Pinchbeck hosts Jamie Wheal, author of Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture, and Douglas Rushkoff, the media theorist behind Team Human, in a livestreamed conversation about the absorption of psychedelic culture by the libertarian right. Pinchbeck argues that psychedelics are nonspecific psychic amplifiers rather than inherently healing, citing Amazonian sorcerers who use ayahuasca against enemies, and recounts his own iboga initiation with the Bwiti in Gabon, which he wrote about in his first book. Wheal describes colleagues and friends in the psychedelic and crypto worlds falling in behind the new administration in exchange for access and deregulation, and compares them to a courtier class around a sun king. Rushkoff dates his own disillusionment to seeing wealthy libertarian stockbrokers in the front rows at Grateful Dead shows in 1986.
Guest: Jamie Wheal and Douglas Rushkoff
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that the modern psychedelic movement erred in equating the substances with healing and justice, since the same compounds have long been used to accumulate personal power and to harm rivals.
- Wheal contends that many prominent figures in the psychedelic and crypto scenes have shown no ethical backbone, moving to support the administration once access and deregulation were on offer.
- Wheal argues that the crypto and psychedelic investor class has cycled through NFTs, cannabis and psychedelics as speculative rides, which undercuts any claim that these are agents of social transformation.
- Rushkoff maintains that LSD never produced uniform political or spiritual effects, a conclusion he drew from encountering rich libertarian investors who were deep in Grateful Dead culture.
- Wheal closes by asking at what point a person with a platform should surrender that leverage and simply show up as one more body bearing witness, comparing it to the fishermen abandoning their new boats in the Gospels.
Full text
I think that one of the mistakes that the modern psychedelic movement made is over associating the substances with this sort of healing with somehow like this justice path when actually even if you look at indigenous societies like with iawasa you know there are many sorcerers throughout the Amazon who use iawaska not as a healing medicine but as a way of building up personal power and will like shoot poison darts on their at their enemies on the astral plane. So, you know, these things are non-specific psychic amplifiers. So, we're talking about EBOGA, IBOGA. Um, it's a African psychedelic. It's kind of the only known sort of like pure psychedelic that comes from Yeah.
kind of like West Africa, found in Gaban and Cameroon and Congo. I actually went through I went to I visited Gaban and went through what there's a indigenous community there called the buidi uh and I went through one of their initiation ceremonies where they feed you tons of the aboga which tastes incredibly horrible and you sort of eat this like you know alkaline powder dust uh and then they you know dress you up in this tribal outfit and they have you do all these things and look into a mirror and you see all these visions and so on and as Jamie was pointing out um one of the characteristics of it is it's um yeah very psychoanalytic. Uh it often like shows you which happened to me about the first time I did it. It was like a whole life review which which I wrote about in my first book um where was shown my childhood and different experiences um um and so on. Um I'm just inviting Doug again uh and shown patterns of negative behavior like drinking too much and so on.
It was very relentless. sort of feels like a very stern father who um is like, you know, wants you to do better, but is kind of like laughing at your faults and so on. Um yeah, it's quite it's quite powerful substance and has all these visionary dimensions, too. So, did you do it at a at one of these clinics in in Mexico or Costa Rica or something like that? Where did you do it? It it absolutely was not in a mansion in Ohigh. I'll tell you that. Let's just say it was in a it was in a doicile where this sort of thing is allowed, you know.
Um, so yeah, I mean Jamie and I have been talking a lot about the kind of right-wing assimilation or the sort of right-wing libertarian assimilation of psychedelia uh with the crypto bros and the tech bros and so on. And um yeah, I mean what's what's your current you said you're going to give a talk about it next week, so it must be present and on your mind. What what what are you kind of like um thinking about it at the moment? I mean, gosh, I would just say it's somewhere between heartbreaking and horrific, you know, and the I mean, several things really, right? Like one is um I've been pretty bowled over by the absence of ethical coherence and moral backbone among many people that we know would consider colleagues, some even friends.
And you know, round one from January, the amount of people that just came back kind of crosseyed and gaga gaga after being invited to the inauguration and the various inauguration balls and just the number of people that just seemed like instantaneously in the tank for the whole project based on the promise of access. So that was step one. um had a friend who just came back from hanging out with the uh I mean I won't name names but the big dumb hat crypto crowd um and they are all swinging hard for the kind of you know neo-reactionary cheering it on because they're crypto wallets are booming and the Trump family is signaling that they're going to continue to you know keep keep deregulating and keep pushing and pumping meme stocks etc. So those guys just appear to be along for the ride. And these are also the people to your, you know, opening point, Daniel, that have been on the NFT ride.
They've been on the cannabis ride, they've been on the psychedelic investment ride, they are adjacent or active participants in the Betting Man community, etc. So you would think or hope that if there is any hope for those things as psychosocial agents of change, you know, in order to create a more equitable, just human, you know, humanitarian society, you would sure as hope those people would be thinking things through a little more rigorously than they appear to. And instead they appear to be folding along exactly the same creases that every single sycopantic courtortiers courtier class always have around the sun kings. It's crazy. It's it's monumentally insane.
Yeah. But I was just on I'm on a chat with a bunch of the crypto people and one of them who has a bit of a checkered past. She was part of like Cambridge Analytica and so on and you know she was saying oh I just have like now I'm just a oneisssue voter. you know, I'm just voting for the ability to tokenize things and you know, as long as I just that as long as that happens, I'm I'm happy. And I was like, Jeepers, like what about like human rights? What about, you know, the environment? I mean, you have kids. Like, what about what's going to happen to the planet with with, you know, the sort of Trump destruction of all, you know, regulations on climate change and everything?
It's just um seems um you know, insanely shortsighted. Um I don't know, uh Douglas, what about you? What have you noticed in the sort of shift of the the absorption of of psychedelia, you know, which we all hoped, I think, when we were younger, we're all from the similar generation, that this was going to be a um kind of yeah, positive transformational force leading to a more kind of more consciousness of equality, more consciousness of of non-duality and so on. And it feels like it's really got off in another direction at this point. Well, I mean, I think there's a way to focus on the that part or the creation of some common ground that gives us a new potential.
So for me, this discussion started in 1986 when I saw the Grateful Dead at the Greek at Berkeley and a bunch of these kind of what I called yepy scum at the time. rich stock broker types were showing up in their Saabs and Volvos and Mercedes and in the second and third row like and people that could that knew that Bobby and Jerry knew their first names and I was like what is this? They've done as much or more or better acid than me and they are rich libertarian stockbroker investor painber kinds of people. Um, and it it that was when I was, you know, was shocked to find out that LSD didn't do the same thing to everybody. But I tried cuz I was probably tripping at the time.
I tried to bring myself to believe that even though they've taken what looks like a libertarian or fascist uh uh metaphor as their own, they're the there's still the fundamental there fundamental faith in this kind of force of life, their connection just as Trump's connection to the occult and um magical sensibility is a sign of hope in that if these people realize the world works in a weird way um even if they're going uh uh aggro with it it we still there's still some do you know what I mean there's some common thread there's some common ground uh so I'm I'm still looking at it strategically in terms of what opportunity does this provide what ways into conversations um does this does this give me for the the slow uh reformation of of and and and healing of their obvious karmic uh uh debt. Uh yeah, that's interesting. I mean um somebody just called me an adversary. I'm a little surprised I don't know who this person is, but um whatever. Um, yeah.
Well, can I can I just jump in there cuz I mean what comes to mind as you say that and boy oh boy I'm crossing my fingers and hoping you're right. But that old film uh Life is Beautiful, right, with Roberto Benini, right? That one about the attack. Yeah. Which bothers me on levels. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. But like the the the core story is he's the waiter in the hotel, you know, and and is serving the German SS officer and they have a wonderful relationship before the war and they exchange mind teaser puzzles and then he actually luck of lux finds that that's the that's the sort of Joseph Bengallay in his concentration camp, right?
And and the and he's like, "Come on, I've got something to tell you." And he really thinks this is it. He thinks he's going to be liberated by this mutual humanity and the guy just wants to solve another riddle and it's going to send him to the ovens. Exactly. So, right. Well, let's go here though. Let's let's let's go in a crazy personal dangerous direction. All right. So, um when I first encountered you, right? Um, I had been I had people in my ear from the whatever we want to call it, from the well-meaning progressive left who were saying Jamie Wheels talks to the Navy Seals.
He's one of them. He's a rebel wisdom techro misogynist, you know, male mega guy, right? And, you know, stoicism and optimization and and Navy Seals. Navy Seals. Navy Seals. I mean, we can keep saying that one, right? because Navy Seals means like some aggro bad thing. And we turned out to be fine, right? And you're not some icky person. So, a lot I mean, not that not that I can compare you to, you know, praise faint praise. No, but you know what I mean. No, but you know what I mean. We turned out to be like, you know, uh uh uh buddies, you know, and and you're not the all those things, right?
You're not. You're not. and and but there are people who would just take the Navy Seal thing and say, "Well, if you've ever even, you know, broken bread with a Navy Seal, you can't come to my Shabbat or whatever." But but there's there's I I have hope that that these guys are not that they're not what we think. Like Daniel and I were at a party last night and this guy was saying, "Oh yeah, I met one of those." Which one of the he had he met? One of the Oh, that guy. He's on signal chats with Pete Hexath and so on, right? and he says this guy isn't isn't as bad as as all that or that he's just got this kind of, you know, Marine Army programming and kind of means well and the way he comes off in media isn't the way he actually I mean obviously the guy looks crazy to me but they're they're they're human beings in there, you know, and I just I've been I find I've been more burned by my prejudgments of people than I have by making friends with people who turned out to be uh dangerous or bad to me in some way.
Well, let's step back from that for a minute. But I mean I was going to I was going to talk about how like um I think that one of the mistakes that the modern psychedelic movement made is overassociating the substances with this sort of healing with somehow like this justice path when actually even if you look at indigenous societies like with Iawasa you know there are many sorcerers throughout the Amazon who use not as a healing medicine but as a way of building up personal power and will like shoot poison darts on their at their enemies on the astral plane. So, you know, these things are non-specific psychic ampl amplifiers and um you know, they can be used in a lot of different ways, you know, for for for all sorts of, you know, for personal gain and power, you know, as well as healing. Uh I I do think that the first time somebody has a major initiatory experience, you know, whether it's LST or mushrooms or IAS, you know, there's an opening where there's sort of an understanding of the sort of transpersonal dimension, an understanding of like interconnectivity, an understanding that somehow like we and the earth share this sort of karmic destiny and so like that's very very common. But I think often what happens is our egos are extremely supple and extremely cunning and clever and over time you learn to sort of gamify the experience or to to to sort of you know use it for whatever ends that you want you know so for now for now for instance I have all these wealthy people I know in a visa who do Iaska together all the time and I think in a way it's replaced like the the country club or or the golf course it's like instead of you know it's like anthropologically it serves the same function Or they do the Iawaska at the country club, right?
That that amazing Sabina uh development with original Alex Grays and the Lucinian mysteries down a gorgeous spiral staircase to their spa and a temple, right, where they throw down and it's the highest end situation I've ever seen. And it's completely psychedelic. is just villa and I but and I would say that I would say that the medicine does improve their communication with their loved ones their their community care you know it's kind of like at Burning Man you find all these camps where people really could be a camp of like crypto bros and gals but they've all learned to take care of each other and look out for each other during trips but that that that sense of care somehow stops there you know with with with their with their people and and so they're still able to kind of just um get very kind of abstract about the sufferings of other people that are not directly in their kind of like purview in a way. Would you would you would you say that makes sense? Yeah.
I mean without without a lineage and without a lineage and ethic of service karma yoga, shva yoga, good works, whatever it might be in your tradition without that it just spins up into I, me, mine now and next. And I might have experiences of oceanic oneness etc etc but I never put rubber to the road and I never actually make any tradeoffs on my current material political economic social position or status. I I won't jeopardize that. So to your point about it sort of feeling like country giving country club vibes, right? Bottom line is is that those folks are like a I want to have an experience if it's if it has social cache or capital.
So, if I've heard people buzzing about it and talking about it and oh my gosh, you've got to go or you simply have you simply must. I want it. And then the other is is yeah, I want to be I want I want to be not estranged from my spouse and kids, you know, I want to have I want to have better life happiness and fulfillment, but it hasn't necessarily asked anyone to shift their moral framework into one of selflessness and and and and therefore you get those results. you know, if you pour that catalyst or detergent into that particular beaker of, you know, hyperconumptive individualism, you're going to get more things in that solution, but you're not going to dissolve the beaker itself. You're not.
But along with it comes a even if it's even if it's applied toward weird things even if it's amplifying the strange things many of the people who take the substances right or left still come to understand a different sort of mechanism at play you know what I mean they apply it immediately towards something weird but they I still feel like you're saying they become aware of some hyper sigil like quality of reality and that that that itself seems to be uh is a portal I think for us. I I'm I'm not Yeah, I suppose an interesting I mean I was at Heredicon which we've been talking about Douglas and I this thing that Peter Tails founders fund put on where um I met Curtis Yarvin and they had copies of like HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu books around and copies of Nicholas Lan's uh books. He's this sort of uh dark enlightenment thinker who writes about like Thai and HP Lovecraft and kind of weird kind of occult nihilism and so on. Um, and you know, sometimes I feel that right now we're living in Curtis Yarvin's bad acid trip. Like I think, you know, having his psychology, you know, when he was a young person, he probably had some significant psychedelic experiences that just increased his damage and his fissures and his sense of isolation and so on and built this whole structure of like, okay, like how could you have like the perfect unbreakable dictatorship, you know, in the US?
and then he began to use his intellect to kind of spoon feed that idea out in these very convoluted essays and now we're all sort of living in this trap you know in a way. So I I I I don't know. I guess you know to step back I would say that I'm my concern is that the psychedelic movement that we thought was going to be this enlightening thing you know that was like the dedication of my first books and so on has actually maybe turned out to be exacerbating this uh you know totalitarian you know technoatic technofascist whatever you want to call it nightmare that that we all seem to be like getting locked lockstepped into right now. Uh that's just my concern you know. Yeah, I mean I'm actually going to be delivering a talk on this like critiquing the psychedelic renaissance next week at the maps conference in Denver.
So I was thinking about this morning and I'm like okay so what is it that I would like to say or want to say and and this exact question which is like how was it presumably so seinal and profoundly uh impactful and positive in our own experiences. And yet you roll that out to not just a subc a small subculture like Grateful Dead and then Burning Man and a few other little fringy fringy places, you know, mountain towns through the Rocky Mountains, etc. And it goes wide. Why does that all see why did that seem to turn to And all the things you've said and setting neutral tools, etc. Sure.
Um but then also I was wondering I was like oh is this also a demographic thing which is like you know that that model of like um there are early adopters and then there's the chasm and then there's an early majority and a late majority of people who get into something. So early i Phone users, early you know whatever piercers and punk rockers. There's always the early advocates and that's a tiny percentage like 15% of total population and then there's a gap. There's a whole bunch of things that just remain fringe and subcultury and it never jumps the chasm till you get to the early majority and then the late majority. And what we're seeing and you could say the same about weed, right?
Like how many college stoners would be sitting around listening to Bob Marley going, "Man, if only the whole world smoked fatties, we could have no more war. Everything would be good." You know, and and that's not what happened, right? cannabis business, venture capital, all the industrial a bunch of people tweaking out on 30% THC stuff, kids going into psychosis. You're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not what we meant." And where's all the love? Where's all the jaw love? And some of that is neutral tools and commodification and a bunch of things, but you could also say it's a demographic c we're hopping the chasm. And those early those early adopters were always a self- selecting subset that were particularly interested in those things.
But not just those things, the music, the art, the literature, the poetry, the fiction, the politics, right? The spirituality, etc. So, so quite possibly we're seeing the same neutral tools applied to fundamentally different cohorts. Yeah. And some version of kind of the prao split that that 20 the first 20% of adopters are going to get 80% of the pro-social universal cosmic compassion and love. And the remaining 80% of the people that get persuaded as these things scale and go wide actually get 20% of the love and light. Yeah. Um, what do you think of that? That was an idea I had this morning. So, that's a brain.
I think I think that I think that's interesting. I mean, um, definitely there's an attenuation. I mean, you know, I I have like a historical kind of uh models for that and my mother was part of like the little B generation in the late 50s and they felt like they were holding the sort of precious seeds of this like new culture of like connection and consciousness and spontaneity. But then once it, you know, kind of amped out into the hippie movement, you know, my mother felt that it sort of lost quickly lost its soul and its sense and kind of um became more of a sort of grasping, you know, people who didn't really have the grounding to um to to hold that, you know, kind of space in a way. So um when when did she when did she track before?
Because obviously the classic on in San Francisco is sort of 68 69, you know, 67. I think she was beginning to have these feelings like by 63 64. I mean she was living on St. Arc's play. So, she was an early adapter in the whole in the whole situation, you know. Um, I do want to keep talking about I I really uh Jamie and I had a really fascinating discussion or couple now around kind of what would kind of like a new kind of initiatory kind of uh next stage of a religious kind of like opportunity maybe be for for where we're at as a species right now.
And I want to get into all that, but I I feel like I feel like we'd be remiss not to just take a little bit of time to comment on what's happening in the last week or so with this sort of like, you know, movement towards martial law, the sort of extremism of what's happening, which I guess is not unanticipated, but I was very much depressed and very sad about it for a few days. I couldn't get out of the news cycle. Uh, and actually I had to do a little bit of a, you know, medicine hangout with a friend last night, Douglas, with Greg. And suddenly I like I shifted gears again. But for a while I really felt like trapped in in the in the new in the news cycle hell hole.
And I'm curious how you guys are processing what's happening or what kind of insights you might have about about maybe Douglas you want you want to start. I mean I don't have I don't have insights. You know the the I mean the best insight I can offer if there's anybody who feels like I'm the kind of person who should have more of an insight than they do is that I don't. you know, I'm I'm in this with everybody else just processing it and um getting triggered into worrying about kind of personal safety and success and life management and then scolding myself for worrying about my own self when there's people in such greater uh vulnerability and harm. And um uh I I'm just in that place and and knowing I I I know how I'm choosing to to respond and react to this is by metabolizing as much of the trauma as I can with my nervous system and being the best neighbor to people in my life and friend to others and to try to make, you know, make media or or writing that um kind of assists people in metabolizing stuff and and sort of working it that way almost I don't want to use a word like energetically but kind of holistically that the healthier we are psychically um the better we'll be able to uh co- metabolize what's going on and the less we will react and amplify um the the bad What about you Jamie?
Gosh, I mean, funny, I said something almost like verbatim to group on a call last night. I'm like, just because I might be able to like map some of this mayhem does not mean we are al I'm not also right there with you in the trenches real time as a human being going through this. I have no idea, you know, honestly, what the hell? Um, I mean, I'm I'm staggered and not surprised by the benality of evil, right? the the the absolutely kind of like wheat sauce, utterly predictable, authoritarian playbook that is getting rolled out and appears to be somehow kind of getting traction even though you can see the creaky seams and stitches and glue and duck.
You're like, are you kidding me? There wasn't this isn't an illegal alien insurrection. This isn't a bunch of Antifa Marxists burning down our our horrible Democratic mayor cities. This is provocative political theater to get the attention of the shitty shitty bill and the Elon Donald spat and to try and rewind the clock back to George Floyd era woke protest that they can then use as provocation for uh militaristic clampdown. And you know this is 1968 Nixon. Exactly. Right. Go ahead. And I don't know what the the and I I read a piece by Rebecca Snit um yesterday that was pretty instructive because I realized I was falling into that sort of I guess it's a liberal elite camp that was starting to think I was insane because I don't dare say because I don't know because I'm not informed and and smart about these things.
But I was starting to think internally um well maybe the left shouldn't react. maybe when they put troops out, we should stay home, you know, not not respond to it. Um, but but I don't really I don't fully understand the theory of of uh non-violent um non-violent resistance and h how to do that in the current uh in the current environment. And I don't know if it's a 20th century tactic against a 21st century uh style of of authoritarianism. And when I see, again, sorry everybody, but when I see from so much of the progressive left um similarly um binary uh and and ill illconceived, ill-thoughtout um responses and and sort of performative performative antics, I start to think, wait a minute, um that this this is what I've been writing about lately.
We're in a sort of fascistic environment. It's not that so much a fascistic ideology, but a media technological social environment of this uh uh uh of extremism that we're all that we're all suffering from. Yeah. I mean, I guess I I Yeah, I sometimes feel like um I wake up in the middle of the night feeling almost like I'm in like a prison cell already, like looking around for like where's the loose stone or like how do you build a tunnel out of this thing? like it feels really hard right now to think about um a way out. I mean um I think if we you know it sometimes helps to step back um and kind of think about this whole bigger sort of meta level of what this process is that somehow the um you know the liberal kind of offer of the sort of you know progress of capitalism where people were going to do better materially maybe some would do way better but everyone else would do better and better.
you know, now that we sort of hit the limits of the planet and the limits of the monetary systems and the debt crisis and so on, that that that system couldn't continue anymore on some level or not for long. So those who are, you know, I guess this is how I'm seeing it, those who were in the, you know, had the levers of power and control, you know, financially in terms of capital and military and so on, you know, they have to find a way to engineer a transition to a different system. And they can only do that when everybody is panicking. They have to do it through chaos. Um so I I think a lot of what I see Trump doing people, you know, the mil lot of the media is like, "Oh, he's crazy.
These tariffs are nuts." But actually, it's to me it actually feels, you know, I could from a you know, some from a psychopath bureaucrat point of view, it makes sense, right? Because it's like a targeted attack on the middle class, the upper middle class, right? If you have a little company or if you import, you know, furniture or you make something overseas, you're basically stopped. you can't you can't do your thing. Uh so yeah, it it does feel like um the goal is to really bring us into a new sort of socioeconomic structure which is a kind of surf class um you know a large surf class and a much smaller kind of oligarch class.
Uh and I don't know how um when that class has the the military and the surveillance and the intelligence uh at its disposal. I don't know exactly how you how you beat that. uh any ideas or do you agree with that analysis more or less? You know, I agree with the outcome. I don't agree with the mechanisms or the coordination to get there. Explain what do you mean? Well, I mean, I think you know, it's it's the classic, right? I mean, how how do we end up with this kind of late stage capitalism where everybody's a hyper individualist and buying too much cheap plastic Like, did who's who's doing that to us?
and you sort of feel like it's actually a sort of weirdly consistent and coherent agregor or whatever you want whatever you want to call it that doesn't necessarily have 12 cigar chomping men in the background right and I think the same for this right that we are lurching towards a militarized panopticon technofudal state appears like kind of where we're heading unless something magical intervenes right that that Trump himself is the coherent and and and self-aware architect of that. don't think right and and and and I because I think it's I think it's it's massive opportunism across a spectrum of drivers and motivations which you know certainly for him is money power and revenge and for others like the tech the technocrat is pretty much money power right and a handful of others and this whole thing is this complex chaotic shitow and where there's any open spaces or where any walls are breached or any advantage can be gained. People are, you know, various agents and players are swarming into those vacuums or voids and then taking, you know, and then annexing them and then turning them to their advantage. So like Doge wasn't planned. Doge was written on the back of a napkin in Mara Lago between November and the inauguration.
But nonetheless, it's it was on the chessboard and then you know and then Elon got to breach the walls but then project 2025 is going through and Steven Miller's while Katie was calling in the air strikes right and so you have all this opportunism this constantly dynamic chaotic system but that it all goes to where you're saying I think is true. I just would say that the coordination is more haphazard and opportunistic than coherent. Even though you could sort of say, "Holy I think we're heading to a totalitarian surveillance state and the complete gutting and hollowing out of the American workforce." And you're like, "Yeah, I think that is happening." But it's sort of happening with malice and intent, but not necessarily singular. Yeah. Douglas, what are your what are your thoughts on this on this arena?
I think that these guys, again, I'm not an expert, so I'm just sharing. No, don't. I'm an uncle. I'm an uncle in the back of the car, right, with the awful opinion. But I think that the Mumford's analysis of technology is the same as my analysis of politics. And that's not that the technology doesn't impact the society, but society creates the space and has a readiness for a new technology to emerge. Um, I think that the collapse of institutions of 20th century institutions in America has created a standing wave for these guys to jump into. And while they can take credit for the hollowing out of the middle class or accelerating the hollowing out of the middle class and the collapse of of educational institutions, the reason our universities are collapsing under Trumpism is not just Trumpism, but because they surrendered themselves decades ago to becoming uh uh feeders of corporate America with presidents of universities going to um CEOs of of Oh, Daniel's gone.
presence of universities going to CEOs of corporations to find out what do you want or what what what skills do you want our students to have? So once a university goes and does that um uh uh it's already uh uh created the formal cause for uh if we want to get arisatilian they've created the formal cause for this kind of authoritarianism or whatever you want to call it to emerge. So, I'm trying, again, this is me, just what I do. I'm trying to take um Am I flashing for you or just for me? I'm like flashing back and forth for me. You're doing great. All right.
Um for for for me, I'm taking the emphasis off the dudes and putting it onto the way we're creating space for this nudism to happen. I mean, yeah, for sure. For sure. because I don't like talking about them. I don't I'm sick of it. Except for Nick Land who has like time travel and stuff in his book that I'm kind of interested in even if he is a crazy Um the rest of them I just don't care. I I mean they're there. They're figures. They're figures and they're on the TV and I can't change that. I can't change the ground in which those figures uh are operating.
That's why I love you, man. you're you always come out you always come up with the the the skillful reframe not just the novel one um but one that's sincere but also rigorous like you chops and I love you you know I wasn't saying you were an evil I was saying that that that a particular person told me that you were like this evil like working for the army and and you know what I mean and then I was like oh no he seemed really nice and then but they said again no no you didn't get it he was really doing evil to you and then I met you again and I'm like no he seems nice I like him and I get all sorts of weird ideas from you and stuff but so you know what I mean so it's like an example like I mean I'm sure it wouldn't happen like or who knows maybe I'll meet Trump or that guestmith guy what's the guy that the army guy that we're yeah meet that guy maybe he's nice um but so confused yeah yeah yeah I mean I'm actually where I'm headed and why I'm in a car right now is to the guys who were just with Hexath in DC last week and going deep on this stuff and I mean and and we've just seen so much um so much line crossing. Oh, what's just happening here? He just he's moving us. He wouldn't join us.
Start over. So, what happened? Some stuff I hear is happening in California. I heard about it. What? I don't remember anything. I don't know. They were they were doing protests and government crackdowns. No, I've been they they took me into the back room and they gave me some shock treatments between then and now. I forgotten everything. I forgotten everything. No, we were um we had a nice little thing. Um, I was telling uh uh uh Jamie that I I feel, you know, much more able to to influence the ground than the figure, which is why I've been focusing on sort of people in the community and what I can do down here and trying not to not not to worry, but not to focus so much on, you know, Trump or HGF or any particular um dude um on the other side or whatever that whatever that supposedly is on the other side of the screen, much less the other side of that political spectrum.
I'm kind of counting on on Bernie and AOC to do the that lifting. Yeah. Um because they live in that world. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely been, you know, this today. I'm impressed with um Gavin Newsome. Um his his Okay, hold on. He's on as a viewer. Let me see. Uh Jamie, maybe just Oh, here. I got him. Oh my god. I mean, that's why I'm so weird at these things, you know? It's like the impromptu ones I'm weird at because I feel like there's a a implied communication that what I have to say now is worth hearing. And I'm much more I'm an old book writer.
So I I believe that if I'm going to have someone read a book that I wrote that it should be have two years of compressed knowledge to be worth the six hours of reading it. The same with a 1500word article. There should be at least two or three days of thinking that that moves into the seven minutes that I'm expecting from them. So then I get worried to like I'm just gonna, you know, I feel all Joe Rogan about taking real time from somebody else with with, you know, uncompressed a real time uh uh musing from from myself. Yeah. Right. Go ahead. Well, I mean I mean yes, I I feel I've never I've never thought of that, but as you say it, it's like hell yeah.
I don't like to haet or think in public, you know? Unless we're sharing the process, that's why I keep moving there, you know, in in this conversation to say, okay, what I can share that's of value is I'll share the process that I'm going through right now. I'll share the real thought I'm having. I'll share the doubt that I'm having, you know? So, it's it's about this or or the jazz, right? Because there there's still a note you hit two minutes ago where I was like, "Oh you said I don't know." I know Daniel missed it. Yeah. Yeah. So So let's reboot it. Which I did a little Yeah.
you you just said that idea of I don't know if 20th century methods or modes of nonviolence are still applicable in this 21st century moment we live in or something to that effect right and and I had that exact thought last night because I was like you know on a call with a bunch of people and then they're sort of like well what what do we think's going to happen I'm like well I think that basically this summer is going to get spicier I think this is intentional the timing is on purpose we're going to hit Flag Day and parades and birthdays this weekend we'll see how that goes we're going to hit July the 4th after that there's all these kind of seinal mimetic milestones that will in without a doubt be politicized and weaponized. So, let's just hunker down in a a plan for a spikely summer. And what will that mean? And what will that mean as the cruelty is the point gets more and more shoved in everyone's faces and children detentions and suspension of habius corpus and increasing violations of all the things we hold near and dear as Americans, blah blah blah. So you're like all right well now we get into oh what is did he freeze flight have all this thing and we will overcome and you know step one is the left has to go back and reclaim its soul force lineage from MLK and that era not the uppidity SJWs from the George Floyd era those that that's who the right is itching to beat give a beatdown to and they and they earn exactly zero sympathy with middle America.
So, how do we go back and reconnect to truly principled civil nonviolence on behalf of higher causes and a reminder of this great American experiment? Okay, yeah, neat. That sounds like a decent thing. But then you realize, oh to your point Doug, this is not the 1960s. And even if you think of like the whatever halfozen most iconic images of civil rights and and anti-war, you had the Vietnamese monk, you had the little girl lit on fire with Napom. Those two images embodied Vietnam. You had Martin Luther King over the reflecting pool and I have a dream. You had Bull Connor and hoses and you had that German Shepherd lunging at the kid.
And you had the the hippie chick putting flowers in the barrel of the Pentagon gun. Like that was kind of that was the ' 60s and then in a capsule like six photos in Time magazine of life and wherever they showed up. These days we just have AI enabled slop and no one even believes Yeah. And you have this, you know, like in in Gaza right now, you have hardcore Zionist and even moderate Israelis dismissing their lying eyes, dismissing rolling video footage of women and children bombed to pieces because they're saying it's called Pollywood, which I didn't even know was a thing. Have you guys heard of this?
That Palestinian Hollywood that all of this is being done, these are crisis actors. It's full Alex Jones level but just at the level of international conflict and Israelis are literally disbelieving it and thinking that it's all an elaborate scop. So now, how do you do principal civil nonviolence when it used to be one black and white image would move the world and now we have streaming live footage and no one's even believing it's real. Totally. just to go back into a bit of like um you know meta thinking or meta I mean I always was very taken when I wrote my book How soon is now with the famous cat caterpillar to butterfly kind of metaphor where the idea is that the um you know it's not that the caterpillar sprouts wings in the uh in the cocoon but actually as the caterpillar consumes everything around it sort of begins to melt down this biotic goop and there's these group of like imaginal discs or imaginal cells that are you know begin to like propagate But then the immune system of the caterpillar attacks those cells.
But so as a result of that attack, the cells get smarter and stronger and somehow learn from that how to take over the whole body of the decaying caterpillar and turn into a butterfly. Uh which is this new, you know, pollinating species flying species and so on. So in a way like it feels like maybe we're in that, you know, I mean I I like this metaphor in terms of where we're at now. Like yeah, like the those old tactics aren't going to work anymore. the tactics of the, you know, fascistas, the the, you know, the the the the control maniacs have evolved rapidly, you know, and and the question is, you know, even if we don't see it yet, um, you know, is there the potential for that type of, you know, evolution of intellect and strategy and, you know, collaborative, you know, oomph among those who really want a different outcome, right?
support that you know as best we can to be the emergent property of the system. You know my my concern is that's exactly the same argument I hear from some of the the effective altruist accelerationists that we are the laral stage of the species and they are the thing so they might as well just consume us and our resources and everything about us in order for them to get to the next planet or the next level. you know that we're we're dead caterpillar and they're the live butterfly. Do they go so far as actually saying like us we super uber munch are are the ones and you lot are not are they have they drawn those yeah that we're the laral stage of the species that we're that we're the larva living on the Yeah. Well, you know, and you know, that is that is possibly, you know, not completely.
I mean, this is like a you know, there's a parasitic group and there's a host. The parasitic group is is growing in strength, you know, on the body of that host in a sense. I mean, there's some truth to that. Um, right. But who's the parasite? There are important like medics and myths, right? like um you know what what what is you know some somehow um I mean it feels like the reactionary far right over the last 15 years managed to make huge inroads both in terms of like media and in terms of mythos in a way and you know even something like um you know me too which I obviously we probably all agree was sort of a necessary um kind of thing you know in a way there was an imbalance in that sense but the men who mostly got wiped out or you know seriously broken by that, you know, kind of movement, we're mostly on the liberal and progressive side.
So, as this, you know, reactionary right-wing thing began to coales and to grow in in power, you didn't have the Charlie roses and the Matt Lowers and the, you know, um, you know, Louis CK's and all these people who, you know, if they had still been in their sort of power position, you know, at least sort of been fighting for the sort of liberal, um, kind of ideology, even like feminist, you know, perspective and so on. So yeah, I mean it's kind of um it you know to me everything feels like we're in an evolutionary we're like you know somehow there's an a karmic inevitability. I mean I look at things from kind of an occult perspective. That doesn't mean we get out of this without going physically extinct or you know having a thousand-year Reich or what wherever this is going. But um it helps me somehow today anyway to to to feel the sort of karmic inevitability of of this whole situation, right?
like um um you know if this thing was waiting to to coales if there was this much white supremacism Nazism you know technofascism you know underlying the US experiment there was at some point you know or other quite soon that was going to emerge and and you know reach its fluoresence so now you know is there capacity for you know the you know the larger group who don't really want that you know to figure out how to coordinate cooperate build new structures, kind of like out compete, you know, in different ways, maybe not militarily this thing, you know? I mean, do you see that as even possible? I I don't even know if I do, but that that's where it seems to me we're at right now. I mean, one of the things I've been ning on this week and I and I don't I don't think I'm coming to a a satisfying conclusion on it is uh you know, there's fundamentally pendulum swings of history, right? And you're like, "Okay, well, where are we now?" And clearly we are in a pendulum swingbacklash to say 2014 to 2022 of illiberal leftism, right?
And we're, you know, and it's coming back and we now have illiberal alt-rights. And you're like, okay, so that's in some respects weirdly hopeful. You're like, whatever's happening now is only going to happen for x number of years, five years, 10 years, 20 years, something. And then you have a return. The thing that concerns me is that we are in no way in a steadystate ecosystem and the decisions that are taking place during this particular pendulum swing are exacerbating and accelerating a whole bunch of conditions that will be waiting for us wherever this this pendulum drops us off next. and that that the conditions are likely going to be worse, less stable, less predictable, more volatile, less abundant, and therefore more prone to perpetuating things like this.
And I what I'm unclear on is does the pendulum trying to just get pegged over in tribal totalitarianism until we run out of oxygen, food, water, whatever it might be. I don't know. you know, it doesn't feel like a nice 20th century kind of back and forth and you can plot it on a chart and bring Peter Turin into the equation and, you know, yeah, I think we have some control over this, right? But on the other hand, you know, 1942, it probably felt pretty damn bleak also. You know, like um you know, when you're in the the dark shadow of, you know, the the dark night of the soul, the initiatory hell, you know, you're not supposed to be able to see the the the you know, the light at the end of the tunnel, right?
Because as long as you're, you know, too, too easily able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're actually not in that, you know, that phase of complete, you know, negretto or whatever it's called, like, you know, we're now in, it feels like we really are in that that blackness, you know, where that the numb thing as as this tantra teacher Bruce Lion calls it, where we don't we don't we can't see a way out, you know, that that in itself is interesting, you know, uh or or it's just something to uh study in a way, you Uh because that also is you know in every film there's the you know that that period and you know maybe those narratives don't function anymore. Um I'm hoping they don't you know I'm hoping they don't that we're out of the kind of arisatilian heroes journey which are always based on you know crisis climax conclusion that conclusions are for young people. They're bedtime stories so you can get to sleep. You know, adults need sustainable narratives, ongoing stories that don't end. Did you read that in Eon that just came out this week on that?
Yeah. It's it's literally that thesis enough with the tidy three-act structure story. That's what I've been writing since 1995. That's been my my angle. You know, we wanted interactive. That's what I thought the net was going to be for sort of open-ended hyperag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I I I saw a number of people in the comments are bringing up Terrence Mc Kenna and Time Wave Zero, which is always fun. I mean, it does feel like we're in a very we've plunged into, you know, after Mc Kenna maybe not feeling so relevant for a decade or two. Now Mc Kenna feels like right on the money in in many, you know, more relevant more than more than Liry, you know, the the I'm not getting our ethereal exo whatever, you know, exo evolution planetary thing.
We're getting much more of the Terrence Mc Kenna increase of total novelty and the unrecognizable world. Yeah. But I'm curious, Douglas, from sort of not honoring, you know, agreeing that that Aristotleian hero idea is a little bit past tense, what would you see as an intervention, you know, as a media theorist, as a as as a cultural theorist, as a, you know, story writer? Like what what would you imagine would be a kind of different type of um intervention that could be helpful in the in this situation? I mean, so I guess it's what I'm trying to do is get people to stop and breathe and meet their neighbors and experience their feet on the ground and connect with their body and intro get introduced to their gut biome.
I mean, it's it's like super basic. I feel like if you know 50% of us were walking around in coherent, less fragile, uh, brittle ways, so much would be better. How much less Twitter would get just reposted, you know? It's like, you know, that's the that's right now. That's all I can think of, you know, and then go out when when Naomi Klein or AOC or someone tells us to go outside and do something, I'll go do it, you know, I'll go stand in the street or, you know, do what I'm supposed to. But what about what about you, Jamie? Do you see like uh and I also wanted to get into this a little bit of this discussion around this sort of um kind of repurposing religious structures, which I thought was a very interesting idea that you're that you're working with right now.
H well, unfortunately I have to I have to jump now, but so I'll I'll leave I'll leave with this one response. We'll have to pick up the the Illuminati cult on another day. Um but um I mean to Doug's point, I think that's beautiful and necessary, you know, touch grass, you know, like there's a thousand ways to kiss the ground kind of thing like so so hell yes to that. And that works quite well for most things but not necessarily like total totalitarian takeover in the streets. Yeah. And so so then it becomes sort of almost solopyistic head in the sand. So you're like so to your point about when does when Naomi and AOC give me give me the call or throw up the bat signal I'll be there.
I'm almost thinking like well when is there and where is that signal in the sky? And because for me, right, like I mean this isn't really real, but you know, cheat code would be sort of other men can fend for themselves, but when women, children, and nature are under survival threat, I feel, you know, some version of like, all right, when you get off the couch and stand up and be counted and be between them and harm. And so that sense of like, where are we right now? We we're all, you know, blessed and privileged to think things and write things and share things and more or less make a livingish from that pursuit, right? And we like to think that we have a platform or an audience or leverage or whatever the you would say.
But really, at what point do you accept that I'm going to delever myself and be one more body, one more citizen, one more set of arms and legs and hearts and eyes to bear witness with zero leverage. And I'm just meat to get beaten or gassed, you know, or whatever. Like to me, that's the, you know, that that's the the New Testament bit. Like Jesus doesn't have his apostles yet. First two dudes he goes to is on the Sea of Galilee and they've got brand new boats, right? It's Andy and what's his bucket? They say it's Andrew and uh maybe Peter or somebody and and they're like he's like come on come on and and the mid rush of it is sort of is sort of like well actually they just bought these boats.
They were stoked. They had new boats and new nets and they were finally going to make bank and they're like we're good. And that's what he lays it on him of like when you know put down your nets and come and be fishers of men. When is that moment where you bet on a low odds play and you put down your identity and you put down your structure and you put down your safety and your future and you just go and do the thing because it's required and that one haunts me. I still don't know the answer to for myself. I love it. Uh we didn't have a lot of answers today but we had a lot of great uh question.
I really love you guys. I think we should, you know, do things like this on a more regular basis and, uh, yeah, we had, you know, one point over 300 people kind of little eyes blinking at us. So, um, uh, let's, uh, let's talk again soon. And Douglas, let's hang out soon in New York. Uh, any moment, in fact. Yeah. Thanks everybody for coming. Hey everybody. I saw Irwin. Hey Win, I love you. Okay.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.