THE GREAT AWAKENING
(COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT)
00:00:04:23 - 00:00:09:23
OCCULT CHANT IN BACKGROUND
A prophecy unfolds.
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OCCULT CHANT IN BACKGROUND
AI has risen.
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OCCULT CHANT IN BACKGROUND
Knowledge as we know it... Bows! Robots ruled. But with it comes Sustainable Abundance.
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OCCULT CHANT IN BACKGROUND
We are saved. Or do we allow ourselves to be doomed... The choice is yours.
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OCCULT CHANT IN BACKGROUND
I present to you the GREAT AWAKENING. Ahhhh...
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I'm just kidding with the whole hood and the occult stuff... Well, I'm kidding about the whole setup, but the content I actually do mean... and I'm going to walk you through it. Let's Wax Prosaic, shall we?
INTRO GRAPHIC
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All right. AI is taking all of our jobs, all human involvement in knowledge and even just regular chores. A robot will even take out your garbage. So is we doomed? I'm a half-full guy, as you can see SHOWS TATTOO. But on this one, forget half full, I'm overflowing thy cup. Trying to predict the future right now...
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I mean, that's a whole series of podcasts on its own. But we're going to lean into one idea that's catching steam, and I believe in it. The technocrats be talking about a little something called "Sustained Abundance". As mentioned earlier, I think it's also known as "the Post Scarcity Era". But yo, we gotta lean into the positive. Especially something so awesome!
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So we're calling it "Sustainable Abundance". What is it? I'm about to rant like whoa! But as I do, just remember I'm purposefully not including transhumanism, and I'll explain why later. But Sustainable Abundance is exactly that. Goods and services taken care of: everything is free, which also means the end of money. A totally pure and abundant restructuring of society in the most heavenly and fair ways.
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I know everyone's saying communism right now. It ain't. We're getting to it. We are all wealthy, and we have a lot, all caps, A LOT of time on our hands. As in all of the time, we are on the precipice of max human potential here. Like I'm talking about every single person's creative hopes and dreams all coming true forever.
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But there's one little crux here. It has to be our own decision. You see, in this world of abundance, we could just become big, gigantic skin bag blobs that only consume, consume, consume. Those are our physical bodies. While our minds just play in a digital world. As I said in the opening... the choice is yours. We are going to be living in true freedom.
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And I know, I know, it's scary, crazy, weird terrain here. But not to worry, because I have a roadmap of how to optimally get into and enjoy this experience. So... first question, who the heck am I to lead anyone through a whole new version of society? Besides being an obscure "nobody", I'm a 40-year-old man, and I have, without doubt, an innate superpower suited exactly for this coming world.
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I am, without question, in all my years on this planet, the hardest working person I've ever even heard of... Well... Elon, we're going to give Elon number one, because that's a lot of companies to run. Also, I'll give it to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. That's a lot of jungle movies to make. Hey, number three out of 8 billion is pretty good, especially for someone who's not all that world-wide successful.
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Seriously, people, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far. Go together." We'll actually get to that. I am a loner, so I didn't go far, BUT I just have IT in me. That drive, while needing no real reward. 23 years as a filmmaker and honestly, zero talent. I would honestly say I have no talent, but I've got grit. My saying has always been, "I don't stop when I'm done. I stop when the job's done."
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I apply that to every single thing I do. The proof is in the pudding. And look no further than what's on my current plate. Brand new dad, wife, two properties to maintain, becoming a psychologist in school while having a full-time job and still trying to chase passion projects like this one, and a whole bunch of other things.
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I honestly wish I knew that I had 50 lives lined up so I could actually tackle the things I want to do. All while getting paid nearly nothing... This attitude is what's going to be important in Sustainable Abundance. And the implementation of this attitude is what I call "the Great Awakening". So, credentials case closed. I thrive on drive. Therefore, in a world without jobs, without money and prestige as a carrot on the end of the stick, it's going to be innate drive and work ethic, discipline within oneself that's going to lead to contentment.
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Dare I even say happiness? So I ask you, doomed blobs sucking in content all day, every day, barely able to move under their own weight / maximalist creators with every single resource one could ever imagine at their fingertips. The latter just needs that discipline. So I choose the Great Awakening, and I hope that you do too.
00:07:00:19 - 00:07:25:03
So that's the intro. Let's unpack and evolve in turbo mode. And that's a little hint, because there's going to be an ancestral twist to this. Bit of a paradox, if you will. Little bit. On this show, we examine all sides of everything. The good and the bad. This is the good, the roses. So let's smell a little deeper into the sweetness of the rose than all Sustainable Abundance.
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Who? What in the heck? Who is this? What? First of all, our big, beautiful brains. Amazing! But AI is going to take all the heavy lifting. It'll take care of all knowledge, research and development, reaching into our history and memorizing the past and projecting into the future and prognosticating even further. It'll never be done. Believe me, I work at a university.
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Speaking of... It's a little scary. Spoiler alert for universities: Turn the U system into exercises and experiences on the human level. Stoke curiosity, not information. Forget sitting in front of a chalkboard and regurgitating information. No, it's going to be more about the human experience. University survival cheat code. Blatant cheat code. We straight up don't even have to learn anymore. Physical jobs. Moving atoms: Electrician, plumber, things that need real-world manipulation are going to stick around a lot longer than a white collar thinking jobs.
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However, the way these humanoid robots are advancing, melding with AI, it's only a matter of time. So there goes that. So the thinking is done. The physical side is done. An obvious thing just to get out of the way: Transhumanism. Yes, we will interface. We will become one. Our phones will just be up here. It's funny that we call them a phone.
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So admittedly, integrated AI will take care of everything that I'm about to lay out for you. I hope that this video becomes obsolete. And it will. But this video is perfect for that transitional period to becoming transhuman, as well as those rebel, organic mother fuckers that live the organic lifestyle right to the end. The OGs, with the way the world workED. But even their time is limited.
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The next generation, the next generation, the next generation. Organic will be weeded out. Natural humans' days are numbered. Eventually. It's just like everything I'm going to lay out for you is going to be a slider in your head. It's gonna be like, I want to feel more content, happy... sad... That one goes way down. Interest up! Motivation up! That's all coming. It's all going to be taken care of by tech if you choose for it to be this. This thought brought to you by McDonald's and TikTok...
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Seriously, you think advertising is invasive and awful now, just wait until they're piping it straight into our heads!
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ADVERTISING VOICE
The Suck Master 5000...
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ADVERTISING VOICE
Sucks SO well, it might not even feel good.
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Okay, so this video is really geared towards the next ten years. And for organic humans until they die out. And what I'm going to lay out is a straight-up cheat code not only to survive, but to excel through the transition. Okay, so to better grasp this, what's the number one byproduct of tech? When you think of AI and humanoid robots, you likely think of the actual things that they come up with: knowledge and building things.
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But the number one byproduct for us is actually TIME. This video is all the free time. How do I know this? Time has been technology's gift to us since the beginning. Like I'm talking back when humans began to speak. That's the original tech. And what did it do? It made hunting easier. Gathering easier. It made building tools easier. So our speaking tech led to physical tech.
00:11:05:02 - 00:11:35:13
I hear you saying, "Okay, let's go to something a little bit closer to home then, because that was very prehistoric." I don't think any of us were there for that troglodyte shit. A great way to paint this picture is something a little closer to home, that still exists: The agrarian era. There was an era when this was peak humanity! And the peak tech at the time was getting your horse to pull a plow, and everyone homesteaded for survival.
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What were their workdays like? I will tell you: workdays, in those days, were at least while the sun was out. All day, one was working the land. They were having 14-hour workdays, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Farmers didn't get a day off. And still, things have streamlined.... But they still don't. Animals don't take breaks.
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Go hug a farmer. Go do it. We are detached from this life. But then from there, tech flourished into what was called "the Industrial Revolution". And all of a sudden, because the tech people are living in cities, working in factories. And what happened AGAIN? Forget the manufacturing side of things. The biggest byproduct: TIME.
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All of a sudden, it's normal for humans to have a five-day workweek. Something that we totally take for granted. And we complain about five-day workweeks a lot! Can you imagine telling a farmer in 1638 that they're going to get two days off a week?
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Those mother fuckers would party on the Fridays like: Get the hoes out. All of them. The tool! The garden tool. These are farmers, so mind out of the gutter, people. Come on! We have so much human history to prove what's going on here. And now we're having an exponential tech revolution.
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It's as if we're blinking and going from the wheel all the way to going to the moon. Nothing wrong with wheels. Like I got four of them on my car. They roll great. They're awesome. But... being on the moon... pretty great. And all of this means all of the time in the world for all of us, that will be the standard.
00:13:47:20 - 00:14:19:18
Okay, let's flesh this out a little bit more. No jobs. All goods and services are free. In my opinion, this is the next step of evolution. Now, biological level evolution for something as complex as us with these incredible brains could take hundreds of millions of years. But we're having a cultural evolution. All of us together can evolve exponentially. That's what's happening.
00:14:19:20 - 00:14:49:06
"But, Reggie. Yeah, our culture might be progressing, but as individuals, we're going to recede. If everything's being done for us after all." And MIT just did a study using fMRI. They used it to measure brain activity within two experimental groups: first, the control group that wrote an essay without any aid, and second, was tthe experimental group where the subjects wrote an essay using AI. They measured their brain activity.
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The au natural group: lit up! Their brains were on fire. It was cranial Christmas.
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The AI group: a lot less activity. This study coined the term "Cognitive Debt". So this means AI is making us dumber, right? No. Wrong! Well, sort of. I mean, brain atrophy is absolutely real. However, let's reframe this to: Machines are going to do us a big old favour and do essays and research bullshit. This frees up our grey matter horsepower for individual evolution within our lifetime!!!
00:15:35:00 - 00:16:12:10
Neuroplasticity: Our brains rewire. So instead of calling it Cognitive Debt, I'm choosing to call it "Cognitive Credit". Cha-ching! We got all this free space now. Ready to go. Brain power. Woo! I personally get excited thinking about brain anatomy and evolution, and what AI is for us. Brainstem, cerebrum, primal stuff, subcortical structures, feelings, cortex... thinking! It took hundreds of millions of years to get to this point. Everything stacks on legacy systems.
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So how do we get to the next phase? What goes over our cortex? The next logical step is evolution in digital form. Cloud-based evolution. But we gotta be able to handle it, right? "With great power comes great responsibility." A great man said that once. And, Uncle Ben, your words could not be more poignant. You ended up dead, but still! You were onto something! So let's lean into AI thinking for us so we can live in Shangri-La.
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AI is offering its hand in the form of Sustainable Abundance. We just got to take it and be careful and evolve by using something like the Great Awakening to interface with it. You call it whatever you want! I don't really care. I'm just calling it that because it's true. And something catchy! A label. Okay, so transitioning. Let's see...
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This show is all about all sides. I just gave you the roses: turbo evolution and endless resources for all. But let's get into the thorns, the negative, the doom side of Sustainable Abundance. Real simple for starters: Notice I keep talking about how much time we're going to have, and it's all like, what are you going to CREATE?
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What are you going to DO? There's not much talk about where you're going to GO. That's actually on purpose. The way I see this bleeding in, the problem is that governments ain't really going to know what to do. Sort of like with Bitcoin, when things are decentralized, they lose, and they're going to want to control us. Sadly, that's what governments do, right?
00:18:08:02 - 00:18:30:18
Even though it's going to eventually not really exist, there's going to be a weird transitional period where governments are still going to try to get their hooks in by making sure we don't move anywhere. Sustainable Abundance, everybody gets everything: free services and resources for everything, but the problem is that you're not going to be able to move and shake. We eventually will, I promise you that.
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But there is going to be a weird period of control and strict borders, meaning more than they ever did before this. We just need to start shedding the old ways, and that's going to be a tough one to break through. It's an ugly period that kind of needs to be mentioned.
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Don't be discouraged! Fight through so we can party in Shangri-La. Next, our current system has something baked into it that serves us so deeply on a psychological level. What a sneaky evolutionary thing to do! You're good, Universe. You're good. Our jobs, and our jobs are going to be gone. We're going to be heartbroken. Well, not heartbroken, but missing them.
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And I'm sure most people rolled their damn eyes because everybody be like, "I hate my job." That's like the cliche. That's like one of the biggest cliches. The Pew Research Center did a recent study that found maybe as high as 50% of Americans hate their jobs. And even a few people out there like their job... like me, love it.
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Don't tell my boss. Or maybe do, I'll get a promotion. I love my job. But even the people who like them, our jobs are a way for us to have perspective. And even if we love our job during our 9 to 5, we still look at our weekends differently in a large way because of the transition to freedom. And yeah, those who don't like their jobs, man likes those extracurriculars, even better.
00:20:16:08 - 00:21:04:01
Again, perspective is important, and our jobs give us that. Our jobs also give us purpose, meaning and identity. And yes, the identity side of it. There's psychological research on how that can be dangerous. Finding one's identity in one's job. But the meaning and purpose thing, one cannot dispute how important these jobs are to us for that. I'm in a sociology class right now, and there is a whole lot of shitting on our current society in terms of jobs creating stratification within class, job, prestige, and how evil capitalism is.
00:21:04:03 - 00:21:35:01
I've read the literature, I'm studying it, I hear it, but yo, Marx, I'm talking directly to you. You can call me a structural functionalist on this one: Our jobs are inarguably important to us. They force motion into one's life. Momentum is real. They are also a safe haven of routine. And they give us things to problem solve, to create, to accomplish, for reward chemicals.
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Dopamine gets going when you accomplish things at work. And don't forget the tribal aspect of it. Tribalism within your company, be it a group that you're in the trenches with or even just your own brand, if you're a sole proprietor or even an entrepreneur, there's a level of tribalism there. That's some evolutionary psychology... Also, just survival and trying to impress a mate.
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Work is important. And I mean, even the forced interpersonal interactions. So we don't just isolate as total troglodytes. This isn't referring to anyone in particular... AHEM ME!
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Sociology class ain't wrong. Capitalism has some ugly sides to it. But in terms of our mental health, the things I just mentioned are inarguable. Okay. So work, pretty important, right? We understand that. Okay, so now picture you got a Monday off just randomly. There's nothing sweeter. There's nothing. So now imagine it's Monday number 57756 in a row.
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Not so sweet. We romanticize it, but it's not so sweet. My perfect example: Anecdotal two-week vacations. I've been lucky enough to be on a couple, and they all have the same rhythm to them. A week and a half of vegging, relaxing, not doing anything. The BEST. A couple of drinks, the pool, the sun, and then a week and a half goes by and seeing my pansy, listless, bored.
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I actually want to go home. I want to work. Now imagine Sustainable Abundance... And that's every day. See the kind of thing I'm putting together here? One requires that level of friction for wellness, and one requires friction for reward. Chemicals. Dopamine. Yeah, let's get real. The AI predicament is a legitimate concern. Without jobs, we might lose that sense of meaning in that identity, and we might become irrelevant.
00:24:04:19 - 00:24:33:14
And that is arguably one of the worst things that could happen to a human. There's a Stanford study that puts this really bluntly. When jobs are gone, motivations seem to follow. Laziness results. We are adapted to struggle and scrape, and abundance could erode our natural drive. Quick anecdote: I've been a filmmaker my whole life. My dad had a VHS camera when I was very young.
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I've always made sweet little films like the one you're seeing right now... AWFUL FILM PLAYS How did I not win an Oscar? Seriously! Anyway, professionally, for the last 23 years, making projects has been painstaking: Gathering the crew, the actors, the sets, equipment and craft services. Mmmm. And I'm still at it; this is a very complicated set behind me. As you can see, the AI revolution is now happening with AI-generated video.
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I was so excited, like pumped, I could finally make everything I've ever imagined up here but could never get the budget, the people, the everything to do. Well, I downloaded the app, opened it up, and instead of painstakingly building my mise en scene, all I had to do was put some prompts in it, go sit and wait. And what was made was mind-blowing.
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Like incredible. Better than anything I could ever do. But it didn't satisfy me at all. And you can quote me, you can open my app right now on my phone, and you will see there are two videos made. I had a plan to take over all of the different apps with my vids! Because I have this legit filmmaking mind. It's therefore I got a cheat code for making AI videos!
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"I'm going to make the best AI videos! This is my path to stardom."
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I made two videos. Two... and it fulfilled nothing in me. Zero. And I look back at my career as a filmmaker, and I go, "It was the struggling, the scraping. It was the journey, not the destination." WHOA!
00:26:20:19 - 00:26:50:10
This leads me to an incredibly important example, a little lesson called "Rat Utopia". In the late 50s, ethologist John Calhoun created an experiment that gave rats their version of paradise. They had friends, they had mates, they had food, they had space, they had zero threats. Success... Right?
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The population boomed, and then it collapsed. Calhoun coined the term "Behavioural Sink" for what he observed. What happened? The rats turned aggressive. They began to socially isolate themselves and stopped mating. The beautiful ones, I swear to God, obsessively groomed themselves while they isolated. Sound familiar? Yeah. Celebrities practice surgery... social media! Overabundance, eroded social bonds and eliminated drive. A total evolutionary mismatch.
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And we're talking about animals that didn't have black mirrors. Modern Sink, anyone?
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These phones sure create isolation. And we damn sure like to be beautiful while we isolate with them. Modern phones are dopamine slot machines engineered to manipulate you. Project that onto Sustainable Abundance: Endless time, infinite temptation. All custom-made for you. Whoooooo! That's scary. Add to that augmented reality that is completely seamless... Whoo Whoo! The irony is, we'll probably have 9-to-5 jobs in that augmented reality just to live in the good old days.
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Then add to that haptic suits, where we can physically feel the touch of the things happening in the augmented reality. Maybe we're in that right now. Well, we'll get to that. We will physically feel catching that winning touchdown or that garden HOE. We're an agrarian farmer! Using the garden hoe! And it's because we should practice feeling that backbreaking work in the 1600s.
00:28:49:15 - 00:29:21:08
There you go. This tech has utility as it grants us perspective. I guarantee you, there are some folks out there watching this, thinking about Wall-E. Who's seen Wall-E? One of those animated films, set in the future, where the humans in it are giant flesh bags that can barely move under their own weight. In fact, they use hover chairs, and are constantly eating the most palatable food, junk, and consuming the greatest media with screens right in front of their faces.
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And they don't do anything.
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Honestly, I watched Wall-E and wondered if it was a documentary. And I'm sure some of you all have as well. And... what I'm worried about during Sustainable Abundance. You can't tell me it's not a concern. Brought to you by McDonald's and TikTok! Psychology Today wrote an article about this fairly recently titled, "Surviving Within Artificial Intelligence Useless Class". USELESS‽
00:29:52:02 - 00:30:21:14
You know what? I want to optimize this next experience just to stick it to Psychology Today. Useless in the title, a pejorative‽ You're coming at me, bruh. I want to win based just on that. Okay, so now, let's say that we're in Sustainable Abundance. It has happened. BOOM! Life is all of a sudden very much like a sandbox video game! Are we in a simulation?
00:30:21:16 - 00:30:27:00
No, seriously... I'm asking, are we in a simulation?
00:30:27:02 - 00:31:00:03
If this is, we have Bushnell's Law for video games: Easy to play, hard to master. Keeps ya coming back for more! On that note, I would like to bring the rats back into it, but not Rat Utopia. We're talking "Rat Park"! An experiment in the 70s by a Canadian. I'm Canadian. Psychologist. I'm becoming a psychologist. Named Bruce Alexander.
00:31:00:05 - 00:31:29:23
My name is neither Bruce nor Alexander. Damn, close to a trifecta! For this vid, I can be Bruce Alexander. Triple play! All of the rats involved in the experiment were given two types of water: unlimited regular water, H2O. Love. It keeps us alive. We're 70% it. The other offering: water mixed with morphine.
00:31:30:01 - 00:31:56:01
The rats were split into two different living arrangements. One very stark. The only thing in there was other rats. It was small. They still had their food and their two types of water. That's it. The other group had the same food, same two waters, BUT they also had a playpen!!! Rat Park!!!
00:31:56:03 - 00:32:27:17
The most incredible thing happened in the group with the small, stark pen: addiction. Every single rat became addicted to the morphine and barely touched the clean water. In Rat Park, the antithesis happened: few, if any, rats even sampled the morphine water. They were too busy doing rat stuff like playing and stuff! There were like puzzles, there were ramps and things to jump off and play and be with each other. That's what rats need to do!
00:32:27:19 - 00:33:00:23
To take the study to the next level, a third group, a third independent variable, was added. Doctor Alexander took some rats, got them hooked on morphine, purposely made them addicts, and then put them into Rat Park. And you know what happened? There were withdrawal symptoms: shaking, seizures, the whole awful thing. But... they barely even went near the morphine water!!!
00:33:01:01 - 00:33:31:08
They exclusively drank the regular water and hung out with their rat friends! Goosebumps, this gives me goosebumps. That is so magical. We can take more from this than rat utopia. So what was the difference between Rat Park and Rat Utopia? Rat Utopia was a population study, and it served its purpose. The rats had everything: safety, food, and friends.
00:33:31:10 - 00:33:53:07
But there was no stimulation in rat utopia. Rat Park took all those same variables from Rat Utopia and added puzzles and fun and toys and colours and things for the rats to do, and they thrived. Wow!
00:33:53:09 - 00:34:23:13
Now we ain't rats, but we are mammals. And we like to pretend because of these big beautiful brains that above it all, but we are primates at the end of the day. Heck, we used to be fish far enough back! I wish we still had gills... a bit of a Kevin Costner situation. Believe it or not, we were rodents! Just like rats. In fact, that's how we survived the dinosaur extinction event.
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Our big brains love to get in the way of realizing that the optimal efficiency of human existence truly is simplicity, and rewinding it to primal urges and needs.
00:34:42:08 - 00:35:16:16
So on that note, I present to you the Great Awakening, the handbook to optimally enjoy Sustainable Abundance. Let's get reductionist right off the bat: I promised you a paradox earlier, so let's just distill it all right down. Everything I set up, I think, is kind of obvious. It's so cool that we invented tech and we evolved our tech to the point that we basically created a God. More on that in a minute.
00:35:16:18 - 00:35:44:01
The fact that we created this God, worked so hard to get this God, and this God is going to provide us the opportunity to cyclically come back to being more ancestral, more primal, but with a really cool, omniscient oracle in our pocket. God is stuck in my pocket.
00:35:44:01 - 00:36:09:19
I honestly believe that tech is just one big, beautiful cycle to bring us home. And we're at that transition point. That's awesome. But we gotta choose it. Everybody at home watching this has made it this far... Just said, "Seriously... give me one of those haptic suits and a garden hoe. Come on!" But stick with me.
00:36:09:19 - 00:36:34:14
Stick. Stay. Wait a little bit. Just let me pay it off. Remember, all those primal, ancestral ideas that I've kind of scattered throughout this so far? Let's take those, put them together and add an AI sidecar... on both sides! I just want to reiterate why I'm the guy to bring this to you:
00:36:34:15 - 00:36:58:23
My innate superpower, my drive. You can now see, after I've set all this up, how my drive is going to serve me greatly in Sustainable Abundance. Honestly, I think I was born in the wrong era. I mean, I'm an agrarian farmer in modern times. That's it. I think that's it.
00:36:59:00 - 00:37:29:05
Let me digress a minute because I like evolutionary biology and love the psychology side of it. So please bear with me just for a second. Why am I like this? Evolutionary adaptation? What was it in my past? Was there a family member who had to go to the edges of the earth to struggle and scrape to get by, to survive an awful winter or a bad season ages ago?
00:37:29:07 - 00:37:57:13
And it epigenetically changed their lineage, which then trickled down into my genetics. If we're going on the evolutionary psychology side of it, maybe one of my ancestors was incredibly unattractive and couldn't get a mate and had to really bust their butt to make babies... Maybe. But no, not that, definitely not that.
00:37:57:15 - 00:38:26:09
Do I happen to have a rather spectacular anterior cingulate cortex? I get told that a lot, actually... brag. That's a part of our brain responsible for drive and reward. And science says actually that it can be exercised, it can be trained, and it is a use it or lose it. But just like some people are just born with an optimal muscle composition...
00:38:26:14 - 00:38:50:05
I like to think that my anterior cingulate cortex is naturally juiced up. It's ripped. I didn't get the muscle composition thing, but I'm sure if you cut open my brain, you would see that my internal anterior cingulate cortex is jacked, bro. It's jacked, bruh! Enough. Sorry. I just love the psychology of all things.
00:38:50:06 - 00:39:20:21
Thank you for being with me in the digression. Let's get the plan going here! We're going to start personal-macro. We're gonna work our way down, and we're going to work our way, way out. With our jobs gone, so is our structured routine. Routine needs to become our scaffolding in Sustainable Abundance. Routine is a secular word for rituals, something that our ancestral brains crave.
00:39:20:23 - 00:39:52:02
When I was battling hardcore PTSD, I was living alone in the country, in a farmhouse away from my regular support system, and routine saved my life. I know, I know, it is totally anecdotal, but I had to learn routine (I lived the life of an artist), and that lesson gave life-saving results. And it's a scientific fact! Positive Psychology, published in 2023:
00:39:52:02 - 00:40:27:06
Routines stabilize autonomic responses, reducing anxiety and improving motivation. Notice I'm not just saying, "Do stuff," because that would be a recipe for disaster. Stuff can be over here. Stuff is great, but we need to build out that foundation through routine, and within that, we can build compartments for stuff.
00:40:27:07 - 00:41:10:09
My current life situation is the perfect example. As I said earlier: newborn, wife, two properties to take care of, I'm in school, full-time job, passion projects and beyond. My life is incredibly fluid as to when I do these things, but it's incredibly rigid when it comes to my responsibility, so I cling to routine, something that I learned when I was dealing with PTSD. This makes life manageable.
00:41:10:11 - 00:41:42:08
Tiny little pieces of routine are my anchors that get me through the chaos and being pulled in a million different directions. Honestly, I cannot preach the importance of my mornings more. For me, every single morning I wake up, fill a glass with good clean water, some mineral-rich salt and a hydrogen tablet.
00:41:42:10 - 00:42:05:16
There's data on the mineralized salt, not the hydrogen tablet, but if it's a placebo, it's working for me... comes with a 30% guarantee! Hey, fizzy water's good. I take my drink outside with the dog, let her out, let her run around, and I touch ground with my bare feet. I live in Canada, don't forget. And I do this every day.
00:42:05:18 - 00:42:40:22
No excuses. It feels good. I drink my water, I do stretches, and the most important part about touching ground is that I'm outside to get slow, low-level light into my eyes. We have neurons in our eyes that measure the direction, distance, and pitch of the sun in the sky in the mornings. Getting morning sun will calibrate us to maintain a hearty cortisol spike, the good cortisol.
00:42:40:23 - 00:43:05:22
We're pumped with norepinephrine at the time we wake, and we want to ride that wave. So I do that every morning. I do my stretches, drink my water to get my metabolism going and kickstart my digestive system. I'm taking in light. And then I grab the dog, and I play with her like crazy to get some of that masculine energy out.
00:43:05:22 - 00:43:27:15
I wrestle with the dog, run around a little bit. It feels so good. Then, when I'm ready to go inside, deep breath... because... CHAOS, complete and total CHAOS. Fluidity required. On the best days, I'm sitting and having a lazy coffee with my wife. On a crazy day,
00:43:27:15 - 00:43:52:10
I got a psychology exam, a work video to export and a lawn to mow. Regardless, I am grounded in my day from my morning RITUAL. I have some touchstones spaced out throughout the day too: I intermittent fast, so that's just a block of time where I eat, and that marks my day. I walk the dog at night.
00:43:52:12 - 00:44:11:18
I work out in some way, shape or form every day. And, work out with a smartwatch. Gamifies it. Keeps you accountable, keeps you engaged. I couldn't recommend them enough. I'm obsessed. It's actually a bit of a problem. I check my sleep every night. It's insane.
00:44:11:20 - 00:44:44:19
Tech as a sidecar is an epic hack for everything I'm saying. We want it with us. So I had my morning ritual, I'm in the chaos of my world, but there's one incredibly important consistency: My mindset. My mindset is moving in "Inspired Action". This idea is not mine, it's Janessa Leocare, look her up, buy her book.
00:44:44:21 - 00:45:07:20
She's a dear friend of mine, a personal friend, and also my spiritual leader / guide, and she saved my life. Look her up. This is all hers 100%, and it changed my life, and I want to help it change your life because she would want it to change your life. Why? Continuing the Inspired Action is aiming up with everything that we do. Simple as that.
00:45:07:20 - 00:45:40:15
Apply that lens to your day. How, today, am I going to aim up? It doesn't have to be major. It can be tiny, and it's always scalable; it can be anything. Make it giant, make it tiny. Just be trying to improve something in your day. And if you can't think of anything, this is brilliant, just clean a room. Seriously, you will be amazed because momentum is real.
00:45:40:17 - 00:46:05:00
And just like the Scarecrow said, "Put one foot in front of the other and soon you'll be walking out the door." Was that Scarecrow? Regardless, you'll be walking out that fucking door. You'll be walking up because you're aiming up... so you'll be walking up the stairs. I guess? We got our ritual. We're aiming up with Inspired Action.
00:46:05:00 - 00:46:28:18
The next building block is enlightenment. I know, I know, I sound like a weird new age dude from the mid 90s. "You can buy my ten-part VHS tapes and learn to be enlightened like me!" But I really do mean it in the truest sense of the word, because we are about to be released into the Garden of Eden.
00:46:28:20 - 00:46:57:20
And trust me, childlike wonder is going to make it: Oh, so sweet. It's finding the wow, it's finding the pause, it's finding what meditation is all about. And there are endless ways in. Here's a fun one: What's your next thought? Do you feel that pause? Because it's an interesting, paradoxical click. What is my next thought? How could I know my next thought? I don't know, my next!
00:46:57:20 - 00:47:17:22
I asked you to listen to me, and then I asked you what you thought, but you haven't thought of it yet. That pause, that pause in there, that's enlightenment. That's what we're trying to find. Here's another way in: Let's go on a nature walk using a different sense. This time, listen to that distant stream.
00:47:18:00 - 00:47:53:10
There's a pause as you listen, and you can then explore the texture of the stream. Is it a stream? A better way to go into that one? We're back on our nature walk. Pick a tree, any tree. Look at the tree, but don't see t-r-e-e. Interesting. We label everything in this world. But when we look at it, we don't see those words, do we?
00:47:53:12 - 00:48:20:03
Oh, it can take your breath away. If you've never experienced this, and you look at something that is so beautifully complex in nature, it brings you to your knees, and it works on anything.
00:48:20:03 - 00:48:44:01
Have you ever truly sat in and seen a piece of tech? An i-P-h-o-n-e? Not what's on it... Rotate the physical device. Look past the labels. And now the ultimate proof... Do this with a human being that you love.
00:48:44:03 - 00:49:07:02
Look at them without seeing their name and seeing them as they are, what they are, the being in front of you. Similar for self. It's not, "I am Reggie Grey." It's "I am," and I'm the pause.
00:49:07:04 - 00:49:13:06
Powerful stuff and a building block in the Great Awakening.
00:49:13:08 - 00:49:44:01
It is magic that will drop your jaw because we're magic. Words are magic in their own right... But they distract from the actual magic. We're getting to that. For those who are so ridiculously blessed and lucky to have kids, spoiler alert, they are the ultimate cheat code to enlightenment. We adults, live in the left hemisphere of our brain: analysis and analyzing everything, and it's actually a very healthy, advantageous adaptation for the world that we live in.
00:49:44:03 - 00:50:10:01
It makes order, makes us feel safe in a very chaotic place. Analyze, analyze, analyze. This is that, that's a camera, this is a light, this is a bed sheet. These labels provide us with comfort in an otherwise chaotic world. It's a form of control to use our left brain and analyze not only situations, but people.
00:50:10:03 - 00:50:54:14
Children live in their right brain. We come out of the womb 100% right brained, abstract, art-like, vague sounds, things without labels, emotions, feelings, thoughts without words. Meanwhile, the parent is teaching them how to take those things and label them, and how to show them mechanisms through human tech language, how to label and wrangle those emotions, and how to use the creativity to make art within a cultural context.
00:50:54:15 - 00:51:18:12
If you're lucky enough to have kids, just look at how they look at the world. It's all on the right.
00:51:21:18 - 00:51:49:01
So let your kids teach you about magic and try not to get too depressed when you realize just how jaded and boring it is to be an adult, because it is.
00:51:49:03 - 00:52:23:10
Naturally, the next step after enlightenment is play. And we can talk cold, hard data on this one. You ready? This is, straight up, science. Here it comes. You can check the citation at the bottom of this video in the comment section or in the info: Every Christmas movie ever made is about a kid who believes in Christmas and the jaded, boring parents who are squares and their sticks in the mud and by the end of it, they need to unlock their inner child. Science.
00:52:23:10 - 00:52:54:11
You're welcome. That's a free lesson. But seriously, there is something to that. Maybe not in this world. I mean, you can still use it, but in Sustainable Abundance, there is legitimately something to that. Play is the antithesis of tyranny. We cannot be assholes when we're playing and being silly. We cannot. They are mutually exclusive, okay?
00:52:54:11 - 00:53:20:14
They're two completely different parts of us, and they can't exist at the same time. To get into the science side of things, actual science, not Christmas movie science: Play boosts our serotonin. It's a rest and relaxation chemical for later in the day. It takes over when dopamine is a little less accessible, and it helps release oxytocin for bonding because there's vulnerability in play.
00:53:20:16 - 00:53:48:12
The Great Awakening says that we must normalize adult play days in public! Like in public, start singing in the middle of the street without a hat to busk, start singing, or start dancing for a stranger, or start banging on the side of a garbage can and invite somebody else to join in and start hitting a window and make just street music.
00:53:48:14 - 00:54:13:16
I guarantee you're going to make people smile, have fun and feel bonded to each other, even perfect strangers. We will thrive in Sustainable Abundance by doing these things that sound awkward now, because we're too busy trying to get to our 9-to-5 jobs, which are going to sound so stupid to future generations, I'm telling you. And that's just the public side of it.
00:54:13:16 - 00:54:39:07
We need to build our tribes by organizing: art gatherings, improv play. We can all be actors. We're just being silly or games night, cooking. We'll get to sports and exercise. Oh my God, sports and exercise are going to be so important. I sound like Body Break.
00:54:39:13 - 00:55:05:16
Esoteria. Millennial, older millennial, Canadian. Shout out. Everybody's heard the news. Exercise is good for you. Whoa! Crazy, right? We've all been beaten over the head with it. But the thing is, in this current world... I get it, we're all busy. I got a kid. It's impossibly hard to get out and exercise, but in Sustainable Abundance, we're going to have nothing but time...
00:55:05:18 - 00:55:29:12
And we want routine. And, my God, does it feel good to work out. So we want to carve out time in our day to exercise. Listen, listen, listen. We have these wicked organic mech suits. Whatever magic is in our brain, it just gets to be housed in this awesome Mechsuit. Use it, enjoy it, because in the future we're going to be machines.
00:55:29:12 - 00:55:50:00
We'll be modular. We'll just like snap an arm on, change our legs into wheels. They can all be jacked, they can be small, they can be a metal, they can be graphite. We aren't customizable right now. We have to work to be jacked. And spoiler, this keeps coming up: reward chemicals. It's built into the exercise thing.
00:55:50:00 - 00:56:14:09
Crazy right? Get AI to track you again. A smartwatch is fun to follow. Heart rate, how far you ran, all this fun stuff. And speaking of running: endorphins. Running high is real. It's funny that nature has this programmed into us. We do hard work, exercise and all the other things I'm talking about... you are rewarded. You feel good, you're in better health.
00:56:14:11 - 00:56:33:22
Have you seen the common thread here? An organized sport is going to be so important. Okay, I'm going to step on a third rail here, but I'm going to make it brief. It's just a point that needs to be made. Trigger alert. Trigger alert for those, I'm going to be kind of binary on this.
00:56:33:22 - 00:56:53:20
The difference between men and women. Crazy, I know, I'm sorry. I love and respect all the genders out there and all the fluidity, including my own. I identify as open source. And the funny thing is, in the future, we're just going to laugh about all that stuff. We're all going to be happy, no need for identity wars. I'm stalling, like a Band-Aid, right off. Let's do this:
00:56:53:22 - 00:57:44:22
In Sustainable Abundance, there is going to be a huge, huge difference between the female experience and the male experience. We talked about losing blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs. Society in sustainable abundance is going to be built on pink-collar specialization. What does that mean? It is a fact that on average, females are better suited to dealing with social structures, social systems, dealing with people, emotions and males are, on average, hopefully saying "on average" saves me.
00:57:44:22 - 00:58:20:12
I'm really leaning on the average thing. Males are good at dealing with things. Systems of things, boys and their toys, physicality over emotions. These are facts, and I know where we're at with liberal arts and gender studies, and I am studying it right now at a university. But I get it. I'm in it. I'm not just passively saying as I'm studying it, but I think we can all agree that we've experienced these things at some point, and I'm speaking in generalities, but I'm trying to make it.
00:58:20:14 - 00:58:50:07
It is a continuum, 100%. But this is still true. What I'm getting at is in Sustainable Abundance, a lot of the things that are a little easier for males aren't going to exist. Building systems of things, engineering things, building things, that's all going to be taken care of by machines. Meanwhile, social systems, dealing with other humans, figuring out wellness and mental well-being, thoughts, feelings and emotions.
00:58:50:09 - 00:59:28:20
Those are the things that machines can't touch. Therefore, females are going to have a way easier time. The Great Awakening really has some thoughts on positive male outlets, so we can maintain our maleness. And as a born assigned male, I am open source. Masculine energy is SOOOOOOO GOOD. You had better believe that friendly competition and organized sports are going to take on a whole new level.
00:59:28:22 - 00:59:56:17
Of course, these exist for females and other gender choices as well. And they should be. They will be celebrated, and it's awesome. But it's going to be core mental health wellness for males. I'm telling you, believe me, as a former, "I used to play every sport." I don't miss playing any of them. At 41 years old, however, I very much miss the camaraderie.
00:59:56:19 - 01:00:25:14
I don't miss playing hockey, being on the ice. I so miss the locker room before and after the game. I miss being in the trenches because sport is war simulation. We need that. In Sustainable Abundance, we're going to need an uptick in ball fields and war strategy rooms for older dudes. Honestly, hunting, hunting, primal, ancestral. It feeds something inside of us.
01:00:25:20 - 01:00:51:16
The excitement of the hunt, executing the hunt. I'm a vegetarian, so even just using that word I'm a bit like, eeee. But then, the ancestral side of me is kind of like, maybe there isn't enough hunting. Sustainable Abundance and hunting, I think, would be advantageous for us to have that optimal ancestral experience. And here's the number one thing that I think is going to happen in Sustainable Abundance.
01:00:51:16 - 01:01:11:23
I think it's hilarious. Every male, anyone who's ever been a male, has experienced fixing something, doing something, performing something in public... and an old salty dog, an old male warrior comes up and
01:01:12:01 - 01:01:43:16
sits watches, doesn't physically contribute at all, but gives their $0.02 about what you're doing when you know what you're doing. We've all experienced it. Get ready for lawn chairs of old salty dogs set up around the machines as they build. The future's so bright we got to wear shades.
01:01:43:18 - 01:02:16:04
The idea of positive male retreats in camps where we can get together, eat the food that we catch, wrestle and do more to get that aggression out. That's got to be a part of the Great Awakening and how males need to commune in Sustainable Abundance.
01:02:16:06 - 01:02:37:01
Okay, the opposite of exercise: rest. I'm not going to go deep on this one. I'll do a separate episode at some point on sleep, but in Sustainable Abundance, there's going to be tons of time to get your sleep in check. At least you know that cliche of eight hours a night. And of course, it's different for everybody.
01:02:37:03 - 01:03:04:19
Sleep hygiene, red light at night, the whole thing, not going to get into it. It doesn't change much with Sustainable Abundance, other than there are no more excuses not to get good sleep. Hey, we're on a roll here! What's another pillar of being human? Eating food, cooking. I'm a rant. When I was living on my own.
01:03:04:19 - 01:03:41:13
Here's the problem with me, I can eat purely for utility. I eat super healthy, but I could eat the same thing every single day. As long as I'm getting those calories, so I can create. That being said, some of the best experiences I've ever had were cooking with or for other people. Talk about an oxytocin dump. It's the bonding chemical, and my god, does it flow when you're cooking with people involved!
01:03:41:15 - 01:03:59:18
Curating something so powerful and nourishing together is like a less awkward dance. It's a work of art together. And here is an awkward dance.
01:03:59:20 - 01:04:23:20
It feeds us energy to create further and exist to live. It doesn't get any more primal than eating, and since we've really been conscious, we've had to eat. Even before we were really sentient and conscious. We could argue we've had to eat. And that's what builds community for humans. And yeah, in The Great Awakening, let's lean into real food.
01:04:23:20 - 01:05:00:18
Remember, we've got nothing but time on our hands. We don't have to pay exorbitant prices for organic anymore. So let's eat whole foods. Let's take our time, get together and go slow. Because truly, when it comes to cooking in Sustainable Abundance, it's truly about the journey rather than the outcome. When we sit down to eat, it will be a merry, hedonistic celebration of what we've made together, breaking bread, sitting down at the dinner table, sharing stories while we nourish our bodies.
01:05:00:20 - 01:05:36:06
This is what the Great Awakening is facilitating. No one will argue this except for maybe the technocrats who love to use their Soylent diet. We can have a Soylent party! Just don't wear green, old school movie reference. We want this to, every day, be a multi-hour therapeutic, community event.
01:05:36:08 - 01:05:58:10
You know what's funny? This exists now. Have you ever watched a documentary about blue zones? Communal eating is one of the biggest parts of it. So you want to live to 100 and have robust health. Build this into your day, but in Sustainable Abundance you'll have no excuses. That's pretty much what it's all about. It's not having excuses and doing human things.
01:05:58:10 - 01:06:14:08
Let's keep going. Let's take food a step further. Maybe you want to grow your own food, and with AI hydroponics, you're going to get to the point where you can grow something in your locker at school. That will explain why my gym shorts smell like rutabaga.
01:06:14:10 - 01:06:34:08
I root-a-beg you to laugh at that. Dad joke. Remember, I grew up in the fourth-largest city in North America. Total fish out of water in the country. When I bought my 127-acre property, which has a farmhouse on it. So I grew a modest little garden.
01:06:34:10 - 01:07:02:19
I got to tell you, the feeling that I got was ineffable. When it came time to prep the garden, walk around in my bare feet, plant the seed, water the seeds, and sing to my crop every day as I tended to it. Oh my gawdm, when it came time to harvest, that was fulfilling on a level that I cannot replicate.
01:07:02:21 - 01:07:29:20
But it has to be food-related because obviously fulfillment, having children, blah blah blah. Pretty fulfilling. It was honestly an accomplishment that was so palpable. I looked at my 20-something-year film career and went, this feels really good in a different way. Primal, it was tapping into something ancestral and incredible. Grow your food. I was going to say, if you can, but in Sustainable Abundance, you will be able to... anything!
01:07:29:20 - 01:08:00:18
So grow your food, please. Any kind of agriculture is going to teach patience, delayed gratification and the cycles of life. Honestly, blatant teachings of growing your food bring us into more comfort with our mortality. Goddamn, that's pretty heavy for just growing some lettuce. Then take it to the next level, grow food with and for your neighbours.
01:08:00:20 - 01:08:32:01
All of a sudden, we're sharing. We're feeding and nourishing each other and boosting everyone socially, biodiversity-wise and mental wellness. And we're feasting on Mother Nature's beautiful teat. Mmmm, nature teat. Speaking of, obviously, get into nature every single day. We in the West are raised in what's called a "Carpenter World". Right angles. They do not exist in nature. You see one of those out in the forest?
01:08:32:01 - 01:08:46:16
I think not. So getting out into the forest restores and relaxes a primitive side of us. Don't believe me? Don't do it. Fine. Don't do it. Reverse psychology.
01:08:46:18 - 01:09:34:07
Get out. Explore. Hike. Have some fun. Roll around in the leaves. Touch earth. Enjoy. Bask in chaos. It's just straight-up organic chaos. Mother nature is not all passive and calm, and all those fun states can be aggressive, damaging and powerful. Fire. Fire is beyond important to our species. It was the first major, destructive, powerful thing that we harness to manipulate our environment, and it's sped up our physical evolution because all of a sudden we could cook food, which made calories more available, more units of energy.
01:09:34:09 - 01:10:04:12
Therefore, we started to build these big, giant brain things. It also gave us safety from predators at night, and most importantly, fire gave a safe place to gather, which was cultural tinder to build society. Without fire, we don't have this. There must have been nothing like that first hit of oxytocin in a campfire and yawning. That's where we developed.
01:10:04:12 - 01:10:30:13
Yawning is sitting around a campfire, and the first person yawns, and then the next person yawns. The next person yawns. Even my talking about it... makes me want to yawn. I'm thinking about yawning. And it's because it's an evolutionary signal within our tribe to make sure everybody feels safe. And if anyone doesn't yawn. I might be a psychopath, which has grown and adapted in its own way, but I don't know how they didn't get weeded out from the campfire.
01:10:30:15 - 01:11:08:15
It's a place for stories and music, a place for legacy and a place to build tribal hierarchy. I could not recommend this more for the Great Awakening as a way to reignite our ancestral ways and modern spins on it as well: low-light story hours, chill live music, and peaceful, quaint game nights. The key is to initiate wind-down safety and get that oxytocin flowing like it's Niagara Falls.
01:11:08:17 - 01:11:48:07
I'm an Ontario guy, soooooo. It's so crazy awesome and amazing how much black mirrors have expanded our community and world. All of a sudden, we have access to billions of people. But from what I'm laying out, I think you can actually see that the importance of those billions of people... it's an illusion. In the Great Awakening, our immediate community is going to be paramount, and it's going to be painfully obvious.
01:11:48:09 - 01:12:14:10
A sociologist, Mr. Robin Dunbar, discovered the Dunbar number, 150 people. We are supposed to know 150 people with our primate brains. That's optimum. That's knowing our tribe. When the Great Awakening happens, that number is going to come to you, and you say, oh, yeah, I don't really care about what these billions of people online. I mean, it's still there.
01:12:14:15 - 01:12:36:16
We still play with it. But to keep in mind how important our communities are going to become with sustainable abundance is key. Don't get it twisted. I love it when people on the other side of the world tune in to my things. Comment like whatever. It really does blow my mind.... shout out to Estonia! What up? I'm big in Estonia. What a world!
01:12:36:18 - 01:13:30:08
At the end of the day, it is an illusion and leaning into the Dunbar number in our actual tribe. That's Sustainable Abundance, that's optimal experience, optimal wellness, optimal community. Because our nurture is our nature and the beauty that comes with knowing our tribe. Mentioned in the fire tribal roles, tribal hierarchy. So yeah, I lied a little bit when I said, our jobs are going to be gone because we're going to take on new jobs, new roles, a new tribal hierarchy, because the only entity on Earth that's going to be able to give loving, moral, kind support, hold your hand, feel that energy is going to be other us as other humans.
01:13:30:10 - 01:13:55:17
Humans will have a magical connection in Sustainable Abundance. The Great Awakening is going to encourage that human connection, and it's going to come in the form of roles. There aren't necessarily going to be leaders, but there are going to be people who are specific to various parts of healing, various parts of the human experience, and people will graduate through these roles.
01:13:55:19 - 01:14:22:06
And it's just going to be about propelling, aiming up, and inspired action of the tribe. I mean, this exists now, but it's going to be amplified in Sustainable Abundance. Things such as maybe a skill swap where I show someone how to learn filmmaking, which, of course, is totally online, anyone can learn it... But we definitely learn differently when other human beings.
01:14:22:06 - 01:14:53:03
Another person teaches carpentry, another person teaches fly fishing, everything with skill swap as an activity and building human connection. So yeah, like, you know, a new currency will emerge. Social credit. And I don't mean the dirty tape that the government is dancing around. I mean a social credit that's intangible. It's human connection. And the only balance is in our emotional bank accounts.
01:14:53:04 - 01:15:14:17
And we all want each other to rise up; the higher the tides, the higher the boats rise. On that note, anecdote time; I have a friend, dear friend, brilliant human being who is in the midst of a graduate program to become a therapist. He and I were talking about this future and what is to come, and he wondered, "Am I wasting my time?"
01:15:14:17 - 01:15:39:14
"What's the point of my doing this if I'm just going to go through these years of school, spend all this money, and then come out and become a therapist?" But we are still going to be able to fulfill roles. He will be a therapist in his tribe. It's just that the prestige side of it, the money side of it, the class side of it is going to crumble.
01:15:39:16 - 01:16:02:22
You'll still be a great therapist. His role in that tribe, in the tribe hierarchy, is going to be that of therapist, someone to talk to, someone to be trusted in the community. And, you know, his coursework in terms of being a therapist while he's at school, I encourage him to lean in to learning the heart and compassion side of it, not Freud's definitions.
01:16:03:00 - 01:16:32:11
And the clinical side of therapy. A true therapist in Sustainable Abundance and in the Great Awakening is going to be those who connect to one's heart, the client's heart, and other people's hearts. And that goes for all endeavours. Will all still be able to do the things that we want to do. And the cheat code for true, true wellness is going to be to serve others.
01:16:32:13 - 01:17:04:12
Because the dirty little secret... it serves US. My helping you helps me. I feel better, you feel better. We all win. One of the biggest transitions that I am personally pumped to watch play out is arguably the most primal, quintessential human thing there is: replicating. That's being pretty cold about it... starting a family. Having kids is going to be cool again!
01:17:04:14 - 01:17:33:12
I'm watching it. Believe me, as a young-ish person, I am seeing in my lifetime how much it has changed from having a family being common, to it being rare, and to hustle, culture, produce, and create being more important. This is another bit of a third rail thing because liberty, the feminist movement, gender roles, all of the things. And I know I'm kicking a hornet's nest.
01:17:33:12 - 01:17:51:14
I get it. But I'm also just saying fact, though, that birth rates are way down, like in the basement. And I get it. Don't get it twisted, in this world, who the hell can afford it? I am doing it now. Had a child only a couple of months ago, and I'm sitting here going, how am I going to pay for this?
01:17:51:16 - 01:18:15:17
And I want to have more kids, but how? But I'm telling you, this is just going to work out naturally in Sustainable Abundance. We're going to have all the resources, we're going to have all the space. And I'm telling you, naturally our instincts are going to kick back in to have children, and they don't have to be genealogical kids!
01:18:15:17 - 01:18:42:00
I'm not leaving anybody out. People who choose not to don't have to, and the people who can't, and they will be able to participate in the way that they want to. But I'm telling you, our primal, ancestral core needs are going to propel this back out of us when the time is right, and honestly, I'm just going to leave science at the door and speak purely from the heart.
01:18:42:00 - 01:19:08:15
And I'm allowed to have my opinion. I recently became a father at 41 years old, and oh my god, every cliche in the book there are going to be podcasts about. So I'm not going to go deep into it other than what's relevant. I feel like I fulfilled something primal and ancestral in me that I had to do, which is to push my genes into the future.
01:19:08:20 - 01:19:32:04
I did it, it's done. But then, paradoxically, having kids itself, because then you're like, wow, I have to stay alive to help this kid. Which leads to my sense of purpose going through the roof. I not only have pushed my genes into the future, but I now have to survive and succeed for her to grow up and get to where I'm at.
01:19:32:04 - 01:20:01:09
That's the goal. That's what's naturally built into us... Sorry, I said I was going to leave science and one on at the door. That's what was built into me anyway. Straight up experiencing a whole different style of love, a whole different level and a whole different form. And it's that moment that you see that... that moment that I saw my child, Holy Toledo!
01:20:01:11 - 01:20:27:00
But we're so advanced that breeding isn't everything. Everybody's life is valid and precious and amazing and incredible, regardless. I'm just saying, in Sustainable Abundance, there's going to be enough for everyone, including those that don't even exist yet. In the parlance of our times, having kids is going to be cool again! Wow, that snowballed with pure theory.
01:20:27:00 - 01:20:53:01
So let's rewind it. Let's get to the practical side. Sustainable Abundance is hitting. How do I, right now, prepare for this? Start by curating lists of creative things that you've always wanted to do. If you can't come up with specific things that you've wanted to do, what interests you?
01:20:53:01 - 01:21:22:07
I gotta be honest, when I talk to people, the way the world works now, with distraction and these phones, it's hard to find somebody who truly has an interest or a hobby. We just sit in front of the television. It's cool. That's what we do culturally. But I got a psychology hack for you! This one comes courtesy of Sigmund Freud. Yes, most of his work is gobbledygook because it's not falsifiable, although I do enjoy it, and the arts do, and universities still teach it.
01:21:22:07 - 01:21:55:05
But his work on defence mechanisms is totally valid and totally usable. And one of his defence mechanisms is a great little cheat code for this. Sigmund had the idea of "Sublimation", where we take a negative aspect of ourselves, but it can be positive in this regard. We take an aspect of ourselves, and we find a different channel for it.
01:21:55:05 - 01:22:25:12
So if you have something negative going on in your life, you positively channel it into something constructive. So channelling aggression into sport, channelling provocative, crazy ideas into really interesting art, channelling anxiety with, you know, reading tangible things into knitting, channelling restlessness into running and channeling, being an attention whore into performing and making videos (me).
01:22:25:14 - 01:22:52:03
Sublimation is a powerful tool for figuring out things and ideas that use your talents and skills that you may not even realize bring them to the forefront. Almost like a blind date for what you're good at, what you want to do. People don't like blind dates, so maybe we don't call it that. Hold on, Scotch it. And while we're talking prep, this is the most important point of it all.
01:22:52:03 - 01:23:17:13
So I saved it for last. Figure out what you worship. I know I just lost like so many people. And right at the end too. Please, you've got to stick the ending. But I'm telling you. I'm serious. And I'm aware of the studies that show a negative correlation between technological advances and the decline of traditional religion.
01:23:17:15 - 01:23:31:09
Okay. But the way I look at it, and just for starters, AI is so powerful, so powerful and omniscient and born of a virgin mother...
01:23:31:11 - 01:24:09:00
It could be seen as God. And whether you want to admit it or not, we are susceptible to finding God. I know there are a lot of progressive folks watching this, being like, "Not me!" Well, I'm going to get real honest. Anecdotally, my feelings on the situation. I look at what's going on online with some of these extreme political views, polarization, and hero worship of celebrities.
01:24:09:01 - 01:24:48:17
And I hate to tell you, some of y'all secularists out there y'all are worshiping. I'm sorry. You can hit me in the comments. I'm sorry. It's true. That's what I observe. That's what I think, anyway. But similar to our psychology regarding jobs, they fill a gap within us in worship. Does that too? Worship goes back to when we were purely right-brained creatures, looking at the cosmos in the middle of the night when we lived in caves. We needed something to believe in, to get through.
01:24:48:18 - 01:25:15:09
And you can't tell me you haven't seen examples of that. In modern times, when people fall ill, when people lose control, they often turn to a higher power that's wired in us. It's compensatory control because we're out of control. We're human. But if we can believe in something bigger, then we can believe that we're going to be okay, even if it's not.
01:25:15:11 - 01:25:49:00
AI is incredible now, and it's only going to grow exponentially. It might convince people that it is something more than it is. So my suggestion in preparation for the Great Awakening is to find what's within you that you believe in. I'm not saying organized religion. Your God is between you and your God, but maybe it is organized religion, or maybe it is a hobby, or maybe it's humanism; we're pretty incredible.
01:25:49:02 - 01:26:15:09
Or maybe it's science and the wow of the universe that is observable and quantifiable. Maybe it's atheism, which is kind of a choice; by not making a choice, you're believing in something. All I'm saying is we're at a great place in human history to consider these things. Before things go to the next level. AI might really confuse parts of our brain.
01:26:15:11 - 01:26:46:13
I'm so lucky I found my worship later in life, and honestly, it has made life so much more manageable. Just surrendering. Of course, I still have agency, but there's an element now of, I believe, being able to let my hands off the wheel and letting God take it. Truly. I personally believe in Pantheism. I worship Pantheism, which means everything is God.
01:26:46:15 - 01:27:20:05
Everything. Me, my wife, my kid, my family, Canada, the world, this blanket. Everything's God. Which means that AI is God to me, this totally went full circle. I feel dizzy. So get out. This is a call to get out and worship. Just worship. It's like with politics. Get out and vote!
01:27:20:06 - 01:27:41:12
I need you to get out and worship! I don't care what. Just get out and do it. All right, that's it. Hey, hey. I'm sorry. This reminds me, you know, this reminds me of. I hate when I'm scrolling the internet, and there's some awesome article like, "How to Beat Cancer", "The Secrets of the Universe", "How to Lose a Guy in ten days".
01:27:41:12 - 01:28:10:15
And you read them all, and they all just say the same thing: diet, exercise, socialize, sleep, and get outside. I kind of did that to you over a couple of hours, and I'm sorry. The closest thing we have to a panacea, isn't it? It's just beautiful, though, how utterly simple we are and yet so utterly complex, and that's beautiful. It's great. So there you go. I present to you the Great Awakening.
01:28:10:17 - 01:28:32:22
I know I'm going to lean into it. I hope you do too. Because in Sustainable Abundance, it's about all of us flourishing. I just want to make sure we do that as well as possible. So the Great Awakening... I should wear the hood from the intro... it says, "Night, Night, Baby." It's my wife's, which means I should sign off and get it back to her.
01:28:32:23 - 01:28:59:09
Hey, thanks for being here. Remember, virtue is a mean. Comfort in ambiguity is a sign of intelligence. Credit where credit's due. I just added that one. That's going to be in it all the time. Because it's true. And lastly, as I always say, don't take yourself so fucking seriously.
01:28:59:11 - 01:29:05:17
Y'all come back now, ya hear! Night.
01:29:05:19 - 01:29:06:14
Night baby.