Sarah Wilson, the Australian author of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and This One Wild and Precious Life and founder of the I Quit Sugar movement, hosts Pinchbeck on the first edition of her Substack Live series, built around his essay The Rise of Sovereign Individuals. Pinchbeck sketches his path from magazine journalism through Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the Evolver network and How Soon Is Now. The talk turns to the tech right: Curtis Yarvin, whom Pinchbeck interviewed in Miami and treats as a Buckminster Fuller style trim tab giving permission for a CEO dictatorship; the South African backgrounds of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; and the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, whose forecast of nation-state decline he says is being turned into a self-fulfilling program.
Guest: Sarah Wilson
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that Curtis Yarvin is a marginal figure whose real function has been to supply intellectual cover for tech elites who want to run the United States like a corporation under an all-powerful CEO.
- Pinchbeck contends that the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual is being used less as a prediction than as a blueprint, with transnational oligarchs accelerating the collapse of nation states it described.
- Pinchbeck notes that Thiel and Musk both benefited from public funding, education and a functioning rule of law before moving to dismantle the federal institutions that provided them.
- Citing AGI forecasts from Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and McKinsey estimates of hundreds of millions of jobs displaced by 2030, Pinchbeck frames the next few years as a choice between mass servitude and a new social contract distributing AI-generated wealth.
- Pinchbeck proposes redirecting displaced labor into ecological work such as permaculture, aquaculture, biochar and soil restoration, which he says extractive capitalism will not fund on its own.
- Drawing on How Soon Is Now, Pinchbeck offers the ecological pattern of immature systems built on domination giving way to mature systems built on symbiosis as grounds for limited hope.
Full text
I might do my preamble. Um, essentially for many of the people who are listening here who have been following my journey, I stopped my podcast um, a month or so ago and I really miss doing these kinds of conversations. So, I'm going to try this format out um, on live with Substack and I'll be posting this interview on my feed. Um, and Daniel, you're free to put it up on yours if you want to. No obligation. um after we finish the interview and I'll have the details of what we talk about links and also a link to Daniel's bio. So I figured that this is kind of a nice experiment.
It's a looser format than a podcast. And I my aim is to host conversations with other substackers, other voices, other really reasonable kind voices in this space who are talking about things through something of a collapse lens and hopefully answering questions that come up in in the community. and I'll be doing it pivoting from a post that I've found that this writer in your case Daniel, it's you um have has written recently that I found really interesting and I want to dig into a bit further and I figure that everybody else would like to hear a little bit more and then they can go off and read it themselves afterwards. So Daniel Pinchbeck, why don't we get you to actually introduce yourself and give a bit of a rundown of your bio and also share with everyone where you're actually talking to us from. Uh actually I'm in uh France also as you are.
I'm in uh uh I am in Burgundy, I believe, at at a chateau that is sort of this anarchist co-working co-l livingiving experiment uh called uh I've heard of this place Ftopia. Yeah, it's adorable actually. Um really enjoying it. It's interesting crowd. A lot of people work in tech, work in AI or blockchain or different visionaries. Um, it's a friend of mine from New York, Amy, who actually runs a matchmaking uh service uh in New York is here with her with her with her team. Um, yeah, it's quite interesting. Matchmaking. Matchmaking. That's an interesting concept. I'd like to hear more about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, she's quite successful at it.
Um, she uh she's, you know, creates a lot of marriages. Um any anyway so um so yeah I'm originally from New York City and I'm from like artistic countercultural background. My father was a painter. Uh my mother was a longtime book editor and writer who was involved with the beat generation back in the 50s. U I uh was a magazine journalist and magazine editor and also yeah just a writer Rolling Stone and you also wrote for the New York Times a fair bit didn't you? Uh I wrote a bit for New York Times magazine. I wrote some features. Rolling Stone, Esquire, um, Men's Journal and Wired and all these kind of places.
Um, and then I kind of had an existential crisis in my mid to late 20s. Uh, having grown up in a, you know, materialist, uh, kind of secular, rational, atheist background. Um, I remembered my psychedelic experiences from college and I decided to make those a very intensive study of exploration. So ultimately that led to my first book breaking open the head and I went to Africa taking the bogga in Gaban which is a long acting psychedelic. I visited the Amazon to work with indigenous culture called the Sequoia working with Iawaska. I visited the Masetc Indians in Mexico. uh I also wrote about the modern kind of research um you know people who developed new psychedelics like Alexander Scholan and so on and uh yeah so all of that was packaged in my first book and I did kind of have um transformation in worldview from kind of being a skeptic or cynical materialist to more of a you know mystic young kind of um occultist you know b based on all these experiences that I had then I wrote a second book called 2012 the return of ketoule which we've also republished as ketoule returns that came out around 2007.
And that book was looking at the prophecies of a lot of these indigenous cultures like the Maya in Mexico and the Hopi and the Aztecs and also sort of like comparing those to ideas from the you know Judeo-Christian idea of the apocalypse. Uh also looking at kind of you know Indian like Vidanta kind of ideas around the Caliuga, the Yuga cycle and so on. So yeah that book was a bestseller in like 2007. Um then I tried to create a company. I was trying to put ideas into practice. So we had like a social network and a a template for local groups to organize um called Evolver.
Um and then I guess my next organized around what was that based around climate stuff at the time? Actually very much. Yeah, it was. I mean um back then I was very concerned already about the ecological and geopolitical kind of crises we were facing and um I had this idea that if you could get local communities to organize around like new new values and new new ideas uh it would be a counterforce in uh in America and all over the world. Um so um do you still hold that view in the face of more broader systems collapse? Uh I'm still very interested and you know I'm always ready for another goaround with this but I think yeah we we basically need um templates for local communities to start to organize outside of the dominant system um you know so organizing things like mutual aid you know permaculture um you know becoming more resilient, more self-sufficient and so on you know whether in urban or rural um areas.
Um yeah that's still that's still a big interest. Um but my yeah anyway that's a long that's a long digression which we could totally go into. Uh but I also felt the the exploration of consciousness was a really important part um because in a way like the mainstream culture is very much focused on technology material progress and yet we've kind of like hit the limits on the planetary resources which I think is one reason why we're having this authoritarian um you know populist crisis is that people aren't able to like in the 50s and 60s there was this sense of like everything was kind of like expanding Somebody said the sound isn't good. Cynthia, how what's wrong with the sound? Yeah, Cynthia, can you give some details on that?
I hope that's not for the same for everybody. Yeah. Um Yeah, if any if anybody I mean, you know, um anyway, so um um so then I wrote a book called How Soon Is Now, which was basically extrapolating on the experience that I had with Evolver, which was kind of incomplete project. Um okay, great. Thank you. uh which was to think about how you would redesign civilization really. It was a very ambitious project even on a on a you know global level to avert uh the ecological catastrophe that we're heading into which I know has been the focus of of your work and that book came out in 2016.
I had Russell Brand who at that point was a spiritual ecological leftist. He wrote a uh introduction and also Sting, who I've been friends with, who's been a fan of my work, wrote a preface. That's when I was interacting with Russell Brand. I was on his podcast and Yeah. Yeah. He seemed like he was he seemed like he was going to be a force for good in the world. Um yeah, he was one of the first to turn, wasn't he? One of the first of those sort of left-wing wellness dudes who turned to Jesus and just, you know, took on board guru status um and went down some weird rabbit hole.
But anyway, let's stop digressing. We're still on your bio. Yeah. What's that? We're still on your bio. Still on my bio. Yeah. So, um, that book came out 2016. And, um, yeah, I mean, I've had other books come out. I did a book with a with a friend who's a woman anthropologist at Iawaska that was called When Plants Dream. Uh, you know, it seems like the way people consume media right now, Substack makes bit more sense than spending years on a book that may or may not get traction. So, I've been really investing a lot in in Substack and Daniel pitchback. substack. com is my is my is my newsletter and and also um doing online courses.
Uh I have a platform called liinal. news and right now um I'm in the middle of a course on Rudolph Steiner uh which I'm really enjoying. So, he's one of my favorite visionaries. Also, I'm involved with a um kind of think tank incubator called the elevator the elevator. Um and um yeah, so um so those are some of my current projects right now. Yeah. And I encourage everybody to go and check out your Substack. I find it absolutely wonderful and there's a few people I talked to about this that there are a number of hetrodox uh writers that I started following at about the same time and your voice has remained consistently compassionate, kind um also very open.
you know, you don't profess to have the answers. It's an exploration that you take everybody on and um I really appreciate it and you go into I mean the depth that you go into. Um your knowledge is just incredible. So thank you so much for all that you offer in this space. Um, and I often put forward your name as, you know, somebody to follow just because I think you do speak incredible reason. Even if sometimes, uh, some of your jargon and terminology and spiritual sort of tangents are quite hard to follow, I find them absolutely fascinating. But look, one of the things I know that you've been exploring in the last couple of posts that you've been writing for understandable reasons because you're normally based in the US is around what the hell is going on in the US and trying to fathom it and give some explainers that aren't the obvious ones.
Um, and there was one post that you wrote a week or two ago which I found really interesting and it was around the idea of the rise of the sovereign individual. And I think um there's a bunch of different voices and uh writers and philosophers that the tech bros, Trump, Elon Musk, Andre um and Peter Teal and so on are drawing on. And um one of them of course is what's his name? Um Yeah, courtesy is the most wellknown and I want to actually talk about him on another another episode of this sort of series that I'll start doing. But um you looked into I actually I interviewed him recently.
We met down in Miami. Oh wow. Okay. Does he in any way feel that his ideas have been sort of bastardized or is he quite happy where with where they've headed? Get another tangent. Yeah, it's it's it's a bit of a long I mean um I you know I I think he's actually somewhat of a marginal figure. People think that he's so central, but um definitely he has put out a thought stream kind of like Buckminister Fuller's idea of a trim tab, you know? So like the idea is that like on the bottom of the rudder of a big ship, there's like a tiny little rudder and that tiny little rudder changes the whole direction of of the ship.
So I think he's been a trim tab for this NX reactionary technofunal movement where he sort of gave them he was one of the thinkers who gave these guys like crucial permission to be like okay like maybe we should be dictator of the world you know like they didn't they didn't need much but they needed somebody to you know in some kind of very you know intellectual sounding way give them this like cover the Nazis co-opted nature you know they sort of I mean that was quite direct But um it feels a little bit the same that you know these feudalists have to grab on to these thesis and sort of yeah you know well he he really I Curtis Yarvin really wants you know he wants like a tech CEO dictatorship. He believes that the US should be like run like a tech corporation um and the CEO should have ab absolute power and there's a lot of like um um yeah kind of like uh eugenics kind of cruelty kind of like like you know one at one point in one of his books he jokes about how you know maybe the underclass could be turned into biodeiesel for the buses in San Francisco. Yeah, I've heard that. Is that the butterfly effect? I think that was in that.
Yeah, we won't we won't deviate into courtesy because I will come back to him in another another substack live. But let's um why don't you just give a bit of a topline overview of what you the sort of the premise of the the post that you wrote about um two weeks ago. Yeah, I have to remember which one that is. I've been writing in in a torrent. Yeah, the rise of the sovereign individual. I mean, I can I can tell you what it was because I just read it half an hour ago. Perfect. Amazing. Excellent. You give it a go first and I'll tell you if you're right.
Well, I've been, you know, trying to understand, yeah, as you said, what's happening in the US? How did this thing coales so quickly and with such force and yeah, obviously like, you know, there's a few puzzle pieces that have come together, right? So, you know, there's a sort of white Christian nationalists. Um, then there's like the MAGA sort of like um people who think that Trump is going to like restore American greatness and and sort of like restore the working class to its remnants. kind of like the Steve Bannon idea. Um but then there's also these sort of tech oligarchs who came in pretty late in the process like going back to um like 200, you know, maybe even 20 they were still supporting Biden or certainly 2016 and 2012 they were supporting Obama.
It's incredible. Yes. Exactly. So for various reasons that I've tried to untangle, you know, these very powerful people all made this rapid turn. I mean definitely Peter Teal was like the ring leader you know he started the movement you he was the first kind of tech oligarch to speak at the Republican convention in 2016 and um he's worked with Trump hasn't he in terms of putting people in place like he's been giving the Trump team suggestions on who uh including putting forward the idea of Musk in the first place but I think that was more leading up to this latest election um but he's certainly been working with Trump since 2016.
Yeah. Well, I mean I mean Teal actually was a right-wing ideologue before he was a tech entrepreneur. Like back at in college in Stanford, he ran like the Stanford review. I mean and both Teal and Musk very interestingly come from these kind of proapartid South African origins. uh and a lot of their worldview was shaped by you know the sense of superiority of the sort of white elite class there and also the kind of insecurity and sort of you know hostility around the the dangers of the black underclass and so on. I believe that a teal's father ran a uh was the engineer responsible for uranium mine which was apparently very devastating for the miners in terms of like health casualties and so on.
Uh whereas uh Musk's father had a um emerald mine which for a while made them like super wealthy and so on. Uh yes and and as Sam noted they they went on to start Pay Pal together. Yeah. It it all seems to stem from Pay Pal. There's a whole kind of uh sort of ven diagram um and and they all seem to sort of have had some connection to Pay Pal but not all of them but a bunch of them. Anyway, so yes, I think what you say is that there's this sort of coalition of tech bros that have emerged um very much focused around this idea of a sovereign individual.
But what you write about is, and we'll get into sort of what that book is about in a sec, but you essentially talk about the fact that these these bros are putting forward a prescription for a new world order, which sees them eat themselves up essentially. Um, and you write that Donald Trump represents an end point in the evolution of the human personality under imperial modernity as does Elon Musk. And I think many of us thought that we were on a trajectory as a species to better to a more noble version of humanity over the years over the 6 to 10,000 years of, you know, our evolution. but with some kind of strange exponential rush. This type of what you call, and I've written it down here, toxic masculine apex predator, a trapped adolescent manboy motivated by resentments rooted in loveless childhoods, yearning for vengeance against anyone who Moxel challenged them, challenges them.
That type has landed as sort of the sum total of these six to 10,000 years of our evolution. Why do you think that has happened? And why do you think it's just sort of happened seemingly overnight? Uh yeah, I mean I well um to unpack that uh yeah it takes a little work. I mean um uh let me see I mean there's there's different elements to that right like I mean in terms of the tech guys um you know obviously when you reach a certain amount of power uh in this case like you know tremendous wealth and power I think then you begin to feel that any restrictions on that power kind of chafe at you um and you kind of and also you begin to believe because you're surrounded by people who are reflecting back how great you are all the time so um you know in this case like um under the dem Democrats under Biden, what they were trying to do was was break up the tech monopolies for the good of for the good of the American tech industry, they believe that these monopolies were actually holding back tech innovation.
Um, and they're probably they were totally right because, you know, these these these companies have become kind of stagnant. Um, you know, particular we see that with like Meta and Instagram and so on. and um you know so the uh the tech elite didn't want to have these kind of restraints placed on their power uh and they saw an opportunity to kind of like get in there uh inside the government uh and then they had the philosophies from Yarvin around um the network state is another one from this guy sort of so essentially this idea that democracy was finished um you know that that that that it wasn't working anymore and the only thing that would work would be to run the US like a like like a tech company. Uh um then on top of that was this book the sovereign individual which came out in 1997 by two finance journalists which yeah also said that uh nation states were done and this was the time of these sort of you know transnational oligarchs the the sovereign individuals who would be sort of calling the shots I mean and um and it's a strange in a strange way it's like they're accelerating what would seem to be kind of a dystopian um reality put out by this book um you know sort of turning a prediction into a fat compon um yeah the it's it's uh yeah it's very it's very it's very strange I mean these are guys who really were the ones who benefited most of all from you know having a rule of law having a um you know a government that functioned I mean they're you know they're now dismantling the you know science and and health departments in the US but um and the educa they want they want to take away federal funds from education and so on. But you know, like Andre studied computer science, you know, on the on the public dime.
Um, you know, Musk was heavily subsidized in his different companies. Um, so it's it's very strange. There's a little bit of this idea like once you've cl once you if you've climbed up the ladder and you're at the top, just kick the ladder away so that nobody else can get up there. Uh so and I think another major component of why this is happening now is clearly artificial intelligence and um their belief that that is going to have very profound rapid systemic changes uh and impact on society. So um you know they're looking at I mean if you listen to Dario Amodai who's the CEO of Anthropic or Sam Alman they're talking about and some people argue against this but they're saying there's going to be artificial general intelligence in two three to five years and essentially at that point every form of cognitive labor uh you know can be performed better by AI.
So um you know that could lead to Mc Kenzie you know suggests that 800 million jobs will be impacted or lost by uh 2030. It actually could be more than that. We really don't know but I mean whole sectors uh like if you look at a country like the Philippines you know like 10% of their GDP growth has been based on kind of uh you know phone banks you know people who do kind of like customer service and so on. um that could easily just get totally wiped away and all and all those jobs will be lost. So I mean it's actually um um one of my ideas is that um this could be a huge opportunity for organizing because actually uh it's either going to go into a very despotic um kind of situation where you have very incredibly even much more centralization of wealth and power and you know people kind of treated like surfs or disposable uh or uh it would be like a new social contract and it would be like we're going to distribute the impact the the the benefits of uh the AI wealth and um retrain people you know and um you know because we know you know talking about the climate and the eological emergency there's you know all this work that really needs to be done on the planet but it doesn't get done in this extractive capitalist uh system you know because because it's not supported financially like if people were to be like, you know, rooftop gardeners, you know, cleaning up, you know, kind of wheds, uh, you know, we need we need like huge projects in aquaculture and biochar and permaculture and kind of, you know, replenishing soil everywhere and so on and, you know, bringing back together species that are that that are disappearing.
Um, you know, this is what everybody should be doing now. So, if you know, you could train the AI to do like legal assistance, you know, accounting, um, it would be amazing. I mean, it would be except the tech bros control the AI and they're kicking the ladders away. They're kicking away the I guess the governmental guard rails that prevent, you know, these tech bros from running the world with their problematic AI. So, I mean, is that even a possibility that we can think about? I mean, I I get your point that what this is all doing is perhaps creating the conditions for revolution, for people rising up and actually having a thoughtful say on what they're actually going to want um going forward because they everything's being pulled away from them.
So, you know, that's what happens in revolutions. Um but in terms of being able to take control of what AI is going to do, do you see that as even a possibility? That's why I'm eager about Substack live and why I'm, you know, making this time out of my nice day to have this discussion with you now. And uh because I think it's um yeah, nothing is set in stone yet. I mean, I mean, you know, so even the ideologies of these of these particular people shifts around a bit. Um you know, like Sam Alman did a UBI uh study um I think a year or two ago with his foundation, you know, giving people I think just like $500 a month in a in a town in Texas.
and he found that it had incredible benefits is um universal basic income. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um so that's why I think that this is the this is like the the final battle like the Lord of the Rings or something like we need we need to get a social movement around this. Yes. That that pressures governments and these you know financial elites and these tech elites to figure out how to share the benefits from uh artificial intelligence. still have a democracy. And I think that's something that a lot of activists it does actually whether we have a whether we have a democracy or not. I mean it actually um you know we I I'm not sure if if I if I think about it um you know in a way I don't know if the US is going to go back to the system it had um and um I just don't know if it's going to happen and you know it it you know it's a long discussion but um whatever the system is you know it's still going to be a system that um can distribute you know goods and resources more or less fairly to more to more or less people.
Um, and that that's like the minimum that we need to uh to make happen, you know. Um, when you were looking at sort of empires and how they tend to go, um, and it's sort of a point that you make in the post is that like we, you know, essentially you reach this apex sort of version of things and we wind up eating ourselves, self-cannibalizing. And you make the point that Elon's little teenage, you know, um, troops that have gone in and, you know, wiped out government departments, you know, um, a few weeks back, uh, is sort of an example of that, of quite a visual representation of this self-c cannibalization process. Um, so is that something that you feel is an alevitable end point for the evolution of late capitalist man? Is that sort of what you're feeling?
Um, and do you feel that it can be turned around? Do you think we can actually prevent this self- cannibalization process which happens to all complex species? all complex species end up, you know, eating out their own environment, you know, and they end up, you know, collapsing. Um, do you think there's a way that we can actually stop this? Uh, well, I don't know, but I think we have to try and um, you know, we have been given free will and and um, you know, I mean, um, you know, history in the moment always feels like chaotic and almost accidental, but then in retrospect, we see a certain like inevitability, right?
a patent. Yeah. Like um you know the French Revolution happened at a certain time when in inequity in that society had become so extreme and the ruling class had divorced themselves like so completely from an understanding of their subjects. you know, they were like Mary was like playing, you know, peasant in in in her yard and so like it never even occurred to those people that there could be like you know, a change in that magnitude or you know, so um yeah, we're in a period of um you know, massive social forces and I think there are some reasons to have limited optimism or at least hope uh and I wrote about that a lot in the book how soon is now. So for instance um if you look at you know evolutionary history on earth there tends to be kind of a movement from immature ecosystems which are characterized by kind of domination, aggression and exploitation to mature ecosystems which are characteriz characterized by symbiosis and cooperation you know.
So for instance like a tree is a much older species than we are and a tree is like you know masterfully successful at symbiosis. It provides like you know so many homes for other species from mycelia to birds to you know insects to you know vines to to whatever you know like um lizards you know so um squirrels you know so you know we're in this we're in an immature stage of of of our species development and in this stage um it's all about domination and exploitation and the sort of masculine kind of like uh you know kind of aggression and so on but you know it maybe that we've created, you know, this crisis to force a transition towards cooperation and symbiosis because that would actually follow follow the evolutionary paradigm. Lyn Margolus who was one of the creators of the Gaia theory wrote about this a lot and you would you like our own bodies are are are kind of like this kind of history tell the history of evolution and how at some earlier point there was this you know huge struggle for life and resources and certain organisms even in in the moment of trying to like consume each other somehow created these new complex uh structures that became like the organs of our bodies and so on. So, um, yeah, it's a it's I I sort of tend to agree with you. It's a thesis that I sort of arrive at at the end of the collapse book that I've just finished writing.
Um, that collap the collapse process itself and in fact our own internal collapse that we're going to have to go through, you know, in terms of our expectations and and uh, you know, the paradigms that we've been working to in and around, you know, what was normal. It necessarily forces us to return to our humanity. it necessarily forces us to actually question what it is that matters because when you're stripped of everything, you have to actually ask these kinds of questions, these, you know, very very fundamental, beautiful questions. And um part of that process is about a stepping up and meeting life and and I think stepping up into an adulthood. Um, as you say, a lot of commentators are saying we're at a very adolescent stage in our development.
And I think what we're going to be forced to do is to actually be the adults in the room because I think we're so used to turning around going, where's the government entity that's going to come in and save us? I I hear it from everybody. Oh, you know, look, you know, who's doing something about this? And I'm like, the point is we're going to be placed in a position where these these uh government forces, these leaders are just not going to be able to save us any longer. We're going to have to do it. And I think that process in itself is actually it could be our our moment.
It could be the moment that takes us into that much more mature um phase in our evolution. Um I'm wondering if you wanted to say a few words. I don't want to go on for too much longer, but um and by the way, your Rubik's cube I was hoping I thought we were just getting started. Oh, well, my aim is to not make these too long because I do tend to ramble and and so on. I want to kind of keep it quite focused on on a on a particular post and a thesis and if there's room to kind of talk about another idea in a in in a bit longer um and down the track, we can.
But um yes, you some of these ideas that you've just been talking about um I think you include in another recent post. um something about the Rubik's Cube. Um and I'll I'll put a link to that for everybody if they want to go and read that. It's about sort of what we're going to be presented with, what people at these junctures in history are presented with. And I think it's a really interesting thesis as well. Maybe I can get you back to talk about that another time. But what do you see happening in America in the next 6 to 12 months? Do you have a feel for for things?
I'm hearing all kinds of ideas that, you know, Trump and Aon are trying to force something of a a sort of a rising up from the left. You know, the the tax cuts and so on. Um the layoffs and and what, you know, where do we end the list are going to prompt some, you know, protests over the summer which will then, you know, sort of give Trump a mandate to enforce or bring in martial law. And from that point, who knows what would happen. That's one idea that I'm hearing a fair bit. Um, I think Ezra Klein is sort of making the point that um, the tech bros won't be able to keep keep up the momentum.
You know, they're flooding the zone with but that requires, you know, quite a lot of momentum. Like to flood, you've got to have a lot of a lot of energy to keep going. And he thinks they're going to run out. Um, I don't know how how viable that idea is, but yeah. What do you think is is is going to happen? And you don't have to sugarcoat things. I think most people here are quite okay with facing what might be possibilities and would prefer to talk about them and have people like us talk about them so that at least they can actually be aware of it, alive to it um and and and working on for instance building communities and so on and and resistance movements.
Now, I think that uh the types of changes they're making are going to impact people's lives, you know, in different across different sectors of society in America more than um you know, most people yet anticipate. I mean, even for myself, I mean, you know, my mother lives on social security and and and Medicaid. if those things are severely depleted or trashed or whatever or or you know if there's a government shutdown you know her ability to to survive will will be imperiled. Um so yeah I think it's going to get you know existential much more existential uh for people in the US and we're already seeing a lot of um Republican voters have been turning up at these town hall meetings and screaming and yelling at their representatives. So, you know, I mean, I've also, you know, I can't I can't be that kind towards the Democrats.
I really think they've done an abysmal job. And today, I was writing about um how, you know, current affairs had this article about Camela Harris's campaign. You posted that today, didn't you? Yeah. Like like a multi-level marketing campaign that just everybody was, you know, giving all this money and it was being used for pointless TV ads. It go pointless political consultants and um you know, ve very poorly aortioned. Um and you know a few you know if they had just said min minimum wage 15 an hour or um you know healthc care for all or you know we really are going to try to stop the war in Gaza you know it's quite likely the election you know with all with all the issues it still would have turned out very differently.
So, for whatever reason, the Democrats seem to have abdicated at this point, or it's like they can't they're they're so like kind of uh covered in sort of institutional cotton wool that they somehow can't uh respond uh in in a live way. And, you know, whatever my problems with the right wing, they're responding in a live way. Like, you know, they're responding instantly. They're responding with great force. And um they're using everything that they can to win. They're treating this like a war and the Democrats have been sort of acting like oh it's politics as usual and you know we're we'll take I mean I think you know some people like James Carville was like don't even do anything just play dead and let them destroy everything and then we'll come back but it's highly likely that um you know the um people in charge now will will never willingly give up power um yeah because they they've now broken so many laws and they've also made the executive power so strong that they're never going to want to give anybody else the power to um use that power against them, you know.
Yeah. So, so that's Do you think the martial law is likely? Do you think that that is something worth lending credence to as a uh who knows? I mean, you know, I I working their way through the military forces, getting rid of people who have blocked them and putting in their own people. That's sort of been, you know, they seem to be setting something up. I mean, it could be. Yeah, I mean I know they're also um you know looking a lot of the techniques that Orbal used in Hungary including uh you know uh legal fights or you know using the IRS to go after people they consider their enemies.
I mean I'm I'm I'm concerned about it. I'm thinking that I might have to ab abandon the US at some point uh even as a small fry, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm worried about also I've started to think about things like, you know, what I've been writing on social media over the last, you know, however many years, you know, at what point is that going to be used against me? And I've got trans friends who are legitimately worried about when their drugs will be cut off, you know, um these these kinds of things are starting to, I think, you know, um occur to people. There's all kinds of ramifications and it's the worst.
And to your point about the Democrats, I look I I've been bewildered by the whole thing, but I've also been a little bit um upset by the way that how easy it is to blame the Democrats for what has happened because now that we know how bad it is. I don't think any of us imagined it would get this bad this fast, right? I did. I did actually. I tried to work people. I was like the last few months I was like I created a video. We created this AI video. We were like, "Look guys, like this is what you're going to get. You're going to get like you ruined cities and like people totally dispossessed and so on." You know, I did the same thing in my book on collapse.
It's, you know, very much what I was writing about. It was, you know, and six months later it played out. Um, and it's sort of like life imitating, you know, um, sort of art kind of thing. But, um, so yes, by the way, Sam says, you can't hate them that much. It's not a question of hating. It's just um I mean it's tragic, you know, because this is a time where we should be Yeah. But I'm just saying in terms of the ecological stakes, this is a very tragic situation. like we did not need a um kind of a government that rejected you know and and essentially like um you know so many I mean one another another lens that I that I wrote about um came from this like Middle Eastern um uh thinker critical analyst and situation which is like essentially you know what's being done to the US now is what the US and its transnational oligarchy have done to other countries.
So for instance in Russia after the Soviet Union uh collapsed you know we we privatized everything that we could and sold it off to the highest bidder which led to the kleptocracy which led to Putin and so on. So it seems like there might even be um this this you know kind of you know the idea is to actually crash the dollar and crash the American economy and while everybody will suffer and the billionaires will lose some of their billions. you know the the the price of like um you know land and companies and so on will will go down so far that people who are you know in the billionaire class will be able to buy a huge amount of the remaining remaining resources and land including they want to you know privatize you know the public parks and and all that stuff. So um so it's kind of like a last grab uh for this uh transnational oligarchic elite you know which is what happens with all collapsing civilizations you know there's this kind of yeah last last days of Rome gra at all the resources and in fact today on Instagram I turned Instagram on for the first time in a week and I saw a lot of memes about the idea that um you know billionaires are crashing the stock market they'll sell it off their off their stocks leave it a bit for the economy to crash and then they'll go back in and buy the stocks again. And you know, that's another thesis that everybody's throwing around at the moment.
Yeah, that's basically the same thing. It's, you know, it's what Naomi Naomi Klein wrote about it in the book, the shock doctrine as like disaster capitalism and so on. Um, but yes, but I mean what we what you know and but what's what's crazy is how the whole ecological subject is just like gone from the American, you know, popular consciousness. Like nobody's even talking about climate change. I mean um and you know among the things that Biden tried to do which was great was this inflation reduction act to create new industries around renewable infrastructure that he was that he was manu creating these manufacturing you know centers in red states to their benefit and Trump is wiping that all away and that's really you would only do that if you didn't really identify with the US if you had if you identify with this transnational oligarchy class like you've got your you know place set up in New Zealand or in Hawaii or whatever so like when everything goes to hell you can just escape and you know meanwhile that's of great benefit to Saudi Arabia who don't you know who you know Musk and Trump work very closely with and I think Saudi Arabia are big investors in Twitter and so on so they they want to keep everybody hooked on the you know fossil fuel um you know kind of grid even even um even though that's so destructive to our futures the environment and um but they've managed to really choke uh the discourse uh around anything ecological um to the level that it's really stunning.
I mean I suppose like one hope I would have but I don't know if it'll take 6 months or year or you know x number of years is you know there is kind of like a pendulum swing right so you know and there were things that were very annoying about the sort of woke progressive kind of like bajgeoa neo green culture in fact I even found Teslas very annoying like all you know rich people I know who bought Teslas and felt they were doing something for the environment when you're still buying 2,000 pounds of steel and and you know rare minerals And I mean, you know, if if Musk had ever really cared about the environment, which he clearly didn't, we can now see, you know, he would have been a pioneer in public transport. We would have had bullet trains in the US. These were just, you know, still hyper privatization, hyper individuation, you know, hyper consumerism supporting that whole idea. Um, yeah. So, so um um so it's like all in the in the wrong direction basically.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, um, we might wrap things up here, I think, on on a note actually that, um, a line that I read in that post, um, about the Rubik's Cube kind of solution. You wrote that you possess a faith that I didn't know I had. I feel a deep trust in the cosmic order. And I really relate to that line because it's sort of where I've arrived as well. I've always had some kind of spiritual faith but it's very much heightened via this collapse experience and very and and facing what is actually happening facing the truth um and not sugar coating it inopium and all that kind of thing.
Um how does that faith play out for you? Is that what keeps you sustained? Does it keep you up get you know does it get you up in the morning? Is it and and how does it manifest? Is it a is it going into nature? Is it seeing the beauty in other humans? What does it actually look like for you, Daniel? Because I think this is I think this is the crunchy point where a lot of people are at. They're needing to find a landing spot to actually bear witness to what's going on in the world, to actually live a life um while this is all going on, to live in and through it.
Um, and I think it's really important that people like you share how you're doing it because you are several steps ahead of the rest of us, you know, in terms of um, processing the disaster and the pain. So, could you maybe just share with us how you actually do it, how that faith plays out and is trusting the cosmic order? Sure. I mean I mean for me that really goes back to kind of all the you know work I did with um psychedelics and kind of esoteric ideas and some practices and so on. So you know for me like um I I went deep enough you know with visionary medicines and practices to for myself achieve you know certain knowledge I would say that um you know this is not the whole story like there are other dimensions of of reality and you know other dimensions of being and you know that that's why I'm teaching this course on real Steiner right now on on my liinal.
NET news platform because I think he's somebody who really uh offers uh you know a sort of a sense of a vast cosmology and and and really you know then you could understand that the things that we're living in are part of these kind of much larger kind of evolutionary streams that go I mean he he said that the you know the mission of his life on earth was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the west and that not only did human beings incarnate again and again much as a culture like Tibetan Buddhism talks about but even the earth itself itself reincarnates and humanity exists in different forms and different ways on different incarnations of the earth. Um, is it too late for people to join that course or will you be putting some of it um up online as a retrospective thing for people to to Sure. I mean I mean we're we're halfway through now. Uh people can still totally join. Uh yeah, we're halfway through and all the stuff from the past is is already available online and there's also some shorter lectures I did on Steiner uh on news.
Yeah. All right. Excellent. Um, yeah. So, so, so for you it's something that's always been part of your practice. It's been in you for some time, that sort of appreciation. I've just, I've just had, you know, revealings of understanding that there's an underlying like cosmic order and um, you know, like you know, the the tempantric Buddhism talks about how samsara is nirvana, you know. So uh as you know yeah I mean the the the relative world of you know where we're living all this stuff is just like um you know a bit of a bit of foam on the ocean of samsara of nirvana and ultimately there's this sort of underlying perfection which I mean for me a very useful um way to look at this stuff is through um the philosophy of analytic or monistic idealism uh which people like Bernardo Castro have explored which basically and Steiner was also a ministic idealist So basically, you know, that that consciousness is the foundational reality and the physical and the material are really just like projections or einations or expressions of of this underlying field of consciousness.
So we're we're actually just differentiated aspects of this consciousness that's sort of creating a collective dream, you know, for its own amusement, you know, also for the sort of necessity of evolving beings like ourselves and so on. So, you know, I think on some level, yeah, like you know, Trump and this whole thing that's happening was somehow, you know, we the the necessary excitation, you know, or the necessary next turn in the cosmic story in a way at this point, you know, and do you find some kind of gentle amusement in being able to create enough distance to observe this? Because at times, I've got to say I do. Yes, Sam said, "Okay, a bit too newagy now." I know, Sam. Sorry.
Sorry about that. But you know, is Sam one of your big followers because he's I don't know. He's just turned He's just turned up. He's just turned up in the last couple of of things. So, okay. He's pretty keen to get in touch with you, I think. So, yeah. Um, hi Sam. Thank you for your I have been reading your comments. It's just that uh Daniel's had too many interesting things to say for me to actually stop and ask him your questions. You'll have to do it in some other format. Um, but yeah. Well, I think we're a lot of us are turning to the mystical here, but um I I find that if we can stand back in the cosmic cinema and observe things as playing out, you know, that sort of cosmic insignificance that Oliver Burkeman called it, you know, I think it's a process that can really help us manage all of this to see that we are part of something way way larger.
Um and that in itself I think can be very very special. Um, and that's a process. That's a practice. That's that's something that we have to do in community as well, which is wonderful. Um, and I think we also can quite simply, it doesn't have to get too woo and too mystical, Sam. It's literally watching watching and observing the patterns that happen in nature and learning from that, you know. Um, I think I've lost you to Sam's comment, haven't I? No, no, I'm right here. I'm right here. Just a lot of other comments popped up. We're getting we're getting a lot of interesting comments. It's overwhelming.
Um, well, yeah. I mean, I know I know you want to sort of sign off, but I mean, one one way that I think of I find interesting to look at what's happening with Trump and Musk and all this stuff is, um, have you ever looked at internal family systems? Yes, I have. Yeah. Robert Falconer has a book called The Others Within Us. There's another book called No Bad Parts. I mean, I've just um I've just Well, I was going to say ordered that. I no longer buy anything on Amazon. I've uh I've procured a copy of that book. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. You found Yeah. Um but yeah, somebody just recommended that particular one.
Yeah. Which one? The others within us. No, no, there are no bad parts. I really recommend The Others Within Us. I really appreciated it. Um so yeah, so their idea is that, you know, we're not just one, you know, thing. We have all these different parts to ourselves. Like they have like many little selves and some of them are, you know, beautiful and angelic. Some of them are horrifying and and racist and misogynist. And it was like, you know, over the last, you know, century, we've been like desperately trying to push all the bad parts down into like the basement or into the cellar, like the racist and the misogynist parts and the greedy parts and so on.
But we really weren't, you know, doing it. We hadn't really become really effective. People hadn't like internalized it yet. and the sort of woke progressive culture was like had the sort of school marmish, you know, you're, you know, make you feel guilty, you know, how dare you have those bad thoughts. And so Trump basically came along and he was like all those bad parts, come on up, you know, you're welcome. We want you, you know, so now we're having like this like festival of of all this um, you know, terrible stuff. And it's like so weird because it felt like we were really past that as a society.
like it's like we I never thought, you know, we would see like Nazi salutes being made in public again, you know, and um but that's how thin the veneer is. I think that's a great teaching on on on an esoteric level. It is that uh we had more a lot more work to do like whoever was you know should have been kind of like um helping steer humanity in a positive direction. you know who you know in a sense you know that that work had not really been accomplished effectively because there was all this you know and we've also seen that with um all the spiritual gurus who you know have have been taken down and so on. It's like um there's not many people left to look up to you know in our society or and there's been a cherry picking of the worst of the spiritual traditions or at least the most selfish elements of it by these you know tech bros and Russell Brand and so on Tucker Carlson.
Um, yeah, that's interesting. I always think of the Greek gods, the Greek god or the Greek mythology um was able to actually embrace those bad parts, you know, and actually um acknowledge them, not not um suffocate them, you know, and exactly I think I think there's I think there are a bunch of traditions throughout history that we're able to to see that we need to recognize these bad parts, you know, um otherwise, you know, they they do come back to bite us u with incredible force. So I suppose when we establish our our new society, the new normal um with all the ideas that are lying around to use that that Milton Friedman phrase um that would be something that we do need to bear in mind. This is what happens when you try to suffocate, drown out um and try to create a perfectionist uh society. We we need to actually allow for our humanity in all of its, you know, manifestations.
All right. So to Jason and others who've just joined, sorry. Uh we're gonna we're going to wrap up now. Um but I will post this interview on my Substack. Um and if as I say, this was my first one. So if anyone has feedback, feel free to go go for it and give me give me your thoughts on how I can do it better next time. Um and Daniel, we'll catch up for a coffee in Paris in a couple of days. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds great. Croissant, cappuccino, espresso kind of a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of a thing. All right. Maybe we can we can maybe maybe we can meet at Oscar Wild's hotel.
Feel like that's better. Oh yeah. Well, that's more of a cocktail vibe, but yeah, we Yeah. Yeah. Well, we can I was going to say we can go and sit on the banquet where some devoir um wrote her stuff, but um it's shut at the moment. The dum goes shut at the moment, but Oh, I'll find Yeah, it's for renovation until the end of March, but I'll find somewhere suitably literary. Oh, I know where we can go. We can go to the restaurant which is where it's the longest um it's the oldest restaurant in Paris. What's it called? La propo. Anyway, it's where the um resistance used to meet.
So, I think that would be appropriate. We're going to have a cocktail at the bar. How do I press end up up in the top right hand corner? Hey, listen everyone. Thanks um for all of your feedback. Sam, thanks for that last thought. Be yourself. Everyone else is take taken taken. Yeah. Um, yeah, I'm certainly taken uh by all kinds of things. Um, and yeah, we'll do this again soon. Thanks so much, Daniel. Ciao.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.