Bad Faith Techno-Jesus & The War For America | Jamie Wheal

Jamie Wheal, co-author of Stealing Fire and author of Recapture the Rapture, discusses an essay he had just published on the turn toward militant Christianity in Silicon Valley, written at nearly the same moment as related pieces by Erik Davis and Jules Evans. Wheal describes a shift away from individualist secularism toward a millenarian, Manichaean Christianity keyed to end times, and ties it to the industry's parallel move into defense contracting through firms such as Palantir and Anduril, Eric Schmidt's clandestine work in Ukraine, and the presence of tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration. He points to the ACTS 17 Collective, started by Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens and his wife, as one carrier of the trend. Pinchbeck presses him on whether any of it answers a genuine meaning crisis.

Guest: Jamie Wheal

In brief

• Wheal argues Silicon Valley is turning from hedonistic individualist secularism toward a muscular millenarian Christianity organized around apocalypse and a stark good-versus-evil framing.
• He links that religious turn to the same industry's repositioning as a defense sector, naming Palantir and Anduril as companies layering AI onto the battlespace.
• Wheal describes the gathering of tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration as participation in a spoils system, with the dismantling of regulatory agencies and congressional oversight as the payoff.
• He identifies the ACTS 17 Collective, founded by Trae Stephens and his wife, as an early institutional vehicle for the new techno-Christianity.
• He argues Americans are bending Christian theology to personally expedient ends rather than adopting its demands.
• In the closing Wheal contends the left dismantled the value of the Western tradition, and that progressives should reclaim Jefferson, Washington and Franklin along with separation of powers, church-state separation and the melting-pot ideal.

Full text

So, um, hi everybody. Uh, this is Daniel Pinchback. I'm here with Jamie Wheel, uh, one of my favorite, uh, commentators on the, um, you know, immediate cluster that we're facing as a species. Uh, and, um, Jamie, yeah, we were talking about that you wrote this fascinating piece about, um, tech for Jesus and, um, no longer Jews for Jesus, now it's tech for Jesus. And uh Eric Davis uh who's also a fantastic uh writer came out with a piece almost like the same exact moment. Um and I guess Jules Evans also had something also. So yeah, you want to what what do you think of of Eric's piece in relationship to yours?

I just I mean I always enjoy Eric's thinking and writing and it was such a neat kind of you know classic Eric. It was a sort of highlevel fairly conceptualized but also still fun and playful take on the sort of psychosspiritual aspects of it overlaid with California witness which is one of his deep cut specialties Silicon Valley es esquetology you know all that stuff and I mean I think I might have had my thumb on the scale ever so slightly because I had sent I sent Eric my piece and I think I might have finished it he was still working on his and he's like a on the same page and I had been texting with Jules just about some of the wackiness back channel between the whole psychedelic to left coast space. So, so in some respects we were we were all in conversation with each other. But on the other hand, it's zeitgeisty as right now. I mean, I think everywhere from New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to Vanity Fair to Wired to the Atlantic now have all published pieces in the last two weeks, you know, all in this vein.

So, you know, some some of that is chattering class, you know, trend chasing, but there's a there's definitely a there there. So, what would you say as uh how would you frame, you know, to people maybe who haven't read the pieces yet, like what what what what you're seeing as as the as the as the thing here? Well, I mean in a super simple level, it's just that what we used to think of like that HBO show Silicon Valley used to joke that it was borderline illegal to be Christian, you know, in in the valley and now we are experiencing I think two really significant turns uh in how we think of Silicon Valley and our culture, its impact etc. I mean the most obvious is obviously you know Elon coming out of that world and then entering Doge and entering the political arena. Um, but I think adjacent to that and potentially even uh an even bigger and longerlasting ground swell is a a a turn away from hedonistic personal individualistic uh secularism in the valley towards Jesus and especially I mean we're not talking sort of like mainline Episcopalian or Quaker or unitarian Christianity.

We're talking about a pretty muscular uh millinarian Christianity. Like shit's happening. It's about to go down. It's the second coming times. It's apocalypse. It's it's good old John of of Revelations kind of coded and very Manakian as well. Very very light versus dark, good versus evil, you know, also playing into end time So you have that and then at the same time you have a turn in Silicon Valley away from very socially justicely oriented both culture commentary but also even products and and messaging and packaging and positioning into straight up defense contractors. And the the the the interesting thing and a piece that I don't think I mean it's right there to connect these dots.

is just I just haven't seen it in formalized publications, which is when I took a crack at it cuz I was just going to be writing on the strange technocchristianity that's emerging. But as soon as I was thinking about it, I'm like, "Wait a second. What the This is Palunteer. This is Enduro. This is like these are all these just burgeoning surveillance and defense companies layering AI onto the battle space. Eric Schmidt has already been doing this clandestinely uh with his operation white stalk or whatever he's end up calling it now. But for the last cut two years uh in Ukraine and the US government there's just been an extensive investigative piece that came out today with like 300 different interviews on US involvement in Ukraine behind the scenes mostly from bases in Germany etc.

But very very very handin glove far more so than has ever been reported. But one of the telling things that there was a changing of the god and uh a Ukra and they presented one of the Ukrainian generals with like a thank you shield, you know, with insignia and memorabilia. And he's like, "Why are you thinking me?" And he's like, "Bro, we we've been getting to play war games at your expense and learn all the new right, on somebody else's body count." So let's just say that as we move into uh a reason that every single Fortune thousand or at least Fortune 5 or Fortune 100 tech CEO were all on the dis for the inauguration, right? They all realized there will be one to three decat trillionaires 10 years from now. And I'd really like to be one of them and Elon's definitely going to be one of them, right?

And then who's number two? Who's number three? up for grabs. So, they're all there. They're cutting all regulatory agencies, all congressional oversight of budgets, etc., etc., and it's fundamentally a spoil system with a mafia boss. So, they're all like, "Hell yes." And then into that opportunistic suit, comes the sort of the dormant, you mustard seeds, if we want to riff on the riffs, um, of this latent left coast Christianity. And there have been a few torchbears like like the found you know the current CEO Y cominator and a couple of other places but then also you absolutely is the one who the one who has that group with his wife the you Trey Stevens yeah Trey Stevens what is it called the society and it's act 17 which is also a procilitizing book in the in the good book if you go look it up but it's basically um some clever acron acronym for Christianity and association for Christianity and science and technology or technology and science.

Okay. Mhm. Um and they are as is Americans want you know bending Christian theology to suit hyper personally expedient things to just basically be joyful. Let's just step back for a half second because I want to get into all that. I mean um to what extent do you feel there's something legit here in that we're you know people talk about the meaning crisis and there's a kind of like you know maybe like a desperate sense of um chaos and emptiness and sort of nothingness and sort of people are now reach the limit you know of of of what they can stand in that way so they're beginning to reach for something and I guess like you know maybe eastern mysticism was the flavor for the last few decades.

Then Amazonian shamanism. Eastern mysticism kind of got busted right because all of the mystics got uh you know morally destroyed by me too you know whether it's like Bikram or you know trunka or um you know so it's like you know yogi there's that whole eastern thing everybody was really invested in sort of fell apart um Christianity in two ways there right we had handsy gurus at the top but we also had MBSR hyper commodification down below you know, so it was rent us under by by dueling forces. Yeah. But I mean I I do kind of feel that um there's there must you know there must be some yearning for some kind of cohesive coherent like ordering something or other at this point you know because yeah I mean um um or do you think that it's mostly opportunistic? You know, I think that So, when you say for people, like a meaning crisis for people, are you thinking specifically right now of Silicon Valley or more, you know, America as a whole?

Yes. I I I am I am thinking of Silicon Valley. I mean, um you know, I'm actually reading Alex Karp's uh book right now, the guy who's the CEO of Palunteer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I commented on his Atlantic piece, which was an excerpt from that. Yeah. Um so, yeah. And I think that these guys, as he's talking about in that piece, like, you know, there was this whole idea that we're trying to make the world more open and connected. Then it became very, you know, that was like an ideology that gave them something to hang on to, like we're doing this tech, it's for the good of the future.

We're bringing people together, you know, do no harm and so on. And then over time, you know, it got more, you know, commodified, more kind of distorted, and now there's no way to hold on to that ideology anymore. So, in a way, Silicon Valley itself is maybe like trying to figure out its soul. And I mean I'm I'm just riffing here. Do you think there's some truth to that? You think it's more um opportunistic? I think there's probably a little soft chewy 15% center of semi-sincere yet rudderless seekers and there's 85% opportunistic pileon. I mean, you know, like compare compare any of our the analogous industries or or or subcultures, you know, and you look at you look at the psychedelic renaissance, you know, I'd say again, you have about 15% um initiates andor academics in some pure pursuit of the thing and then all the crypto and cannabis bros and investors, all the, you know, everybody at their mothers piling in because it's the next trend.

So without a doubt there is positive social pressure towards performative Christianity in Silicon Valley at this point and it's going to get much much more intense and extreme and coherent. And what about the uh the Jews? Are they embracing kind of more traditional forms of Judaism in the same way that the Christians are embracing this Christian thing? Dude, I think the era of looking for or tracing or tracking or policing or calling out ideological inconsistency is over because the people who are the least coherent and consistent don't give a about coherence and consistency. So, you're sort of like spluttering and puffing like an old, you know, modern major general.

No one gives a anymore. You just you just play through. Everyone's like, "But but peak headshots, but what about her emails? are so like I don't care, you know, and or like but how are terrorists part of a conservative, you know, free market ideology? Like it doesn't matter. And the same with Silicon Valley's turn toward Christianity. It's like wait, did Jesus really say bill bombs? Did he really say build a totally satellite enabled fascist surveillance state and say it's for Jesus and for Western values and and to defend civilization? And the Shire. Oh, by the way, the Shire, don't forget, cuz we're hobbits. We're not orcs, you know.

It's loopy. Yeah. And how much do how much uh do you think that Peter Teal bears responsibility for this? Do you think he started the ball rolling or like Well, I mean between you, me and and and and Rockos's Basilisk, I mean I I I would say that uh I think he is the central transferable ideological bridge between some exceptionally wacky, very intense western chauvinistic fascist mysticism like Jules, you know, like going back into the 20th century, late 19th century. like he's picking up some stuff and he has been the architect for a decade easily, right, of sewing the seeds of this culture and propagating these ideas and whether that was whatever his program is of, you know, drop out of an Ivy League and I'll give you uh the Teal Fellowship, right?

That um sponsoring Curtis Yavin, hosting all of those things, standing up JD Vance's uh candidacy, hosting that hereticon that I think you went to, right? Um, uh, all of it, all of it, all of it, all of it, uh, is is is translated and coded by Teal and in many cases strategically positioned and funded. And the fact that he's behaving more like a Steven Miller or a Russell Vault than a Steve Bannon, you know, or an Elon, he's like happy to be getting done off camera. happy to be getting like happy to be seeding these things, seeing them connect and propagate, seeing them take their intended course, and he's nowhere near the explosion. Um, I think he's happy to do that.

Yeah, for sure. I agree. You know, yeah, but what is the I mean, this is what I've been wrestling with in my last few Substack pieces in a way, you know, it's like trying to kind of understand these people from the inside, from their insides in a way. I mean um I it's I'm still it's hard for me um to understand how these people who were the greatest beneficiaries of the system of constitutional rule and law and the you know the traditional financial structure you know why did they decide and I do understand it I've looked at the you know but I'm curious what you think you know what you know it just it just seems even when I try to understand it still seems insane to me you know because this is like risky business, you know, like when you start a radical, you know, metamorphosis of a inherited structure that's the one that's provided you with 80 or whatever billions of dollars that could go pear-shaped. It could go sideways.

You could end up with thermodor, you I mean I mean you know what what do you think that I mean yeah I'm just curious your perspective um and I I have mine also you know uh perspective on which bit just on why like why why are they risking so much considering how much the society as it was constructed had given them why tear up the rule of law you know like like uh why why you know rubbish the constitution you know why pull us in this extreme direction when you were like the you know most, you know, kind of like supported person of the whole system, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like whatever you do, don't kill the golden goose.

Yeah. And they're like, "Babbecue the Put it on a spit." Exactly. It's the killer pterodactyl. Yeah. It's um I mean I mean, you know, I think it's I think I I blame uh you know, Settlers of Katan and and Ketamine. Uh, you know, I think that basically Settlers of Katan there was there's that, you know, that nerdy board game, right, that that people it's like a little baby kind of civilizations game, but you you you play and that was one of the uh disclosures from that Facebook tell all book that came out a couple of weeks ago from the woman who was quite senior up and then, you know, basically wrote about it all and she's like, "Yeah, I was on private jets playing and watching everybody lose on purpose to Zuckerberg and I didn't." and he accused me of cheating and then I pointed out all the better moves he could have made along the way.

Every single last one of these is playing settlers of katan with simps and they've got a distorted sense of their ability to rule civilizations, right? And so their sense of how necessary it is, how much better they could do it, right? They have radical confirmation bias and they've all Peter principled out as rulers of the universe. You know, Peter principal, you get promoted to the level of your incompetence. I was I'm not saying that for you, but I'm saying that for listeners. But um you know the idea of like yes they have actually defeated all the boss levels and and in like in Elon in Elon's case explicitly he is both the richest and most powerful man ever in history.

So if you were checking yourself you'd have nothing to not wreck yourself. And if you have a codory if you've got your posy around you uh who are all literally their lives are made or broken by their proximity to you and and your logist to them you're not getting clean signal anymore. Yeah. You know, so I think it's delusional. Maybe you short of it. Maybe you and I can rent ourselves out as a team to slap these guys like they could pay us like a million dollars a day and we'll be like, "No, you You up. You thumb sucking manchild. Spend 10 minutes in the corner.

Think about what you've done. Now you're gonna have to make it right." Yeah. So, I mean, so Jamie, I guess like uh I mean I really, you know, appreciate what you just said. I mean, I think there's different levels to it. But obviously they both had this South African childhood. Uh their fathers were involved in mining operations there, you know. So there's a problem. As do I. My whole family is South African. Um yeah, I know. Right. So so know that world. How has that would you from your knowledge then? How does that background shape their psychology? I mean, uh, you know, we got David Saxs, we've got Teal, we've got we've got Musk, you know, like, um, you know, I mean, is it insecurity like fear of the the black people that are working for you and, you know, dying for you in the mines to make your fortune?

Is there a sense of like justice or sub suppressed guilt over what what what what allowed you to have this power? Um, yeah, I just curious if you have any insight. Yeah, I mean I mean my own lived experience was that my my family straddled the divide, right? So, one uncle was the secretary of treasury in the 70s and we like went to visit and then I was just like, we're going to uncle's pool, uncle Owen's pool, and he's got a swimming pool. We're going to get go swimming. I was like, sick. Super psyched. And there's like dudes with machine guns and pill boxes on the drive.

I'm like, what's this about? And then my mother's brother um was the bishop of Johannesburg and was worked directly with Tutu on on all of the post-apartite stuff. So I think the simplest way to describe it is is it depends and um but in general white South Africans do come with a no bless oblige chip and unless you uninstall it right there is a sense they are quite comfortable um dictating to others and also quite unconscious but but pervasive in their orientation of of a sort of presumptive benevolent paternalism. I'm doing this for your own good, you know, whether you understand that right now or not. Well, I know that Teal in college when, you know, he he was a right-wing ideologue long before he was a tech investor.

I mean, in Stanford, he was he founded the Stanford Review, which was like super right-wing and so on. Um but he used to say about apartheid that actually it was kind of beneficial because the on on a mean average the blacks in South African had a better standard of living than the blacks in the other countries around. Um so for him it was just economic rationality. Um um yeah but I want to get into like uh so I know that you know we talked about a little this I don't know how much you want to share about this but we you know I know you live in Austin. I mean I guess I keep waiting at the moment.

I'm thinking about running out of the country. But I keep waiting for a turning of the tide ideologically where people are like this is insane, you know, this this can't go on. I mean, people who are MAGA and maja, you know, having a kind of aha moment, an awakening and so on, you know, maybe that's not going to happen. I mean, I I am hearing I just hung out with a friend today who's connected in Washington DC to a lot of defense department people and so on. And he's saying that on the right and for defense contractors and so on, many of them are beginning to feel more and more distance and skepticism and kind of um negativity towards this this situation.

Um though I'm curious, how are you feeling about that? Do you think that we're going to see any kind of um shift or breakthrough or or is this going to be with us for um the foreseeable future? I mean, the bottom line is is kind of like, you know, I'm always so humbled. I mean, a like when when Biden had to fulfill Trump's treaty to exit Afghanistan. So, I mean, people seem to forget that one, but he signed it after he lost the election to Biden into having to act on it. But when Biden did that, right, no intelligence agencies called the 72-hour collapse the same way that that agents agents all whiffed on the fall of the Berlin Wall, right?

smartest, best minds, best intel, their day jobs, you know, all whiffed. So trying to predict what's in a chaotic uh dynamic multivariable system is impossible. But that said, um so could there be some grassroots uprising? Uh maybe, possibly, right? Could midterms, if they don't get actually hamstrung, right? Right. I mean, I I was listening to somebody. It was he was a he was a savvy DC political analyst operative. I mean, he kind of knew his ins and outs of what's actually going on. And his biggest concern was like, I don't even think that the 2026 midterms will be free and clear. And then he was describing all the things they're already doing like act blue.

They're hamstringing Dem's ability to raise money. It's like it won't be necessarily stuffing ballot boxes, but what it will be is absolutely hamstringing the opposition almost Erdogan style so that they can't win. And if that happens, game over. I mean, Trump already, what today or yesterday? Already was like, I'm not rolling out a third term. I mean, just to make that super clear now. And you're like, of course you're not. And I know your arguments ahead of time, but when we get there, we get there. And so if you end up with a sort of you know representation representative democracy and name only because everything is the thumbs are so firmly on the scales that it takes almost blood in the streets uprisings to shift it then we're in for a wilder and willier ride and the suspension and and the thing is is that it feels impossible to English this like people can put it in a headline they can underline it in their article or the point they're making on a podcast or an interview and it's we're we're we're completely numb to the words and the meaning of the words, but the idea that that that the American republic and the global order and democracy as we've known it as anything better than a failed state um is potentially in the next 3 to 9 months at risk of being irreoverable from where we end up after that.

Yes. Daytoday lives right now. our day-to-day lives might not look that different if you're a more or less privileged American with a decent savings account and something that doesn't get eaten by AI, you know, um maybe maybe your world, but I mean I again living, you know, traveling in Mexico, traveling around the world, Thailand, living in South Africa, you're like, "Oh, normal goes on more or less, you know, for an increasingly shrinking chunk of that iceberg." And it's the privileged chunk. And in like Johannesburg, you still have nice houses. You still have you still have nice neighbors. It's just that you come and go from like underground garages and you leave in armorplated SUVs, you know, and but when inside the houses dinner party, you indistinguishable.

But outside capital versus the district. Oh, I mean, you know, I guess there's all sorts of different factors as you say. It's a chaotic situation. It's a very big country, over 300 million people. uh a lot of different states with different uh perspectives also. Um what do you feel you know in terms of um you know kind of like I don't even like the word resistance bu building some kind of like you know substantive alternative or opposition like it feels like you know among the things that happened that led to this catastrophe um you know one is you know Russia you know Russia in a sense has won a mind war over the US an information war and most people are not even aware that they lost a war to Russia right now like probably probably like less than 1% of the population even has a clue that Russia you know had strategized this out for decades and had developed all these techniques for you know creating like fragmentation and fish and the American psyche and so on fishers um yeah then obviously the tech the tech thing that we're talking about and the Christian thing and so on but it feels like you know the I mean you can look at charts where there's like quote unquote blue and quote unquote red media you know the blue media has kind of like shrunk The red media has expanded in terms of its reach.

You know, people like Joe Rogan with more reach than CNN, people who flipped over from blue to red like uh red, you know, Russell Brand, our buddy. Um uh you know, so do you see any way I mean it feels like it's a sort of rhetorical ideological mythological kind of like kind of like thing that's just like moving forward on its own momentum. Do you see any kind of jiu-jitsu move or like or like alternative or way to flip the dynamic of this thing in any way or or you know is it you have no idea. Well, I mean look super brass tax I would just save all your powder for midterms because the entire any any quote unquote resistance is absolutely powerless um with both houses judiciary and executive all in one bucket. So there's all all to do until until Congress switches if it does.

Um, so as far as like acupuncture points, that's the first first one in the stack. Don't waste a single calorie until that's done or not done. Um, on the more culture jamming level, it does feel that if you're not thinking and operating in the term of like manakian mimetics right now of like polarized tribalized battles between good and evil, if you're not slinging your memes in that lane, you're going to get run over by everyone else who is. So the the curse of the clever, the curse of the psychedelic, the curse of the spiritual, who can see all sides of everything and everything is complex and subtle and nuanced. And I heard about it on NPR.

You're like, "Fuck you. Bullet to the head. You're done." So like, start getting comfortable embracing tribal stories again, embracing vilifying an enemy. Even if it's with a nod and a wink, even if it's rabbit, you know, especially ideally, right? It's Robert Anton Wilson trickster discordian style, right? But it is brainwashing people to think for themselves, you know, like they're like in the culture war game. Like who are we up against? We're up against a bunch of nutratch literalist Christian fundamentalist apocalypticos. And you're like you don't we can't come up and Qinon. It's like seriously that is like that is like the garbage dregs of the western tradition.

chewed ups turned inside out and regurgitated on, you know, onto a table and people are lapping it up, you know, on on Reddit and Telegram. You're like, "What the fuck?" So, telling better stories is the simplest and telling fun, punchy win-lose stories where you actually, you know, you're smuggling in the infinite game because the the prize for realizing this game is a game, right? Is to wake up out of the trrons and hopefully get us to the other side of all this. So, we for instance are playing with, you know, this happened. I think I shared this with you, but it was after um being on Jordan Peterson's podcast a few months ago, and I was like, wait a second.

How is it that the only people speaking for this entire Western legacy, right, are alt-right nutters. And there's a whole bunch of people, to your very first question, experiencing a meaning crisis right now, right? So, they're like, "Okay, there's nihilism. This this is all for nothing." and and and existential risk and overwhelm and diseases of despair. Or I go to these sloshings to the other side of the Titanic and I end up hanging on to the fundamentalism because those are the only people out there and the middle's been hollowed out. So to me, like telling really compelling, fun, engaging, quirky, zany, creative, subversive stories and mythologies that orient people in the middle that rocket jibralar to prevent them from sliding into that, but still allow for all, still allow for um what is the word I suppose surrender, right?

It's almost to me, I've been trying to study this sort of sociologically and almost uh you know, almost economically. What are they doing? like how why does AA work for instance you know why are these mega churches booming why are mainline protestants tanking all this like what's working and I my sneaking suspicion is that it's almost like BDSM right our existential kink our exist because of our existential overwhelm is we want to submit and any of the more nuance sophisticated indiv hyperindividualist you're not the boss of me and we're all sovereign selves and I I listen to my own inner guru stickixs right simply can't hold a candle to I not I know not what right m may I receive sucker and inspiration from a source than myself don't don't you think there has to be some I mean silver lining potentially in that you know what is false must die so what is true can be born on some level right you know, some something in the whole sort of Burning Man, new age, psychedelic kind of spirituality, evolution of consciousness. What's that? The phoenix.

all that needed to kind of be disrupted or tossed out because now we really have to think about it you know because and this was something I've been screaming about for like many years like um you know the psychedelic movement which maybe helped launch new form um became so much focused on the individual and and not having like a like a a political or systems level analysis um um that Um yeah so that so that people just would go into these either it was for self-optimization or it was for healing but it wasn't this idea that you're meant to go through this initiation in order to yeah heal heal the system in a way like work work at a systems level you know like so for instance right now I'm looking uh at Audrey Tang's work do you know her at all yeah yeah totally um she has a book called plurality and this is a trans woman from Taiwan who was part of a student movement there called Sunflower and Taiwan actually embraced this movement and she ended up becoming the digital minister and created a whole set of tools to make democracy more responsive um and more democratic and she changed and went from like 30% trust in the government to like 70 or 80% trust and she developed you know all these tools they're also under constant information attack from China so for instance they did like pre-bunking. So like, you know, knowing that China would probably start sending deep fakes, they educated the whole population about what that would be like and how to resist it and so on. Um, you know, so it seems like there's a set of tools that we now know on a systems level can help to restore trust in democratic processes and create more responsive systems. There's obviously no way that the Republicans are going to introduce those tools or Trump is the slightly slight slightest bit interested in it. But there's no reason those tools couldn't somehow be disseminated through the US and um maybe help us like restore you know democracy.

But yeah, I'm just thinking about like how do we move from, you know, at the moment it's so scattershot like and you know in the in these spiritual movements it was either about a guru or was about substances about individual experience. How do we move back to working together to yeah heal the system in a way you know? Well, I mean honestly like um I mean my sense is is that there's actually a pretty elegant stack, right? Because if you really want to like at least for me, right? It'll different people will see things differently and have different bits to contribute, right? But one of mine is you know my whole academic career orientation etc has been to the western mysteries you know whether that's first century gnostic Christianity elus and Greece it's the progression you know through the eras of that whole western esoterica right and within that you're like okay so in fact I'm going to I think I'm going to give a version of this talk I haven't done it yet so it's still kind of loose in my head but um at uh breaking convention um that psychedelic conference in the UK uh next month um on Good Friday, funnily enough, right next to Exod Cathedral.

So, I'm like, "Fuck yeah, this is definitely the time for me to do it." Uh stuffy Anglicans be damned. Um but basically, if you take a look, you're like, "All right, the right conservatives have they've got all the they've got the better toy box. They've got way cooler in their toy box. They've got honor, duty, courage, sacrifice, history, tradition, civilization, greatness, mythology. They've got all of that. And we've got grammatically inconsistent pronouns, intersectionality, you know, and and and and fragility. You're like, that's a shitty little post you to try and mobilize and inspire people with. So you're like, "All right, if Christianity appears to be ascendant, at least right now in alt-right and populist moves from Russia all the way through to, you know, California.

Go with it. What's the judo move, right? Don't try and show up as like a secular humanist Karen, you know, and separation of church and state, you know, you're just going to get mowed again. So actually lean into it. And how do you lean into valorizing and steel like steelmanning Jesus basically and and using that and and the interesting thing about if you if you s if you read Tom Holland's book Dominion he's that English historian out of Cambridge I think um it's it's become the apology bible for western chauvinist these days he basically makes the case even though he's not Christian that hey so much of like humanitarianism universal civil rights you like you know mercy for the dispossessed all these things are deeply Christian values even in the secular secular nation states that evolve from it right like all right cool so now let's take initial rootsy Christianity sermon on the mount turn the other cheek etc etc and then trace that and show it back to conservatives be like look you're right there's some super important stuff here and this turns into universal human rights this turns into the infinite game rule of law no one's above that Magna Carta, take your pick, right?

Like the whole western story as wigs would tell it, right? Conservative Republican voices and then hold it back to them be like, "Look, Christ consciousness is the very very very same as participatory inclusive democracy. That's the infinite game in expressed in a sociopolitical context, right? Where love thy neighbor and love thy enemy as thyself is sermon on the mount original mystical and inner spiritual." So there's this beautiful continuity across the whole western tradition. like let's stand up and do this people and this is our job and this is our responsibility and this is our legacy and by the way yes there is genocide and slavery in the footnotes.

So we are honoring duty b as well as you know D-Day and Normandy and the Vietnam memorial there's a lot of dead bodies white and brown on this experiment on this hill. So we are honorbound to like to right to redeem all that suffering and to redeem the cost of this but to not throw it away because we have a bunch of like again apocalyptic theocrats literally just looking to rip rip the stitches out of the entire 20th century. They're looking to take it back prefr Wilson and prefr Woodro Wilson is birth of a nation and the clan and failed reconstruction. That's what that right and I don't think we all voted for that. No.

Um what's your I have my own personal relationship to Christianity which I can express. Uh but I'm curious I mean you mentioned that you have a relative who was a bishop. Did you grow up in like church and did you did you did you ever have like a a sort of visceral relationship to you know Christ? Do do you believe that there was something divine there or or or or is this kind of like a positional uh kind of exercise for you? Well, there was that one time on three hits of acid second set on Jerry Garcia solo, you know. I mean, I was like, "Oh, bro, right on.

Right on." You know, I liked your pictures in your article of like Jesus with a machine gun, you know. Yeah. No, I mean funny enough my experience was like Church of England, so like Easter and Christmases very very you know cultural but going to boarding schools where you know you have chapel, you have you know you have cathedrals, you have that whole thing. So so steeped in that um obviously you know uncle etc. but then came and got confirmed in the Episcopal uh church, the sort of Anglican equivalent here, um at the National Cathedral, funnily enough, um in DC. Um and but went to Catholic school, which was completely foreign to me, um for 11 years.

So, I had a very, you know, stranger in a strange land exposure to it. And yeah, if anything, I would I would make a case that western uh psychedelia leaves itself very wide open to mystic cristic experiences and metaphors and analoges. Um so that's kind of how I would hold it. Non non-denominational heter, you know, heretical and heterodox. But in your in your heart and soul, do you think that Christ was some kind of incarnation of of a higher force or do you think he was just a dude? Um, and we've ascribed a lot to him because it was like the right moment for such a thing.

Ah, funny that you should mention that because actually one of my heroes and colleagues, uh, Ela Pagels, the Princeton scholar who did the, uh, the Gnostic Gospels, uh, she and I got a fireside chat in Aspen a couple of years ago. Um, but her new book is coming out this week. Uh, and it's on the Jesus meme. And I had written a section in my last book, Recapture the Rapture, about the Jesus meme. And I was like, look, I mean, here's my thing. I think the Jews had it weighed down way better, right? Because through all of Judaism, connection and contact with divinity is is orthogonal to looking at the thing straight on.

Whether it's the fact that the ark the ark, you know, of the covenant is behind the curtain in the temple. Whether it's the burning bush that is forever burning but is never consumed. You know, avert your eyes. Don't you the tetetrogrammaton. You may not speak the name of God. Like it's all mystical, metaphorical, and then somehow you flip to the New Testament and everybody becomes literal and fundamentalist. And you're like, wait. So CS CS Lewis said that it's the one clear and outrageous fact of Christianity is you have to accept that you know Jesus Christ was was you know born of man was the was the was the son of God and one with God and died and was resurrected for our sins.

You're like, "What the fuck?" Like that is a bit of a leap, you know? And if you think about instead of Jesus as this forever impossible to validate pissing match of historicity or blind faith, you're much more like, well, why don't we consider him a scintillating hyper object from the nth dimension, you know, and and just groove on that. And then you have access to awe. You have access to surrender or submission. Not my will, but thy will. you can interact with this deity, this god complex or or or hologram in I think more nuanced, more interesting ways and you just obviousate, you just take out of the equation the entire literalist falsification because even if you do if you if you give fundamentalists like literalist interpreters 100% benefit of the doubt, you're like, "All right, I'm willing to grant you historical analysis be damned.

Every single word that was laid down in our good book was Pentecostal tongues of fire and was literally and eternally true no matter what by the author. She like, "All right, let's start there." Now, was that in Hebrew? Was that in Aramaic? Was that an early middle or late Greek? Right? Was that King James? Was that some hippie- dippy '7s version? Which one? Because every active translation is political. And so, if you're like, you know, and and we have documented evidence. The Virgin Mary isn't the Virgin Mary till the Nyian council in the 4th century, right? And Alma and Pthanos are two, you know, mean completely different things in Greek.

What was uh what was Ela Paggel's perspective in this uh in this discourse? Well, fascinatingly backstory um which I did not know until we were hanging out, but um she was high school friends with Jerry Garcia before even the Grateful Dead and she was at the early acid test. So they were rolling around and then she's a beautiful dancer ballerina. She leaves Palo Alto. She's a faculty brat at Stanford. She goes to New York to Martha Graham to to dance and then realizes a I'm going to be in the lineup. I'm not going to be Prima. So she nips up to Harvard to get her Ph D.

Then ends up on this this whole trip and she just met her and her and a friend of theirs, a mutual friend of Jerry Garcia and Ela Pagels back in like 6162 was this English, you know, upper class English aristocrat going to Cambridge playing Hookie. He comes up to get his Ph D in anthropology. They run around for a summer of love, have a blast, disappears, they they meet again 2017 at the Dead Shows in Boulder. So he he had been the manager for Jerry had called him back up and been like come and do our be our manager. He's like I'm a Ph D anthropologist from Cambridge.

I don't know the first thing about rock and roll. He's like don't worry we're just hiring our friends. So that guy Allan did this amazing amazing tour and then they came back and she's basically I would say like a I don't know how I would generationally do it an auntie or a grandmother. Um yeah of she's Thomas Merin like the snow mass mystics um monastery in Aspen. spends time there. She's fully psychedelically aware and informed and was lit up in that early60s original original West Coast scene and then dedicated her career to first century Gnostic mysticism at the ri most rigorous primary text academic level. So, you're like, "God bless you." and and just hearing her interview with the New Yorker this week, it was like, oh, um, she she's very precise about how she describes her relationship to the archetype of the Christ, the Jesus meme, and anything resembling institutional or orthodoxies.

So, and the relation relationship being seeing it as an archetype that shapes culture, but necessarily not necessarily like a literal reality that we have to, you know, get behind. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just guessing I haven't heard the thing. The simplest is just is like who said, you know, like who said that in order to be a card carrying because I mean, there's nothing in the Bible about the church doesn't exist yet, right? So, like that was the whole big ricochet of Henry VII, the Reformation, all that stuff. People started reading the Bible. They're like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. 99% of the rules you've been having us follow aren't even in here.

You know, you guys made a bunch of this up, right? That was the Reformation in a nutshell. And you can make the same case about these literalist shibiliths, right? B like sort of requirements for entry, for membership, for for being in good standing is to sort of and to me it feels like such a wildly unsatisfying compound to more rigorous philosophy and theology. It's like you mean and even even those uh friends of ours Jordan Hall who was recently you know recently uh became Christian and uh was featured I think in a free press article you know with Ioni Ali and and the kind of usual suspects and um he's a rigorous thinker smart dude and I sort of feel like it's all comes down to like there's that South Park episode with the underpants gnomes I think and they have a slideshow they're doing their business like step one steel underpants step two, question mark, step three, profit, you know, and like that's the whole joke of their business plan.

And they just don't know what the middle part is. And I feel like that's Christian theology at this point. I mean, sure, there's been some smart you know, Aquinas and and St. Francis and, you know, and and a bunch of others back in the days, but contemporary American Christian theology just cannot solve for the equation in the middle and just lead a rational person through it. And then it's like, by the way, phase two, somebody on the John Johnson is asking if this is being recorded. It is being recorded and I'll put it out on my newsletter and Jamie, if you want to be co co- host, it'll go out on yours also, but they can pick it up afterwards if that's cool for you.

Sure. Um so so um but you're so so you're thinking about um kind of like um reviving or kind of like reconstructing almost like a church um kind of format, you know, like what could that be um uh in this context and how could it help this sort of evolutionary movement in a way? Yeah, because back to that whole notion of we're in Manakian mumatics right now, you know, so you have to pitch a ripping yarn. And so, yeah, I would even propose to call it the church of the good, the true, and the beautiful, you know, and it's rooted equally. I never like when people use the word good.

Well, no, this is this is the Platonic triad. This is not anything. Yeah. Yeah. But it's we just abbreviate church of the GTB, right? Are you down with the GTB? Right. Like like that's the thing. And it's both Greek and Helenic. the Ulissinian mystery. So it's rooted from Pythagoras through the ptocratics to to Socrates and Plato and the the mystery of Elusus and Greek Demos, the rule of the people. And then it's Christian Messian and ethics and Nosis on the other side. You're like, look, that's that's our lineage, right? Like like like never mind Aristotle and never mind St. Paul. They both sucked ass and couldn't hold their psychedelics.

So let's wind it back to Plato and Pythagoras on their side and let's pump up Jesus and Mary. And the other thing is like Mary Mary Magdalene Virgin Mary whatever whatever you're like okay similar concept with the feminine on that side of Christianity you're like you're like okay let's just for the sake of argument say there's just a Mary meme there's a holographic pulsing thing that is both virgin mother maiden right all of it in this one construct and you can even just say all right take your holy trinity father son holy ghost and that was always a weird one right everyone's like holy ghost. What's the Holy Ghost? Does he have nutsack? Is it like is he is Casper like Bobby?

What's the deal? They're like, it's all the same. It's kind of one and different. Numa was neuter. Rua in Hebrew is feminine. The Holy Ghost was the sacred feminine all along. And then you have father, mother, child. And you flip the trinity, you know, so that you have you have you have the child at the base and and and the two wings are are the balance polarities, the masculine and feminine. You're like, "All right, we can do this." And this is not wishful thinking. This is not like a unitarian whitewash job. This is like rigorous, careful revisionism, but not revisionism in some flighty lightweight way. It's it's it's psychospiritual archaeology.

You're eroding it back to first century roots of a vibrant condition. And then, oh, by the way, there's ethics. Oh, by the way, there's service. Oh, by the way, we are called to do something better than build weaponized drones or dunk on poor brown people. Okay, cool. You're you're you're getting me a little excited here. Um, so this is like you have like a place in Austin to kind of like construct and and a community to bring together. Have you started bringing community together around this or is it still kind of like in its ideiation phase? No, we have. Um, and it's also uh something that we're looking to do like like second Sunday's gospel brunch in a box basically like a good like a fun and inspiring TED talk but you know with all of these themes not not secular like a a TED talk and karaoke.

So good redemption song tunes and then brunch break bread with your friends and family and then have have Jeffersonian dialogue and discussion around the meal. So, like ideally just being able to be like, "Hey, spin this up. We all need this, you know, and here's a clean way that doesn't require swallowing a fish story, you know, to to sign up for for participation because we see so much of that. Is that And is your role kind of like what you just expressed kind of like really putting down on paper and some kind of like document kind of like the the sort of um the gospel of the uh of the new the new church? Uh, am I talking to the the prophet of of the future right now, Jamie?

No. I I I would be super like super circumscribed, you know, and try like and I mean I've taken a cut at writing some of this. I haven't shared it publicly, but but but basically that that survey of all like American religion that I've done for like the last five or six substacks has been a precursor and a wind up to right none of that works. What do you think might work? And that so really it was just a long long long wind up as I was doing my own research. Um, but basically being like, "Look, here's the deal. We're not going to quote scriptures at you.

We will tell Bible stories that are especially ones that are both significant and timely, but also have made their way into Western literature." So, you your cultural literacy is expanded if you know about the wife of Lot or you know about Jonah and the whale or you know about Job's trial. Like you just you have access to thousands of years of literature, poetry, song. So, you're smarter and better. So, we will tell those stories. will be redletter Christians or Jeffersonian Christians where he only cut out the words of Jesus, you know? And he's like, "Let's just work on that." Like, never mind the miracles, never mind everybody's secondhand Let's just boil it way way down and, you know, and and and bound it.

And then obviously the Greek side is equally equally reent, equally real. It's just it doesn't have 2,000 years of aggregated baggage that you have to unwind right now. You can say anything you want. You be like Pythagoras. was like, "Yay, you know, triangles, you know, no one has no one has a dog in those fights." It's unwinding and deweaponizing, I suppose, or I don't know what the something of bounding and grounding the Christian inquiry so that people don't have to have one ear cocked for when they you smuggle in the fundamentalist play. You're like, "No, no, this is how we're going to try it." Uh, that's fascinating and I'm excited to learn more and I'd love to come and visit at some point.

Uh I'm curious also kind of like um you know one thing that we've seen is um yeah I guess like there's obviously kind of like a gender schism happening and um men maybe particularly young men are kind of gravitating to the right um and um you know these kind of like powerful you know very wealthy neo-reactionary forces are playing on that you know so they like they flew Andrew Tatan from Romania you know to Florida to to to speak the language of um you kind of patriarchy and so on to young people. Um you know this movement sounds beautiful but as you described it still sounds a little bit rarified. I'm wondering if you've given any thought to yeah like like you know this is something I I have been thinking a lot about like how do we deal with this sort of like you know sort of weaponization of testosterone in a way for for this right-wing agenda like how how do we you know like we know that for instance you know young men were beginning to feel um kind of like uh oppressed maybe by the rising of of the feminine right a lot a lot of what's happening to me seems to be very much about that right like women were like 70% % of college graduates are sudden suddenly and we're excelling in um because basically in a peacetime society female gifts which include emotional sensitivity communication so on those are very successful techniques for you know building for building companies for you know it began to feel that women were starting to excel uh in a way and this feels like a giant kind of like push from this more like regressive masculine you know, that Trump, you know, and all these guys represent Hegsth, obviously. Um, and they're kind of like trying to carry, you know, the the the masculine, particularly all the young men into this, you know, muscular kind of like, you know, you know, weaponized kind of ideology and reality. I guess I guess I'm wondering yeah what is there on the other side that could um uh provide like an alternative model or role model you know or anything like that you know just curious if you have any thoughts about that I mean I mean sure you know it's just it's going to sound really uninteresting and kind of cliched you know it's just it's like okay look if we ended up with you know for the sake of argument right if you said that the last 10 years to 30 depending on how you want to count has been a feminization of valorous or noble masculinity and even then a a you know a criminalization in the sense of yes all men me too etc etc the vilification right therefore what we're seeing now is a pendulum backlash therefore what comes after that is some synthesis to the antithesis and we ended up with integrated masculine and feminine yay you know but getting there I think would be you know quite tricky.

Um, totally valuable. That's kind of why I wanted to just point out the reinstating of the Holy Spirit as feminine and a and a mother father child dynamic which is family unit not some esoteric abstraction and then also um even that notion of like a Mary meme an Otamus and Apollo the twins are on on the Greek side so they're doing a similar thing and Otamus embodies everything from like Katalhay you know like Anatolian fertility goddess and cabelli all the way through the virgin mother at Ephesus, you know, and Diana Artimus, right? She she goes from big titted, big belly fertility goddess to increasingly slender and girish and virginal in her progression, but she actually embodies all of them. So, you're like, "All right, look, we need to have mythologies and stories that go beyond Taylor Swift and and Britney Spears, you know, and even for the Mary meme, right? like the Mary meme, you're like, "All right, let's let's lump Magdalene and M mother Mary because we just don't even know, you know, like let's just do that for the for the autistic sense, but then let's include Black Madonna in Eastern Europe and Spain, right, which is very Kaliike and you know, and she has shrines, the Virgin Guadalupe Dalgo in North America, which is the corn mother in body.

So, let's just like load up these images and archetypes and start working with them sincerely and and accurately, but also with a mystic's insight and start actually trying to propagate, hey, look, healthy Apollo and Otmus, they're twins, right? That is the balance. Jesus and Mary, the memes like this the hyper objects that are not the literalist interpretations, but they are they are infinitely inspirational for this moment. Can we have a whatever depending on how you're counting a fourth great awakening or a fifth great awakening in this country comparable to the first two which were definitive in the 17th and 18th centuries and were wild ass revivals and created women's rights and created abolition and created a lot of very pro-social heartfelt real things also created Joseph Smith and Mormonism you know so they were weird mutations but was the second awakening like Emerson and Toro kind of transcendentalism No, it was it was 1803 Can Ridge, Kentucky. It was basically like an early burning man.

It was like literally in August on the far western perimeter of this of the national boundaries. There were like 20 or 30,000 people gathered in the hills of Kentucky picking bluegrass and banjo getting getting laid, getting hammered on whiskey, and then preachers just like DJ sets would be up on scaffolds and frothing the crowds into like ecstatic frenzies. And this went on for like two weeks. So like subsequent ones depends, right? You can you can take the 60s Jesus Jesus Christians. You could take you know different scholars do different But the point being is that a great awakening in this country that is actually a shaking off of established orthodoxies and and perversions and pollutions and something in favor of something more direct, experiential and socially oriented.

You know, to me, that plus winning the midterms is kind of where my uh is where my bets are as far as actually anything that you could get to spark off that actually has the capacity to self-propagate, catalyze, and actually do something versus like liking Robert Reich's on Instagram, you know? I do like Robert Reich's things on Instagram, but yes, I hear you more than that. plus one, you know. Um, no, I like I I like what you're laying out here. But I guess sometimes I thought that um uh I mean I was always very impressed when I went to Dharmawa in um which is where the Tibetans have their headquarters and I saw the young monks doing these sort of dialectical reasoning exercises where they would sit in the public square.

They would make like a point about you know kind of uh Buddhist philosophy and then they would like clap their hands and the other guy would make a counterpoint and clap their hands. I feel like we actually don't have a um a sort of public reason kind of like um place in our society. People are kind of marinating in kind of prejudice and opinion and uh you actually need to have some kind of like dialectical kind of um yeah kind of like like you know that also is good for men too because men tend to be you know like uh yeah it's a part of a part of the masculine I guess is like is like wanting to like reason things out. Not that women don't do that also, but it's particularly a masculine trait. So maybe that could be part of your of your new church of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

A way for uh people to obviously doesn't have to be men, but sort of public uh reasoning, you know. Um um yeah, we kind of seemed like we really lost that in a way. Well, I mean, yeah, we actually we've kind of sketched that out because we we did that in our earlier lives. Ran an outdoor school. So it was based on Aness's deep ecology plus uh null's outdoor stuff and it was you know kids in prep schools and boarding schools you know in junior senior year college etc. And um you know basically time in the back country so a full-on two to four week expedition where you're just learning your and handling your is a profound right of passage.

taking a nine-day wilderness first responder training is super duper empowering because you now you're you're you're you're a sheep dog. You're not a sheep anymore and you were your situational awareness and your your duty to help just goes through the roof. So that's a psychoactive practical initiation. And then um community service, you know, the idea of like you actually show up and so so we do this with all of our with our community like those three things. Um 40 hours of service in your community plus that wellness medical training plus the outdoor initiations, but it's not like vision questy initiations. We go do real and teach technical skills, but we're also reading Gary Schneider and Joanna Macy and doing simulations and war games and theory.

So it's like it's very curriculum rich. It's not just camping, you know, and um those things. I mean, everybody brings their hands about it. We don't have rights of passage anymore, you know, da da. And you're like, absolutely right. Um but you also need like the Lucinian mysteries, you need techniques of ecstasy andor transformation that really do deliver on the die before you die. If it's just armwaving, you know, like bar mitzvah and and and um you know, and and graduations and things like that, then people lose faith in do I have different obligations, responsibilities, and identities on the other one side of this thing from the other side of this thing.

And and having those um does feel essential for them to work, for them to do the thing they're supposed to do. Nice. you know like set aside childish things and and and now I Maria Montasuri right she she had that very great saying she said basically all kids want to know two things in their life they want to know what am I good for and what am I good at and if you can provide them or help them discover answers to those two questions you will you'll be on your way to healthy and welladjusted folks and giving credentials right having them train and learn and then receive a card like you are good for this whether it's a scuba certification a second language certification, medical, you know, training, whatever it might be. But like, look, I can I can participate productively in society and you don't have to just take a gamble on me. I've I've done I've done some work ahead of time.

Feels super duper important. Uh yeah. Um that's really cool. Oops. I had a question for you and then there was like a a notification and I had a I had a brain uh malfunction. Let me see if I can come back to it. Um, oh, it's almost there. It's almost Oh, I don't know. It's gone for a second. You have a question for me? Well, I mean, you know, certainly um I you you kind of tackled a far a fairly wide range of interventions. Oh, I know what it was. Okay. Yeah, I'll ask you a question. I'll ask you a question because you gave me feedback.

you gave me quite some some quite lengthy feedback on that piece and you said something along the lines of me um wanting wanting from me to so effectively bear or share more of my heart in my writing not be so kind of glib and bouncy about it. Um and then and I was I was having a conversation with Julie my partner. I was like I was like Daniel's kind of trying to egg me on to to share more. But on the on the one hand, I don't and if if I'm making a a sociopolitical observation, I don't feel like my feelings about it actually matter. Of course, I have my thumb on the scale as far as how I write the thing, but but like I'm outraged.

I'm insensed. I'm you know, like if I were to write about me, but but I have noticed you've been taking you've been doing that. You've been sticking your neck out in the last six to nine months. Um, for me, I guess I was feeling like I want to hold my bullets. I I feel like this is a deer hunter situation, not a pulp fiction spray and prey situation. So, like when I was talking about midterms, I'm like, I will write some things before that, you know, but until then, I don't want to be seen as in the tank in the culture war for one side or the other, and I want to be able to reach as many people as I possibly can.

You have been taking a different tac at least as reading you. um what's informed that decision for you and and and why do you feel that that is well just yeah explore that for me because you you've you've tak you know you take the hits in the comments you do all you know you're doing all a whole host of things with causes and effects and I'd love to hear how that's been for you. I'm not really I'm not very I've always had a problem where I'm just not a very political person. Um and I'm I'm just not really taking like I actually my heart is broken right now. Like I'm so sad that our society has crumbled to this degree and that you know we could be looking at you know concentration camps that like you know people are being like picked up from the streets that like there's you know our whole cultural discourse has collapsed into this like you know sludgy disgusting uh nightmare you know I'm just sad and uh angry you know I'm angry that you know these people who um you know are so incredibly greedy have um you know been allowed to dominate you know our our our society and um you know we have this sort of ruthless um kind of like um you know money money system um and it's destroying everything it's destroying the planet like I you know I mean I think you know we're not even talking about the ecological crisis anymore and they want to you know they've taken the climate change and all that stuff off of the you know out of the websites and everything but the reality is that um Greenland is looking very interesting.

What's that? I said Greenland is suddenly looking very Yeah. Well, I mean I I think there are lots of deep structural reasons why they're looking at Greenland and Canada. Yeah. Yeah. both in terms of the you know the energy and the resources to power artificial super intelligence which Musk and Teal believe will make them immortal and um the idea that we can resettle whoever they want to save up north as the global south and the southern US start to melt down. Um so I think it's a very a very man you know intentional um I mean it's also fits in with you know Elon Musk's um grandfather's technology uh political party where they saw um a kind of giant North American technate you know from Greenland and Canada down through the Panama Canal in Mexico as one unit that would be under the control of a um you know engineer dictator um so they're basically following that model but um yeah so I mean I yeah for me I I just um uh I've never felt that the you know people are like and sometimes I get you know people like oh you know you're so in your head or I always feel that like the brain and the heart are actually very connected and so you know what what what what what spurs me to want to write or express anything is like the heart you know and and so and I you know I think that you're I mean I've really enjoyed this dialogue with you and I think you have incredible gifts um but sometimes in your written work I want a little bit more of just like Um, it feels often very like uh tight in a way like like so much packed in and I just want a little bit of a I just want to feel you more like a little relaxation.

Uh, and um yeah, a little more uh where where are you at, you know? And I feel it in this conversation actually quite a lot in a way that I don't always with with your writing. Um, which is great. I mean, I love your and I think you know you're you're doing a great job, you know. Uh but I think also like you know maybe sometimes because we spend a lot of our times in these realms we overestimate um where other people are and um actually that most people need more unpacking uh and repetition. In fact when I look back at my career um one of the big mistakes that I made was um not wanting to repeat myself.

Like I wrote my first book on psychism like okay I said what I wanted to say it's done you know then I wrote a second on all these other things I was like okay you know but I didn't you know if I had been you know more on it I would have realized that you actually have to say things again and again in different cadences and you know that's actually like you know and and you know try to simplify in a way to reach a bigger audience like you know the 2012 book could have been like four books you know broken up and and stretched out, you know. So, I think it's uh we want to bring people with us so they feel that they're on a like standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us on a plateau. And I think the way to do that is to sort of like slow down, you know, be patient, like re, you know, come back to the same ideas. Like that's how I I I how I feel, but I mean, everyone does their own stickick, you know? So, that was just it.

Like when I read your stuff, I sometimes feel like it's so tight and there's so many, you know, kind of like things hitting me. I'm like, ah, you know, whereas like um I want to just slow it down and um yeah, allow it allow some air and some u something like that, you know. Yeah. Well, I must confess I I I have a pathological fear of being underwhelming. So, you know, I I I tend I tend to go both barrels most of the time. Yeah. I think it's okay to be underwhelming. I think people actually really appreciate it. Most people are not as don't have the same fast level, you know, mind that you have.

you know, you have a very specific mind and I think um you could actually help a lot more people learn and it's like yeah because I you know you had this strategy around the election and I kept sort of saying like Jamie don't you want to like tell people to vote for Kevla Harris so we don't have fascism and you kind of held your powder and then you had this one post near the election but I think it was like too staccato like people actually to be influenced by somebody they need to feel it they need to hear it they need to get a repeat they need to have it slowed down they have it in different cadences is and then they're like, "Okay, like I get it." Like I mean, um, yeah, I was very like I, you know, somebody wrote to me today. I put them on my, you know, free subscription list. They're like, "Oh, at first I thought you were just kind of like kind of like boring and like leftwing." Then I started reading your things more closely and I saw that, you know, then suddenly they were like, "Now I'm like on every word, you know, and I was like really you're you're nerdy and leftwing and and that's a whole that's a whole bigger bucket, you know. Super nerdy." Yeah. So that that's that's all.

I mean I think you're doing you know what you're doing is great but I just you know if I was your editor you know which I've been an editor I I would I would have you just open up you know open up a little bit you know if you ever want to like experiment we could um you know we could experiment a little bit with that you know. Well a couple of things I mean I mean one is a firing them these off these off in a day and they almost always get bigger that you plan as I'm sure you experience. I'm like oh I'm just going to write a quick little thing on religion and it's going to be one later I'm like what the So, so yes, no, that there's a slap dashness to my subtext that doesn't show up in my books. Um, but also to your point about never wanting to repeat like I've written all of this stuff over the last five years. I dealt with global population, dealt with the mllo traps of capitalism, dealt with like basically signposted all the different ways we're super triply doubly Yeah.

And I have already grieved for Western civilization. And I feel like we're living we're living through the the the duong of the inevitable. And so to share my actual personal feelings and to share my actual heart is often to disillusion people at a rate they might not be able to handle and to reside in the brokenhearted grieving of the post. Well, don't go that far. Well, that's why I hang out in some cynicism and some funny hashtags, my man. you know, because like at least we got a laugh or we or you know, I wrote one piece about how I some for Facebook I wouldn't write it for Substack where like suddenly I think we only have like you know sometimes I think we only have like 10 years left before we go extinct.

Um and um yeah I mean I I there was like a slap dash thing for Facebook and then I was like you know what I don't really like I don't want to like lose a hundred you know subscribers. I don't want to like make everyone miserable you know. So yeah there is calibration you know for sure you know. um try I try and take a sort of trickster Tom Wolf Oscar Wildy angle on it and then at least people are a little bit smarter a I mean even just from my days you know teaching at outdoor schools like I never taught down to my students even if they were like AP kids I'd be like you're I'm not I'm not talking I'm definitely not talking about dumbing down I mean slowing down and dumbing down are not the same thing slowing down is just giving people a little bit more um space to kind of receive um the the compact um you know punches in a way and yeah as Gil said I enjoy Damy's writing. I do too.

I love it. Um you know but that was just you know since he asked me I just had felt this little bit of of comment. You can I love comments and criticisms you know back too. So if anything occurs to you let me know you know. No dude I I I I get I get that often. It's it's one or the other. It's like, "Ah, you're making my head hurt." Or, "You're super duper triple buming me out about things I didn't think about, or I laughed, thank you." Right? Or words salad and I had to look a bunch of up. So, like, it's all over the place.

And I accept that for sure. But since these ones are for free, you know, it's like, "Fuck it. I'm going to have fun with it." So, in some it's mildly therapeutic just to at least enjoy our creative processes. That was actually the question that I forgot that I was going to ask you before. Um I mean so I can put it into good language. Um yeah like where we are now you know um in this you know neoascist you know tech feudal takeover of society does this feel like unanticipated or unexpected to you or does it feel like an inevitable you know consequence? Does this feel like the natural progression of everything that you'd been you know kind of anticipating or do you feel still kind of like shocked by what's going on?

I would say the uh it is much faster, much worse or much worse, much faster. Um it's all happening and it's all happening without any more checks and balances or es and flows. Um and even it was like Russell Vaultz buddy was the co-author of Project 2025 that got canned. He was the sacrifice firing six months ago. He was just interviewed last week and he's like he was giddy. He's like, "I'm out of my ear, but this is amazing and way crazier and better than anything we dared dream of." Right? So, that's happening. And that's happening on top of the substrate foundation of a world in multiple overshoots that's not penciling out.

So, you're like, "Oh, okay. We're not going to be having COP, you know, 33 conferences and we're not going to be having our Manhattan Project Victory Garden moment where the world rallies together under a handful of inspiring leaders and a coalition of the of the benevolent willing. We're not going to play that game. I guess I guess this is going to descend into Mad Max ethnotribalism and we and and climate change will be banished as a thought crime, but we'll just be living tits up through it. Yeah. You know, so so somebody somebody had asked just a question of um culture architecture and neuroanthropology and like as as tools, right?

And so super quickly just to just define them, right? Neuroanthropology would just be at least how I look at my profession, what I was trained in academically, etc. But it's like you take a look at what's happening in the world, anything interesting, and you look at um where are the historical precedents of things like this in the past. So now you have a bigger data set of instances of a thing like this. Take breath work for example. You can take a look at current holotropic breath work. You're like, "Oh, it's all the rage. It's happening on Friday night with the big dumb hat crowd." And then you're like, "Okay, breath work, breath work, breath work, breath work." You look at free diving.

You look at Tibetan chanting. You look at Catholic prayer. You look at Aboriginal digy dude playing. Like all of these do something with spirituality and respiratory control or patterns. You then say, "What's the mechanism of action? Why does that work? Why does Hail Mary full of grace, which is 9 seconds long as a nine Herz entrainment thing, right? blow off CO2 etc etc etc and it's the same as Omani padbeham in Tibetan Buddhism and secular breathing on a digery do increases nitric oxide 15 times and gets you into dream time you're like neat right so that's neuroanthropology once you understand the actual you know plausible repeatable mechanisms of action behind a given socioultural practice now you understand what the there there is then you can look forward into culture architecture like all right how do we build new better and rather than it being a continuation or perpetuation of old superstitions or spinning up weak sauce new ones.

You don't have to play that game. You're like, we know functional mechanism of action. Let's lay the Lego blocks in a way that snap together and deliver the results we need for healing, inspiration, and connection as you know, broadly distributed social glue for functioning ways of being together. So, I hope that I hope that speaks to your question. Yeah, the question on the chat, I think that was a good answer. Um, cool. Well, we've been chatting for an hour and 20. Maybe maybe it's a good time to wind to a close. We've had nearly 500 visitors to the call, which is really sweet. Uh, I think this is a fantastic tool, by the way.

I hope you start using it. The uh the Substack live. I love how instant it is. And uh you can see from the level of the comments it's like um uh I think that Substack has really become uh the kind of forum for the moment uh in terms of like uh more intelligent uh thoughtful reflective people gathering. You know I am concerned about the you know where this this platform will end up considering that Andre and Harowitz are are major investors in it. Um but at the moment it's a very it's a very useful tool and um yeah we should do it we should do more.

I don't know if you could do three people. I think very interesting to do a chat with you and Marian Williamson. Uh or I could just connect you two uh because um I think the the the layers that you're bringing into kind of uh this Christianity church idea could be um useful for her. It's um yeah, I don't know. Might might be interesting. We should definitely try to like you know that's another thing. It's been interesting to me how people in our, you know, progressive neosspiritual cultural world were really not very good at collaborating compared to the people on the right um who seem like much more like um like I don't know why they just you know they don't have a they all just work together like there's never you know it's kind of weird you know like onward Christian soldiers man there's rank and file and hierarchy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, actually, can I can I just riff on one thing as a public serviceman? Whatever, whatever, whatever you would like. So, I don't know what I think I think you're probably having similar experiences to me, but in our in our friend groups that are, let's just say Elon Bobby stands somewhere in that space. Um, I'm I'm perpetually shocked to the point of almost just like getting hacked off and almost leaving group chats with otherwise friends I know, like, and trust who are just slinging the most unvalidated from the bowels of Twitter on, you know, crazy inefficiencies. Look what USA ID, etc., etc., etc., right?

And and it's like, look, man, if I if I can fact check this in one Google search, you shouldn't have been polluting our feed with this And shame on you. You're smart, educated, successful, powerful, have responsibilities. What the are you doing? Retweeting this And it really feels like um there's a version like everyone is confusing diagnosis with prescription because the prescription of like absolute show that's going on right now and the chainsaws and wrecking balls and the complete theocratic takeover under the guise of efficiency under the guise of the well of the people all that kind of stuff is is absolute But when you call out the fa factually inaccurate tweet you know or 40% of social security calls are all fraudulent. I would I looked that up.

I'm like, "No, it said 40% of all claims are processed through phones." You know, someone just fudged 40% in their meme slinging, right? So, you're like, "Okay, the the diagnosis, government is bloated, country's inefficient, we've got lots of debt. You know, the rest of the world doesn't pay their fair share." Like all those things, diagnosis, diagnosis, diagnosis. Yes. Prescription, they just in instantly slip on over to, well, then how can you then have issue with what's going on? what's going on has to be the solution because they told us it was the solution. Don't you want the solution to that terrible diagnosis? And then I realized I was like, "Oh, This is a subset of the M and Bailey fallacy and rational discourse, right?

Where the M is the little hilltop castle and that's your sane defensible position and then the Bailey is the batshit crazy stuff you say out there until challenged on it and then you go retreating up to your castle." So, right. So, so, so our our good buddy Zack Bush is a classic abuser of the Mton Bailey fallacy, right? Where where he'll be his ma, the little the little defensible castle is like, "Hey, glyphosate's really bad. We destroyed our soil health. That affects our microbiome and our guts, and we would be healthier and probably not need so medicines, including vaccines, if we all had healthier soils and guts." And everyone's like, "Yay, Zack." And then then he's like, "And you know, and if you take a vial of blood and you send it to a lab, quantum physics makes I can change the p H of my blood.

if I take an aspirin, the p H of my blood will change in the lab in Europe. And you're like, "No, it won't." He's like, "And then we're all going to go sterile in 10 years, and we're going to mutate our 12 strand DNA to become new soul tribe people." And you're like, "Wait a second. What the fuck?" And then he's like, "When I was at UVA in the oncology lab?" And he's back to his baby. What's What's happened? What's happened? What's happened to people's discourse or what's happen? What's happened? Why Why are people unable anymore to um make distinctions? you know, because you know, why why can't they see where they're going?

Effect, the Flynn effect has stopped. If anybody's familiar with that, it was the whole idea that that uh that IQ was just rising organically. Yeah. Over the 20th and early 21st centuries and it stopped and you know, initial analysis plausible connection is onto heights phone thing like screens and phones are making us dumber than rocks and we're out so much of our computational cognition. Yeah. Right. So, we're losing we're losing our cognitive capacity. Absolutely. And of course, I mean, all the stuff, right? Tristan's social dilemma stuff, all all of that. But like the idea of like outrage, you know, outrage and pushing a button. Like there was one where is it?

It's not Kaylee Mcinany, is it? What's What's the the press secretary's name? The young woman who's like 28. I I have no idea, but I know who you're talking about. The blonde, whatever her name is, right? And I saw I saw a tweet by her supposedly that had said something along the lines of well even if we did lose all electricity our founding fathers got by without electricity so we should be able to too right something along those lines. So it kind of struck a patriotic note it was sort of tonedeaf and oblivious about infrastructure collapse and the implications for citizens and it was coming from you're like get a load of this and I was like wait a second I think I've just been hijacked and I just Googled it and nope she had never said that and that was a meme.

Yeah. And people were slinging the one about Elon being like, I can do piles of ketamine and I have infinite tolerance. And I was like, and all I was seeing was screenshots of that. And I was like, wait a second. Is there a live version of this tweet anywhere? No, there wasn't. Right. And so we are in the same way that we've become digital digitally add, digitally autistic, and digitally narcissistic, we're also becoming um digitally moronic. And so you take away our phones and screens and people revert back to more or less normal. I mean I I think I think one thing that happened is like and sometimes I think about this that there was like um a connection between how people perceived kind of like rational authority structures and even just something like graphics, right?

Like you know before you would like go to the New York Times or the Atlantic, you know, or you know it would just look different or like CBS it would look professional. it would look like honed, you know, but now, you know, Tittywink conspiracy site can look just as professional, you know, or Alex Jones Infowars looks, you know, pretty much just as good as like MSNBC or whatever. Um, so I think, you know, there's a a way that um, you know, if you've decided that the mainstream media is, you know, dissembling and and un, you know, unt untrustable, you no longer have a sense. You're you're you're unmored. you don't know what factoid uh is legit.

So then it's like if something just attracts your attention in that second you kind of gravitate to it and you have this idea that that the actual there's no kind of like authority structure anymore or you know I mean um do you think that's part of it in a way? Well, there's the sort of, you know, good faith overwhelm like I am just not equipped to deal with the with the sugar highs and temptations and distortions of AI deep fakes and algorithms. Can't do it. I don't have the cognitive bandwidth. I didn't have the, you know, Jesuit training, right? So, there's that. I'm trying, but I'm just failing at it.

And then there's also the the worst is the sort of middle ground where I'm not 100% keeping my eye on the ball, but I've also got a healthy dose of that kind of anti-establishment contempt because that's always a good fallback. So like I the same text thread, right? These these these these friends of mine yesterday or this morning had posted the thing on, you know, Zalinski threatens Putin, nearly assassinates him, blah blah blah blah. And then isn't it curious that no MSM media is covering this? And I was like, yeah, that's really curious. Let me look. And I went and looked. I couldn't find anybody outside like Hindustan Times, South China paper, Russia Today, you know, you know, and random blogs for two pages.

I'm like, there's not a there's not a legit organiz news organization on the planet that is covering this, right? Not Al Jazer, no, no one. And so I was like, I don't think that happened. That's my working assumption. That's my working assumption is that this this gave birth as a meme on Twitter and and and yet right on that social security thing of like 40% are fraudulent. That's what Elon's up to. He's doing he's fighting the U um I said look guys I said please don't sling in our feed like fact check it and and I said it's in the it's in Washington Post was original journalism second invalidated by Forbes.

I'm going with their stats. And the my response from one of my friends was like and the Washington Post fact checks. Uhhuh. Uhhuh. And you're like, "Okay, look, I totally understand where they where their, you know, political leanings are. They're center left, but they are in no way lefty, you know, and by and large, yes, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, you know, Sunday Telegraph, like these places do actually still have factchecking. I do privilege, right, legit information, the Atlantic, you know, right? And if you give that up, right, because you can't keep up with keeping your own bearings and making sense accurately and effectively and credibly, and instead you default to that kind of oh broy cynicism and anti-establishment bias, then I feel like you're a part of the problem.

Yeah. But what do you do with all these people which seem to be such a large number right now? Like um I am staggered. I'm staggered by the number of psychedelic burner/fillin-thelank, you know, otherwise supposed to be on team human. If any of these things we believe are supposed to help, that's honestly partially why I just feeling like like I have to just flee the country at this point because it's like if even those people are unable to, you know, kind of um sort of get out of this cobweb of delusions and and and and poor, you know, failed reasoning. Um I just think that the whole thing is going to collapse.

Like I I don't see I mean you know there it feels like it feels like you know I mean um I guess you know fascism you know there could you know associate with likeos the death drive. It feels like there's a underlying death drive that our society is trying to commit suicide to me. I mean they're taking off all these you know protections like crypto. They're introducing financial protections, you know, environmental protections, closing, you know, the Institute of Health, you know, kind of like, you know, closing imunology, like anything that like would protect from diseases going crazy, putting this lunatic RFK into that position. Um, it feels like there's a death death wish uh as a result of this sort of collapse of meaning uh that people don't know.

They're like caught in like some kind of loop. Uh I I don't know. Is that how is that does that make sense to you or how do you how do you feel that's that that that's going on? Gosh, I mean I'm still going to default to the sense that I think there's an overwhelming majority of fundamentally good-hearted live and let live humans in the world and that what we're experiencing are um amplified um distortions of the extremes. But that said, they are they have disproportionate power as well. So it's not nothing. It's not like we're just hearing louder volume on on on their their speakers. Um, so what I would love to do, I don't know why this would be so crazy terribly hard, but is basically not necessarily a steel man, but just like no Russell conjugation, like no slipping in, you know, impugning of motive, but just being like, "Hey guys, this is what we think is going on.

It seems like Elon bought the presidency and believes he bought the presidency is acting on that presumption. And I happen to, you know, have fairly closeand um reasons to believe that's true. Um he's acting that out. He's he first went after the agencies that were regulating him were litigating him. Um he then went after culture war targets and when he ran out of his own um he had Russell Vault and Steven Miller calling in air strikes which they've been preparing for 5 years behind that. Russell Vault as well as the five Catholics on the Supreme Court have been validating as of last July a position of the unitary executive power, right?

And believe that um Leata, right? I I am the state. I am the king and and my will is thy will. We're gutting this that liberal institutions like Harvard and Colombia and Ivy's and everywhere else are actually enemies. They're they're not American institutions to be reformed. They are enemies to be destroyed. And then throw in the suspension of all inspectors general, all military jags, all surveillance, the the white shoe law firms, etc. So you're like, okay, so that is actually what's happening and it's happening very clearly and very transparently according to their own playbook and according to their own words. So there's not imputing of motive, etc., etc.

Hey, America, are we cool with this? Do we actually think that that we need to revert back to a 19th century balance of you know regional regional tinpot dictators of which we're going to be job one in the western hemisphere but Russia and China are going to are you guys cool with this and by the way separation of of state of church and state which was founding religious tolerance of this nation we're undoing that also and are we cool with this so so like you might be rooting for it you might be thinking it's the worst thing ever, but can we at least agree on the same thing we're looking at? Like that to me just feels like step one. And it just requires, like I said, just avoiding Russell conjugation of like, you know, impuging motive sliding in, you know, shady words like what what is what is Russell conjugation? So it's it's so it's so so it would be what is Russell uh conjugation?

He asked snarkily. You know, it's it's it's adding in right bias words to impugn motives. That's it. So, can we just, you know, again, it's not steel manning what's going on. This is a nightmare, but can we actually just call a spade? And can we just have Americans be like, "Okay, now I might be all in on that hypothesis." Or this could be like 1% whacknut Christian theocrats and that was not my people. I just thought sucked and I didn't like the price of eggs. That's why I'm here, you know? And I think that to me just without hysteria although there's hysteria is 100% called for like actually it's it's fire in a burning building you know yes but the the burn the building is on fire and this is the richest stud.

So how do you look at the possibility of getting that you know kind of like what you just kind of articulated there as a kind of you know statement that could be agreed upon or not agreed upon. Well, I mean I mean in some tiny little way I try and chip away at that in those substacks. I just sort of point stuff out and just kind of call it like you guys see kind of like you know kind of like written out as kind of like you know this is the situation and then that is like circulated or people can um kind of like vote for it in a way or vote against it you know in in in various forms. Yeah. I mean I mean my my argument would be like hey um again let's just give you full credit for voting for Trump for all the positive reasons and value based reasons you thought you were now um are you aware that this the status and the future of the republic the state that the viability of the infinite game is at stake.

So it's no longer just about political parties. Um it is the breaking of institutions and can we acknowledge the truth and value and decent intent that you had on voting for the policy statements you thought you were voting for and can we still grant you those because you guys won the election fair and square. So you have absolutely have the four years to enact those policies as best you can. But can you actually can we entice you to take a stand against the process which is ends justified the means and which is fundamentally and antithetically anti-American. Yeah. Well, let's craft that. I mean I I think that's a simple um you know we could extract that from what you just said and kind of like extrapolate on it um and uh circulate that you know like um see if we can at least get basic um buy in on the narrative of what's happening you know.

Yeah. Uh I mean I I always find like it's it's infinitely more s to your point, right? If you if you like felt like reading me or listening to me was like kak sometimes and you wanted to be soothed, right? Like it's soothing. It's not a not it's not a question of being soothed. more that I think that a lot of people don't take in even me struggle. Um the the the the speed you know which you go is uh a lot and it's great and it's amazing but I think like um uh people process information at different speeds and um sometimes also when things are this intense um yeah people need to hear it at different cadences.

They need like their their emotional body has to somehow be able to sort of handle this. Their their their psych their psychological structure has to be softened up a little bit otherwise they just like you know block it out. Well here's here's 100% what I would recommend. So it's that idea of like hey in the last decade and kind of where social justice movement was right and and the Ibram Kendy's you know at all and even the Tatashi coats and that that kind of world was the American dream was a lie project 1619 project all these things um the infinite game right of this grand city on a hill experiment was false not not MLK who said you know I I I this my you know check has been returned with insufficient funds funds, but I refuse to believe the church that the the you know the the bank is bankrupt. Always calling up versus calling out.

Well, the left basically dismantled the value and promise of the infinite game and the western tradition. I feel like progressives have to go back into American history. go back and dust off Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, you know, slave owners and sexual molesters and, you know, and all of their sins and be like, "Hey, those guys were on to something." Separation of powers matters. You know, church and state matters. You know, by the people for the people matters. Immigration as melting pot matters. Remember, fellow citizens, this is what we were founded on. This is what our grandfathers died on the beaches for, right?

This is what our This is what our mothers march in the streets for. Like there is a grand and beautiful tradition here and because right now only the right is going back into the past and they are just and it's infinitely easier and has more inertia than trying to spin new ideas new fangled order better bees from college campuses. So, I feel like yeah, to tell this story in a an empowering, soothing, reminding way of like we've been better than this and we've even been great and we really need to remember that and share it and take a stand for it and protect it and defend it otherwise it's going away for sure. Uh, I love it. Um, okay, we're at 8:41.

Maybe we stopped there for today. That was a nice long uh Let's uh let's keep doing this. I love it. And um um let's think about this um this idea of like how you could present something where it's like you know can everybody at least agree on what kind of the story is of what's happening right now you know situational situational assessment and then which side are you on exactly yeah thank you Jamie love you thanks everybody listening too yeah yeah bye

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