Are We Doomed?

A live event in New York rather than a studio conversation, hosted by Pinchbeck and framed as an unrehearsed descent into collective dread. Pinchbeck introduces Bob Eisenberg, who proposed the evening and argues that this generation, or its children, will likely witness the demise of humanity, that wildfires, floods and contaminated water are worsening measurably, and that the culture's reflexive hopefulness should give way to what he calls overt pessimism. Eisenberg invokes Marx's theory of crisis, underconsumption and overproduction, to describe profit concentrating upward; Pinchbeck notes that anyone with a retirement account is implicated. An original plan to work through the existential risks one by one, including nuclear war and AI, was abandoned. Musical performances open and close the evening.

In brief

• Eisenberg argues that of the roughly eighty generations of human history, this one is positioned to witness the probable end of humanity, and that the more closely one looks the worse it appears.
• Eisenberg claims wildfires, floods and disease-ridden floodwaters are more frequent than they have ever been and are worsening by the month.
• Eisenberg proposes overt pessimism as a corrective to people who privately despair while publicly refusing to be a sad sack.
• Eisenberg applies Marx's crisis theory of underconsumption and overproduction to argue that profits concentrate at the top while the majority is squeezed, and that governments and corporations will do anything to postpone the reckoning.
• Pinchbeck responds that none of the participants are clean, since ordinary retirement savings feed the same exploitative system.
• The closing musical piece argues that love of matter leads to love of the mathematical patterns within it and then to love of their source, refusing any separation between erotic and religious devotion.

Full text

okay everybody you know we're about to start I think just getting a few more people in from outside so this is a very special event um you know in New York there's a lot of like very polished events like TED talks everybody like prepares for weeks and they're like super on point and ready to go this is not an event like that um this is a different kind of event this is more of a a raw kind of journey into the unknown you know into the darkness even we're going to go a little bit dark um because we know it's hovering right like everybody you know feels that right now so let's embrace it let's let's go into it let's see what wants to wants to take us um and yeah so the the Genesis of this event was this man right here Bob Eisenberg who um I guess about a year ago or something it's been a while you were like look I really feel like we need to do a event that acknowledges you know how yeah you want to you want to speak the end of the world a little closer a little closer like here oh yeah yeah okay yeah there you go like so yeah but what what about the end of the world yes what about the end of the world for you bu well I mean how do you define the world it could be the end of life on the planet could be the end of humanity yeah you know there's various ways to Define it but any way you put it like the way I see it we've been we've been about 80 some generations let me hold it for you okay yeah there go we've been eight okay I got it I can hold it for no no I I'll do it but then I'll no no I'm kidding uh so but and then another license Moses about 120 Generations but of all these Generations we in a sense you might say are fortunate enough to witness the probable demise of humanity I'm not saying it's written in stone seems the more you are aware of it the more worse it seems to be getting so isn't that strange of all the different possible uh you know scenarios we are the ones who will very likely or maybe our children our grandchildren at the L who will see so to speak the end of the world and if it's not from climate there's many other things yeah originally we were going to have a full roster of all the existential Terrors awaiting humanity and just like go into each one right whether it's like nuclear war or like AI taking over Benjamin Netanyahu no infinitely infinitely stable dictatorships that's a good one but we we didn't get as organized is that I been ping pong with them once um but I know yeah you were saying that one issue you have is that you feel that people yeah they're they're kind of too hopeful too poish yeah I mean you're always hearing people say you know well I don't want to be a Sad Sack I don't want to be opposed to this and but in the end they are pan maybe we need a little more overt pessimism overt pessimism yeah M I think how do people feel about overt pessimism know could be could be like a new movement or something you know did you want to um what else did you want to share about what what in inspired you to put this together well actually I do believe that the number of wildfires on the west coast the number of Bloods elsewhere the number of C ridden blood Waters in India and Bangladesh all of these are greater than they've ever been and they seem to be getting worse as strange as it sounds by the week or very least by the month at Washington Post this is I normally don't like Washington Post but they do a stellar job on reporting what's going on in this respect and we were also talking a little bit about the economic system the deficit and Carl Marx and um you got some issues there too you really good yeah I got an issue with Carl just kidding no Marx was obviously a great thinker what I wanted to concentrate was his theory of Crisis which basically has to do with the theory of under consumption or over production of goods and basically and I'll just say this once but the people at the top who manufacture and make profits are getting more and more in that direction while the masses at the bottom are getting more and more what's the word smoed yeah uh yeah just kind of built into the logic of the system right now well it has been yeah but the government will do anything to keep the this scenario from taking place so and also big corporations and small corporations and all of us might have a 401k I mean none of us are completely clean yeah we're all feeding into the sort of exploitation system and uh yeah we good we'll come back we'll come back to it yeah so yes thank you Bob for putting this together and um yeah it's exciting to be here with everybody look at this wonderful crowd people are jubilant to talk about the doom and and the grief and the pessimism and uh so to launch us off we have our our our musical interlude uh from Nathan to four hi everybody how you feeling are you feeling doomed if you're feeling doomed let me hear you say I'm feeling doomed see that's not everybody so if you're not feeling doomed let me hear you say I'm not feeling doomed I'm not feeling doomed that's more robust you know I mean the the show is framed as a question it's not a statement we're going to be exploring this how about if you're absolutely not sure if you're doomed or not if you're absolutely not sure if you're doomed or not let me hear you say I'm absolutely not sure if I'm doomed or not absolutely not sure yeah it's about as ambiguous as you feel you know worst call and response possible um I I'm gonna get things started on a musical note my name is Nathan everybody say hi Nathan hi hi Nathan that good Bob that was good that was good what are all of your names didn't hear it we're doomed um yeah let's let's talk about this I mean the the name of the show is um is are we doomed but another way of of of examining all of this um can be encapsulated I think in a question that I want to thematize in this song cuz there's let me put it this way there's a lot of going on would you agree about this this is something we can agree on there's a lot of that's happening right now in the world you agree bunch of is underwater right now you know what I mean uh a lot of is on fire right now a lot of is mixed up and upside down in terms of its economic structure and the access to the agency that we would have to make the things that are on fire underwater not be on fire underwater do you agree about all this yeah so another way of asking the question that this show seeks to ask in how the fck fcking do mdle stage how fck do I orchestrate to begin this show how the does work and I think that that's a question that has multiple possible angles on it it's a material question how the does work how do the material processes function that bring us to this stage ecologically such that we're facing possible crisis and such that we're actually beginning to experience some of the experiential aspects of climate change there's that question but that question is also related to the question of why works in the first place what is the meaning of being here in the first place now typically we think now that that latter question is a question for philosophy right you enter a philosophy 101 course you ask yourself the meaning of life or it's in the province of religion and science on the other hand is a totally different province that describes mechanically how things operate do you understand understand this distinction that I'm making these how questions versus these why questions but originally in the context of ancient science and philosophy in various different civilizations but I'm mostly thinking of the western tradition because that's what I'm trained in these questions were one question all at once and I sometimes think that the fact that we have made them so divided we have philosophical questions of value over here and mechanical physical questions about physical systems over here that very division is part of what's brought us to this precipice or this feeling of a precipice that we don't integrate our questions of value of why we're here what is this mystery of actually being here in this moment baby with our questions of how things work in the first place Round of Applause for Bella everybody so this is a song about that and it's called how the does work you ever find yourself asking this question how the does work you're just living your life you're just a baby you know what I mean or you're about to turn 80 or just living your life and trying to do your thing and you find yourself observing that a bunch of is upside down in this world but that question of what the is going on is related to this question of how the works in the first place and what is the meaning of and if we could perhaps reintegrate these questions and look at them all holistically perhaps we could join the ranks of those who have asked from the dawn of time these important questions such as are we doomed and how the does and work people have been wondering how the Works since before there was or any other words the the function of which were to give names to objects and find a latent order in the sprawling chaoticness a it's fire it's bright at night look I don't know where it came from but now I can cook it's from a higher power I'mma write that in a book I'mma praise it for Millennia that's how long it took until it occurred to me that the person that I'm worshiping can't account for all the phenomena I'm observing quite perfectly and I gazed at my fire and whatever was frying up and I thought perhaps it's Flames are made of Elemental fire stuff and water is made of water stuff and earth is made of Earth stuff and air is made of air and iron I've ever heard of or made from these two being just some conglomerates of parts and holes particles of a bunch of other smaller but how small get is it infinitely divisible or a big and small balance by some kind of invisible power or is a random and at bottom inert in short how the does work it was heard in the cave and the Hut and the yurt how the does work is this making sense so far Plato thought the universe was a living organism a unitary animal with Spirit form and vision he got it from Pythagoras who got it from Egyptians who got it from a mashup of observations and religions that sprawl into the vastness of History's distance and if that just seems like an idiotic inference it isn't all I know is life it is my principal condition life is all I am and from it I am Arisen so why would I assume that other within the system at which I look and listen isn't in the same position I grow trees grow or forms are rearranged winds and oceans blow and flow as if with conscientious change there's nothing that I know that doesn't sometimes do it so all is soul and life for all is r with movement it's a beautiful construction it hits you like a bullet but just because it's beautiful doesn't mean it isn't is it all a big Soul or a bunch of freaking dirt how the does work you feeling me on this now it's interesting to think about right some of the themes that we've been addressing are such as this is matter just matter is it just inert stuff that just follows mechanical processes you know what I mean are we just stuff and our consciousness is just an epip phenomenon as it's called just sort of an illusion that wafts up from matter how many of you feel that way like like there's no such thing as a soul per se it's just matter doing matter things just by a show of hands wow what a spiritual Bunch you are I told you they're not going to feel like we're doomed how about all of you what what do you tend to lean toward the sort of materialist metaphysical Viewpoint okay all right all right round of applause and how about you Bella how about I'm I keep saying instead of I'm so sorry does don't say unless you're being philosophical um on the other hand you know there's a more panchis view of reality have you ever heard of the term pan psychism we got materialism over on one side pan psychism is the notion that in matter there's a sort of agency there's a sensient there's a feeling there's another side of reality that exhibits that same sort of thing of Consciousness and perhaps it permeates all of reality and that's another way of looking at things and that was actually more common in the ancient world but in early modern Sciences began to be sort of issued and and excised from the way that the Sciences worked and perhaps that's one of the things that have caused things to be up Newton supposed that a God that's all knowing preconceived the world machine and then set the ball rolling such that anyone who knows all of the relevant conditions within a physical system could make accurate predictions of all possible events and so even without God knowing what the what becomes an approachable job stats past and Futures and there's nothing actually Mystic in this universe that's AB absolutely deterministic but further observation of really really tiny stuff sued that conception still wasn't quite fine enough for subatomic particles whose masses are mad small don't behave in accordance with the common sense facts at all and we can make guesses about how they'll act later but they seem to express a lot of random behavior and if the parts that comprise things just kind of do whatever then what the holds all the larger stuff together and what makes it gather just so in its random fall is there some Supernatural happening here after all quantum mechanical uncertainty word how the does work there's only 10 more minutes don't worry now what we have is intellectual unrest the inevitable result of knowing dick buus wondering not just what but even if stuff is and when we hear an answer fearing to trust it and we're back once more to our former condition but with much less faith and with less given whether anyone can answer the old inquisition of what the happening and is anyone listening and next to the question of what the nature of matter is is the question of just what's at stake when we're asking it is the universe for our use or are we its tools the answers are opaque and the askers are fools is Earth other than us self-balancing steadily or is she our mother and we're her edibly and is it just in reference to us that she's precious and which comes first the physics or the ethics I hope you didn't think I would tell you what the answer is I'll probably forget that we were asking this after this the fact is I'm alive I live on earth I'mma figure out a way to make the work how the this work how the this work how the this work how the this work how the this work how the this work everybody how the this work how the this Bella how the sh how the does this at work and are we doomed thanks everybody thank you Nathan for that that Charming phenomenological investigation my my pleasure uh so uh our next uh guest non-m musical uh is guy mcferson so guy I think I learned about your work I don't know like 15 years ago a long time ago uh guy has been the leading kind of like like a Doomer climate scientist who um yeah for for a long time you basically felt that it was like too late and uh we're just sort of looking at the the burnt out Embers of a failed human project uh so I'm going to turn the fly the floor over to guy and he's gonna you know let us have it in a way it was me oh you gotta use the thing the thing I think it was June 20th 2012 that I included we were doomed to Extinction in the near future and by we I mean Homo sapiens and what that really means is all life on Earth because as we go so goes all life on Earth for two reasons one there's something called aerosol masking that nobody in this room has ever heard of even though there have been peer-reviewed Papers written about it since 19 arol masking I've heard of it really we have the most informed crowd I've ever spoken to I'm telling you get ready so at the same time industrial activity produces those those greenhouse gases we're all familiar with it also produces these small particles that go up into the atmosphere and reflect incoming sunlight before it has a chance to strike the Earth and therefore to let the greenhouse gases warm the Earth so that's called the aerosol masking effect and when we reduce industrial activity those aerosols fall out of the atmosphere 91 like 911 and the planet heats up very rapidly very high very rapidly how how quickly well according to Professor James E Hansen the commonly considered the founder of climate science within five days all those particles fall out of the sky so if we reduce or stop industrial activity for 5 days the planet heats up by 133% Overland which is a lot because we're already over 2C above the 1750 Baseline so that's a huge number and so I've been following this peer-reviewed work for a long time about climate change and how doomed are we and every time I think there might be a solution to mitigate or to reduce the probability that we're all doomed more peer-reviewed evidence emerges and convinces me otherwise so I hate to be the bummer in the room really but it seems like that's my task do you want me to leave it there or should I go on and on it's it's a bit unspecific so I wanted to get into like you know I mean how are we all going to die because but actually I mean I also know that like a few years ago you were saying that 2026 we were Kut and here it's looking like it looks like we're going to make it to 2026 yes we almost certainly will make it to 2026 and I was I I made a mistake there I quoted individuals instead of quoting the peer-reviewed evidence but is it like uh so my understanding I can I can join you on the Doom I I can go fully into the the Doom situation would be like the methane eruption becomes uncontrolled that leads to the warming then the oceans warm then the Plankton sto reproducing 60% of our oxygen is produced by the Plankton does then we all suffocate is that is that your best scenario for how we all oh no no no no no no no you know lately I've been answering this question by telling people you got three minutes you got three minutes and with every breath you get a reset live that way live now but when are we all going to die we aren't going to make it till 2030 now I'd say there's a 0% chance of that based on my reading of peute liturgy and I I made a mistake in saying 2026 because I was quoting two renowned scientists James Anderson at Harvard atmospheric scientist at Harvard who famously led the team that discovered the link between chlorofluorocarbons and the whole in over the Antarctic and Jennifer Mc Kinnon at the University of California San Diego and they both said that we were going to lose Arctic sea ice by now and we haven't you'll know when we have and the pro the problem with losing the Arctic C is that reduces the albo effect yes so nothing's any more reflecting like we could have painted all of the rooftops of all the cities white to sort of compensate for the loss of the albo effect but for whatever reason we haven't done that we've just been doing other things right that's exactly what we've been doing other things in this set of living arrangements you're deemed successful if you do other things all the time and so we've been doing other things and but is that the main problem with the Arctic CIS because I've also read that that isn't necessarily catastrophic oh it's definitely catastrophic again based on the peer-reviewed literature um one the the first season we lose Arctic sea ice we will experience an increase in temperature of 133% on land that's kind of a big deal we're already above two see by the way as governments of the world agreed in October of last year so we're already at two what is 133% of that that takes us to about 4.6 4.7 degrees very rapidly and the most important Phenomenon with which almost nobody is familiar except ecologists is the rate of environmental change it's the rate of environmental change that dictates the continued survival of populations communities and species so if we change the environment too rapidly for us to evolve through natural selection or any other species to evolve through natural selection then those pieces go extinct and that's what happens when we have an ice free Arctic Ocean we'll see a an Abrupt warming more abrupt than anything we've seen on this planet for at least the last 70,000 years so there's no time even for like the microplastics to kill us or anything like that it's going to be yeah it's it's interesting because every day I come across new material I I generally read it and it convinces me that I was wrong that it's not going to be climate change it's going to be fill in the plank it's microplastics it's did you know that most beaches in the world have more plastic than they do sand and it's not even close the the sand is disa appearing microplastics are doing great and so there's so many things that could drive us to Extinction but I still think that climate change is in the lead on this one there's like the insect apocalypse I'm just like feeding you kind of like zingers like you know yes the insect apocalypses already underway and contrary to what most people believe it's the little things that actually matter matter the little things include those pollinators that ensure that we have food and that decompose organic matter so that we can continue to have s food because we continue to have soil so the insect apocalypse is problematic and so are about 10,000 other things I I've been roped into talking about climate change because for some reason I started talking about that first so it could be almost anything you know when I'm on the rare occasion I'm falling asleep at night it occurs to me that that today I've out of 147 other reasons were going extinct by the day after tomorrow I don't sleep well so okay but I guess like you know in a way I'm always up for kind of going through different thought experiments so let's say we're are all kind of like doomed by 2030 then what you recommend that people do so we shouldn't bother to conserve or to like fight for what's left or do anything so we just like burn it out or like what's what's what's the deal listen while you and I conserving while the people are conserving in our use of fossil fuels the billionaires are doing the opposite they're maintaining aerosol masking I I have a friend I haven't met yet who is those are often the best kind oh you're telling me and she's the personal assistant of a billionaire and every time he takes his private jet somewhere he takes two private jets he sends one out in front of the jet he's on a couple hundred miles to detect any turbulence cuz he doesn't want to have his plane drive through the turbulence that would be upsetting so we get the billionaires maintaining aerosol masking with the rest of us conserving natural resources so if we're all going to die in 2030 we should at least Guillotine the billionaires first took the words right out of my mouth but there are things we can do you know we can treat each other with respect and with love we can we can act as if we matter we can act as if our families and friends matter as if no we really can't I'm I'm positing it as an experimental kind of approach which it is for most people and in our communities we can go to the town meetings and you know every civilization so far is characterized by misogyny and R ISM every single one including this one we can go to our town meetings we can go to our city meetings and we can try to overcome those challenges yeah they're going to be difficult but what else you going to do with the few years you have left try to make the world a better place and then the most important thing we can do is safely decommission the nuclear power plants because when they melt down we don't know how many of them have to melt down to and and this was shown in the 2021 film Finch if you haven't seen it I strongly recommend it it was subtly displayed when those n nuclear power plants melt down they strip away stratospheric ozone and superheat the plantet way faster than any organism could ever possibly keep up so we melt down some nuclear power plants we're done we're taking everything on Earth with us that's a different you mean the asteroid that drove the dinosaurs to Extinction the asteroid that struck the ucatan peninsula yeah we didn't have nuclear power plants then let's uh I I want to turn it over to Vicki but I want to you know I think we owe guy a round of applause for holding the Doom for holding the negativity you know for I mean you know Doug asked you a brilliant question before we came up here which is like you know how do you metabolize all of this doom and this Darkness like what's your psychological kind of like mechanism for that well the most intelligent thing I did in my life was when I was 19 years years old and I had taken a couple of biology courses in college and I realized that I would not have any children yeah and I was with for more than 35 years I was with a Midwestern Catholic the youngest of six children and I managed to not have children and that's amazing was like the the pull out method because you know if you think we're imagine bringing children into that situation they didn't even get to vote yeah right they just pop out of the womb hey what's going on and the first thing you tell them you're doomed right that's not a good entry point no all right gu well thank you so much for uh sharing your uh your research and your uh your deep thinking oh by the way if you want to if you want to check the validity of anything that I say go to guy mcferson dcom guy mcpherson. com and type in the search box whatever you want to learn about n nature bats last is that what it's called yes nature guy mcpherson. com yeah uh okay cool so um I can't I can't promise that everybody is going to be as Doom Laden and dark as guy mcferson uh but we do have some other contestants tonight and uh we have Vicky Robbins who um you had a podcast um what could possibly go right what could possibly go right yeah and you wrote a book about monetary systems yeah your money or your life your money or life and recently focuses aging kind of like a a podcast or blog it's a I have a Blog called coming of Aging yeah and yeah very happy to have you here and and I know you want to share some thoughts with us sure yeah I mean how do you follow and act like that was like okay everybody Refreshments um I'll just I'll just offer some of my my own ground of being um in 1989 I found out about overshoot and collapse I found that all species that uh that do not have natural Predators will naturally move uh eat through the entire food supply and the whole Colony will expand and collapse and that that is what's happening with the human presence on planet Earth so that was like and I'm the sort of person who thinks well maybe we can do something about that um and so I've done a series of things over the years trying trying to you know put my finger in the Dyke hold back the harm Etc with the belief that you know prediction is not you know prophecy is prediction is not you know reality there's something we can do so I've I've gone through many many initiatives trying to um slow down the process and um most recently you know in the last whatever it is 10 15 years I'm very dedicated to relocalization I live on an island in the Pacific Northwest um and we're working in a lot of different ways on the idea of local self-sufficiency um and it's a it's a diverse Island and we were I wrote a book about local food called blessing the hands that feed us about uh relocalizing our food system so we're tending to water even though U peripheral chids are throughout our entire water syst anyway so I've been addressing this um there's a graph that came out out um just about 1992 that showed that we gone into overshoot in 1986 and I looked at that graph and I said holy and I that's what inspired me to keep going I didn't understand why business as usual was just continuing to go on the people were analyzing the situation but there weren't activists out there literally trying to stop the train so um that's just one piece that I'll lay down uh I do agree that we're going we're going into a an extremely unpredictable time I and my belief has been without scientific evidence per se that small pockets of human communities will actually persist uh I think that people will move north um and maybe they'll be the ultimate event but um and so that you know the human population will be diminished vastly the natural world the speciation will be diminished vastly but we've come back you know life itself has come back again and again um a man named Sir John glub has documented that there's been at least he documented 24 civilizations that have risen and Fallen uh over time so our civilization is in end times so one way you could ask are we doomed it's that our civilization as it is is doomed uh and so but that doesn't mean that we are doomed it means that there is this huge thing that's toppling and there are people who are trying to understand how to be more not even more self-sufficient but you know really to reform communities for survival so that's another way to look at it it's very normal natural for civilization to go into Decline and end uh so then what what do we do uh I think one of the pieces of evidence of end times is that there's always the story of the splitting of the worlds there's the the splitting it's the Rapture you know there there are those who who go into the Rapture there's the splitting of the technosphere and the ecosphere you know there's a separation of the technological C civilization it's throughout literature future fiction that these worlds separate and I think that that's what we're seeing also now so I'm I'm betting on the EOS ecological sphere you know that's really where I'm putting my marbles uh so I mean I'm just saying these things to realize that entertaining the question is important yes we are doomed but that doesn't mean everything's doomed all at once despite what guy says maybe he's right maybe he's wrong who knows it means that it's a it's a complex system in adaptation and because it's a complex system in adaptation being being able to ask the question are we doomed is actually Pro survival It's s it's not just personal survival where I'm banking is on on the level of community that's not just you know like a little village that I live in but it's the island I live on and it means all the natural systems and so becoming an ecological being you know exiting the technological being and becoming an ecological being and that is actually a possible process uh so the other thing um because we've is it possible in big cities or do people have to relocate to smaller areas I think I I I I'm not living in a big city that's all I can say no I I don't think big cities are are feasible I mean New York completely depends on you know trucks coming in from elsewhere completely depends and if there is a collapse then people rural people are not going to want to like send their vegetables here no no joke I mean you just you should just walk around New York and realize this is a completely untenable place not that it's bad it's where we live you know but it's untenable and when you say because I me I guess uh you're saying collapse of civilization how many people here do you feel that we're headed for a collapse of civilization just have curiosity okay and so that that has so many layers to it or or Dimensions to it right it could be like a su in like suddenly there's no food in the supermarkets everybody's like running for the hills or are you thinking more of like a decline or you don't even know it's just like the collapse is inevitable if it's 10 years already happening the people in the rest of the world are already in collapse ill distributed collapse is ill distributed and those of us who are privileged are still hang on to the illusion yeah uh I I have an experience because I live on Seventh Street in Avenue be in New York and oh that's going to that's okay there's a there's a center for processing Asylum Seekers from Africa and Venezuela and like a lot of these guys are lining up every day they're from the Ivory Coast I like oh what's going on in the Ivory Coast you know turns out that that's like 50% of the world's chocolate is grown there and Nestle and Hershey's are the biggest companies who are corrupted the government and oh was like how much does the average chocolate farmer make anybody want to guess how much in Ivory Coast what's that they 78 cents a day you know and and the and the country is 80% deforested and so what's happening in all these countries is our as our Western corporations have you know corrupted exploited to to the to the Max and now these countries are like breaking down so these people are just moving North like their whole family will pull together get somebody one flight to Brazil or Colombia then they'll just walk North to the Mexican border and see if they can find a way way across the border and because if they can make $15 under the table here as a you know doing whatever you know that's like they could support their whole family back there so yeah so I totally agree with you we know for us in the first world the collapse is still still marginal enough that we can sort of avoid looking at it I'm actually very glad that I see this on my corner because it just brings the presence of it I I visited abisa I have all friends who are living in this like mediteran paradise in abisa and their flowy clothes and local you know re farming and so on and you know but there's really not much water in ABA all these islands are already keeping out all the refugees from Syria and the Middle East who don't a place to go so it's like uh yeah almost reminds me a little bit that that edgr post story The Mask of the Red Death you know where like the prince creates like the pleasure Palace and then they like um hang out there and then finally the plague enters the palace and everybody dies so yeah it's just a not kind of it's a good story but you know there there is a sense of like um you know the first world is still very much trying to keep the reality what's happening to the hid in or the peripheries or the margins and the wealthier you are the easier that it is to do at this point yeah I I I think that when when civilizations collapse you know the bigger they are the harder they fall the people at the who are most dependent on the systems persisting will be the ones that are most um upset uh to say the least but you know what I'm banking on and it's maybe you know stupid and ridiculous but I'm banking on you know my small little little networks of you know the farming community and people who are preserving the forest and people who are preserving the water and people are gathering mushrooms and it's small but it's a it's a crystal if you will it's a crystal on which other crystals can grow and and in a way I'm not trying to provide hope but this is actionable um one other thing I want to say in in this topic and then I'll stop talking um is this curent current inquiry into aging uh that I do on my blog called coming of Aging I'm in my 80th year so clearly it's an issue that I should be you know looking at and you know I've gone through all the not all of them but there's plenty left but I'm going through many egoic losses of like importance and visibility you know the things the the the sense of self the the self that I built in order to live in the world is starting to disassemble while I'm still in this body and so the question is what is this period of time for because you know I was thinking about Ernest Becker about the fear of death his whole study was you know the the sort of the back pressure of the fear of death is just in completely shaping our lives and it may be that that's what we're seeing you know in this collapse this fear of the collapse of civilization the collective death it's like it's like what is this about and I'm finding it's a refin of the Soul this is it's just an incredible period of time of transformation inner transformation and I'm not the only one more and more I talk to older people this is this is a process that's happening if you allow it so I think that's also another actionable perspective beautiful thank you so much Vicki Robins uh and next we have uh the esteemed Doug Henwood esteemed um thank you um I want to apologize I'm a neurotic so I have a prepared text I apologize however that it's not peer reviewed Doug just a second a little bit about yourself your background you do a Blog about sort of Economics system oh I I've been writing about economics and politics for many many many years I do a radio show uh on economics and politics um I am now studying the American ruling class as a rotting social formation uh which is a rich topic for investigation um so as I say here's my I have a prepared text it's not too painfully long I hope uh my first thought on uh seeing the title of this event was to paraphrase Bill Clinton depends upon what your meaning of we is and the second was of a story about Herman Melville's last meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne as ha Hawthorne recounted it Herman Melville came to see me at the consulate looking much as he used to a little paler perhaps a little sadder in a rough outside coat and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner Melville as he often does began to reason of Providence and futility and of everything that lies Beyond human Ken and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated sometimes it seems to me like a lot of us are echoing Melville it's not just my gloomy leftwing intellectual milu um although I was unprepared for precisely how much Gloom I was going to be marinating right here the other day Facebook presented me with an ad for an article from Car and Driver magazine published in March 2020 a week or two into the pandemic listing the 13 best vehicles for tackling the apocalypse among them the Ford police interceptor Interceptor utility hybrid the Jeep Gladiator Rubicon and the aerial Nomad tactical on the right and some of the politically detached mainstream apocalypticism leads to stocking up on guns and canned food on the left where I lead my political life it often leads to arming resignation that was brought home to me back in 2019 before the pandemic damaged human society when I was doing an article on DSA the Democratic Socialist of America of which I am a member I interviewed a young member the one in fact who drew me in and I asked her what she thought the organization should be doing in 10 years uh she said I don't really think there's a long term I was stunned and haven't stopped thinking about that since young people are supposed to be full of Hope but polling data and interviews with psychoanalysts who shown me that these are fairly widespread views especially among those who lean left and then there's that rhetorical style much but not all of it on social media that only breathes despair this is the endless recitation of Horrors with climate it's alarming bits like another melting Glacier or the 1th consecutive month of record heat but it's not just climate my Twitter feed and I still can't say x is full of horrible images out of Gaza which are undeniably horrible but what these recitations accomplished do the spreaders of this sort of thing think that with one more picture of a blown apart toddler you could end the horror or with one more tale of catastrophic methane releases what is the theory of change here outside a small circle of connoisseurs cataloging Horrors is more numbing than mobilizing on seeing these even I who might otherwise be the ideal target audience want to escape into pictures of beautiful food on Instagram or there could even be the perverse reaction nicely described by AR Emmons in his book length poem sphere when one knows he's going out can't when when one knows he's going out can we blame him for shoving the voltage up I'm kind of skeptical that knowing that world all doomed by 2030 is going to encourage us to be nice to each other I think it's more likely to encourage the uh the war of each against all um 12 years ago I he's been wrong before though he thought we were out by 2026 so four we got four more years I'm grateful for the reprieve a whole another presidential election to go through 12 years ago I wrote the introduction to a collection of essays edited by my friend Sasha Lily called catastrophism the apocalyptic politics of collapse and rebirth the title of my contribution was dystopia is for losers which makes me sound trumpy before the P before the fact but I'm not now nor was I ever I meant that embracing Doom was profoundly alienating and demobilizing and guaranteed defeat if I were so inclined I might psychoanalyze the Embrace of an eroticisation of Doom perhaps his defensive strategy against despair but not to Kink shame or anything this seems a fixation that should be worked through let's Muse on one of the more famous exhortations in political history workers of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your change chains rather change I could I could psychoanalyze that one for for a long time but I won't um it sounds quaint almost embarrassing it draws on structures of feeling that are looking very withered today the notion of abroad solidarity and a sense that once mobilized the United Force could trans transform the world into a better place we lack that ambition if you think if you think we won't be around in 10 years you aren't even going to imagine what a better Society might look like it's distressing to see the right so mobilized and ambitious page for the heritage foundation's project 2025 their blueprint for Trump 2 and you'll see a detailed and terrifying plan for transforming every aspect of American Life they're going to bring bring Jesus into the Department of Labor and drive woke out of the Federal Reserve I'm not kidding about those things they really plan that we've got nothing approaching that despite constant harassment and repression the political left was once profoundly optimistic and ambitious we lost that partly because the collapse of the USSR discredited any notion of remaking the world we couldn't imagine that because it would inevitably inevitably lead to the goog instead we should keep to keep to the small and the local and so reconstruct what was lost and not more the historian Steve Fraser has a piece in Jackman magazine a while back arguing that we've lost all sense of the future on the right we're all about going back to 1955 to make America great again and much of the Bernie Sanders left dis backed in 1935 to rehabilitate the New Deal there was much that was great about the new deal but it derived lots of his political energy from trying to domesticate socialist Ambitions without those we can't have a green New Deal we can't have a new deal green or otherwise to close I'm going to quote the conclusion of my 2012 intro on catastrophism because I couldn't improve on it now wouldn't it be better to spend narratives of how humans are marvelously resourceful creatures who could do a lot better with the intellectual social and material resources we have that new collectivities could imagine together a world better than the capitalist mess we've inherited as someone who finds a temptation of pessimism to alluring and that's true even though I haven't sounded that way so far I keep reminding myself that recovering ing a utopian sensibility is about the most practical thing we could do right now dystopia is for losers are we doomed not if we can help it very nice very very aerody I like I liked your uh the Melville hawthor moment and AR Ammons I got them all in there you got them all in there um so yeah so I mean although so you you tend pessimistic pessimistic but right now you're feeling there's a little bit of utopian kind of frisan kind of well I you know I just don't think we have an alternative I I'm not really willing to resign myself to human extinction we're very resourceful and uh uh obviously it's it's a steep hill to climb but uh you know I I do think that if we do I'm get convinced that we're doomed within what six years um we're going to be very mean to each other and society's going to get even more brutal than it is and that doesn't seem like a way to spend our final days and you know that that Amon Spug too we're just going to shove up the voltage um and uh bring the bring the Doom moment forward um so I don't know there's this great quote from KES which I wish I could recite about one the famous animal spirits passage of the general theory where he says that humans never really did anything in the rational evaluation of possibilities you know we have the only way we do things is just with some irrational striving uh to to improve things in the future and maybe I'm quite consciously selling a bill of goods here um but uh uh I just I just I guess despite you know a tendency I read a whole lot of fry I'm like you know given to somewhat gloomy central European worldviews of things but on the other hand I don't know I just think that we've got to uh do the best we can and try to um pull our asses out of the fire nice one yeah I think it'll be fun so I think what we'll do Doug is going to speak hi Doug uh and then it's rare that there two Dougs May little bit of like a back and forth but then we're going to take a break have a drink martinis are available uh whatever you need uh and then we'll come back but I thought we could also maybe talk when we come back a little bit about like yeah let's let's you know let's admit that we're in this time of collapse we don't know if everything is going down uh or if civilization is going down what what is like in a way like that could that be a beautiful time like could we actually take from that an opportunity to I don't know like Forge some amazing thing out of like the human Spirit y yada I let's at least think about that I was I was at I was in England last week at a festival and this guy Satish Kumar spoke do you guys know him and he was so wonderful and um you know he was just like you know he he I think his his talk was called walk the talk and he talked about how when he was young he just decided to walk around the world so he had no money he started in New Delhi just like step by step he said in two and a half years he found himself in Washington DC and yeah like he just you know you know people took took care of him and basically his whole thing was just love you know like he would go to a Christian country he would you know he'd meet a Christian like I love you you're Christian great you know Muslim you know I love you you're Muslim you know great you know um you know so like yeah may may maybe this type of situation you know could could force us to access our inner leadership capacities and even if things are going down or out or flaming up uh it could be the most amazing time to be alive you know uh so it's just something to to think about but Doug what what are what are your thoughts for us tonight well I'll just agree with that um so yeah if you don't know me I'm Douglas I write books mostly the most recent book I did was called survival of the richest Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires which was about their fantasies of either escaping the Doom or saving us all with a big moonshot techno project um so what what I'm reminded of in hearing everyone talk is a couple of years ago I ended up being the guy who was alone with my mother-in-law in the hospital room as she died and I was at first thinking why the am I the one in the room at 3 in the morning with my mother-in-law when she's got three kids and I'm the one I did this for my mom I did this for my dad I did this for my best friend when I was 25 years old as he died in a car next to me why am I here with this dying person and over the next hour as she kind of fought for breath but but was actually I think fighting to not breathe if you know what I mean fighting to let go I felt connected with her on on a melal level if you know what I mean it was as if I was tripping on 10 grams of acid and in the same body as this person metabolizing with her the letting go of life and I realized this was the most profound Mitzvah a human being could be blessed with by Mitzvah it's funny Mitzvah means like a commandment but it also means like a privilege and a blessing at the same time it's it's that it's that and it's not what I was going to talk about but but but I've I've often wondered is my work here to help us fix the problem or am I giving paliative care as if they're two different things right but what but what what if they're if they're one in the same you know what what if they're one in the same you know we're we're I I agree I'm a I'm a recovering Marxist I agree conditions on the ground the data the stats indicate we are doomed right the machines say she is dying the breath is stopping this is ending right this boom but there's there's a a difference between attending to the probable and opening ourselves to the possible you know in an age of AI which is what we're living in right the age of artificial intelligence is the age of probability that's all AI does is it finds the most probable uh uh response the most probable the average it it creates the mean for you whatever you put in and if they want to make it look more human they just randomize a little something about it to make it look noisy like human but a as we we Converge on the probable I feel like the the the human offering is the possible is the wiggle room is the lional space is is that that other thing and I I I believe in science but I believe in science as being so incomplete they just discovered the gut biome and that that's bigger than the gut right they juster realizing that our connective tissue is an organ right the the connective tissue in your body they thought that trees competed for sunlight in the forest but they actually are sharing nutrients under the soil you know we do not know what the is going on here right we really we really really don't and I'm holding out hope on Magic I really am on magic on that we can collectively undergo the same uh mind shift that I had with my dying mother-in-law where the horror was the blessing and whether that just means changing our experience of our colle itive Extinction or changing the fact of our Collective Extinction who knows what it is that we go Quantum that we rise from the Chrysalis of matter as pure Consciousness as Terence Mc Kenna argued we could that we connect on some other level that matter the that the as rert CHR would tell us that the the the laws of physics are themselves evolving along with us along with Consciousness um I I'm I want to go there and you know whenever I talk like this someone says it's like well not Whenever two times when I've spoken like this someone said oh you sound like you're you're just playing in the band on the deck of the Titanic as it goes down what Better Life Could you what how much more true to a sense of purpose if you are a musician then to sit in that chair as the boat goes down and and play for the people it's like a great Jewish prayer in medieval times and the Jews had a lot of up sucky times medieval times were some of the worst they wrote this prayer called the unana tokef it's what they read on like rashash Shana and yum kapore it's the worst one of all it's like between rashash Shona and Yung Kapur it is written who will live and who will die who will be sick and who will this who will this it's like it's like the book of life and everyone you're supposed to think oh right it's cuz we got to be really good now because God's writing it down no what this says at the end of the poem is this is all going to be written in the book of life but with with compassion and Grace and and mutual Aid we can lessen the severity of the decree right so we may not be able to change the facts on the ground conditions on the ground uh not easily anyway but we can change the The Human Experience of these conditions and in the process perhaps um flip the script and discover you know an entirely different human stories of play uh so na Nathan as our as our youngest representative up here how does all this strike you you said you're not feeling the Doom well I'm feeling a little bit more now uh no I'm actually I'm I'm not that's I'm I'm joking I I agree with you I I agree with you Douglas and I I it would be absurd for me to try to act as an avatar for younger people and represent you know A diversity of views and things like that and I'm 37 I'm not as young as some people are not as young as Bella Bella's very young Bella is the youngest person here um but I did a show the other day where I do you know some of the same material that you saw tonight and things like it um and teaching like this sort of interactive Eco philosophy course um and I usually do it with other adults but I did it with um some high schoolers at like a sort of summer camp kind of context not too long ago and they were articulating a Viewpoint not across the board but quite saliently that was similar to what Douglas is expressing a sense of almost certainty that things as we know them are collapsing that they're going to collapse these were gifted students who are were involved in this program because they've devoted their lives to various forms of research and created pursuit of you know intellectual goals and Gifts of various kinds and I was talking to this girl who works in Ai and she was like it's definitely going to take over in the sense that you're asking because I was asking her about this but she also had this sort of strange and to me at first moment paradoxical but then in a way that resolved sort of response in addition to that which was that that's okay that something is Shifting and changing and the existing systems are shifting and changing but life itself if what we mean by life is the self-organizing tendency of matter itself is going to persist that's not how she put it she's 16 but she is very bright but that's what took from it a sense of yes what you have perhaps attributed your meaning to is collapsing that is ending we feel sure of that young people seem to feel sure of that at least the ones that I've talked to but we're alongside that shift there is a shift into what some call the Post secular Beyond this notion of a Mechanical Universe where life is the exception and a more integrated notion of what the operations of the universe entail in the first place and perhaps yes the very laws of physics are changing in the cosmic Evolution but one way or another the story of agency the story of matter organizing itself persists and I think if you're younger whether or not people would articulate it that way there is a sense and I do have the sense that that's why it's okay the Adventure Continues and it's Invitational in that sense and it's kind of fun in the same way that maybe it was fun like imagine you know Christianity emerges as the Roman Empire starts to dismantle itself and you know it there's hundreds of years of of Christian Evolution but the early Christians were living with almost a sense of certainty that the apocalypse was imminent and it was a good thing Revelation was a process that was nearing completion and therefore be activated constantly to live in that now and within the confines of your immediate sphere of agency build the kingdom here so you're so assured of the imminence of total clearing of the Slate that you actually create the ideal reality that would have been impossible under the strictures of the existing existing structures and I'm not saying every young AI Savant is converting to a new form of early Christianity involving a post-secular leap into the self-awareness of matter but I am saying that though okay so this is what I'm feeling about our situation right now maybe instead of taking a break and coming back I think the energy is still good people still seem like unpo so maybe like we'll take a question and then we'll all try to answer it in whatever way somebody have like a burning thought yeah over there there's a somebody has a mic for you coming right up uh yeah in the blue shirt right there behind the pole yeah and then we'll go for we'll see how long we want to go then we'll go and have more drinks and martinis and all that stuff yeah go ahead um this question is for Professor rushkoff so um it's gonna be for all of us we're all gonna oh for everybody we're so we're talking about billionaires right in power and and one of the things that Professor rushkoff brought up in a medium you call him Doug I think right now um Doug cool um that he was invited to talk to a group of billionaires and they wanted to ask him when it came to the Future they didn't want to talk about how to save Humanity how to prolong life basically about when the system start to collapse how do we prevent the security people from turning on us right like basically there are people that we can afford to pay to protect us yeah but what do we do when they turn on us have people read Douglas's piece on this so it was widely circulated and got a lot of attention actually that's a great question good well sorry so one of the things that occurred to me and so this is the basic question is like are our perceptions totally flipped right does that possibly reveal that the billionaires realize they have no power the people who have the power are the security people the people that have the power are the people that they hire the same way in our society the people who clean your hotel rooms the people who grow your food the people who tend to the highways they're the ones with the power and not the people with all the money so the question is are our perceptions flipped and that's why this power system exists because we're applying power in the wrong place I like it you look like you're ready to go yeah I mean this is a bit what I was saying is that there are people many people many communities now low to the ground that are already creating systems that that are prolife pro or pro- life uh you know pro- living systems um and it's not NE just technology it's it's communication it's love it's like it's like conflict resolution it's it's circles you know where we think about things together all of that technology is happening low to the ground and it's invisible because of perception of power but it's it's there you know so maybe it's that as the big crashes happen I don't know I mean it's not it's not a strategic but I'm just saying that for me being woven it's like Douglas is saying you know I'm part of the mycelium we're growing a melium down there you know close to the ground we're growing those connections and I want to say really that it's not an individual Transcendence process it's the process of the realization that there is no you without us and US isn't just these people us is the microbes and The Roots and the you know there's an us out there that is functioning now you know I mean guy puts a Marker way out there like that there will be no us so don't worry about or like just be a good person until we go in 2030 what I'm positing is that we can become part of the ecology rather than part of the civilization or we can make that journey and part of the journey is realizing that We're All in This Together part of the journey is the tolerance for relationships with people that that you don't see eye to eye part of the journey is almost like the bo of humanity and you finally get used to that you you it's earthy yeah so anyway that's my perspective on it that was beautiful thank you I mean often I think civilization is really just the process through which older weaker monkeys prevent younger stronger ones from killing them and taking their stuff right until the young ones are finally old enough to then need the civilization themselves right um the the billionaires understood that much I think and the the place where I would flip the script on the billionaires especially the tech billionaires is we perceive of them as bringing revolutionary new things to us but the tech billionaire mindset is actually reactionary the devices and Technologies and platforms they've created are there to maintain the existing order right they might disrupt the taxi vertical but they run to Goldman Sachs for their IPO just like Grandpa did right so it's ultimately it's it's reactionary it's about keeping the certain certain kind of uh uh Power in place but you're right they feel ultimately powerless to influence the future right the future to them is not a verb it's not something we create in the present the future is a thing that you hire a futurist to tell you what is inevitably happening given conditions on the ground so that they can prepare for that right so the the shock to me was that the most powerful men I had ever been in a room with felt less powerful than I do to influence what's going to happen that the best they can do is you know hang on for for you know the inevitable uh uh the inevitable effect of the causes that they themselves um have created cre I have a question for you and these people um do they think their money is going to be worth anything postapocalypse well that was what I had to tell them I mean this was they were stupid right these were like 14y old Walking Dead audience Elon Musk has made this very apparent to the world now yeah no they really were the the the I mean the the event it sounds like I was invited to speak to billionaires I wasn't it was a hedge fund holding a a like a reward conference for their biggest clients out in the desert you invite like a 100 people and then there was like a menu of people that they could see so it was like improve your golf swing with this Pro you know learn to cook an omelette with Emerald you know or this or that and then there was you know at one at one o'clock it's like you know find out about the future with futurist Douglas rushka and I'm not a futurist I'm a presentist right who know who knows what's gonna happen I would never say so it was that it was five guys show up you know it's like oh so you know Bitcoin ethereum you know or virtual reality or web three and then one guy's you know like what about my bunker you know is it going to work Alaska or New Zealand you know that whole that whole thing so it got into that and I was really as a as a a a intellectual dominatrix you know I saw my job as to tweak these people so it's like oh you know so are you g to have security you know they're like oh yeah we got Navy Seals on speed dial oh so how are you going to pay your security once your bitcoin's worthless uh uh you know so it's like they hadn't even thought you know one one degree of uh you know beyond beyond the I mean one of them was saying I'll be the only one with the key to the food supply it's like oh and you know Navy Seals have no experience getting information out of people right you'll spend the apocalypse getting water boarded or something so it was just it was odd I was trying to tweak them to joke them out of their their their lunacy but you know and I also I what I asked them is why aren't you you know getting on you making a rocket ship to go to Mars and they're like we're not that level of billionaire they're like lowlevel billionaires so the best they could do is like get a seed on one of Richard Branson's things but they can't make their own poor things I mean a lot of them are getting into like permaculture and New Zealand and stuff like that so we have a question over there but we need a Mike for this uh lady in the corner lady I'll give it back I promise um it's more of a comment to uh than a question but uh I I really picked up on your analogy to paliative care Doug because um I was just at a conference like a workshop last week on for p paliative care caregivers and and terminal patients and um it was a guy named BJ Miller uh who who has written and talked extensively on the subject of how we deal with our own mortality and how we Embrace death and there's a real clear parallel between the uh you know the end the the finiteness of human life and then this analogy being applied to the sort of this notion that there's a a finite end of of humanity um the one life and Humanity as a whole and I think the concepts are very uh it's the same it's just on a different scale um what you described with your mother-in-law um you know my husband is a doctor and I've never been in a room with someone who died but what he said to me is that there is an energy it is palpable and it leaves and what BJ says is that where do you go when you die and he he did a New York Times uh oped during during Co I think that was the title of it his theory is that there is this this energy that we're all connected to so everyone's picking up on this on different levels matter um particle you have a question just uh no I it's t easier when you're doing a thing like this okay now I know so the point I did actually want to make is the interesting parallel to the billionaires is there obsession with longevity and ultimately what it comes down to is this notion of control and do we are we seeking control um and to Stave off the inevitable which as we all know is change which is a process of growth and Decay okay thank you are we seeking control Nathan yeah I I think that's I like the way that you framed that just now because the the proposition comes down to a question of Fai faith and what I mean by that is it's connected to what Vicki was saying if I'm a billionaire which I'm not right now I have so little money I have money in my bank account because I discovered that I by setting up my LLC which I just started doing I'm I'm not very good at doing business stuff uh I could like I had a company credit card and I could just transfer so I just made this money out of nowhere so I'm counting on things changing as well because I have no no plan for the future but if I were a billionaire I would probably be interested or maybe I would be interested in uploading my Consciousness to the to the cloud or something like this some sort of I investing in how to preserve my finitude but in doing so I would be I would be acting in a way that I think does not presuppose what I mean by faith and I earlier was trying to articulate visible or detectable in the consciousness of young people a kind of Faith akin to what Vicki is describing where instead of locating value in the egoic we locate it in the eoic we locate it in in a more actually communitarian way of being and you know you were talking about Marx earlier and you brought up Marx earlier this Marx's superstructure as an economic theory is ultimately based on an understanding of matter that has that tendency to aggregate almost willingly I mean Marx wrote his dissertation about the epicurian the ancient epicureans they were the materialists they were the Renegades who you know said there is no soul but they still asserted that there is a swerve in matter that makes it come together and so it has this tendency to sort of love or care and yeah some kind of you said a Transcendent rule or a Transcendent tendency to instead of infinite particles falling through infinite void never touching the desire to sort of touch the way that relates to this Faith proposition is this if I truly feel that what matters most and the only thing that could possibly matter is the collaborative aspect aspect of reality the mutual care aspect of reality I'm not incentivized to worry about how I get my finite experience to follow a different material Channel and exist on a floppy disc or to continue to live in this meatsack in a bunker it just doesn't matter as much there isn't meaning for it and we see this play out even in our individual experience if anybody here is a musician or whatever you know that if you're trying to get credit for the moment in the moment that you're expressing you're going to up the moment you have to become the music and there's no way to put it that isn't woo woo and the whole conversation gets really inundated with a bunch of woo woo and you know there's a legacy of sort of new age speak that makes it hard to talk about these topics in a way that doesn't sound totally without meaning but what we're trying to get at is that thing is that expression of the ego is okay the ego is part of the ego but if you if you enshrine the former at the expense of the latter the former literally stops existing ontologically dissipates and so when you talk about that moment of okay there's an energy that that left the room the fact that that energy is clearly going somewhere because everything comes from somewhere is more important than where do I put this finite experience of mine we have a very emphatically raised hand over there and then we have a hand over here that was also you you want to go first actually is he's closer yeah Sor I run a a conference every year called environmental Joy so I figured I'd come and check out uh the other side so I don't really um I don't really disagree with a lot of what you're saying I think the field is diverse um I I think and the last two points especially are I think really Salient what does strike me is the question I'd like to ask is what's causing the Doom right we uh spent $6 trillion dollar on a war in Iraq for oil which is all of us working including the babies and the old people working full-time for two years uh so we were doomed in some ways by that I don't give a about what the billionaires do honestly um but what is causing the Doom um like David Graber said oh we'd like to talk about inequality as a big problem that's a really bad way to describe it instead of concentration of capital hegemony oligopoly there are things that are causing the Doom not to say that the ideas and the melal and the response is inappropriate but I think having this conversation without thinking about what is causing cusing it which is why and part of environmental Joy is saying well six hurricanes in a summer Hurricane Sandy is very anxious creating but we're ignoring $6 trillion dollars in Iraq or the net subsidies to the fossil fuel industry of seven trillion a year globally um so I just I'm interested in your answer the question sounds like you have your own answer which is kind of like the DED nature of the financial system in some sense I no I'm just interested in what you all think is causing the Doom like as you sit there and think about the particles in the atmosphere or the or the AI I have about them but um but I'd love to hear what you all have to say I guess I I personally kind of think of it that you know I look on everything on some level on some kind of evolutionary process including technology like at some point Humanity was going to develop you know trade routes and you know trains and satellites and you know that would lead to concentration of wealth and so on so it's like you know and Technology efforts to kind of like you know whether it's the Plastics all the things that we're doing you know it's it's all very fast like most of the destruction it's like the last 150 200 years we didn't even really know what we were doing it's like oh that works and you know oh like you know we can we can use um fertilizer we can make it out of chemicals then we can increase agricultural yields then more population and then you know more consumers then more factories more wealth generated I think up until this point it's just been this momentum this sort of like logic of this whole thing and it's only now we realize that the logic is is completely faulty and only leads and you know meanwhile you still have countries like India you know or China which are still like cat catching up to this faulty logic that we've now imposed um you know which is a very extractive kind of logic I guess I wasn't I wasn't defending I wasn't defending yeah never just say we're we're on some larg scale it's like an evolutionary process like you know up up until we shift to something else right which I think has to happen you know whe why bother shifting if we're going to die in six years that's what I he was wrong about 26 I think he's gonna be wrong that attitude is so depoliticizing and so I never thought of myself as a you know member of the party of Joy but I I do think that like we need to like get our together understanding who's doing what and see if we can in our remaining six years do something about it to like make this all work better we have an immense amount of talent and possibility and capability that is being all used all for the wrong things or M for the wrong things we uh i' hope you know if we can do it in the short amount of time remaining um Can redirect ourselves into more constructive paths and this kind of even the notion of evolution uh imposes this kind of inevitability on it and agentless and that all the agents who are doing the bad things disappear from that kind of analysis and there are a lot of Agents meant I was just giving you one way to look at it yeah I don't know I just when people start talking about Evolution societ pointing fingers at blame also doesn't seem to do much either in a way it's fun yeah I I I have one thing that I'd like because I I want to just go on your what what you were saying the demented nature of the financial system I think really that is a root cause debt-based money debt-based money was actually you know brought into being um you know by the merchant class and the Kings you know when there was a new world and they couldn't figure out how to finance you know sending the ships over and getting the gold they they invented debt-based money Y and they also did it to prevent I mean as I've written that to prevent the rise of the of the middle class in medieval Europe who were using local monies and trading and getting wealthy the aristocracy was getting poor so they made these local monies illegal they created Charter monopolies so you couldn't be in business for yourself but currently it's it is how money is brought into being is via debt and so it requires a growth economy which is killing us it's I I really think that that's the engine and it's like we're the Sorcerers Apprentice we learn the incantation for go but we do not know the incantation for stop how do we change it how how how do we change something as big as a Global Financial system totally I want to let this woman uh and if you try they will come after you they will come after you of course yeah hi I thank you for your conversation and for the Doom predictions I'm extremely literal and it seems to me that the most pertinent question is where where am I going to be because it doesn't seem like this is all going to happen in the same way on the entire planet so I'm just wondering in a very literal specific way if you have some suggestions for example I'm sorry that's just the nature to try to survive or make my apocalypse some somehow a little bit better than you know if I can I'm like spending all we we're doing like a drainage project in our backyard to try to keep our house from flooding and we've this is like our third bios swell that we've built and also we're building a retaining wall and like so we're investing tens of thousands of dollars in flood prevention but is it actually just completely feudal and should we actually just be selling our house and moving to New Zealand where we actually have family that I'm just asking where that's the same question that the billionaires ask me where where Alaska or New Zealand and the only response I have is in the arms of your lover you know you know people are going to be moving North it is going to be happening you know what else is going to happen the global South is parts of it are going to become unhabitable I mean I talked to somebody from the Rand company and they said that two billion people could resettle in Canada it's just going to be happen yeah I mean ter according to the investment Community you know um what was this Dr Doom the guy I I did the thing with that time yeah yeah yeah um he said um they're saying Siberia and Northern Canada that's where they're investing and there are already economic interests who are figuring that out or trying to like buy up big land trusts and control that real estate and looking at making a profit you know on that that's the global map yeah yeah he's saying the the temperature in Northern Canada can can be higher than in than in Mexico City yeah the whole thing is getting so murky and weird yeah yeah yeah yeah uh Omar has been very excited to thank you but of all the places New Zealand does sound like a good one my friends made a ton of money then did a whole survey around the world where'd be the best safest place to go and New Zealand was what they came up with that's where they moved it's really hard to be right about those things though weather systems are so thank you so much thank you so much everybody for speaking this is really an interesting conversation and I I want to just make reference I went to a oil conference in 2005 or six and I got to hear Steven levit one of the authors of Freakonomics speak to a world of of oil people and he what he talked about was everybody was worrying about you know environmental stuff and what he said was that we as a as species have always been on the verge of disaster like and he used penicillin as an example of like we figured out how to how to change something so I'm I'm listening to everybody I'm listening to all the questions I'm listening to everybody talking and it's all wise but the one thing that speaks out to me is um Douglas talked about magic and and I am curious about you speaking more about magic and everybody thinking about like what did you mean by that so that I I I want to hear you talk more about that magic is a spectrum right at best what I mean by magic is that we use language and thought to change material reality um in positive ways um on the other on the other side of the spectrum is that that we can through language and propaganda and art we can uh uh initiate or engender a radical Global mind shift that alters um human behavior and neutralizes the Mind virus of capitalism on on a deeper level it would be you know the the the physics of of um that that uh Consciousness proceedes matter rather than that Consciousness is an emerging phenomenon of complex matter that there's there's more going on here that there's the the fundamental uh uh mover of of physical matter is uh consciousness of some sort and that that would be when I look at the the the massive challenge of global wi of of global climate catastrophe somehow coming up collectively with a Sigil that flips that changes the story seems a more probable path toward survival than doing something in a lab that's going to make the ozone stop yeah can you you pass well just just briefly I I'm kind of on the magic side of this uh discussion but I'm also have sometimes served as a group therapist and I'm concerned about guys uh feelings right now and perhaps his thoughts on what this whole discussion seems to where we were where we're all where the other people are all going with this uh would you resorted to magical thinking right my paternal grandmother died when I was 12 years old and I cried for weeks and later I realized that I was crying because I realized I was Mortal it wasn't about her I didn't even know her saw her once a year for a few days I don't even know this person birth is a sexually transmitted disease that has proven fatal in every case all right yeah we all act as if we're Immortal we act surprised that we're going to die and go don't move to New don't move to New Zealand I have a standing invitation to move to Zealand on a small island off the coast I've been there half a dozen times s everybody dies no everybody doesn't all die at the same time of course not but what matters is how you live given your terminal diagnosis how you treat other people how you treat yourself how you live in the face of knowing that you are dying and we all are but that's the thing we're all dying we all know that the whole sexually transmitted disease proven fatal every time we all know that's true right from the time we're 12 or 14 years old so let's live let's live fully let's live as n said as though the day we're here because it is we don't know when I don't know when you're going to die you know I thought it'd be really cool if everybody had stamped on their forehead their death date and everybody could see it except them imagine how people would treat you like if you only got 12 hours left then they'd be nice if you got a long time then you're a I don't want to have anything to do with that guy he's going to live forever sorry Hi d g h as a as a therapist how did you find his response we we got a question in the back or several questions thank you so much uh this is fascinating um Daniel you had earlier today I was in a seminar you had earlier today um mentioned something about like maybe your thought was the self-willed kind of nature to this Doom that we've kind of like unconsciously maybe are willing it uh we don't know why but it is happening maybe we're looking for the surprise Factor just to see what happens maybe it's just like getting kind of this evolutionary forces really get going to see what going goes on and maybe that enhances us to LEAP to the next level I want to hear everybody else's thought about that thought and maybe than God you don't want to hear mine yeah I guess yeah yourself as well sorry but also how other because it resonated with me in many ways uh but I was curious about everybody else's as well thank you yeah well yeah I mean I I wrote a bunch of books like actually there books for sale out there one of them is about this idea of the shift from the materialism to idealism to the idea that Consciousness uh is more likely to be the foundational layer of reality than just physical stuff and that that is like a beautiful shift that as that becomes more available to more people that could actually lead to all sorts of societal changes you know in the time we have left uh you know depending uh because like yeah because like materialism has also what sort of led us into this culdesac right this idea that if you live in a material reality where conscious is entirely based in your brain then you can only Shore up your kind of sense of ego is very insecure so you want to like have the yacht and and and the mansion and and you know the trophy wife and all that stuff if if we begin to surrender that sense that um we're just in this material reality then it opens up a lot of new spaces and yeah it all seems to be converging right this idealism that this like this philosopher Bernardo castrop expresses very well um you know the ecological crisis the technological Evolution the the planet all sort of forming one communication grid just feels like we're on this like incredible trajectory which I guess I I do see as a kind of evolutionary trajectory and yeah there's a sense that we've known for quite a long time you know about uh the global warming and climate change and we just haven't been able to skeer in a different direction it's almost like we want to see what happens or something like we're just um you know we we or we can't break out of the spell until we get to like the the limit of it or something like that uh and and maybe yeah maybe that's what we have to do to liberate something else some other potenti hedg hoold in in human beingness you know yeah my friend Dwayne Elgen traveled the country he's a planetary thinker uh he traveled the country doing groups and asking people you know how old is Humanity I mean are we babies are we toddlers are we teenagers are we young adults and he said universally people believe that we're teenagers and the behavior of teenager is risk let's see how far we can go it's it's it could even seem to be a Death Wish like you know okay let's play chicken and see who goes off the cliff first it is a fascination with edges and in his theory and I would say somewhat mine is that we're in a maturation crisis where where there's the evolution of Consciousness isn't just like a total leap to you know Bliss it's a it's a Evolution to the mature mind which has understands limits has a sense of proportion understands that there's actually other people there you know it's not just all me you know that's and and for me you know for a while I used to say I'm holding out for the maturation of humanity and that this is a maturation crisis this is a coming of age uh and and that frame helps because then you can start to see okay what are the tasks for myself my loved ones my community what are the tasks of maturation that was very beautiful yeah I mean initiation crisis would be another way to look at it let's take another question we got some other good ones looks like hi um I came to the conclusion that the first country to give up oil is was going to be the first country to lose the next War so I thought and is it possible that man our society cannot learn to live in peace and if we can't learn to live in peace then we're never going to be able to come to grips with our environment because our environment is always going to be subject to and a place to find the wherewith all to create war is that a question is that I don't know is that a question question so I mean um this um sense of magic do you think that that's just another way of saying that the sociey learned how to live in peace and that that might be a a beginning to uh mature and no longer be looking at Doom but is it possible for mankind or societies to live in peace have I think that that would be part of this maturation I mean um there's a book I really liked called spontaneous evolution by Bruce Lipton and Steve bman and they talk about how in evolution there's this like ultimately it moves from from competition aggression and domination to cooperation and symbiosis so like a tree is a much older older species than we are and it shelters like 2500 other species you know it it it just gives back it gives back you know it it it doesn't it replenishes and it gives back and and it and it holds space for all these other beings right so you know we're we're still in the sort of competition aggression phase in terms of our nation states and our stock market our corporations but it may be that we have to go to the Limit you know maybe right to death's door or just the edge and then you know we have this this shock of initiation where you know we transmute our systems and structures to allow for cooperation and symbiosis it's possible can can I just presence another person who was supposed to be on the panel but she got ill and she couldn't be here Jody Evans and she was very excited to come and talk about the work she's doing she's she's working with code pink she was one of the founders she's been working for so many years uh to challenge an end War um and uh so she has a website called peace economy. n netor whatever um and she is developing um a almost like a taxonomy of a peace economy all the different elements that she sees actually emergent now of a peace economy you know like uh cooperatives I I can't recite the whole thing but she's painting a picture through this documentation of what would it look like to have a peace economy and it's not theoretical it's based in research that she's done and she's inviting people to do the co- research to fill in this beautiful taxonomy of what a peace economy would look like so I highly recommend you look there and it I don't know if her website is on the invitation but it's important peace economy. okay we have another question yeah um we're talking about the potential for social transformation and uh um one thing I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the potential for psychedelics to bring that about um and I know we had the 60s or I you know I've heard about the 60s I've read about it and you know there are reasons why it didn't happen it was criminalized you know they um uh we have burning men and there's communities that flow out of burning men um people are still using drugs you know I'm referring to like psilocybin which is like the more commonly available psychedelic or LSD um but it is a obviously a need we I think we all feel the need for that transformation so I know Daniel you've written about psychedelics as ritual in in various societies um and while I have the mic well I'll come I'll let it I'd like to say something else but I don't want to detract from this this point Thank you should I okay regenerate a.

org Doug Henwood the Ingenuity of humanity has been compiled by um uh Paul Hawkin uh at regeneration. org uh list of beautiful methods of of stabilizing this is a doom event I don't want too much of that that false hope well if we're going to do it the information is has been compiled at regeneration. it's so hard to keep people's mind on the Doom they keep drifting off like and magic and possib it's bit after 9: when do we get to drink um yeah no I mean um I mean my first book breaking up in the head was about psychedelic Shamanism and you know yeah I was very interested to see what the possibilities were not just for like individual healing but you know maybe for deconditioning and and transformation of society and I'm I'm still very interested and you know we we'll see what happens I feel like Terence Mc Kenna talks about how culture is the enemy you know So like um Things become a culture like burning man when I first went I was like wow this is like so transformational then after a few years it began to feel that it settled into sort of crystallized into a culture where people were more about kind of like imitating what they thought they were supposed to do with Burning Man rather than being spontaneous and and kind of you know creative in a sense and I see that with the whole psychedelic culture it's become sort of like co-opted in a way by therapy and by like the sort of you know corporate Gold Rush and so on but that's just this state like this big thing happened now where um MDMA was going to be maybe approved by the FDA for use in Psychotherapy to treat post trtic stress disorder and you know many people that I know put years and years into doing this with a lot of good heart and so on and for various reasons that we could go into that was FTA turned them down and and um so that's interesting you know I don't know what that means exactly maybe it's not the legal route maybe maybe it's not ready for that or maybe it's more predatory corporations are going to be the ones who profit or something um it's what's that Bingo yeah it's possible yeah I was way more uh optimistic about psychedelics for widespread societal change that I am now yeah you know I I think Timothy lir was right and set and setting are are more important than any drug you take because what I've witnessed now is that a tech bro on acid is still a Tech bro yeah complely yeah right but but also but I think you know and also that you can achieve trans Transcendent States or alter we don't even need these substances I me I'm reading like HMF Clint's biography and it was just there were a group of women who sat together and decided that they were going to call in spirits and they had all these Visionary experiences and she made some of the greatest art of like the 20th century so I I think we've over overestimated maybe I'm slightly responsible for a little this the importance of the Psychedelic and that actually it's something that's just you know very innate to humans that we can go into Altered States I mean through I've been doing these like neotantra work workshops with ISTA those are very shamanic like I think it's these things are very available to us and in a way like it's very much part of our culture that we look for the agent and then we put all the focus on the agent whereas realizing that actually this is just part of us you know in a way yeah yeah got a question behind so I attended a few talks recently with futurists and they believe that um AI is actually like more um imminent than even climate change to change the world like we are on this brink of huge change and part of that could be um like most White Collar jobs becoming irrelevant and so that kind of we can look at that in a good way or in the magical way where we now have the power to get back to Our Roots like the physical of land and regeneration and actually Direct the AI because it's just this intelligence that's combined for all of us and so what do you think about that yeah that's like I mean that's it's a whole huge question there was what was this woman made a comment recently where was like I wanted robots to like do the laundry and clean up well I made art and wrote poetry I didn't want the robots to be writing art and poetry while I did the laundry and cleaned up you know um but um yeah so I mean it's going to eliminate big Industries and you know some of them are like accountants and and legal a and they're already affecting you know it's it's it's hard to really predict it's just part of the you know kind of like the general chaos right now right like um um what's that in Insidious yeah yeah it's Insidious yeah I don't know what do you think Nathan yeah I think Insidious is what it can be it we're we've talked in this discussion so many times about different seems there's a pattern of talking about things that began as a tool as a generative thing uh and as a magic thing because every tool is originally a magic artistic act magic magic occurs at the edges you know where I go like stick but no this stick is a like hammer or a bat or something you know it's like whoa and then that tool then can become a tool that uses me that's sort of our history that's what happens philosophers have always been worried about this Plato was worried about uh writing itself even as he was writing he like this tool is going to start using us because we're going to lose our embodied memory and AI is like an extremely macroscopic intensified version of that same thing and so it's an opportunity space where it's like how do we make it be magic which for me it's there's another pattern in all of this which is the sort of the friction between the instrumental view of reality where I use things as tools and I use other people as tools or I use the people that I hir to work my bunker as tools until they're not tools I can pay anymore um versus the relational view of reality and if we lean into the relational then AI keeps on being not a tool but a magical friend to put it in you know sort of stars and sunshine kind of way because I think that's way more interesting I mean I I don't use AI very much I'm I'm not an AI theorist I know very little about it really but I know that I'm bored by the notion of something that does anything for me because that's what we always do but I'm interested in the notion of another friend there's literally another entity in the universe and that is cool and yes it's an entity that uh functions differently than other entities in terms of its performance of language it's probabilistic it is finding an average but anything that can be interacted with is there at the edge of the other where the other exists and it is an opportunity for magic and so I think that that's the that's the Lynch pin of the matter as I see him uh yeah go ahead oh wait wait wait Mike is bringing the mic hello everybody thank you very much I think this has been really great way to spend my amazing Sunday um I have a question for everybody so we have six years left um what is your action plan what is your bucket list for yourself what is one thing that you wish to do in these six years that's a great question I'm I'm I'm I'm interested I I mean I've been very inspired right now by this ISTA philosophy and ISTA work and one of them Bruce lion is one of the founders talks about how you know we're always seeking love and instead we should just try to be love you know that's that's that's my plan for the next six years mine is similar I've been saying this for many many years at the age of Extinction Only Love Remains for me for you that's a good question yeah um I since I'm sort of introducing the idea idea that guy introduced you know I'm close to personal Extinction you know I don't no really don't look bad it's you seem pretty robust so far you don't know you know I have so many friends who are having brain bleeds you know I mean it's just like no no not me no no I so I I think the back pressure of the notion of Extinction is super interesting in terms of the transformation of consciousness not through drugs not through idealism per se but through the sort of Confrontation of the human ego with the reality of the end of personal life I I spent some time in a conservation um a conservation Cemetery you know where people are just there's a grid and you get buried and there's no markers you know and I'm walking through that I just saw Mound after Mound with grass and I realized oh my just like like this earth is made of human bodies the earth is made of us you know living and dying how special am I I don't know it's it feels more special to be part of of you know of the the process of life I think Satish Kamar was saying that the word human originally comes from humus which means soil so we're like soil beings soil being and it's so it's there something beautiful about that that is unexplored because we are so materialistic and there's always this thread of hope that I'll survive we'll survive this is what will happen but maybe not and so how beautiful I can operationalize it but I've been doing it all night so maybe we will take just one more if there's a uh maybe I mean I'll try to think about how I'm going to be love and and tell you in person um but um what's that anybody else who hasn't spoken yet I have a question in the back oh no you spoke already no so anybody who hasn't a question yeah um this is kind of related to um the way that you framed your question I don't remember your name no y yeah hi um just like the cause of Doom and um I'm trained as a theologian and I'm I'm thinking about a piece by um rold neighbor who wrote during um you know the World War II era um and he spoke about there's a book that he wrote called moral man immoral society and he kind of distilled it down to Greed and when we talk about like you know human evolution and where are we in our maturation process um I guess what's the antidote to Greed if not psychedelics that was one of the threads that I had and then I was also wondering if any of you had like um thoughts about changes in governance like if we have that six-year window and let's say it's even smaller or three years it's interesting that there's one woman on the stage maybe there were supposed to be two but like what would governance look like if there were more women in charge that's a question um so that goes alongside psychedelics let's say but um I'm Cur I'm curious about power and who makes decisions and I'm thinking specifically about that environmental climate activist group in the UK I'm forgetting their name Extinction Rebellion Extinction Rebellion who operate off this premise that you only need 5% of like a population or Society in order to direct change so if you let's say we're working on that premise if you only need 5% of a society to create change or at least make a left turn and go in a different direction what are your proposals for a change in governance and decision making the the person who came up with the 5% that the extinction Rebellion were using changed it to like 30% or something it turns out 5% was I mean just recently that was like a little upsetting um to to find out I actually I actually do have something to say about that I've had something to say about almost everything um so no I mean one of the things I'm working on in my community is the idea that the shortage of housing can be solved by by you um using underutilized spaces like you know the family room in the house that you know the the family house that doesn't and so it's a strategy it's like turning part of your house that isn't used into a an efficiency apartment where somebody can live it just makes a lot of sense the amount of underutilized space or unused space in my community is enormous and yet there is no place for the working class to live but the sale of that is that you are better off with other people in your home than you are alone and so it's breaking the the back really of one of the founding principles of this country that is almost unbreakable and I might get hisses which is private property the Primacy of private property makes it very difficult to move this so I'm trying to tell homeowners and land owners like oh you could slip somebody else in you're still the queen of the of the may but you could slip somebody in so it's it's a transitional mental model strategy to show people that life is better to get together than it is alone I I I personally think we need to run these kinds of low Toth ground experiments and to it's it's a it's a you know policy experiment but it's also for me mostly a Consciousness experiment about sharing is caring not only sharing caring but sharing is profitable because you could charge rent for somebody in your home you know so anyway I just want to offer that as a strategic yeah do you have a did you have a comment um I think it's a lot for us to cover like you know whole new government system but I'm really enjoying this event personally and I'd love to do more things like this I don't know what form that would take but it it feels like it's at a very good level of just authentic communication and that feels really nice so like it would be great to do something on governments I mean governance structures I mean um participatory democracy deep democracy I'm not an expert on these things um you know some way that things could scale up from like local to you know Biore Regional and then like planetary kind of like you know I mean social networks could have allowed us to do so many things where they were completely co-opted by PR you know profit-seeking corporations right like they could make it so efficient for us to share or do things together make decisions together or learn things together and instead they're actually like sort of turned into like our enemies now with like X and Facebook you know so I think there's something you know there I always think like an open source social network that's designed for participation and sharing that helps people organize on different scales you know that could be something good you know I don't was it yeah everything does um yeah do you have a last burning question comment okay cut and dry go for it yeah yeah let's let's let that one go for now yeah I okay let let's let's I think it's too much for this for this moment yeah what I'd like to do is give everybody a last word if they'd like a last word uh and then we can hang out and have drinks and chat uh and uh and think about you know uh other events we might do together in the future I just want to thank our host yeah I want Tok for making this possible and convening people cool was this enough Doom for you or do you feel we got too like hopeful we did do cool and I know you wanted to invoke Marx you had a at the beginning and but yeah and now I'm really having a hard time coming up with the right word or this that I'm not complaining though I feel good I feel happy love yeah you know when you can't come up with the word you you say I don't remember what the word is in English and then you sound like a multicultural genius instead of an idiot so that's what I do all the time I mean the only I would say in in in response to your invocation of Marx is what what I felt tonight uh about socialism is that the ism is like useless but the social is so valuable you know I thought it was funny this place is named MCM because that reminds me of the classic Marxist formula you throw a bit of M money into production to make a commodity C and then you hope to get M Prime more money in return and that the system that really needs to be uh derailed I I I would like to um just plan right now to reconvene in 2030 and see what happens we'll all be we'll all be younger then exactly we were so much older now we'll be so much younger then um I I would like to re-echo that gratitude and um and thank you for convening this and and thanks Italia also for organizing and thank you to Italia yeah and really thank you to Bella who's been a real trooper sort of grounding element um and you've been a few words but the energy has been felt and you you've used the word presencing and the presence has been felt and that is what it's about it's about presence um I just to go back to the psychedelics thing I mean I I I'm sure I would be different and I would be less aware if I hadn't ever had experiences with psychedelics but I I'm into sobriety right now and I know I keep citing Christian things but St Paul says let us be sober then because if you're sober not in the sense of perhaps being a tea totaler or vilifying substances or something like that but there is so much to be present for right now and Terror even terror is so enjoyable if you don't run from it if you just look it right in the eyes it's like the ghosts in Mario remember the big ghost in Super Mario that if you're scooting along there and like you run from them then they chase you but if you look at them they cover their eyes and granted all the climatological processes aren't going to do that it's a metaphor but if we look at it the entire thing is so delicious and then what does that mean there's been some questions that are hinting the direction of what do we do I this is my tangible answer for that it's don't worry so much about changing the large scale institutions it's still relevant but it is also a ruse and it is just a show and what actually happens is material inter relations between people so yes grow on your roofs everything in that book regeneration is dope and it's all ultimately about get together with other human beings and non-human living beings and create physical systems that are resilient and that you can live in and while everything crumbles around you you'll be having the most amazing time while you're farming along with people and there are fights to fight politically but the most relevant ones are when they come for that thing that you built not asking them to build the thing for you and so that's that's where it's at I think beautiful guy have a last uh you want to leave us with I've been such a bummer us how you sleep I I don't you know it's interesting I went to a neurologist for a while first I went to a spine doctor at Dartmouth and he finally gave up he says your spine is hopeless and you're going to die miserable but at least if you're right you won't have a long time during which you're dying miserably so then I saw a neurologist a couple of neurologists and I told them I really need to sleep because my cognitive function is just going south because I can't get any sleep and after four or five meetings with these people they finally came to the conclusion that you need to sleep is it just me or is it the medical community that's us all over I don't know oh sorry that wasn't supposed to be my last word I appreciate it clopin anybody else have a last little anything else you want to bonm Doug have a bonmot for us Clin that's it conine benzos when went in doubt benzos no don't take benzos just go to sleep it's okay go to sleep um all right I guess uh anybody else that have a last little word I mean I just we Clos with that I mean we could we could do another musical moment you guys want to hear another musical moment before we yeah okay go for it go for it yeah musical moment I feel like we're all on the edge of our seats because we were going to take a break and then we didn't take a break does anybody else feel that way um all right you want to do one little more little musical moment though just to sort of shake it up a little bit we've been talking a lot about ecological stuff but we also been talking about love what what are you in the mood for you in the mood for something ecologically themed or love themed love themed okay all right let's let's talk about love let's talk because you know it's an interesting thing love it's easy to Bandy the word about and talk about um I'm going to live as love which is an evocative phrase but it's a question what does that mean to live as love love because the question of what love is is an ambiguous question I don't know if you ever thought about the nature of love can you define Love Is Love a universal univocal term do we mean the same thing every time we say the word love it's an interesting question what does love mean and when we ask the question what love is we're asking something that's been asked since the dawn of humankind poets and philosophers and theologians even little babies subconsciously as they're held by their mother are all asking this question of what is the nature of love what is this thing all of us have said with one Accord in various forms the thing that is perhaps most famously said uh by Mariah KY are you familiar with Mariah KY that's the other person who couldn't be present tonight no uh she quoting Foreigner actually said the Fong she said you familiar with that question I want to know A love us or that statement maybe we could sing that together that's how we'll close out right can we sing this together I can't hear you everybody I want I want you show hi Bob well Mariah some would say that love is actually nothing special at all some would say that love is just a physical process it's just a stimulation of a gry lump of fatty acids inside your skull called your brain that would be the physical scientific description some say that love is a chemical inducement to affect our reproductive or our recreative Fusion it arose like other functions in the course of evolution survival the fittest I'll fit my pin inside your cushion a mixture of hormones to motivate pressing one vessel of Flesh into another and it's Pleasant adrenaline and estrogen and exquisite intersection and then some oxytocin serotonin and vasopressin did their make an impression as their tailor real figure that's the cocktail splashing through your neurotransmitter that orgasm you're given or that of which you're the giver that's epine and your glycogenic degradation inhibitor and then a choke of Serotonin makes you feel you're in a bubble and a bump of oxytocin makes you always want to cuddle it's the very same stuff that makes the baby's mother's Supple little milk bigot suckable to the infant's hungry muzzle and I get all that but what's that mean that's how love works but what is Love's being what my love is is what I ask of it oh dear Mariah Carey I want to know what love is I know you would just want to drink but sing I want you to show me but some would reject that mechanistic description some would say that love is much more than just a physical process some would say that love is nothing less than the actual force that binds us all together in this universe the force that makes matter come together the thing that makes the universe move the thing that will transcend whatever we up or don't up the thing that still exists even if we do in fact happen to be doomed you've heard of Plato we talked about Plato earlier right I've heard of the phrase platonic love usually when we say platonic love we mean like I love you but I don't like you know like love you you know what I mean like I don't want to you you know what I mean but actually that's not what Plato said we're misusing it as we so often are we need to return to our ancient philosophy Plato actually says there's a connection between human sexual love and love of the Divine there's a connection between the ultimate between the love of the cosmos between God it's self or themselves and love and sex there's a connection because if I love one person if I have a love for one finite other being in this universe that allows me to empathize with the notion that other people love other beings and that love for other beings extends to a love for all things even non sensient things into matter itself and that love for matter itself leads me to a love for the patterns that inhere in matter and itself the math of the universe and that love for the math of the universe leads me to a love for the author of that math the source of all things the thing that creat things or started the Big Bang there a connection between God and sex whatever we mean by both of those words there's a connection between getting done on your knees to pray a prayer and getting out on your knees to suck a dick or lick a trembling clitoris like it's your last day on Earth cuz you're doomed some say that love is how you grow one with God when you find that special someone and they're so hot it stirs in you a feeling that will lead you to the thought that all things are Divine whether you find them hot or not you love that person you tell them they're flattered but then you start to contemplate the shape and formal pattern of their loveliness and above this you begin to also after feel a love for all objects even inanimate matter so you started off wanting to squish your junk in someone else's but melted by that force your selfish self becomes more selfless to your selfhood is absorbed into the pulse that all things swell with you feel a sense of love for other people goats and elephants and car parts and slime Ms and shipping crates and sediment mountains grass amibas edifices and elements and having loved All Things based on the sensory evidence you start to love the force behind that binds them in their Essences and I get all that but what's that mean that's where leads but what is Love's being what my love is is what I ask of it oh dear Mariah Carey I want to know what love is but whether love is in God or in neurochemical stuff all I know about it is that I know that I love I love and I love love and I cannot more Define it and I want to know what love is like Foreigner or Mariah one more time everybody sing like you're doomed I want you to show me you show I love you all

Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.