that has identified your account and says it is time to create the following impression around Chris Martinson, Right.
That is a very powerful force.
It is a force capable of preventing an awareness that would otherwise dawn from occurring.
So anyway, sock puppets.
Go ahead.
You would agree, though, that that level of narrative control has gotten all the way down to the individual level.
What do you mean?
You're targeted, I'm targeted.
There's enough force behind this now that they're not just arguing in the comments section under the New York Times to shape an appearance of conformity.
No, there is a project with your name on it.
And the status of that project and the institutional knowledge of that project.
What are your blind spots?
What are your sensitivities?
What are the impressions that can be created around your feed that will cause people who might otherwise listen to you to turn away and walk the other direction?
These things are somehow being wielded in a sophisticated way.
But I will say, before I return you to wherever you were headed, The power of whatever is doing this, and you know, with COVID, we learned the names of many of these organizations, you know, the Trusted News Initiative, the Gavi Alliance, all of these various components of the weaponry became visible over time.
Who knows how many we haven't seen yet, but there are, you know, a dozen organizations that set about to various pieces of controlling the narrative.
Spectacular how ineffective they were.
Now, I'm not saying they didn't.
I can't speak for you.
They put a lot of dents in my ship.
That's for sure.
Right?
The difference between the trajectory that I was on before COVID and the trajectory following it was profound.
But the degree to which these motherfuckers lost Right?
2% of people are getting these boosters.
So yeah, we took a lot of hits and it was very unpleasant and it has meaningful consequences.
And I really want people to think about what that means, that they are capable of disrupting the lives of those who are trying to tell you the truth, right?
In the most profound ways.
But as ferocious as the force that we have faced is, They are losing.
They are losing control of the narrative.
And I'm worried that what they do next is stop dealing with this at the level of narrative control, or at least dealing with it at the level of persuasion and nudging and all of that.
That they, they, uh, they're not good people.
They obviously don't care about, um, Anyone but themselves.
And that means that the options on the table for them are presumably many.
I mean, they obviously were perfectly comfortable giving people an absolutely insane new technology that maimed many and killed quite a number.
So, I don't think they give a damn about ending people.
So, I worry about that.
But anyway, you were talking about the massive investment that is put into controlling the discussion online through various mechanisms, sock puppets, bots, all that stuff.
So the hypothesis rests on that observation, which is that they, whoever they are, whatever the system is, cares enough about narrative shaping and control that it's gotten all the way down to the atomic level, you and me, right?
It's like all the way down, right?
So the control freak's fine.
And so then we say, well, if it's gotten to the individual level, it's not unthinkable.
We know from the Snowden releases in 2015 that they were already operating at a sophisticated bot level with just actual software programming under the comment sections of all the major newspapers.
So if an article came out about the Federal Reserve or something, you know, they had to shape the appearance that this is what people think, right?
So they were doing that.
That's a long time ago in technology.
My, my, my position is this, right?
This narrative control, of course, they're not going to leave something as important as our most critical signaling devices to their own devices, because why, that would be terrible if people actually got real information.
Think what they might do, right?
The most important signaling device we have right now are financial markets.
And they are, I have all the data.
I've got this wonky stuff.
I can show you how they do it.
It's like get all this and that, but they've been controlling.
Okay.
So fine.
They like stocks to go up into the right.
They like, they like to set the price of money.
They do all this.
Here's the problem.
When you're shaping a narrative, by definition, you're picking an outcome that you already think, you know, so you, you're smarter than everybody else.
You're smarter than the collective wisdom of the markets.
And you know what the right price for something should be.
They've been doing this with oil now for a number of years.
I thought that oil markets were larger than them, but it's not true.
So we saw obviously Biden dumped the SPR.
To try and drive the price of oil down.
And he did, but I can show you the financial tracks of how somebody would come in and dump 20 million barrels of oil in a one minute window, and it would crush the bid stack and create a lower price for oil.
And then they would manage that.
So while they're doing that, that's fine.
They had reasons they needed, you know, it would be unfortunate if the Ukraine conflict said to people that because of that, your gasoline is going to be more expensive.
It would be unfortunate.
You know, it's always a bad time to have reality intrude in the narrative, right?
But this became systematized over many decades and now it's just a matter of routine, and they do it.
Here's my concern.
While they were keeping oil held down for the past seven years, it hasn't been at a level sufficient to justify offshore drilling, which is the nuclear baseload of oil production.
Trillions of dollars has not been invested over the past seven years.
And if we suddenly wake up one day and said, we need more oil, you don't just flick a switch and throw a trillion in.
The materials might not be there.
The labor might not be there.
Leases have to be negotiated.
It's complicated.
These are big.
This is like oil.
Offshore oil is like a farmer who plants a seed that matures in seven years.
Right.
There's a big latency lag in this story.
Right.
But meanwhile, the narrative keepers have been in service of the narrative.
They've done some things that now are going to, I guarantee you are going to shoehorn us into a very uncomfortable situation in the future.
Um, because the investment simply hasn't been there.
And so this is my, my biggest concern is that our markets have become fictionalized.
There are mainly a conduit for transferring wealth from the many to the few.
The few happen to be big names, you know, Ray Dalio, Ken Griffith.
I'm sure they're very smart guys, but none of them produce anything.
None of them made a single widget pair of underwear.
None of them grew a single fig, nothing.
The skimmers, you know, have, have sort of like are the system now.
And it's a, it's a funky little environment, but the, the fact that we have this inability to have the market set the prices for things means we're not getting the right information.
So this is fundamentally an information fidelity problem.
We now have more signal than less signal than noise.
And this is going to really hurt us.
Yeah, it is.
And I, you know, I cannot help but wonder whether the rent-seeking elites that are driving this system are as dumb as they appear.
They are creating chaos on a planet they cannot leave.
And There are a number of ways that that could play out, and I'll put two on the table, and we can talk about what you see.
One, there's a thread, I call it the Collapse Game, and the idea is, I heard somebody say recently, We're not all in the same boat.
We're all in the same storm.
Some of us are in rowboats.
Some of us are in battleships.
The storm affects us differently, but we're all in the same storm.
But my concern is, evolutionarily, historically, over the span of history and prehistory, elites have faced the following truth, which is collapse hurts everybody.
But it often hurts your competitors more than it hurts you.
And so it can be net positive if collapse destroys your competitors and hurts you, but you inherit what your competitors had by virtue of it, you know, cleaning out the environment.
If that's true, in a general sense, It would cause people to detect when they are in that elite spot.
Hey, I'm better positioned than anybody else to deal with a collapse.
And it would cause the elites who feel that they are in this position to become reckless with respect to the things that would cause it, because the basic point is actually it's kind of a feature, not a bug.
And in the present, That doesn't work, because the technologies on which we all depend, and the interrelatedness of everything, and the weaponry available to us, all of the things that are in play now, function at a scale that takes what used to be true, which is that collapse could serve those best positioned to withstand it, and means that maybe none of us withstand it.
But you wouldn't expect the understanding of that.
It would be a much more visceral willingness to gamble amongst people who were well positioned that might get us all into a situation we simply can't get out of.
That's one possibility.
It's a ship of fools, and those fools are operating on out-of-date information about where there is a future and where there is not.
The other possibility is that they have understood exactly where they are.
And that the story you tell only plays out the way you say it does, uh, if our energy demands remain the same and that a lot of the weird, you know, failure to give a shit that they're killing people through bad pharma, the, uh, deafness to, um, the various,
There's an awful lot of thinking that says the population needs to be lower, and we can argue about that.
I know you and I probably, while we detest the people saying these things and find their logic feeble, also recognize that the Haber-Bosch processes jacked the population up with no exit plan, and so while It isn't clear what's supposed to happen.
My hope is that we get really wise, really fast, discover fusion, apply it correctly, and we make a sustainable planet and, you know, pick a population level that can be maintained with everybody being free and well taken care of.
But I also think that's unlikely.
So there's a question about whether or not the people who have these discussions and used to talk about population have taken those plans to some other level that they're not sharing and, you know, is that just a wild-eyed conspiracy theory?
Or is there something to the idea that somebody is actually looking to address the problem by reducing the amount of energy we need by allowing the population to drop in some way?
Well, the depopulation thing comes up a lot, and I can't... I have a hard time dismissing it out of hand, Brett, because there's a lot of...
Statements and like, as I said, we go back to the WF crowd and we're using them as a placeholder for these elites.
And I believe that they're just the front men for this organization.
I think the truly, truly elite people never show up on the Forbes 400 list.
Right.
You know, it's just, that's, that's gauche.
That's, that's new.
Right.
Yeah.
Rookie.
Yeah.
That's like a set first, second generation kind of a thing.
Wait, you've been around 10 generations, you know, then you'll get it.
You'll work this out.
Right.
So then you'll know.
Um, But, you know, again, back to that, the WF putting out that idea that by 2050 we need two and a half planets.
Well, we don't have two and a half planets, so we have one, right?
And then let's imagine as well that they have access to the same data I have, maybe better, probably better.
They actually know how much Saudi Arabia has or doesn't have left in its oil reserves.
They know.
And this is just a simple calculation.
You go, okay, how does this work?
Now, this is my seminal theory.
The way I look at the world is that we have an exponential money system.
It works really well when it's growing exponentially.
It's great.
It doesn't go in reverse at all.
It hates reverse.
It just doesn't know how to manage reverse, right?
So as long as our credit in the system is expanding by some percentage, eight, nine percent a year, it's reasonably happy.
The problem is, is that our income has been growing at less than half that rate.
And these two things are compounding against each other, you know, away from each other.
And we're at that asymptotic phase like this, like, oh, we're going like this.
We're going like this before.
We don't know what's going to happen when it levels out.
But this is where we are.
And it's really easy to reason through.
So they talk about a great reset.
Our monetary system is in the final throes of trying to desperately ignore something which is completely obvious, which is that we've made way too many claims on the future that can't be met.
Right?
So when people ask me, Chris, summarize all your financial theories in one sentence, I'll say, great, it's very simple.
All we have to resolve is who's going to eat the losses.
And now we can put the players on the table.
The bankers always like it not to be them.
They've been very successful at getting bailed out, you know, taking the obscene profits during the fat years and getting bailouts during the unfat years, right?
The politicians don't want it to be them, right?
And everybody's going to hope that the little people will be the patsies for this again, right?
As we always are.
We are Charlie Brown and they are Lucy holding the football time after time.
The problem has been that this thing called the Internet came along, Brett, and people are onto the scams now.
And so their job has to be fracturing us and keeping us away from each other so we can't organize into a coalition that says, wait a minute, we'd like to have a seat at this table when we answer the question, who's going to eat the losses?
I think that explains a lot of what we're seeing.
Yeah, it unfortunately does.
And we can rephrase some of what you've said in some very ugly ways that will rescue what I've said very clumsily here.
There's a lot of food produced in this system to feed us.
If a massive contraction is coming, that food can be reapportioned and the people who are going to get it are the people with the power, whoever they might be.
So, in other words, it is a little bit like a version of living on a feedlot but not understanding that you're not You know, in the Garden of Eden.
your resources will feed them if lean times come.
Two other things.
You talk about growth versus going in reverse.
So I've been Hammering this particular note.
It's a long-standing thread for me, but I've been talking about it in public in light of the crisis in the Middle East, because I think it is THE perspective which allows us to understand what's actually in play.
We are in a battle between what I call the West, which is not a geographic description of anything.
It is a set of values and a way of organizing a civilization that is superior to the ancestral way.
It is superior in that it is fairer, it is safer, it is less violent, it is more productive, it is more liberating, it is more rewarding, it is better in every way.
The one way in which we cannot make that argument is that it is fragile.
It only works, this version of the West, only works under positive sum dynamics as the pie is expanding.
It works great because it doesn't make sense to bludgeon your neighbor and steal from them when there is wealth to be produced by collaborating with your neighbor.
So we tend to do a good job of putting race aside, for example, and collaborating based on opportunity under growth circumstances.
When you reverse the polarity and things contract, what we do is the system, the West, breaks down into the ancestral system, which I call lineage displacement games.
And the idea is blood is thicker than water becomes the dominant.
Arbiter of who you collaborate with and we get Very ugly tragedies of history as people get rid of other people and take their stuff so that is the predicament and my refrain is We have no choice going forward the only way a planet this high-tech integrated and well-armed can continue
is if we stabilize the conditions that allow the West to flourish and globalize, so that everybody gets to participate in that system.
That's really the question.
We either do that, or I believe we will face one ugly end or another as a species.
Okay, in that light, you have this question.
You say the internet comes along.
People are no longer falling for the scams, because we can now compare notes and do things like that.
This is absolutely right.
I believe that the reason that as powerful as the elites are that they fumbled the ball on COVID is that they really didn't know what a podcast was or why it should matter.
And they thought, okay, we own all the major properties.
We'll just control the story.
That didn't work.
Why didn't that work?
Um, because there's something called a podcast and people can talk and it's clumsy and the production values are low, but you know, it's amazing what they do.
Oh, well then we'll just, we'll, Hey, let's get the New York times a podcast.
Everybody will listen to that one.
Cause it's better.
Really?
No, not true.
They're going to listen to Joe Rogan.
Weird as that sounds.
Yeah, the fighter.
So anyway, that thing upended them, and there's only so long they're going to put up with this.
This is what all the draconian bullshit is about.
Mystics and malinformation.
We have now, as of yesterday, seen Israel making noises about, uh, locking people up who say things that cause a drop in morale, et cetera.
The same bullshit is unfolding as it always will.
But we also see something that for the moment I'm calling the coalition slicer dicer effect where we, you know, we had.
An amazing, very painfully constructed coalition of COVID dissidents.
People with a wide range of expertise from vaccinology, to toxicology, to evolutionary biology, to several different stripes of medicine, right?
All of those things existed in the coalition, and that coalition was in a great position of statisticians, and we had a lot of different skills.
And that coalition was in a great position to actually check the work of the official narrative, which was like laughably bad when you scrutinized it.
Which is why only 2% of people are getting boosters now, because we broke their narrative.
Oh, bad news!
The conflict in the Middle East just so happens to land a direct hit on that coalition, so now we can't even talk to each other anymore, right?
People have divided on a false dichotomy and they view each other with suspicion.
Now, maybe that's just an accident, but the point is, this is now happening repeatedly, where the churning of what Marc Andreessen calls the next big thing, where There's some big thing, you know, I don't know what happened to Ukraine.
I was told I needed to focus all my energy on it, you know, three weeks ago.
And now I don't hear it mentioned because we're on to the next big thing.
The churning of this next big thing machine causes any coalition that develops any capacity to Basically function like a grassroots institution relative to some topic, get slammed with a dividing force, and can't play the next round of the game.
Now, I think we need to get wise to this, and we need to start realizing that the only people who really belong in the discussion are people who are playing by the meta-rules that will allow them to address anything that comes up with rigor and decency and an explicit and carefully chosen set of values.
It's not about the particular thing, and hey, I noticed you're failing to wave the correct flag this week, Chris.
Does that mean you're morally defective?
Right?
That thing cannot be allowed to take the grassroots institutions that are actually springing up and demonstrating capacity to be destroyed on the regular by something that just simply cannot afford to have them around.
Well, I agree.
I don't do left-right politics.
I don't do this flag, that flag stuff, you know.
I got in trouble a lot with, you know, such as it is.
I get in trouble with everything because people are like, oh, you know, are you pro-Russia?
You know, pro-Ukraine.
I'm like, well, I'm neither.
My understanding of that conflict starts in 2013 when I first wrote about the dissolution of the European Association Agreement and Yanukovych chose not to do that.
Then there was this mysterious color revolution.
Then McCain showed up.
With Victoria Newland by, you know, 2014 and, and the rest, you know, and then since then they've killed 10,000 people plus shelling across into the Donbass regions.
And then finally, you know, here we are like, there's this context.
It just, it, you know, it's, I watch this thing.
People just show up like, like this thing with Hamas, just, it just came out of nowhere.
It has no context.
It just happened.
And it's awful.
And I agree.
It was completely awful.
I think that, um, There's just no excuse.
Anybody does anything like that to anybody I love and care about, I get it.
I'm right there for the blood vengeance.
But it didn't just happen out of nothing, you know?
And so that's the thing I hate, is they always present these things as if, you know, are you pro-mask or anti-mask?
Are you pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine?
And our side is like, I think there's nuance here, right?
Wait a second.
I don't want to screw up your role.
Keep going.
Well, you know, to me it's not left-right anymore.
Up-down, right?
And so, what is that up-down axis?
For me, that axis has always been integrity versus rigidity.
You know, ideological rigidity.
So, what do I mean integrity?
To me, there are a lot of definitions.
But to me, the definition that resonates for me the most is that you have high integrity when you stand ready to be completely re-educated at any moment in time.
Yes, my friend Alexandros Marinos has been banging the drum of epistemic humility, which I think is synonymous with what you are describing.
It is a willingness to accept that your understanding is imperfect, and that means you may have to swallow a reversal of any size based on new information.
And if you can't do that, and if you don't behave like your highest objective is to figure out what's actually going on, Um, yeah, then you're not really playing the same game.
Well, I mean, a lot of people think integrity means, you know, I've got the integrity of an Oak, like I'm, I'm unchanging.
Right.
And it's not that it's that I am strong enough in myself that I'm not attached to the ideas.
Right.
I've, I've mentioned that before that I have to work hard at that.
Cause my ego can get attached to things, but so I, I work at this, but, but to be completely reeducated, like if somebody came along and said, Chris, I need a half hour.
I've got all the data.
There really is a flat earth.
Let me show you, and they can prove this to me.
I'm going to have to go, okay, wow, I had that wrong.
I'm going to have my own Cartesian crisis.
Now where do I go?
But I do believe that that's what they're trying to forestall.
They don't want critical thinking.
They don't want you to think for yourself.
They want to just push you into this thing, right?
There's a lot of those dichotomies, and they're all false.
They're all traps.
Democrat or Republican.
Well, there's a you and a party, actually.
For what it's worth, I maintain a list of things.
It's not complete.
Who knows what might emerge?
But I maintain a list of things.
That if I encountered them in a compelling form where I actually believed that the evidence was what it looked like, I would have to reverse my position on Darwinian evolution as the explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.
I don't expect ever to see these things.
I spent my life thinking about evolution.
I'm a diehard believer.
I could recite to you, you know, an unending stream of evidence that points in that direction.
But it doesn't mean that there aren't things that if I saw them, like You know, a Bible verse of a particular length inscribed in the genome of some creature that nobody had had the opportunity to mess with, you know, that it wouldn't force me to think about it.
If aliens stepped off a spacecraft from a foreign body and spoke English, right, that would cause me to You have to rethink because there's stuff, right?
There's a list of things that would tell me, yep, you've wasted your life, your life's work is wrong, and it is time to start with a fresh sheet of paper.
So that is, in some sense, something we all have to do.
What would really tell you that you had gotten even the most fundamental stuff you believe wrong, including things like the roundness of the Earth?
But I wanted to go back to your excellent point about the false dichotomies, that these false dichotomies are traps.
And this couldn't possibly be more important.
The way the story, the next big thing will come at you, will come at you in the form of a choice between two things, and your gut will tell you the answer is that one, right?
I just watched Ukraine, invaded by Vladimir Putin, a murderous maniac, has invaded a sovereign country.
Right?
It is time for me to put the Ukrainian flag in my bio.
Right?
Perfectly straightforward why you would conclude that.
Makes moral sense.
But it misses a whole layer of nuance.
That causes the story to be one in which maybe that's the right answer, but not for a straightforward reason.
I'm not arguing that I'm not on the side of Ukraine against Russia.
But I am also not on the side of anything that would have lured or forced that to unfold for reasons that I'm not in on.
Right?
Why did NATO cause conditions that would make Russia feel vulnerable that would induce it to do this?
If I'm against the invasion of Ukraine, I'm against anything that would put Ukraine in jeopardy of an invasion from Russia.
I'm definitely against Burisma energy.
I don't know what it is, but I do know that it's been corrupting my country and that it's an energy outfit and that it hires people who don't know shit because of their connection with powerful, corrupt elites.
So which flag do I put in my bio that says, I stand with the people who are against Burisma in Ukraine?
It doesn't have a flag, right?
It needs a flag, but it doesn't have one.
So I think the Chris Martinson rule here is the dichotomy, the false dichotomy.
If you can spot a dichotomy that you're being asked to declare sides on on the basis of some moral precept, and you can spot that there is nuance that would force you to want to embrace something for which neither side speaks, then it's a trap.
and the The thing then goes into another mode, right?
So it says, well, which side are you on?
Are you on Putin's side, or are you on the side of the Ukrainian people who have just been attacked by this demon?
Right?
Well, I'm on the side of the Ukrainian people, and that means I'm against Burisma Energy, and I don't know what flag I'm supposed to be waving, right?
The Burisma Energy head It somehow put the people of Ukraine in danger and I am on their side.
So, what am I supposed to do?
When you get to that level, then the point is, the thing comes after you, the machine that you described that has bots and sock puppets and organized armies of trolls who create a phony conversation in your replies or whatever the thing is, comes after you and it tries to turn the heat up.
On the area where the truth actually is.
Somewhere not exactly in either of the camps that you've been told you have to join.
And by driving the heat up, most people will retreat.
They don't know what just hit them.
They think, oh God, I'm being morally questioned because I haven't put the Ukraine flag in my bio yet.
So maybe I'll just do that because at least I'm on the side of the people of Ukraine.
Right?
Anyway, that process is one we have to wise up and learn to spot.
Every time it's a trap.
Every time there's some third position that hasn't been articulated and somebody is going to struggle mightily to prevent it from being articulated, and it's kind of our job to figure out what it is each and every time.
I completely agree, and this gets me to, um, I think what The thing is, as I get older, Brett, the thing I'm coming to is that I'm starting to see the great tragedy of that, right?
Which, you know, H.L.
Mencken said that the point of politics is to present people with a never-ending series of hobgoblins, you know?
And so now they've really ramped that up.
The next current thing right and you see people it's it's black lives matters it's it's the shot it's the flag this flag not that flag this flag forget that that's last week and it's just this never ending thing so what's the tragedy in that the tragedy is that those things push us down if you know Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been very useful to me because you know if you have the physiological needs if you can breathe and excrete Then you can get to safety and security, and then you can actually have a sense of belonging.
And, you know, by the time you get to the top, it's true self-actualization.
Existentially, I think that's why we're here.
That's why I think I'm here.
So to the extent I can derive meaning and purpose out of my life.
War gives people a sense of meaning and purpose.
That's one level.
But I would submit to you, it's not a very growthful level.
There's not a lot of additional lessons to be gleaned there on a sole journey basis.
But, you know, why are you here?
Why is anybody here?
I submit you can't answer that question in the cacophony of noise of being constantly stimulated into some new fear response state.
Because that's the habituated state we're in.
Fear response, fear response, fear response.
And some people have gotten quite addicted to it.
And they love it, and if everything magically went away, they would, I think, you'd find people clamoring for more of it.
It's a tragedy though, because that's not why we're here, right?
And to the extent that we're problem defining, the solution space for me has got to be, look, from an evolutionary standpoint, if we humans are going to be around in 10 million years or a million years or 10,000 years.
If we're going to do that, I submit to you, we're going to have to break out of these old metaphor narrative patterns and find some new ones, right?
And so how do you do that?
How do you move towards that new state?
And I'm convinced that all of this noise that you and I sort of battle on a daily basis is designed to keep us off of that question.
That that's, that's the actual job right now is how to, I'm old enough.
I've, I, you know, I'm, I'm the pound puppy.
That's going to be scared of brooms for the rest of its life for reasons we don't know.
Right.
It's just something in my background.
That's me.
I am what I am old dog, but I, I believe that I can help create a container where these, where young people can come in and actually begin to evolve in new ways.
Right.
And I'm deeply disappointed to see that the people who we've entrusted with that sacred duty.
Universities, right?
Um, and other sort of, you know, teachers in their lives have completely fucked that up.
They've taught them how not to think.
They've broken critical thinking.
They've broken their spirit to actually dare to be re-educated.
It's the most bizarre thing to me.
Yes.
As with so many things in very recent history, the thing has become its inverse.
I have two college-age sons, but I'm not Really rooting for them to go to college because as much as college is presumably still a place that serves certain functions like integrating you with members of your generation so that you can figure out how to set your adult life off in the right direction.
I don't know.
It is obviously a place.
In which you are going to have to actively work.
Not to become stupider.
Like, I really believe that.
If you're going to come into a biology class and they're going to tell you that sex is a spectrum, or you're going to go into a math class and they're going to tell you that 2 plus 2 can equal 4, but not inherently, right?
Or they're going to tell you that actually, you know, it used to be that we discriminated against pedophiles, but now we understand that they are minor attracted persons.
If they're going to tell you any of this shit, They are working to unhook your capacity to think well enough to even act in your own interest.
And I don't want to send my kid, somebody I deeply love and have invested two decades into bringing to the brink of their adult life.
I don't want to send them to a re-education camp that makes you stupid.
That seems like a dumb move on my part.
So anyway, we are there.
And again, I think just as no institutions function, but we are learning to bootstrap things, grassroots institutions outside of the institutions that do, this is the same question.
You need to be educated.
It doesn't stop when you graduate from high school.
But what then?
What is a real education at this point?
That's the question.
I had one other thing I wanted to say.
Sorry, I keep doing that to you.
I keep putting two things on the table at once and it's really bad form.
But in response to your last point, the word that we need to focus on is counterintuitive.
In the circumstance where you are being presented a false dichotomy, In the circumstance where you are facing the same puzzle that humanity has faced for centuries, and you're about to do it again, and you know that it's a cycle that doesn't go anywhere good and is only getting more dangerous based on new weapons, the answer is, you can be certain that the right move is going to involve a healthy dose of the counter into it.
You're going to have to think some thought that sounds wrong at first.
You're going to have to make some move that people are going to swear is immoral or unbearably dangerous or something.
You're going to have to do something unexpected to break out of the trajectory, which you know in the end leads nowhere.
And so I would just say people need to look at that and they need to budget.
Oh, I'm going to have to say something that's going to get me in trouble.
I don't know which thing it is yet.
There's no way out of this puzzle that doesn't have me saying something that's going to cause people to swear I'm a bad guy.
Okay?
Maybe I'll just budget for that.
Right?
There's going to be something counterintuitive and people are going to have a hard time with it at first.
So, that's just where I am until further notice.
Yeah.
The way I think about that is, um, Charles Eisenstein framed this really brilliantly.
He's such a beautiful writer, but he called this, this is the interregnum, right?
We're between stories, right?
And so the old narrative is infinite growth and you know, the bank, this is how banking operates.
This is how, what geopolitics means and all that developed and made a lot of sense.
Like I'm old, I can't even believe I can say this, but when I was born 1962, there were 3 billion people on the planet, right?
In a year or two, there might be 9 billion.
Who else has been alive when 6 billion new souls have come on this planet?
I don't even know how we adapt to that level of change.
We don't really have to do energy budgeting because there's always more and we'll think of something and we can just, you know, treat nature as the disposable repository for whatever waste streams or, you know, soil.
Every ton of food we grow loses six tons of top soil right now under current practices.
So we all like, we can squint at that and say, that doesn't seem sustainable, whatever.
So that's the old story, but we don't know what the new story is yet.
And that's like the king is dead, but we don't know which of the uncles and sons is going to actually seize the throne.
So we don't know which regime we're going to be living under.
And the interregnum is a highly destabilizing, uncomfortable place to be.
And that's where we are.
We're in that interregnum between stories.
And so that's both frightening, but the exciting part is, well, guess what?
There's a lot of leverage.
People who actively rewrite the news stories, like you said, say that wrong thing, you know, dare to say something that will offend people.
That's how new stories get written, right?
So this is an incredible moment of time where Good thinking people hopefully come together and people of good faith come together and figure out if this is a time when stories get rewritten, I'd like a hand in that.
I would like to have a seat at that table.
I would like to have some input.
I fully agree with this.
And unfortunately, it puts me in the mind of a scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
which haunts me.
Always good to bring that up.
Yeah, it's a great one.
It's, you know, how true brilliance is conveyed in the form of an excellent story and just unbearably powerful humor.
But there's a piece of the story that haunts me, and it will probably sound arrogant for me to describe it, but I'm going to do it anyway because it's later than we think.
You'll remember that in the Hitchhiker's Guide, The Earth is actually a sophisticated computer designed to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
After the initial computer that was designed to do this after, I think, thousands of years spit out an insane answer, which was 42, which didn't mean anything.
And then when asked to explain it, it said, well, what was the question?
So the Earth was the 2.0 version of the investigator for what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
And as you will recall, the computer actually produced its result.
The Earth did figure out what the meaning of life, the universe, and everything was in the form of a young woman on whom it dawned.
And she picked up the phone to convey the answer at the exact moment that the Vogons destroyed the place.
A thruway, right?
Right.
Interstellar thruway.
A space bypass that had been on file in the whatever planet held the paperwork, and it's your own damn fault for not complaining when you had a chance.
So anyway, the point is the Earth spits out the answer, but we still don't know what it is, because lo and behold, it was destroyed at exactly the moment that the answer was ready to be delivered.
I feel a little bit like I might be the young woman in that story.
Because I believe that actually, evolutionarily, I do know what the next thing is supposed to be.
And it isn't that complex.
We describe it, Heather and I, in our book, in the last chapter.
It's called The Fourth Frontier.
And actually, it's worth talking about what the first three frontiers are so you see why there needs to be a fourth.
And actually, you hinted at this earlier in our conversation.
Human beings, like all creatures, seek frontiers.
Frontiers are untapped opportunities, either an opportunity that isn't being competed for by any other entity or one that is being underutilized, something that you can make evolutionary well-being out of.
So, we seek geographic frontiers.
Where there are no other people.
You might find an island or a continent on which there are no people, but the stuff of life exists.
And you might, instead of producing two surviving offspring, which is the expectation in a population that is not growing, you might produce thousands of surviving offspring, beating the odds tremendously.
That's a geographic frontier, and there have been many, but as you point out, we're done finding them.
We've found everywhere there is on this planet, and the next planet isn't any good, and our ability to utilize it is a long way off in time.
So, geographic frontiers are done.
Then you have technological frontiers.
These are places where you learn how to do more with what you already have.
So the move from hunting and gathering to farming obviously allows a population to grow as if it has found a new habitat, even though it hasn't, just making more of what it's got.
And that can be true, you know, crop rotation, Haber-Bosch process, anything that allows you to put more people on the same plot of land constitutes a technological frontier.
And so the point is, evolution has turned us into growth addicts.
Because growth addicts always find the opportunity to make more wealth and therefore allow the population to grow, and because that's evolutionarily a win, we are obsessed with finding those opportunities.
We look for growth all the time, and we're very good at finding it, which is why we're so ingenious at creating new ways of doing what Buckminster Fuller called ephemeralization, which he defined as the tendency to make more and more with less and less until eventually you can make everything with nothing.
So anyway, those are the first two frontiers.
The third frontier isn't a real frontier.
When the growth runs out, when you don't have a new technological innovation that allows you to have more abundance than you have need, people start looking at other populations of people.
People with wealth who can't defend themselves, who their wealth can be captured.
And it means, this is again back to pie charts, My population's pie can grow if I can find a population that can't defend its slice of pie and get rid of them and take their stuff.
This is the tragedies of history.
This is the Holocaust.
This is a population faced with an economic contraction that decides, hey, we need some growth.
We don't have a mechanism for growth.
But if we go after the Jews, then the good times will be back.
And so they come up with an excuse, and they go after the Jews, and the point is, that's what history looks like in the lineage displacement regime that dominates when we are in zero-sum or negative-sum dynamics.
The fourth frontier is an architected steady state that gives us this sensation of growth without requiring external growth.
And this sounds preposterous.
I swear I'm not a utopian.
I'm anti-utopian.
I think it is the worst idea humans ever had.
So this is a non-utopian idea, and basically just as it is true that inside your house it is always spring-like, it doesn't violate any laws of physics.
We know how we did it, right?
We cooled your house by heating your backyard.
It abides by every law of physics we know.
You can create economic well-being that does not trigger our human impulse to go after each other by giving us the feeling that things are growing, that we have just found this new frontier.
And I believe that is the only hope for humanity, is that we will find that ability to generate a steady state and we will understand that we all depend on its continuing.
If we do that, it can be stabilized.
It's not magical thinking.
If we don't, if half the world is out to sabotage it, they will succeed.
Frankly, probably if 10% of the world was out to sabotage it, they would succeed.
So, in any case, all right, that was a little long-winded.
Maybe that was two pages worth of text, but it's not the most complicated answer in the world.
Maybe it's wrong, but I do feel like we are at a place where we can see the problem and we can understand loosely.
I'm not telling you I've described how this thing would be built, but I have roughly described where it would be found, where we should go look.
And I don't think we're going to make it, because I think what we're going to do is we're going to destroy ourselves here in the very near term over lineage versus lineage displacement games that are perfectly predictable and are back right on schedule.
So I like this.
Let me hypothesize a fifth frontier.
And this is going to dangerously put me into hippie territory, but I speak hippie.
I dabbled in the arts for a while, right?
Nice.
Fluent.
But, you know, this is the woo-woo side of things.
But that other frontier might be inward.
Right.
So we've conquered the external world.
Arguably, we've conquered space to as much as our chemical abilities allow us to do with our chemical rockets.
You know, maybe we could get a little further, but...
Unless we break the space-time fifth dimension, we're kind of stuck here for a while.
This gets us back to consciousness.
I've been wrestling with this for a long time because I wanted it to be wrong, and I bet a lot of physicists did too, but the observer effect in physics is very well characterized.
We understand now that smallish things, electrons, photons, are either waves or particles, and the dividing line seems to be, was anybody watching?
What do you mean?
Was anybody watching?
Like, could a cat watch?
And would it be different?
No, you have to have this awareness that you're actually observing for this thing to be located in space.
And when you bring that awareness, lo and behold, this thing has always been a particle.
Even if you do it after it had to make the decision, right?
It's a brain breaker for me, but it says that there's something else happening here we don't quite understand.
And I connect that loosely to this other idea.
That I've just been astonished by it.
When you look back through history, there are certain people who seem to have figured some stuff out.
And you're like, where'd that come from?
Right?
Like, there must be some access we have, some of us, or maybe all of us, that we have to the greater mystery, right?
That there is a way for things, awareness, information to be processed that we don't get yet.
Right?
And I think Carl Jung put it best.
I loved how he put it.
He said, people don't have ideas.
Ideas have people.
And I can find that same sentiment in the autobiographies of Herbie Hancock and his music.
Uh, who else was saying that?
Oh, Albert Einstein said the same thing.
He's like, dude, I just, I had these crazy ideas and then I had to find the math to make them work out, you know?
So where did, where did the, where's that come from?
So I have to hope somewhere in here that evolution has a point of view, that it's clearly experimenting with consciousness.
And I can make a strong argument that if consciousness is awareness, I can show you many species that this experiment is running in, not just humans and that humans are just one of many Species that evolution, nature has said, let's try this consciousness thing out for some reason.
Right.
So what do we do with that?
Besides bark, you know?
So, so I do think there's something going on here that I, I, again, I'm, I'm standing the older I get, the less I know for sure, but I'm just now starting to put these pieces together where I'm starting to understand that there is on offer for humans, the capability to do some extraordinarily Truly great things that get us out of our brainstem.
Listen, we're all that more.
Like the tantric wheel says, we're all of these things.
We are these vile, gross little subroutines of hardware and wetware, you know, that sort of evolution gave us.
And we also have this capability to step out of that frame and be these other things too, you know?
And so that's the moment in history we find ourselves in, and I think that's the prime tug of war.
It's like, can we find a way to break out of our programming so that we can actually architect things?
Because I'll submit to you, everybody listening to this would say, I don't want it to be this way.
But here's the reality.
These people have hated each other for a thousand years, so that's just how it is.
But it doesn't have to be that way, right?
I mean, we would want it to be different.
So the question for me is, how do we move into this new state where we can actually manifest, make real the things that we actually want, rather than the things that we inherited, however we're using that term.
Beautiful, because this brings us exactly back to the topic that we put on pause at the beginning of the podcast.
I want to lay on you my model for consciousness.
I will warn you that in all intellectual endeavors where people work independently and then team up, there's an inevitable process, I don't think you can particularly accelerate it, you just have to go through it, in which Everybody who works independently ends up having to redefine and sharpen and invent terms in order to do the work.
Because the way that we work in public, the use of a term like consciousness is used across so many different things that it becomes a blunt instrument that is impossible to do surgery with.
So to get back to a surgical level of precision, you have to redefine it.
And the thing that I hold many of my Intellectual colleagues responsible for it is that they forget that they did this.
They don't understand that they have developed a personal language that they are then using as if other people should understand what they're talking about.
And so it is their responsibility to remember that they speak a personal language.
And when they join together, my rule is, look, I don't care if we use your term for this or my term, right?
We can just set a glossary for our shared work.
And the only requirement is that everything that is important to our discussion needs a term to refer to it.
We have to agree on what the term is that refers to it and the whole space has to be covered.
So I will tell you my definition for consciousness is not going to be satisfying because it's going to leave out what a lot of people mean But there's a reason that I have narrowed it this way.
Consciousness is that packet, that portion of cognition that is packaged for exchange.
Doesn't mean that you do exchange it, but it's any thought that you could report.
Now that is almost exactly synonymous with it is subjective experience.
Your subjective experience is those things that are noticed in a way that you could convey them.
It is not things like how much force am I going to put on an adductor muscle to throw a rock a particular distance.
That's obviously some kind of neurological processing, but I can't look into that processing and report it.
It just sort of happens.
I feel it.
So, with that definition in mind, Consciousness is subjective experience.
Another way to say that is that consciousness is that portion of cognition that is packaged for exchange.
The question, evolutionarily, that people struggle over, that they swear is difficult, is, what the hell is that?
It must be, many people now conclude, it must be written into the material of the universe and pre-exists the minds in which it manifests itself, which I think is nonsense.
But I think what they are missing is the following, what I would argue is an obvious set of conclusions.
The utility of consciousness that explains its evolution and its nature is not individual.
The idea that we have a subjective experience that exactly overlaps that which we can report to others is evidence of what this Paradoxical, expensive process is what it's for.
And it is not primarily for thinking thoughts to ourselves.
It is in fact advantageous for that, but secondarily.
The obvious reason to have consciousness is because the capacity of a group of people who are not identical To collectively arrive at thoughts that are better than the sum total of what each of them would arrive at individually is the stuff of human well-being.
So, the point, this is a little more halting because I'm fending off this cough from four weeks ago.
The idea is that human beings, when they face novel circumstances, things for which their ancestors did not hand them a recipe for use, have to bootstrap a mechanism for dealing with those novel circumstances.
And the way they do it in our book, Heather and I encode this as campfire.
They gather around the campfire when they're not occupied finding food for the day or doing other important work.
When they are sidelined, By the fact that their eyes are not particularly adjusted to the low light, they gather around the campfire and they pool their cognitive resources and they talk about things that they have noticed, they talk about opportunities they do not know how to capitalize on, and then they parallel process.
Right?
If I've seen a creature that I know has got to be edible, but I don't know how you would catch one, Then I might talk about this creature, and where I've seen it, and what I know of its behavior, and I might pass that on to a dozen people.
Some of them may be hunters who are too old to pursue game anymore, but know a lot about different creatures, or have passed through some habitat with other things that might tell us something about what one might do to capture one of those things.
And it is the parallel processing that makes human beings so capable of switching niches.
This is the thing.
Most creatures, when we say, you know, what is a springbok?
A springbok is defined by a particular niche that it exists in.
We don't find it across a dozen different niches.
We find it in one niche.
Most species have a niche.
Humans don't have a niche.
Our niche is niche switching.
It is the ability to inhabit thousands of niches simultaneously in different places with different software packages.
Without swapping out the hardware.
Right?
Your same basic platform, but with different cultural packages that enable you to be anything from a hunter of sea mammals to a farmer of mountain terraces.
Right?
Different software packages enable different populations differently.
And that came about through, we argue, this process of Collectively becoming conscious of a problem and arriving at a solution through the emergent cognition of multiple minds sharing the puzzle through the magic of language, which is really, aside from the fact that we pretty much understand how it works, magic.
So anyway, your point about where we are, the interregnum, where we must go, the counterintuitive, all suggest to me that what you're looking for is this is the moment at which we have to do whatever the modern campfire thing is.
Frankly, maybe take the entheogens that are appropriate to that process to liberate the mind so it is not so constrained by what it knows.
Mm-hmm.
Whatever that process is in modern terms has to happen so that those of us who are thinking from first principles can take at least a shot at getting us out of this puzzle.
Because if there's one thing that I think any reasonable person, anyone courageous enough to even confront the question, would have to admit, it's that none of the people who are driving us seem to know anything about a long-term plan.
They may have plans for how they escape the catastrophe that's going to befall the rest of us, but nobody seems to have a plan for all of us.
And wouldn't it be a shame if this marvelous species, with all it has accomplished, didn't take at least a really good shot at architecting a world in which we actually could exist.
A non-utopian world in which we could be liberated and we could put aside ancient rivalries and just simply be our best selves.
We can, and we have to, because I think that's the game afoot right now.
And so this is where my nature serves me really well, all my time in nature.
And we're starting to see these strains of thinking come out in the so-called sustainability communities.
They don't use the word sustainable anymore.
They go with this other word, regenerative, because nature is regenerative.
And when something is regenerative in nature, it does something that you have to do.
It's like the one thing you have to do.
You have to create negative entropy.
Right?
So the sunlight's coming down and you're going to collect that as a tree and you're going to put that into highly organized molecules and relationships and all of this stuff, right?
Because, you know, we got this metaphor, you know, everything tends towards disorder.
Second law.
It's the law.
Well, it's not how nature works.
Nature takes stuff and collapses it and makes negative entropy out of this, meaning highly ordered things, not more disordered things.
And that's the rule.
Anything we've done, like, oh, we have these sustainable wind towers.
No, we don't.
We have these positive net entropy devices that are going to just wear down, and we're going to have to rebuild them.
So they're not alternative energy, they're rebuildables, as Nate Hagen says.
That's all they are, right?
So we haven't yet used our big brains to figure out how to fashion something so that it rebuilds itself over time, right?
That's what nature does.
Everything it does, it's creating pockets of negative entropy, right?
And that's the rule.
So I can tell you, whatever the trees are up to, the tree has figured out a way to do what it does.
And in 10,000 years, you know, all things not going supernova in some spectacular fashion, there'll be trees here, right?
So we have to start thinking about how we create things that are truly regenerative.
It begins to me, Brett, we have to really appreciate and understand energy.
And how energy actually moves and flows, that we've been given this amazing once-in-a-species bequeathment, right?
You know, there's complicated reasons why we have these things called fossil fuels.
Like, we have coal.
You know why we have coal?
Because plants developed lignin before the fungi figured out how to break it down.
It was this awesome period of several hundred million years or so where, you know, in the competing chemistry of life, one branch of life had figured out how to make stuff that nobody had figured out how to eat.
Holy moly, is that true?
Yes, so it built up, right?
There are no modern coal eras anymore.
The game has advanced beyond that.
I have been wondering that for so long.
That's beautiful.
That's really marvelous.
Yeah, all right.
Well, among other things, thank you for filling in that piece of my model of the world.
But I certainly take your larger point, and I actually think your point about windmills is fantastic.
There is something galling about the idea that this is the sustainable future.
It never quite adds up.
Back when I used to teach, I would always point out the details of what is a tree.
used to teach, I would always point out the details of what is a tree.
It is a self-constructing solar farm that is capable of spreading across a landscape into places where the sun is falling in an underutilized fashion.
I mean, that is, it's so far beyond, you know, we think of ourselves as so sophisticated and what was here long before we were here is really breathtaking.
Right?
It's miracles as far as the eye can see, and we clearly are not wise in the sense that we are not even thinking about why our technology doesn't look like that.
Our technology should look like that.
Or, we should figure out how to live in harmony with the stuff that already does this really well.
You think solar power is good?
Yeah, I do.
Let's talk about plants.
They prove how good it is.
And even your fossil fuels are proof of how good solar power is, because that's what they are.
They're just old solar power, you know, that happened in a past environment.
So, yeah, there is a certain dearth of wisdom in our discussions about the future that really needs to end immediately if we're going to have a future at all.
Well, I'm struggling with this idea of, um, and by the way, a lot of these ideas come from a guy who came to our, our recent honey badger gathering.
We hold a yearly event for peak prosperity members here at the farm.
And this guy showed up, um, and he wasn't on the schedule.
And within minutes of talking with him, I put them on the schedule.
This guy, Alan Booker, just a amazing, amazing polyglot information guy around regeneration.
So he's like, wow.
Wowed me entirely.
But I started thinking off of that, like, What would really regenerative architecture look like for humans?
You know, cause it just things wear down.
And the closest I could come up with were, were like the Tibetan monasteries.
You create a place that has a narrative and a story and a beauty that cause people all on their own to show up and keep that thing going.
You know, it's got its own regeneration is built within its own self, right?
Nobody's going to show up when the strip malls outside of my town begin to break down.
Nobody's going to rally to.
Rebuild them.
Yeah, no, you know, as always, you're, uh, so much of your thinking is just so instantly resonant for me.
Strip malls in particular.
I've spent so much time thinking about how dominant these things are in our environment and how preposterous it is that anybody would.
I mean, look, when people buy a car.
They care what it's like on the inside, and maybe they don't buy an expensive car because they can't afford it, but it's not like anybody is confused about wanting to be surrounded by things that are nicer.
You know, everybody would like a nicer house.
They would like their house to be sitting in a place in which looking out the windows is a rejuvenating experience.
We all get it.
How is it?
Once upon a time, architecture, public architecture, mattered.
People put up structures that actually changed the way the population thought of itself, the way it understood its position in time.
And for us to have created these just appallingly ugly structures that do reveal our inner ugliness at such a profound level...
It's like, it's like a surrender to, um, I don't know, self, self destruction or self mutilation.
Preposterous.
And you're right.
Nobody would rally to them.
But what about a place that, um, That you actually felt some sense of pride in the fact that you had gotten to live there and that it would be there long after you were gone and that it would matter to someone else that you hadn't met and that they might wonder about you just based on the fact that they knew someone else lived here 500 years ago.
What would they have thought?
Right?
It's such a more powerful vision of what a human being is in its environment That it's amazing that we surrendered it so easily.
It is.
And I think I had early environmentalism sort of as a disease, you know, thinking of humans as this blight and we're not, we're just a highly invasive species.
And here we are, right?
We have the capability to use our big brains for extraction and depletion, or we can use them for regeneration and rebuilding.
And so, you know, our whole goal here on our farm is the reason we have cows, they're our soil management experts.
They're brilliant.
We don't know how they do it, but they improve things, right?
So that's it.
We're just here to make the soil better.
And whether the people who come after us choose to see it that way and maintain it or not, I don't know.
But if they do, that's an actual legacy that will pass on.
And they don't have to know my name and it's not about an individual legacy, but I've noticed, Brett, that when you step onto a place where the people have cared for it in a very loving fashion and have mostly just worked with to help it be a better form of itself, because we can, that's what we can use this for, is to help speed things along.
We can help nature create topsoil at 100 to 400 times its native rate, right?
Great.
Um, when you step onto a property that's managed that way, it's just instantly observed.
I just know it, right?
There's certain farms you walk on and you're just like, Oh, okay.
This is where it just it's immediately obvious that this is correct and right and true.
It just is immediately obvious is that ivermectin works.
I mean, there's just some things you just know right away, you know, and and so I think it's as simple and as hard as that.
It's empowering people to step away from the old story and this and what's the new story?
Well, Let's get busy being regenerative.
I don't know what happens next.
I can't control any of that.
I don't know.
I have worries, but I think the best I can do is just, you know, set it up.
Put the ball on the tee for the next team.
You know, I think that's as close as I can get.
Interesting that you say all this.
Heather and I have moved to the San Juan Islands, and we live in a place that's very different than any place we've ever lived before.
It's weird.
It has a strangely short history in geological terms, because what formed the Salish Sea and left the islands that remain here
It was a glaciation that ended 15,000 years ago, and effectively, there was a giant, mile-thick sheet of ice that sat in this location, and when it melted, the erosion carried a lot of loose material out into the Pacific, and the rocky material remained, and those are the islands that we live on.
So, 15,000 years isn't a long history for a rock, right?
Now, this particular set of rocks had a native population on it, and that population, if you know how to look at the place, radically altered landscapes.
They transformed them into utterly Beautiful, self-sustaining, regenerating places.
And so we live in a former fishing camp.
The evidence of it is there if you know how to look.
There are middens where huge amounts of shellfish were processed.
They were taking advantage of the massive salmon runs that came through here and maintaining Prairies where there would have been forest.
In any case, you don't initially know that that's what it is.
The first time you see it, you just think it's a pretty place.
But then the more you learn about how it was altered, and you know, it's sad that these people are not there, but that their work remains, and that it is not It's the opposite of a strip mall, man.
It is a testament to their facility that they were able to transform landscapes in a way that wasn't just bulldozing stuff.
Right?
They made something, and something remarkable.
And I think about it all the time.
I mean, we bike through these habitats and we see their work and feel a connection to them.
And anyway, it does give you a kind of, exactly as you say, it doesn't matter that they know your name, as they utilize the soil that you improved through your labor on your farm.
It really doesn't matter at all, your name is irrelevant.
But that they might stop to think, That somebody who was wise had this piece of land and did something with it with a thought about how they would take advantage of it later.
You know, you're right.
It does sound a little hippie if you're not used to thinking these ways.
But on the other hand, it's like, look, okay, you got a choice.
The hippies were crazy.
I mean, we know this.
They became boomers.
They were not Disproportionately wonderful people who had tapped into the way that we could all live in a nicer fashion, treating each other better.
That's just not who they were.
But such things, such people have existed.
And we have a choice.
We can either figure out how to tap into that kind of long-term thinking, that wisdom, or we can wreck ourselves.
And the thing that makes me really concerned for the place I now live is that I worry that not only are we going to foolishly destroy ourselves, which I think is pretty likely, But that we're going to destroy all of the stuff.
That exists.
The whales that swim by, the eagles that hunt, the gulls and the salmon.
All of these things are fragile, and we've in fact jeopardized all of them.
And in that jeopardized state, and in our arrogance to think only of what we might do about the next five minutes rather than thinking about what's our plan for the next 500 years,
We threaten to undo the work of people who did think about their impact on on the land and that I don't know I guess probably in the scale of the universe it's such a tiny tragedy that it doesn't matter but given that this is the only planet we know of that looks like this
The tragedy is not, it cannot be small to us, even if we take ourselves out, which I truly hope we don't, because I do think humans are in many ways the most special thing that has ever happened here.
The place was plenty special without us.
And, um, it would be such a shame if our arrogance wrecked it on the way out.
Well, I guess it's true.
And if we manage to wipe out everything but one vent, you know, in the deep ocean, life will come back.
Give it 10 million years or 100 or something and it will find a way.
But my grief is such that I think it's beautiful and I think it's unseemly to destroy things of beauty.
I think that's just always wrong, right?
So to me, nature is beautiful.
The thing that fills me with dread bread is, is that, you know, and I tell this to people in a lot of time, light bulbs go off.
It's the windshield moment.
Like when I was a kid, our windshields, when you drove from A to B would get just coated with insects, you know?
Yeah.
And now you can drive literally across the country and maybe never have to clean your windshield once, you know, for of insects, right.
It could be other dust on there or something.
And so this is a 480 million year old food chain.
And we're wiping it out and nobody has a single clue what the emergent effect of that is going to be.
We don't know.
We just don't know.
But I would, I would say a little humility there would be awesome.
And we should rewind our clock and say, when did this start?
Like right around mid eighties, like anything we introduced since the eighties is off the market until we figure this out.
Right.
That would be an intelligent response.
You know?
Oh, don't I ever?
And in fact, this was, I remember well, our first conversation.
And that fact, the change in the windshield from, you're a bit older than I am, but not terribly much.
When I was a kid, The windshield, I mean, you know, it was a problem.
There were special products that you could, you know, put in the windshield wiper fluid thing of your car and they didn't work particularly well because the insects were pretty gooey and, you know, it was a thing.
It was a problem.
And then at some point, I don't know when I first noticed it, but it's like, hey, where'd they go?
Like, We're talking about a huge transformation of the way the biology of planet Earth functions, and it just vanished.
And I will say that there's one other piece of this, which I think is hopeful.
If you had told me Not that we were going to crash that 400 million year, is that what you said?
400 million year food web?
I would have said that that would potentially be an extinction level failure.
That at least you would get massive starvation out of it.
And that obviously didn't happen.
I think what did happen is we got a radical reduction in the active diversity of these things.
But somehow the plants that we eat were not dependent on the creatures that were destroyed.
Something.
If you'd asked me what would happen if such a change occurred, I would have thought it less recoverable than it obviously is.
Likewise, if you had told me that we would hunt sea otters down to a population of less than a hundred, or elephant seals, or eagles, or condors, if you had told me that these things would reach this precarious edge of extinction,
I might have told you that I thought the likelihood that they would re-emerge and create a sustaining, self-sustaining population was near zero, and I would have been wrong about that too.
In any case, I do worry that people will look at how much damage we've already done and they'll think, eh, screw it, it's too late.
And it is too late for some stuff, you know.
The Tasmanian Wolf will never roam the Earth again, but there's so much left to be saved and, you know, I do, as I know you do.
I believe a beautiful, non-utopian, liberating world is possible if we can embrace the counterintuitive and embrace your call for us to confront this puzzle together and perhaps, you know, run the risk of sounding foolish in exploring what might be done.
And I would default it all the way back to the metaphor level.
And, um, I'll here I'll get in trouble.
Um, here's, here's the metaphor that's wrong.
Humans are special, indifferent.
I'll get in trouble and say, no, we're not.
We are a part of a very special thing.
Like if you know what the jewel wasp does in its predation of the cockroach, or if you understand.
Like, you know, just how aggressive plants are at shading each other out.
And, and it just, I mean, just watching all of life.
We can be special, but, but where I would submit that we're on a par with, like we're a part of this.
Well, we're part of this computational machine that's solving the mysteries of life and all of that, right?
So I just want to leave, I hope that we can leave space for enough other organisms so that we don't accidentally create a whole lot of extinction.
Ours and others, right?
Extinction is the technical moment when there's no more surviving species and you can't resurrect them.
But there's functional extinction, which you know is the layer before that where there are Some, but not enough to get things going again, you know, in a meaningful way.
So I hope that we can figure this out before we get there, you know.
And I'm very encouraged though, Brad, by seeing a lot of younger people in particular who are like, they're getting, you know, they want to be part of this real regenerative Sort of, um, landscape.
And I think they deserve all our support.
I wish that instead of a hundred billion going to Ukraine, we would have a billion going into these sorts of activities, but we don't have those as priorities yet in this country.
You know, the priorities are still let's blow up some people.
Let's make more money for banksters.
Let's put in some more strip malls.
We still have this narrative running and we're not putting anything really in this other direction yet.
And I don't know what it takes to get us over there.
Um, But maybe it's just getting people out of this demoralized state of shrugging and going, well, that's just how it is.
What are you going to do?
You know, I got elected to Congress, but I couldn't dare promote any of that stuff because then I won't get in again or whatever the stories are.
That's what we need to do at this point is create space for people who are doing this stuff.
Uh, to do it.
And you know, I would encourage anybody listening.
One key way you do that is you, you pay a little more for your food.
Cause it costs, takes a lot of energy to grow it.
And you buy it from those bright, shiny kids up the road who are trying and they're building soil and relationships with each other and with nature as they do that.
Right.
You know, time to vote.
I love the people voted against Bud Light and Disney films and all that stuff, but let's vote for two.
Yeah.
People are doing it right.
I agree with that.
I am going to take the risk of taking the exact opposite position that you have taken.
I'm going to do it for a reason, and then I'm going to give you the last word, and I feel like we are at a good place to wrap this up.
You have said, and I don't disagree with what you've said, that human beings are not special.
I'm going to take the position that human beings are highly special.
And that if we in fact look at that highly special nature of human beings, that we in fact arrive at exactly the same correct place that we arrive if we take your proposal that we are not special.
So the way in which we are special is that we are capable of appreciating Our position in the universe.
We are capable of appreciating the marvel of the things that exist on this planet with us and in the cosmos with us.
Uniquely, as far as we know.
We know of no other creature that can do this.
And even more amazing We are capable not of just appreciating these things in isolation, but of co-appreciating them and of extrapolating collectively together about the meaning of these incredible mysteries that surround us, these miracles that are our everyday experience.
And that that is a profound gift to be a member, even briefly, of a species in which you can do that.
To be alive is an incredible thing, but to be able to understand What it is to be alive and why it is incredible and what the other things that are alive are.
And, you know, even mundane things like having a pet, effectively a friend that is a member of a different species where you don't know exactly what they think of the world, but you can certainly infer a lot about what it must be, right?
This is an incredible, an incredible opportunity that we just do not savor well enough.
And my point about If you decide that human beings are not special, as you're suggesting, then you would naturally want to prioritize the other things on this planet and protect them in their own right.
If you decide that human beings are ultimately profoundly special, you actually arrive in the same place, and I think a little bit more securely, because if I say this is a marvelous planet full of incredible miracles that have nothing to do with us, Maybe I even argue that those things have rights to exist and that we have no right to destroy them.
It's certainly an argument that I resonate with emotionally.
But what do I do with the Anopheles mosquito?
It is as miraculous as any other creature.
But I want to drive it extinct for the well-being of people.
And I can't, if I decide that it and smallpox and, you know, the pathogens that infect our every organ, if I decide that these things are as important as I am, then I'm in no position philosophically to address them.
On the other hand, If I say to myself that the specialness of humans, our ability to appreciate what it is to be alive and to be in the universe and to be on this beautiful planet, if I look at that as fundamental, then the answer is, well, now I know what to do.
I know what it is that I am actually obligated to protect and I know what it is that I must actually, maybe with no joy in my heart, but drive to extinction.
Because my real obligation, philosophically, Is to take that marvelous opportunity to be a thinking, collaborative human being on this beautiful planet and to provide it to as many people going forward as can possibly be given that gift.
To deny anyone the experience of being here, who might live and won't get to, is a loss.
We would not want to have been denied this experience, and we do not have the right to deny it to those in the future.
And so, anyway, it tells me that I'm obligated to protect the giant Pacific octopus, and the orca, and the polar bear, but I'm not obligated to protect the Anopheles mosquito.
So, in any case, I don't know what you'll do with that, but I'm interested to hear.
Well, thank you.
Thanks for that.
Thanks for the for the last word, which won't be, but.
I actually think that this idea of not special is the portal to get us to where we need to go.
And the reason I think that is that an executive coach dropped a bomb on me a long time ago.
She wasn't my coach, but I was explaining how she worked with people.
And so she works with CEOs, and the CEOs need to be better humans.
Manage better and make better decisions and find more time in the day.
She lets them burn through that.
Usually within, you know, a number of weeks to months, she gets them to the point where she can maneuver them to say, actually, what you're seeking is happiness.
You're seeking contentment and that the gateway word for that is enough.
Once you know you have enough, you can be satisfied and all of a sudden things become clear.
And so this thing you're talking about, this evolutionary impulse, there is never enough.
Bill Gates operates from a scarcity model, right?
You know, he still needs more for some reason, right?
Wasn't enough.
Had to put 500 million into, you know, buy in tech stock because he needed more.
And so This idea of humans not being special gets you through, hopefully, this portal of saying, actually, we might have special responsibilities because we have special capabilities, but there's nothing out there assuring that humans are protected, right?
This exceptionalism.
Because if the plants all go away, if all photosynthesis stops, we're not that special after all, it turns out, you know, in a very short amount of time, right?
There are things, you know, if those steps in Russia decide to, you know, burp lava over a few hundred thousand square kilometers again, and, you know, the whole Our atmosphere becomes acidic like it did at one of the boundaries, extinction boundaries.
We're not special.
Right.
So, but that's, but that idea is that once you realize that we're just a part of something and we're in this great flow and it's this great mystery and we'll never know our hardware and software is incapable of actually processing what's happening.
And when people take certain, you know, medicine plants and the filters come down, you realize just how complex.
Those filters are to help us make sense of, of this energetic world we're actually inhabiting for, for a brief time.
So, so that, I think it's, it's that lack of specialness for me sitting under that is this idea of this humility again, but that with humility is that ability to actually begin to really engage with what's out there because awe to me, awe is, is a felt sense.
I can't put it into words, but I'm awed.
Special sunsets, moments, birth of a child.
There's just this thing.
It's a, it's a felt sense.
Right.
So I do think this is an invitation at this moment in time, if we can let go of our, our exceptionalism, you know, that, that we're owed something that we're somehow just by being human, we're due something.
I don't think that's true.
Right.
Ben Franklin said most people die by the age of 25.
They're just not buried till they're 75.
Right.
Because they've given up on engaging in life.
And so, to me, that's what this whole invitation is about, this period of time when the old story is breaking down.
What a great time to sit back and reevaluate and say, well, what's this all about?
And to say what you said, which is, this is an extraordinary thing to be alive.
To even to have the, to be sensing this in this moment with you, this is, it's extraordinary.
It really is.
And I think our culture is militating against all of that.
They want us distracted, confused, angry, disturbed, whatever these things are.
But these are emotional states that take us out of really engaging with life, I would submit.
And so, yeah.
Identify it, and let's move past that.
I think that's the challenge we have right now.
So, there.
That's beautiful and I do want it to be the last word.
I'll just tell you one thing I got from it.
This concept of enough.
If you put modern people in the context of what we once had and what we now have and take for granted, you realize our enough circuit is broken.
And it's broken for evolutionary reasons because we're pursuing opportunities Agreed.
our ancestors didn't have.
Agreed.
So we're focused on what we might have that we don't, rather than focused on what we do have.
But we have to get in touch with the concept of enough. - Agreed.
Agreed.
Well, let's keep this conversation.
I've got 400 more questions and comments, but let's save it.
This has been a fantastic conversation as always, Chris.
I never know where our conversations are going, and I cherish each one of them, and I certainly hope that people have gotten as much from this as I did.
It was really, really good.
So we'll do it again soon, and thanks for joining me.
Well, great.
I have you on the books to come and be on my show because we need our audiences to find each other because the beast is keeping them apart from each other.
And so we should, we should introduce them as much as possible.
Absolutely.
And they will find, it's interesting that there's not more overlap, but they will find each other fellow travelers to be certain.
So my audience should find you at peakprosperity.org.
Com. Com.
Yep.
It should find you at your Twitter handle is...
At Chris Martinson.
At Chris Martenson.
You want to spell Martenson?
M-A-R-T-E-N-S-O-N.
Martenson, right.
Okay, and what else?
You've got your crash course, which people, if they want to come to understand the nuts and bolts of where they are in history, would be a great place for people to go.
And what else?
Well, that's the problem definition.
The companion book is Prosper, which talks about building eight different forms of capital up.
Finance is one, but so is emotional capital.
So that if you're rich in all eight forms of capital, you'll be more resilient.
So, so really, we're about resilience and peak prosperity.
Obviously, you know, I put my my own stuff there a lot on this for my content goes, but it's what it really is.
It's a community of people.
We got a lot of people back there and they're No surprise, right?
We're curious, we're free-thinking, we have very civil discourse.
There are a lot of overly represented successful humans in life who kind of are on the vibe that maybe now we better start becoming resilient.
So that's how everything I do is in service of helping people see what's coming before it comes.
And the good news is the community has now a level of intelligence built around that that's I'm astonished at how smart our community is.
It's an amazing thing.
That's fantastic.
And at the end of the day, that matters so much more than all of the noise that one experiences out in the world.
All right.
Well, it's been a pleasure.
And not only thank you for joining me, but I want to thank everybody who hung in there with this wide ranging and I think important conversation.
So be well, everybody.
Well, thank you, Brett.
I appreciate it.
I've been looking forward to this all week and it exceeded all my expectations and hopes, so... Perfect.
