Transcript: Staying Human in the Digital Age — Daniel Vitalis #008

0:00

I don't draw the distinction between natural and unnatural.

Rather I like to draw the distinction between natural and artificial.

Now we're being told AI is going to free us up intellectually from all this work that we've been doing.

0:16

Well, I don't think that's what's going to happen.

Cognitive diminishment is going to become very significant.

You look back into the origins of science, and these are all primarily Christians and also a lot of Muslims in early chemical sciences and astronomical sciences.

But this secular science, this science divorced from the spiritual, is about 150 years old.

0:37

Look what happened in our world in 150 years.

My goal is to keep my soul.

And that might sound a little bit extreme to some people, but I think other people get exactly what I mean.

Welcome to the first solo episode of the Daniel Vitalis podcast.

0:56

I get a lot of requests to do these solo shows.

They're a little bit more challenging to put together, but very rewarding for me.

And one of the reasons is I've got a lot of my own personal content that I've developed over the last 20 years, but a lot of that never really shows up when I'm interviewing other people, except maybe in little bits here and there during our conversation.

1:16

So although it's a little more difficult to put together than just bringing someone on the show for a conversation, I'm going to do more of these episodes because you've been requesting them and because I really like doing them.

So this will be the first one of the Daniel Vitalis Show.

1:31

And just to say, the Daniel Vitalis Show is actually my third podcast.

So I'll get a little bit more into that as we go on. 1st, of course, hey, you know, the landscape has really changed from the last shows that I've done in What I mean is the podcast world is so saturated now.

1:49

There's so many podcasters out there.

It seems like almost everybody has their own show.

So I know you hear it all the time.

Hey, please subscribe, please leave a rating, please leave a comment if you don't do that.

Part of the challenge is we get overlooked by the algorithm.

2:05

So if my work has ever really contributed to your life in any kind of meaningful way, if anything I've ever said or shared or guests I brought on have been a help to you, you could really give back by giving that, you know, So hitting that subscription, leaving a rating, leaving a comment, it really does help us.

2:21

So that would mean a lot to me.

And I understand I'm one of those people.

I'm pretty slow to do that too.

So I get that.

But I'm personally asking you for that favor.

And I promise I'll keep continuing to bring you really incredible content as my give back to you.

So thank you so much for doing that in advance.

2:39

So the Daniel Vitalis show is all about equipping people with the tools they need to survive the changes we're going through in the modern world, because everything is changing right now.

I'm going to be really focused on this show, on some of the core things that have always meant a lot to me.

2:57

Health, fitness, nutrition, but also intellectual stimulation, emotional intelligence, which I think all of us can work to develop more of.

And spiritual discernment, which is something that I think, you know, in the years past, maybe 10 years ago, to say that that you know, you're going to focus on content around spiritual discernment might have come across as a little bit of a turn off to people.

3:25

But more and more I'm seeing that people are really opening up to the spiritual realm in the spiritual dimension.

I know I am.

And I think that has a lot to do with the kind of things that we're seeing happening in the world today.

And that is going to be a focus for this show as well.

Now, before we get too far into it, I just want to say if you have guest recommendations for this show, send them over to me.

3:46

Go over to danielvitalis.com, send us an e-mail, write me on Instagram, leave comments to this episode, but let me know who you'd like to hear or see on the show.

That would help a lot.

But like I said before, this is actually my third podcast.

4:02

So I did the Rewild Yourself show back in.

Started in 2014.

Again, just a completely different era.

So much hadn't happened yet.

We went 177 episodes.

That show was really all about this concept of human rewilding and how I arrived there was studying domestication and realizing that, oh, the forces of domestication that we had used against the natural world, you know, wild animals that we domesticated like, you know, the aurochs becoming the cow or the wild jungle fowl becoming the chicken.

4:43

You know, these this domestication that we'd also done to plants, right?

So taking the wild brassica and turning it into broccoli and cabbage or, you know, wild black tukas and turning them into lettuces.

These same forces of domestication that we'd applied to other species we had inadvertently applied to ourselves.

5:02

And now we are like a domesticated species.

And part of the thesis of that show is this idea of modern humans being Homo sapiens domestico fragilis, the domesticated, fragile human.

Because compared to our ancestors, we really are pretty fragile and highly domesticated.

5:20

And so I was looking at everything at that time through that lens.

And what would it take for us to start to apply to ourselves some of the principles of our wildlife in existence so that we could become stronger and more fit, maybe not for the built environment, but actually for our natural environment.

5:39

So again, like one of the things that had occurred to me was when you domesticate an animal or a plant, they actually become very fit for the environment that they're in.

So if we were to take a wolf, a Gray wolf, and domesticate it into a dog, all domesticated dogs are Gray wolves and we domesticated it into a lap dog.

6:02

And that lap dog's job was to live in an apartment and comfort the people that it lived with.

Well, that animal is very adapted to its apartment lifestyle.

But if we took that lap dog, let's say it's a Shih Tzu or a miniature pincer or something like that, and we want to take it now out into a wild environment.

6:19

Well, now that animal is not adapted.

It's actually Mal adapted to its natural environment.

So we'd want to look at wolves and be like, well, you know, what are the things that wolves do?

What are the things that wolves eat?

And if we give some of that stimuli to that domesticated dog, can we begin to build some of the strength that would help it to readapt to its natural lifestyle?

6:42

Part of the reason I want to do that is because I see that modern humans are more and more living in the built environment and the digital environment, but they're becoming very maladapted to the natural world.

So that is kind of the main theme of the Rewild Yourself show.

6:58

And all of those episodes are, most of those episodes are still available.

And just about every week I get messages from people that have just found that show and are still being impacted by it, which is really great for me because, you know, I find those episodes a little embarrassing.

7:14

You know, that's back in 2014, 2015, 2016.

I was a lot younger, pretty cocky, you know, I hadn't gotten married yet.

So, you know, had a lot of my sort of like still bachelor mentality.

And I was applying this idea of wildness, I think, with a lack of the spiritual discernment I was talking about a little while ago.

7:38

So still some really useful content in that show.

But you know, I've grown and changed a lot.

And so eventually that show came to an end.

Now one of the things that was happening was I, I was, I had already been a public speaker.

I'd already been leading workshops and retreats for about 8 years or so when I started the Rewild Yourself show and I'd had my company, Sir Thrival since 2008.

8:03

So I'd already been pretty busy with the work I was doing and my primary interest was food, nutrition and physical movement.

Still huge areas of interest for me, but that's where I was really focused and those episodes sort of led me as I kept learning more and more about wildness.

8:25

Now, a little context.

I was talking to a lot of different types of experts and what I was finding was in all these different fields.

I mean, I, I talked to a lot of psychologists, I talked to a lot of professors, I talked to folks who specialized in birth.

I spoke to folks who specialized in death and death care, you know, all these different interesting fields, you know, child rearing, education, all, everywhere I went, it seemed like everybody understood that we had gotten away from understanding human beings as an Organism embedded into our natural environment.

9:01

And that that stepping away from our natural environment was leading us to take on education and practices that were very divergent from what humans actually need to thrive.

And so it seemed like everyone I talked to understood, hey, reintegrating into nature and into the natural world is going to be crucial to our health moving forward.

9:24

The more that I looked at that, the more I wanted to figure out ways to do that.

So slowly and overtime, I finally got more and more interested in wild food.

So I did my last episode of Rewild Yourself in 2017 and that show had a lot of broad content and I decided to focus in more specifically on wild foods.

9:47

Now I had had some background, especially in foraging, but I was starting towards the end of that show to get into hunting.

So I think I started hunting in about early 2016 and I ended the Rewild Yourself show in 2017.

10:04

So I had just gotten together with my wife, now wife and I remember early into that relationship I said to her, you know, I'd like to spend these next 10 years hunting and pursuing wild food.

And so I decided to do that and I started up not just the Wild Fed podcast.

10:24

So that would be my second podcast, but I started filming with my friend, cinematographer and long time producer Grant Giuliano.

We started to make ATV style show for Vimeo called Wild Fed as well.

10:39

So there was the podcast as well as the TV show, Now the podcast.

Every episode was focused in on wild food content.

I'd bring in foragers, hunters, nutritionists, people who really understood wild foods.

And then each episode of the show would be us going out and I would be hunting for something or fishing for something to get an animal and get protein.

11:01

And then I would be foraging for something, which could have been a plant or fungi, a mushroom, something like that, a lichen.

And then I'd be bringing those ingredients back in.

A lot of times what we do is go to chefs or restaurants and turn those into these incredible meals.

And then we'd gather everybody who had been involved in or advised in that hunt or that forage, and we'd all sit down to a meal together.

11:23

So we started to produce that show.

And before we knew it, we actually ended up on cable, which was a really incredible story, which I'll share a little bit of.

So it was about 2019, I think, when we first got the podcast going.

11:40

And that podcast went until 2023.

So that was about 175.

I think we did 174 episodes, like I said, very focused on procuring our own food.

But we started putting the TV show out on Vimeo behind a pay wall, and we never had an intention of getting that onto cable TV.

11:59

We kind of imagined it actually getting onto a streaming platform pretty quickly.

What we realized is because of the weapons involved in hunting, most of the streaming platforms don't want to show that.

Now this is a really interesting bit of media psychology because think about all of the movies and TV shows where you see people using firearms to kill one another.

12:25

Now of course this is fiction, but you'll see all manner of weapons being used not just to shoot people, but I mean to like blow up cars and blow up buildings.

And I mean, you just see mass murder and individual murder, cold blooded murder constantly with firearms on television and in movies.

12:44

And yet if you want to use a firearm arm for really what it's best used for, which is going out and procuring food, well, nobody wants to show that because it's real.

And So what we found was it was very difficult to get ourselves onto any streaming platforms, but we did end up getting onto cable because of the Outdoor Channel, which is part of the Sportsman's group.

13:08

And now this is just a couple of channels.

They're really the only channels platforming hunting and outdoor content in any kind of meaningful way.

And they are very comfortable platforming that kind of content.

So firearms being used to harvest animals for food.

13:25

And we were a little bit, I'd say a little out of place on that network.

I think I'm a lot different than the typical host on that network, but wow, were they just incredible to work with.

We went six seasons on Outdoor Channel, 60 episodes total.

13:42

I can't even believe it looking back on it, but we made 60 episodes and they were just amazing to work with.

So even though I didn't fit the mold, I don't look like most of the people who hunt on that Channel.

I don't talk like most of the people that hunt on that Channel.

They were extremely gracious to me.

13:58

We had a great couple of guys we worked with called Dynamo Films.

That was sort of our go between between US and the network and we had almost no oversight.

We just got to make our show and turn it in every year and received our budget.

14:14

It was just a fantastic opportunity.

Now, for me, that was like getting a college, like a, like a doctorate, you know, at least a master's degree.

I mean, 60 episodes of this show, traveling all over the country and a bit around the world, learning all about, you know, harvesting plants, harvesting mushrooms, harvesting animals and fishing and then how to process all of those into foods.

14:38

I mean, I got the education I was really, really looking for.

Now, I also did the podcast, which didn't run as long as the show, but those 174 episodes are similar.

I got to learn a lot about wild food.

Now part of why I wanted to do that, I think you see today, so many people are interested in learning about where their food comes from.

14:58

And very often what happens is people go towards growing a garden and or getting into permaculture or planting an orchard and maybe raising their own chickens or raising their own pigs or a cow and learning how to use agriculture to feed themselves.

15:14

And I wanted to try an alternative approach for a couple of reasons.

One reason had to do with just my overall worldview.

Having studied wild people and wild foods for so long and the idea of humans integrated with nature, there was like a kind of like an ethical reason I wanted to learn to feed myself with wild foods versus agricultural foods.

15:39

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But another component of that is like I have a strong kind of survivalist mentality.

16:49

You know, I'll talk about that a little bit more in a while here.

But but I grew up with paranoid and timey type, a pretty end timey type mom.

And she really instilled in me that the world was going to change dramatically in my lifetime.

And so far she has been right.

17:06

And I see the trend line and where it's headed.

And so I like the idea of wild foods because I can take that anywhere with me.

So I very much appreciate my friends who have farms, who have gardens, who have orchards, who raise livestock, who have laying hens for eggs.

17:27

I mean, I rely on these folks.

I love those foods.

But let's say something happened that disrupted their ability to be on the property, where they had developed the infrastructure to grow or raise or rear those foods if for some reason they had to leave that place.

17:43

Now, that's a very difficult thing to replicate wherever you end up.

But with Wild foods, I can take that skill set with me anywhere.

That's not to say that I think it's a better skill set.

It's a different skill set.

And I think it's important that like a like if you were a team, like a sports, sports ball team or something like that, you need people with all these different qualities and different attributes.

18:08

And so I'm very grateful that I have friends who raise chickens and I have friends who grow vegetables.

And it's important to have somebody in the mix who understands wild foods as well.

So that if there's ever a time in our future world where those kind of skills are actually necessary, then it's great to have people who know how to do all of these different things.

18:29

But additionally, even if that's never the case and nothing do me like that ever happens, it's so nice to go out into wild environments and recognize species.

And that's been a huge theme of my work.

Again, if you followed it over the years or heard me on other podcasts, I often talk about how the average person goes out into nature today and while they're walking down, let's say the trail, what they see on either side is what I call the wall of green, just disambiguated green plants, but not necessarily knowing how to identify individual species.

19:08

And that kind of creates a bit of an anxiety because that's kind of like being in a a new town or a new environment or a new school or a new office surrounded by people who you don't know.

And there's this sort of sense of insecurity that people can have.

19:25

It's like, wow, I'm alone here.

I don't know anybody.

So this is so like kind of a threatening environment versus how it feels to be an environment where you do know everybody and you're known by everybody and you have all these friends and relationships and shared history and story.

19:41

When you have that, you feel very relaxed in that environment.

You feel like you're part of that environment.

Well, what I have found is very few people today, very few what I like to call moderns, have that in the natural world.

And so the natural world seems like this kind of threatening place.

19:57

So when I hear wildness or the wild, I think for some people, they hear like, oh, scary place where I can die and disappear.

And other people hear that and they go, oh, that place where I go to be restored and renewed and to be around all of my non human friends, like all of these species that I know and I work with.

20:15

So, you know, there's the survivalist component of why I wanted to get into wild foods and why I did the wild fed show.

But then there's this other component which is.

I think it's just like great lifestyle.

So, you know, yesterday my wife and I, Avani and I went to have dinner with some friends and their kids.

20:31

And before we left, you know, we went out and harvested wild blueberries to bring over.

And they were such a treat for all the kids and, and for us to the adults.

And it's just nice to know how to do that.

I that same day actually, we had stopped at a store and I saw wild blueberries, you know, selling for $10 a pint.

20:49

And it's like, oh man, we just went out to the backyard and harvested those for free.

And there's something just so nice about that, that kind of self-sufficiency and having that knowledge and the fun of getting to forage.

So I went for 174 episodes of the Wild Fed podcast, 60 episodes of the Wild Fed TV show.

21:08

By the way, the Wild Fed TV show lives on Outdoor Channel, so Season 6 is still airing there.

So if you have cable, most people don't anymore.

But if you do, we're on Outdoor Channel.

But Outdoor Channel has a streaming service called My Outdoor TV or motv.com or myoutdoortv.com.

21:27

Either one, both point to the same streaming service and that's where all of their hunting and fishing shows are.

And all six seasons of our show are there.

And you can get kind of one of those free trial subscriptions for a week and you can watch as many of those episodes as you want for free.

21:45

And I think it's probably around 10 or 15 bucks a month if you want to get a membership.

So you could watch the rest of those episodes.

I always focused on three main components when making that show, art, entertainment and education.

And I wanted it to be 333333, like really evenly broken up so that it's as educational as it is entertaining as it is artistic.

22:09

So it was more artistic than almost anything you're going to see in hunting TV, but more educational than almost anything you're going to see on cable.

But also it was entertaining as well.

So we really tried to balance those things.

So it's a very watchable show, but it was really important to me that I was also curating all of this wild food content so that if somebody wanted to get involved in wild foods like I did, when I wanted to get involved, it was a little bit difficult to penetrate that.

22:39

And it was like, how do I learn all of these things that I want to learn?

And is there one place where I can?

And so I really endeavored with the Wild Fed podcast and the TV show, the podcast being kind of a companion to it, to put as much of that content together so that if you get the bug and you're like, I want to learn about wild foods.

22:58

These are incredible resources.

I recently learned that the first five seasons are on Tubi for free, TUBI.

So if you go to Tubi, you can actually watch these as well.

They're not behind a paywall.

You just have to watch with commercials, but that's a great way as well if you'd like to see the Wildfed TV show.

23:16

And then of course, the Wildfed podcast is still available as well.

So all of that was such an incredible experience.

But now I'm back with the Daniel Vitalis show.

If you followed my career over the last 20 years, I'm sort of known for making up words to describe what I'm doing.

23:34

So, you know, my earliest project was like me making smoothie.

I did smoothie DVDs, you know, where I was doing like highly herbal and medicinal elixirs and that was called the elixir craft.

And you know, I went on to found my company, my supplement company, which is still, you know, still going strong 18 years later.

23:52

That's Sir Thrival.

So to survive and thrive, Sir Thrival, of course, wild fed rewild yourself, you know, sort of like putting these words together.

Calling my show the Daniel Vitalis Show was a little cringe to me, but I did it because I'm finding that what happens very often is if people come up with a clever name for their show, it can pigeonhole their content.

24:16

So again, I mentioned this is my third podcast with Rewild Yourself and with Wild Fed, I felt kind of like locked into really specific content.

So going with the Daniel Vitalis Show, part of that is because I just don't want to be locked into anything specific.

I want to be able to talk about anything I want to talk about and have that license and liberty to do that without straying outside of the confines of what the show is meant to be.

24:39

And 2nd to that is that I've noticed when shows have specific titles, sometimes I never know the name of the content created themselves, even though I really like them as a host.

And so that's why I've named the show The Daniel Vitalis Show.

Now, episodes for the The Daniel Vitalis Show are going to drop every Tuesday morning.

24:57

So it is a weekly show.

So you can always, you know, count on new episodes of being out Tuesday morning early.

Now, both of those projects were a success.

Both Rewild Yourself and Wild Fed.

So I didn't end them because they weren't successful.

25:15

I ended them because I have this tendency to kind of Max out on a topic and want to move on.

So that's another reason I'm just keeping this project a little more open-ended.

Also, because we're in a time of so much like radical change, I want to be flexible for whatever's coming next.

25:35

So first show is about looking at human domestication and rewilding.

I'm bringing that forward into this show.

So it's one of the lenses through which I'll be speaking with my guests and through the solo episodes, Wild Fed was about how modern people can access wild foods and work them into their diet.

25:55

That's just something that's not going to go away from me.

That's just integrated into my life now, and it's changed the way I see ecology.

And so I'll be bringing all of that and seeing things through that lens as well.

But there's a spiritual component which I'm going to get into later in the show.

26:12

And I've had a lot of people writing to ask me to kind of explain a little bit about sort of my spiritual conversion, and I want to share with you about that as well.

So that's another lens that I'm going to be bringing also.

But like I mentioned before, this show, the Daniel Vitalis show, is all about equipping people with tools to survive and thrive in this rapidly changing world.

26:33

Now, I want to be clear, I'm not somebody who thinks that I'm going to provide tools to help change the course of events in the world.

It's it's not that grandiose a vision for me, honestly.

It's more about equipping individuals, you who's watching people who are listening in.

26:54

I want to help individuals.

So this isn't like a we need to save the planet kind of a approach.

Personally, I have feelings about that.

I think that sort of we've gone over the event horizon, if you will, you know what I mean?

So like that's sort of astrophysics, black hole kind of language.

27:13

It's like that point at which, you know, you're being pulled into the gravity of a black hole theoretically and there's now you're like tractor beamed in, there's no escape.

I sort of think a little of that's going on on our planet.

I also think that cataclysms here on this Earth are cyclic.

27:28

And I don't think that's something we can really interrupt or change, particularly with, you know, lifestyle hacks and things like that.

So I think the world's changing.

I think the world's destined to change, predestined to change.

I think we're living in one of the most exciting moments possible, maybe one of the most exciting moments in all of human history.

27:47

And I'm not looking to change that.

I'm looking to equip people with tools that can help them as that unfolds.

Now, one of the things that's unfolding in front of us is a dramatic health crisis.

I mean, at a level that I don't think we've even begun to come to grips with as a society.

28:08

I don't even think we're really having the conversation in a meaningful way.

Let's look at it.

Let me give you kind of like a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that there was a health crisis taking place in another species, because part of it is that we have a difficult time even looking at ourselves as a species or as like a type of animal, and that to our detriment.

28:35

So let's imagine another what we call a charismatic animal that's surprisingly that's like part of the that's like a zoological language.

A charismatic species is like a gorilla or a chimpanzee or a hippo or a giraffe or a brown bear or a zebra.

28:55

These animals that are beautiful to us, that are interesting and iconic to us, right?

So there's animals that aren't really charismatic.

Spiders aren't charismatic, snakes aren't charismatic.

They kind of give us the heebie jeebies.

But imagine a charismatic species, let's say hippos or gorillas or giraffes.

29:13

Let's say that you found out that giraffes were suffering from sudden onset degenerative diseases.

Now hear that word degenerative please, because we say it all the time.

Degenerative disease.

Degenerative sort of tells you that the body is degenerating.

29:34

So think about decomposition.

Decomposition is the opposite of composition.

So think about what's a composition like?

Think about a Symphony as a composition.

So it's all of these things being brought together in concert.

29:50

In this case, we're talking about all these different instruments which on their own might be discordant to each other, but they're being concerted.

It's a concert.

They're being concerted and brought together, right, so that we have this beautiful symphonic sound.

But that's the composition.

30:07

But decomposition is where things start to come out of phase with each other and breakdown.

Similarly, like to generate means to create, but to degenerate is a thing breaking down.

So if you're thinking about adaptation or evolution, that'd be like sort of generative.

30:25

And degenerative is almost like a synonym for like the opposite, like devolution, the opposite of evolution, or the opposite of adaptation.

So it's like maladapt or maladaptation, or it's a thing breaking down.

But we've got a suite of degenerative diseases.

30:43

We're dealing with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's.

If you found out that gorillas or hippos or giraffes suddenly had these 4 degenerative diseases and they didn't have them in the past, would that get your attention?

31:06

Would that get anyone's attention?

I think it would.

I think you'd start to see like, hey, there's a crisis in these animals now.

Let's say at the same time you found out their sperm counts were dropping precipitously and that reproductive rates had dropped off the charts, that they were struggling to conceive.

31:27

That would definitely get our attention.

If you found out that blue whales sperm counts had dropped off, that their T levels, their testosterone levels had dropped off the map, that they were not able to reproduce reliably anymore, Would that get our attention if that was coupled with all of those degenerative diseases?

31:46

Let's say you found out that they were also suffering epidemic mental illness, including suicide, at unprecedented levels.

Now, let's say on top of that, you found out they were suffering from obesity at epidemic levels that actually more of them were obese than not.

32:03

And on top of it, that their teeth were literally rotting in their own faces right with cavities, and that their teeth weren't fitting in their mouths anymore because there wasn't enough space.

The jaw hadn't developed enough so that the teeth were coming in all crooked.

And then on top of that, they had cavitation.

32:21

Would that get our attention?

What if they had neurological conditions that had were so common that they were becoming normalized, like, you know, being on the autism spectrum or Asperger's or something like that?

If we found out all this stuff was happening in gorillas or hippos or chimpanzees, I think we would pay attention.

32:40

That would definitely alert us to the fact that something was really, really wrong, that there was a serious health crisis.

Well, all these things are happening to us specifically.

On top of it, we know that the average person's eating like a credit card worth of plastic a week, and we know that that plastic is being found in tissues all throughout the body, as well as things like glyphosate and forever chemicals and heavy metals.

33:04

We are dealing with a health crisis that is so unprecedented, and yet we're acting as if everything is just continuing on as normal.

Well, I'm here to tell you that it's definitely not.

And so that's part of what this show is about.

33:21

Again, not to change what's happening in culture at large.

I don't feel that calling.

It's to help individuals address these things for themselves.

That, to me, is what I get the most excited about.

I'm glad there's other people who want to tackle these problems at a bigger level, at an umbrella level, but I'm really interested in helping you specifically and helping the people around me specifically.

33:44

Now, on top of all of that, we have this whole other layer of what's going on, and this is another part of what this show is going to be about, and that's the technologies we're now playing with as well.

So on top of all of these, this health crisis, now we have kind of a technology crisis incoming.

34:03

So I'm not just talking about AI, but that's a major component for me.

But I'd really, I'm talking about four technologies and how they interact with each other.

So it's AI and all of the associated compute.

It's nanotechnology and you know that micro robotics idea, it's robotics on the macro scale to include, you know, the androids and humanoid robots that we're building, as well as the transportation robots like our self driving cars and things like that.

34:35

And the robots that we're going to see, you know, in all other kind of roles in our culture, from manufacturing to servitude in our homes.

Now couple that with biotechnology, right.

So this is gene therapies.

This is this rapidly emerging, although still Gray market peptide explosion that we've been watching.

34:57

You know, it's it's watching people getting onto steroids in a much more common kind of way, like where it's just like you go to your gym and they used to be sort of relegated to the world of bodybuilding or maybe certain sports.

35:13

But now it's just a common kind of way that people are augmenting their bodies.

But also that's things like the mRNA vaccines and all this other associated biotech biotech that we're seeing in reproduction.

35:29

Now.

I'm seeing all of these things as symptoms of what I call transhumanism, what a lot of people call transhumanism, which I think is like an emerging religious paradigm that takes us further and further away from what we are naturally and starts to push us more and more.

35:47

While it's right in the name transhumanism, the idea is sort of to move into a post human world.

I'm very much aligned against this on a physical level, on an emotional level, on an intellectual level, and definitely on a spiritual level.

And so that's part of what this show is going to be about as well.

36:03

Because as we head into these unprecedented times, my goal is to stay human.

My goal is to keep my soul.

And that might sound a little bit extreme to some people, but I think other people get exactly what I mean.

There's a push to be less and less human and more and more machine and to integrate ourselves with machines.

36:24

And I think that this is maybe it's the hill I'm willing to die on.

You know, it's something I feel really strongly about South.

A big focus of this show is going to be about staying human and about keeping your soul.

Now, some people accuse me at times of being sort of like a doomer or I, I was told recently on Instagram that somebody said, I really like your work, even though you, you seem to think the sky is always falling.

36:51

And I'm just like sort of to me internally.

I got a bit of a laugh at that because I'm so full of hope and excitement.

This stuff does not scare me.

I feel like I was born for this moment.

I feel like I was trained up for this moment.

I feel like when I read prophecy, I mean, this is the moment that I'm always reading about.

37:08

This stuff has been foretold.

This is an exciting moment to be alive.

I'm filled with hope, but I have spiritual reasons for that.

And if I didn't, maybe this would be a little scary, maybe it would seem hopeless, but this collision of humanity and machines, or this collision of humanity with those who would like humans to become machines, this is very exciting to me.

37:34

I just think, what a moment to be alive.

I want to maybe open up a little bit of my paradigm on this for you and share on one of the unique insights that I've had over the years.

This is sort of something that's in a lot of my lectures and workshops, but I'll share it here because I think it'll help you to understand why I'm bothered by the artificial part of artificial intelligence.

37:59

So let's define some terms.

A lot of people think that the antonym to natural would be unnatural.

And you'll get into this conversation with people sometimes where you'll say, like, oh, I like things that are natural.

And people will say, well, what's really natural?

38:15

Like what?

What's unnatural?

Because they'll say, hey, you know, my TV is, or my phone or my laptop or, you know, satellites or, you know, bombs and missiles.

They're all made from things that come out of nature, right?

38:31

They're all made from things that molecularly are found in nature or from elements that, you know, we can extract from natural ore, right?

Like silicon is a major component of, you know, our machines, while silicon's one of the most common minerals on the surface of the earth.

38:46

That's what quartz is made of.

It's what sand is made of, right?

So you could make an argument that, you know, our computers aren't technically unnatural.

And I wouldn't disagree.

I don't draw the distinction between natural and unnatural.

Rather, I like to draw the distinction between natural and artificial.

39:05

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39:25

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Dot com I'm going to say that again, this is a really important component.

So if you, this is your, if you're looking for a big take away from this episode of the show, it's this natural versus artificial.

40:37

The word artificial shares the root where we get the word art, right?

So art is like creative expression by people.

It's also where we get the word artifact.

Now this is really interesting.

What an artifact is, is an object that bears the impression of human will upon it.

40:59

So I want you to imagine this little scenario.

Imagine that you are out walking on a landscape and on the ground you're seeing rocks that are made of Flint, and they're all around you.

Maybe it's Flint, maybe it's chert, but a stone that our ancestors knew how to nap into an arrow point or into a knife, right?

41:24

So that's like old pre metallic technology when we were still using lithic technologies or stone technologies, right?

The so-called Stone Age.

Let's say you're walking around and you're seeing all these stones and they're untouched.

41:40

Well, those would be natural stones.

Now, let's say as you're walking, you notice an Arrowhead on the ground, and you bend over and you pick that up, and it's clearly been made by a person from one of these stones.

Well, if we were to take one of those natural stones and we were to take that Arrowhead made from the same kind of stone, and we were able to zoom in at a molecular level, we would see that they were exactly the same, right?

42:09

They're compositionally the same.

Their ingredient deck is the same, but there's clearly a difference.

One of them has been shaped by human hands and human will, and that makes it an artifact.

We wouldn't call the natural stone an artifact.

It's just a piece of nature.

42:26

So the same material, same molecular composition, same ingredients, but one of them is natural and one of them is artificial.

I often make this joke in my lectures that it's not really a joke.

Actually, it's quite serious that most of us are living in artifact land.

42:44

So especially if you live in a very urbanized environment, everything around you is essentially made and shaped by human beings.

And it used to be that you could kind of look up at the sky and you'd be like, well, they're the Sky's still natural.

But now we look up at the sky and we see all of those trails from the plains overhead, and that's like an unnatural cloud, right?

43:04

It's like an artifact of technology.

It's not a natural sky anymore.

And when the lights go out, the sky looks very different than it did to our ancestors.

We have so much light pollution that we can't see nearly as many stars.

And in addition to that, we see all of these satellites going overhead, right?

43:21

So all these man made objects.

So the sky now bears the mark of human will upon it.

And if we stepped outside of our homes, which are just filled with artifacts, onto the city streets, well, everything we see is made by people.

Everything is concrete and buildings and glass.

43:37

Now, we might come upon some things that appear to be natural.

Let's say you've got a little square of mulch and soil with a tree growing in front of your apartment building, and you go, hey, that's something natural.

But then it's like, well, is it or, you know, it's not like that was there and they built the whole city around it and that tree had always been there and that little patch of earth had always been there and it was never touched.

43:59

No, that's like a basically a planter, a pot that they've built into the sidewalk and filled with soils that were brought in and mulches that were brought in in.

That tree that's growing in there is not a wild tree.

It's a horticultural tree.

What do I mean?

It's a tree that's been through some aspect of the domestication process, so I'm going to get back to that in a second.

44:19

But let's just say in your apartment, in your house, almost everything in there is going to be an artifact.

That's why I say we're living in artifact land and around us we occasionally have other species, non human species, cats, dogs, the tree in the open spot in the front of our apartment building.

44:41

But all of these are domesticated species, right?

We don't bring wild animals into the house typically.

So your dog is a Gray wolf that's been domesticated, right?

Your cat is a domesticated feline.

These aren't the wild form of the animal.

44:57

Just like the maze, the corn that we eat today is not the wild form or the wheat that we eat is not the wild form or the vegetables we eat are all domesticated.

Our fruits are all cloned and domesticated.

So we're, we have what I call biological artifacts, and that's what domestication is.

45:12

It produces biological artifacts because you have a, a species now, right?

Like in the case of dogs, these are Gray wolves, but they like the stone that was changed to make it an Arrowhead.

The natural stone in this case would be the Gray wolf, and then we've turned it into whatever breed of dog, and that's like the equivalent of the Arrowhead.

45:34

So it's been shaped by human will through a process we call artificial selection.

So think back to biology one O 1 when you learned about natural selection, right?

So this is how the environment, interacting with genes and the epigenome shapes a species to be more fit for its environment.

45:52

And of course, something we often leave out is sexual selection.

So that's the role that females play in selecting mates and that helps to shape a species as well.

But then what we have is called artificial selection, which is where we as people decide which ones to breed.

46:07

So if I want to take a Gray wolf, 2 Gray wolves and I want to turn them into a, a dachshund, the hot dog shaped dog, right?

I need to keep taking wolves, you know, or dogs with shorter legs and longer bodies.

And I keep breeding those together until I get a dog that has an extreme long body and short legs and we end up with a dachshund, right?

46:30

So it's, I'm artificially selecting the partners rather than letting them choose their own partners or letting the natural environment shape which ones live and die.

And so artificial selection, again, we have that word artificial is how we end up with all of these domesticated creatures around us.

46:47

There's a very famous experiment called the Russian fox experiment.

And basically what it was was a, a Russian, I believe Siberian, I don't quote me, but I think a Siberian fur farm where they had silver foxes.

And it wasn't set up to be a truly scientific experiment, but this is leaned on very heavily in the literature when looking at domestication.

47:11

So basically what happened was they were raising silver foxes for their fur and they started to segregate the animals.

The way they did that was animals that when they would go to feed in their cages that were receptive to the humans who would come, that would move towards people that would be friendly towards people.

47:31

All of those animals were moved to a different area and bred together.

And animals that were fierce or ferocious or wanted to bite or wanted to attack the cage when people would come near them, they were segregated to another area and they kept breeding those animals together.

And over time, within a few generations, they were able to create a fully domesticated silver fox such that these were even sold as pets.

47:55

So they were realizing that domestication can happen very rapidly through artificial selection.

They also created, you know, sort of evil monster foxes by breeding together the ones that were less social.

So very powerful experiment and very eye opening.

48:13

But here again, in artifact land, everything is artificial.

Now I want to add to that this other layer.

Even though this has been a long and slow process of artificiality, it really started ramping up.

48:28

I mean, 'cause there's been tremendous civilizations in the past, right?

So the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, the Inca, the Maya, the Aztec, incredible civilizations that created artificial environments, city states, but did it all without electricity.

48:54

But not too, not too long ago, we had what's called the Industrial Revolution.

And that's where the combination of electricity and machines radically altered the way human beings on our planet live.

It can be hard for us today to appreciate this to to truly appreciate these massive city states that existed all throughout our history around the world and did so without plumbing and without electricity.

49:25

I mean, just imagine what it would be like to live in an Egyptian city, a Greco Roman city, a a, a Babylonian city where you have 10s of thousands of people living without plumbing.

Can you imagine this?

Just the smell of of that, right?

49:41

No refrigeration, just like very unpleasant to think about.

We have enjoyed the luxury of the Industrial Revolution, but at the same time we've been softened by it.

So it has turned us into that Shih Tzu, when we used to be the wolf, if you will.

50:01

So it's accelerated our domestication and the sort of softening of human beings.

But another thing that happened was we replaced all the physical work that we had to do all through human history with machine labor.

Now, this first started really in the textile industry.

50:19

And the third episode of this podcast, if you haven't heard it yet, with Brian Merchant, the author of Blood and the Machine, I really recommend you go back and you listen to that.

It's all about the Luddite rebellion.

If you've ever heard someone say, you know, I, I don't like technology, but I'm not a Luddite, you'll hear that a lot.

50:37

It's something I in the episode I talk about how I used to say that I didn't know what the Luddite rebellion was, but the Luddite rebellion was actually the first rejection of big tech and tech overlords and oligarchs.

And what it was was that there were people in these cottage industries in England and they were called cottage industries because people basically could work from home and do their industry from home with their families.

50:58

They were textile artisans and their jobs were quickly being replaced by the 1st sort of steam driven machines that produced lower quality textiles but much, much cheaper.

And the Luddite rebellion was this incredible.

What they were doing was kind of using guerrilla tactics and they were going out at night and destroying those machines.

51:22

Now, they did it in a very sophisticated way.

They did not just wholesale destroy factories.

They did not just wholesale destroy everything in them.

They specifically destroyed the machines that were replacing their jobs.

And so Brian Merchant's book is really paralleling what's happening with AI right now and relating it back to what happened during the Industrial Revolution.

51:43

So put a pin in that we're going to come back to in a second.

But what I'm trying to point out here is that one, we, when we replaced our physical labor with machines, one of the things that happened to people, and you can really chart this over the decades as you just look at photographs of people, we started to gain tremendous amounts of weight and lose our muscle mass.

52:05

And eventually we ended up with an epidemic of obesity and flaccid bodies, under muscled, underdeveloped, aerobically deficient bodies and aerobically deficient bodies because we weren't doing all the labor that had kept us fit and lean and strong all throughout human history.

52:26

Suddenly everybody's freed up.

Now think about how you're hearing this today related to AI and what you're hearing because you're hearing a lot of like soon you won't have to work, soon you won't have to do any admins.

Soon you'll just get a universal basic income and you can just spend all day being creative.

52:46

This is what people were being told during the industrial revolution.

These machines were going to free up all your time for leisure.

That's not what happened.

In fact, people got sick, people got fat, people got weak, people started developing all these degenerative diseases or what we call the diseases of civilization that I mentioned earlier, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative illness.

53:08

These things are absent in non industrialized people.

They don't have these diseases.

These are diseases specifically of civilization.

So all that happened, but at the same time, did it lead to this unprecedented amount of leisure?

Not really.

People work more now than ever, right?

53:25

So we're actually not working less that free time was then you were expected to fill it with more work.

So now we're being told something similar here.

While AI is going to free us up intellectually from all this work that we've been doing.

Well, I don't think that's what's going to happen.

53:42

I think that what's going to happen is very similar to what happened to us in the industrial revolution.

So if machines made it such that our bodies became weak and fat, I think that's going to happen to us intellectually now as well.

And actually, some of the very early studies that have been done on AI users, people use chat bots, is that they're experiencing what they are calling cognitive diminishment.

54:07

So remember, cognitive decline is like neurogen degenerative diseases, right?

So that'd be something like Alzheimer's, but this is cognitive diminishment.

And if you're wondering what that is, we'll just think back to a time, if you're old enough to remember when you had a lot more memorized than you do today.

54:26

Probably more math, probably more phone numbers, maybe quotes or statistics or scripture, whatever it was that used to remember.

But now because you have easy access to that information at your fingertips via your phone or your computer or other things that access the Internet, very difficult to remember anything anymore.

54:46

And that's powerful because the amount of information people used to memorize, you know, keep in mind that even writing is only 6000 years old.

So prior to that, all cultures were oral, all storytelling was oral, wasn't written down.

55:02

People had to memorize these things.

You know, you think about like in let's say the Middle East, you know, 2000 years ago, you know, you know, it would be nothing to have the first five books of the Bible memorized.

55:17

That's just like when I think about that, that's incredible to me.

That's just incredible.

Like we have truly lost a tremendous amount of our cognitive ability.

So what's going to happen if we had to, after the Industrial Revolution, if we had to create gyms and create this whole new field of medicine, really, that we call fitness and exercise, which you can think of like a hamster wheel.

55:43

So think about this.

If I want to take a hamster, right, and I want to take it out of its natural lifestyle so that it lives inside of a small enclosure, it's going to get overweight and sick and it's going to develop degenerative diseases.

So I got to exercise that hamster.

56:00

So do I do I put that hamster wheel in there so it can run in place.

It's like a treadmill, right?

Well, that's what we're doing.

So look at our gyms.

What these are is and, and I love gyms.

I got a gym in the room right next door to me.

I love the gym, but let's face it, the gym is a hamster wheel for domesticated people living post industrial revolution.

56:19

So where does this go for us?

I think what we're going to see is the rise of the mind, Jim.

We're going to have to, because cognitive diminishment is going to become very significant.

AI is taking over our cognitive tasks.

That means less memory.

56:35

That means less creativity, not more.

They keep telling you you're going to be more creative.

Well, how is that going to work when we're outsourcing our creativity to it already?

People are already outsourcing their writing, they're already outsourcing art, they're already outsourcing music generation.

56:52

You know, how long until people are no longer really able to do those skills unless it's something that they personally endeavor to maintain or develop?

And how much will they do that if they don't need to, right.

So when technology arrives, usually it replaces the old way.

57:11

So how many of us, if we want to write something, go out and make our own paper anymore?

Well, we don't because the technology is such that paper is widely available.

So even though we could do that, we don't because it's very easy to access prefabricated paper, right?

How many of us write out a book by hand if they're going to write a book?

57:31

Well, we don't.

We keyboard that, right?

So it used to be a typewriter.

Now it's keyboarding because it's that technology is widely available.

So with AI, how many people are going to choose the hard way anymore?

Probably what people will do is develop some kind of mind gym where they work on math and they work on writing, handwriting specifically, they work on reading and other cognitive tasks, problem solving tasks, because otherwise their minds are going to become very flaccid and weak.

58:02

And that sets us up for that kind of dystopian replacement scenario where robots and machines kind of take over for us.

And again, I always want to be clear, I'm not this the kind of person here going the sky is falling, or maybe it is.

58:17

But I'm excited by this.

I'm not.

I'm not disheartened, but I'm concerned.

And I think it's important that we address it.

And what I'm noticing is how little even in the conversations about AI, how little this is really being looked at, we're hearing a lot about AI replacing us.

58:35

We're hearing a lot about AI doomsday scenarios like AI kills, you know, wipes out humanity or whatever.

Hey, we need to be worried about our actual cognition.

And that's something that I don't hear as many folks talking about.

So what will be the mental hamster wheel of the future?

58:53

Here's another take away for you.

I made a video about this on my social media a couple of months ago and it did really well because I think people resonated.

I'm personally doing a lot of different things to keep my mind working because more and more, you know, you've probably noticed this just in the last year.

59:11

You know, it used to be you'd go to Google and you'd search for something and then that would lead you to web pages where you would further investigate and you'd get a variety of different answers and a variety of opinions.

And then you would have to personally work through that to come to your conclusion to get your answer.

But now something like 98 or 99% of Google searches result in no one going to a web page but just getting the AI summary.

59:35

And I'm guilty of that too.

I find that that's very convenient.

But I also notice if I ask the same question multiple different ways, I get multiple different answers.

So it's not truly reliable, at least not yet.

And slowly, we start to forget how to access this information.

59:53

So I grew up in an era, you know, I was born in 1978.

So at that time, we didn't have Internet, We didn't have mobile phones.

And when I went to the library, we had what was called a card catalog.

And that card catalog would be how you'd look up books.

1:00:10

So you'd go alphabetical through the card catalog, you'd select the card for the book, Then there was a little sleeve in the back of that book.

And when you check the book out, they would stamp your return date on that card and slip it into that little pocket in the back of the book.

And that's how you'd access books.

And I remember the very first computer I interacted with, I had the same attitude then that I have now.

1:00:30

So this is quite a while ago.

This is decades and decades ago.

But even then, I was, I, I thought computers were very SUS.

I didn't.

Have they been powerful?

Yes.

Have they allowed me to have a career that I would have never been able to have in the old world?

Yes.

But have they also introduced a lot of new problems?

1:00:49

I think so.

I think the answer is yes.

And they've set us up for this world that we're in now.

So I kind of saw that coming.

And I remember the first computer I ever personally used was in a library in Florida because I they didn't have a the card catalog anymore.

It had all gone on to a computer, and that was the first time I ever used one.

1:01:08

And so similarly, when I would go to those libraries, you know, I'd often go with a question or a topic that I wanted to learn more about.

And I would have to go find as many books on that top because I could not bring them all over to a central table.

And I'd have all these different books open with my notebook, and I would gather together this bits of information.

1:01:27

That's a skill.

That's a skill and that skills being lost because people can quickly access information.

Now the The thing is, if you're thinking to yourself, well, what's wrong with that?

Isn't this better that we can quickly access information?

1:01:43

The problem is because we can quickly access it, it's a very low value to our mind.

So psychologically, we have a difficult time ascribing value to that information that's easily gotten.

And so we don't remember it well.

1:02:00

So how often have you found yourself?

You listen to a whole podcast, you get done, you're like, that was amazing.

I learned so much.

And then it's like, what did you learn?

You're like, well, can't remember, can't remember where you look.

You look up a fact and then two days later someone asked you about it.

You can't remember it.

But I used to, you know, when I went through all that work and getting all those books and actually digging out like mining that information, that information was valuable to me.

1:02:25

I put a lot of work in and it stayed with me.

So I think one of the issues is that people are not going to have very much information left inside their minds and I'm a little concerned about where that leads people.

1:02:41

I don't personally think that's a good thing.

So just look back.

I mean, you know, how much information did you used to know?

I mean, growing up as kids, I knew all my friends phone numbers.

I don't know any of my friends phone numbers anymore.

It's hard to remember my wife's phone number because I can just go to her contact in my phone.

1:02:59

Now I know some people think, well then why do you need to memorize it?

Maybe that's true of phone numbers, but that's not true of everything.

We want minds that work.

And I personally think about the world as this information rich place.

And what I'm always trying to do to decode it and understand it better is gain new facts that I can plug into my internal mosaic, which is my mind map of the world.

1:03:23

And so if I learn something new, it's like, where does that piece of information fit into this overall mosaic, which again is a mind map of the world As I try to understand the world better.

If I have no mosaic, if I have no mind map of the world or I only have one that's temporary and constantly dissolving because I can't hold on to that information, it's going to make me very susceptible to being led and it's going to really impact my ability to think critically about the world.

1:03:54

So it's not just about, you know, memorizing phone numbers.

But again, we have been physically diminished by technology, and now we're being cognitively diminished.

So if we are both physically and cognitively diminished, what are we becoming?

1:04:12

And that's why I keep saying stay human.

That's why I want to use this show to encourage people to not just learn new information or get new facts.

This isn't a show where it's like, I just want to discuss whatever new ideas are around or like, what are the cool new trendy ideas that people are talking about?

1:04:32

Boring.

I don't care about that.

I care about lasting useful information that can help you to become a better version of yourself, or at least not be degenerated by both this cognitive and physical decline that we're experiencing.

1:04:47

So a lot of people around me, they'll say things like this to me.

They'll say, Daniel, you seem to think this technology is bad.

I think technology's neutral.

It's just how you use it.

And when people say that to me, I'm always like, have you seen Lord of the Rings?

So let's say you've seen Lord of the Rings, you've read the book.

1:05:06

Would you say that?

Would you say that the ring in Lord of the Rings is just a neutral technology and it depends on how people use it or is it kind of, is it kind of a technology that is addictive and degenerative to the person wielding it?

1:05:26

I think it's the latter.

So I noticed recently I gave a talk and I said, hey, put your hand up if you feel like you have total control over your use of your phone.

No hands went up.

In fact, everybody laughed.

And when everyone laughed, myself included, my hand didn't go up.

1:05:45

Sort of thought, wow, that's interesting.

Everybody in here knows that their use of their phone is out of their control because it's an addictive technology and the addiction worsens, right?

It's not the kind of thing where it just you, you stay at the same level.

1:06:03

It's like an addiction to drugs.

Like the amount that you need to use keeps going up and up and up.

So I think we're all finding ourselves using our phones more and more and more.

And that's why we're seeing so many new offerings of alternative phones, of software that makes your phone inaccessible at times, or phones that come out that are, you know, trying to riff on the flip phone or phones that are coming out that don't have access to the Internet or to apps.

1:06:30

You know, we're seeing all these things because people are going like, hey, wow, I'm I have a problem using this, right?

So it's like that ring in Lord of the Rings where Frodo's got to carry it, but the just carrying it is breaking him down.

He's degenerating and devolving from exposure to it.

1:06:47

It's not a neutral technology.

There's the character in Lord of the Rings, Boromir.

He says, hey, maybe this rings a gift.

Why don't we use this ring?

And they say to him, like, no, you can't wield it.

No one can.

And that's kind of how I see these technologies that I'm talking about.

1:07:05

My fear is that we, or my concern is that we think that they're neutral and that we can and use them for good.

But like Mickey Mouse in the movie Fantasia, who is using Merlin's hat but not knowing how to wield the magic, everything he creates, even things that are seemingly good, get out of control on him until he's creating chaos, and then he's trying to use more magic to stem the chaos.

1:07:29

But the more he does that, the more chaos he creates.

Each new solution generates more problems.

And that's kind of what I see is going on.

Our technology is out of control but we don't have the ability to wield it.

It's a degenerative slope in that the addiction worsens and worsens.

1:07:47

And these technologies are fundamentally, in my opinion, anti human.

And if you think that's strong, then explain to me why they degenerate our bodies and minds.

How can they be good for us if they're degenerating our bodies and our minds?

I also want to remind you where these technologies are made and by whom, because when you're living over here in the US or you're living in Europe and you're living maybe in a in a first world place, it can seem like no man, these are perfectly fine.

1:08:17

And then you see what's actually going on where they're being produced and you realize, oh, there's like a slave class of person.

If this is a neutral technology, why are the people building it in utter servitude?

That can't be right.

1:08:33

These are anti human technologies, but we're like the boy the the proverbial boiled frog, right?

So the idea is like you put the frog in, you know, comfortable temperature water and then you slowly heat that water up.

And because the frogs cold blooded and he's susceptible to ambient temperature, he's not noticing that the water is eventually heating up to the point that it's cooking him.

1:08:55

And I think we're getting cooked here and not realizing it because it's come on slow.

Now it's actually not that slow.

I mean, I having been born in 78, I I look out over my life and there's just this moment where technology starts to really hit.

And then we get into that exponential kind of hockey stick growth curve of how we're using these things.

1:09:13

But for a lot of people, it has been slow enough for them not to see the big picture.

So part of what I want to do with this show is help people zoom out and see the big picture.

Now, another thing I want to point out is that the the more we use this technology, the more I'm noticing that the US is being third worlded.

1:09:32

What do I mean by that?

I'm watching the breakdown of our infrastructure.

I'm watching the breakdown of the service industry.

A lot of you have surely noticed this.

I'm watching the younger generation take over the work workforce, but not really know how to do anything.

1:09:49

You know, for me growing up, you know, I when I was 16, I worked at a Wendy's, you know, the fast food place.

And back then if I came in with even a little bit of a 5:00 shadow, I got sent home.

I had to shave everyday just to work at Wendy's.

1:10:04

Can you imagine now if you go into a Wendy's, you'll somebody might have like a piercing between their eyes and demon contact lenses in their hair can be like blue and they can have an earbud in one of their ears and be listening to a podcast while they basically don't take your order right?

1:10:20

Like that's OK now because we're slipping into this like kind of third world scenario.

The infrastructure everywhere looks dirty and broken down.

The only things that look new out here where I live are weed shops.

You know, it's amazing.

Like we're really starting to slip over the edge here.

1:10:38

And I noticed more and more that the place that I live is feeling like places I've traveled to that we call the so-called third world.

I don't really like that term, but everybody knows what I mean and it's happening at an accelerating rate and everybody's so ensconced into their phones that they're not really noticing what's happening.

1:11:03

Additionally, those that cognitive diminishment is showing up in ways that are shocking.

Let me give you an example.

I gave a cashier the other day, they gave me a a total of $3.01.

I gave them a $20 bill and a penny.

They couldn't figure out the change.

1:11:22

I couldn't believe it.

I looked at my wife.

She said you got to help him.

I was like, do it.

Let's like watch, this is like an int.

You know, this is interesting.

The person was panicking, going back and forth, apologizing, trying to think.

I could see how they kept wanting to reach for a calculator in their phone.

1:11:39

And eventually they finally figured it out.

But it was like, wow, they don't know.

It's like it's kind of an easy math problem, but we're at a place now where people are losing their ability to do basic cognitive tasks.

And that leading to this scenario where it's like, who's even taking care of anything anymore?

1:11:59

Like who's taking care of the infrastructure?

Who's taking care of our culture?

Seems like no one is.

So it's breaking down and that's going to force us all to need to figure out individually what we're going to do to sustain ourselves.

Oh, I forgot to mention, so earlier I was saying that I made a video about cognitive diminishment, some of the things that I'm personally doing.

1:12:18

So I want to kind of make sure I, I explain what those are.

So one of the ones for me is that I've been doing basic math just, you know, a couple times a week, taking out an adult math workbook and working through basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

1:12:37

Now, I don't have very advanced math skills.

I never have, I don't think for most of us they're, they're that I don't need algebra for my day-to-day, but I need subtraction, addition, you know, division and multiplication for my day-to-day.

It's very useful to me and to a lot of other people as well.

1:12:52

So, so I've been working through those.

But if you're at a higher, more advanced math level, whatever it is, I think you should work at that edge, right?

So similar to like let's say you're working out in the gym, if you're capable of dead lifting £350, it's probably not going to be that useful to you to deadlift 100 lbs every time, you know, sometimes, but be good for you to work up near your edge.

1:13:16

Similarly, I think you should work at the math that's at your level.

For me, that's not very high, but I want to keep the math that I have sharp, particularly my times tables and things like that, they're very important.

I do reading of real books.

I cannot stand to read on a screen anyway, so I'm a little biased about that.

1:13:33

But I read the Bible every morning, and that is a wonderful reading because of the complexity of the text.

I have friends who are just so against the Bible and against the idea of Scripture in general.

1:13:49

And so I'll say to them, OK, well, maybe you should read Shakespeare or something like that where you have some kind of similarly challenging text because it's important that we don't read dumbed down to content because we're trying to avoid cognitive diminishment.

1:14:05

So again, that we're working at reading at a level that challenges us to some degree, I think that's really important as well.

But there's all kinds of cognitive tasks that we can be doing.

So for me, it's also memorization.

So again, because I've read scripture, I like to memorize scripture.

1:14:23

And so I've got a series of cue cards that I go through.

I'm constantly practicing memorization skills so that that part of my brain stays active.

I want to constantly be working on my vocabulary and making sure that I'm not seeing a diminishment in the words that I have access to, etcetera, etcetera.

1:14:42

Right.

For that.

This could be different for you.

So for some people it's learning new language.

For some people, it's learning music and more complexity in their musical theory.

Whatever it is for you that keeps your cognition sharp.

I think that that's a really important component of thriving in this world that's here now and continuing to come upon us in an accelerated rate.

1:15:05

So AI is going to rack radically change our world.

It already has really.

I mean, I think back on the last year and it's incredible what we've seen.

And a lot of this we were warned about, right?

Not warned about.

We were, it was prophesied by the oligarchs around us and by these unelected social engineers.

1:15:28

You know, think about Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum in the famous quote that they were talking about the Great Reset, by the way, that happened.

You know, it's like you don't hear about it anymore because it happened.

They called it COVID essentially, and all those things that came with it.

But there was a great reset.

1:15:45

And one of the things they said about this coming world was that you'd own nothing and you'd be happy.

So if you're like, what does that mean?

Well, that means like, think about music.

When I was a kid, you would go buy a cassette tape and later on ACD, and you would own that music and you would have it for the rest of your life.

1:16:04

Now, more than likely, you've got something like Spotify where you rent the music, but you don't own it.

If you cancel your subscription, you lose access to all that music.

You don't own it, you just rent it.

Or we're hearing more and more about the challenges for people today, especially first time homeowners or would be homeowners, how challenging it is to afford a home in these current conditions because house prices are up and of course interest rates are up.

1:16:33

So more and more people are renting.

So in other words, you don't own your home.

Many people leasing cars or having car payments, they don't own their cars.

Like more and more, you don't own anything, you just rent it and that's the future.

But apply that to every aspect of your life.

1:16:49

That's what the social engineers would like for you.

So that's that world that's coming.

Or think about if you own a smart TV, how it works now compared to how it used to work.

Remember, you used to just turn on your TV and you'd watch what you had access to.

But now you turn on your TV and it's like a store where it's showing you all these things that you can purchase.

1:17:05

It's constantly trying to sell you things for you to rent or buy.

Very interesting these changes that are taking place around us.

So our world's changing in a lot of ways.

And again, I'm not trying to go up against these social engineers.

1:17:21

I'm trying to out with them in my own life and in my own body to the degree that I can so I can maintain some amount of personal sovereignty.

You know, another way the world's changing is the things that we called for so long, conspiracies are just turning out to be true.

1:17:37

Now.

I grew up on conspiracy.

My mother is deep in the game.

So my mom loves like the Flat Earth stuff.

She loves the mud flood stuff.

She loves, you know, all aspects.

I mean, someone like the really far outside.

1:17:53

Because here's the thing that I've noticed.

If you were into conspiracy theories 10 years ago, so many of those things that you were into are now just fact.

Now, maybe the average person doesn't know they're fact because they're not following up on the information.

1:18:09

But a lot of us know these things have been proven now.

So that means the conspiracy theories are getting really, really fringe.

And some people just like that as a hobby, you know, But for me, having grown up inculcated in a lot of conspiracy stuff and personally reading a lot of books and, you know, listening to podcast, watching videos, I'm pretty steeped in it.

1:18:32

And now we're seeing a lot of this stuff is true.

So it's like, you know, for a long time, it'd be like this conspiracy theory, man.

The fluoride in the water is there to make you stupid and docile.

But now it turns out there's Harvard studies showing that it does lower your IQ significantly.

You know, it's still in water all over the US, right?

1:18:49

And, you know, it turns out the fluoride was put in water, but that the person who kind of facilitated that was Edward Bernice, the guy who created propaganda, wrote the book called Propaganda, created the whole field of public relations.

This is the guy that got women to start smoking cigarettes.

1:19:06

This guy worked for the CIA and the Department of Defense and all the major corporations to help them figure out how to sell products to people that they didn't need.

He created consumer culture through propaganda.

He's the guy that helped the aluminum industry figure out how to sell fluoride to water municipalities, municipal water facilities, so that they would put it into the water supply supposedly for your teeth.

1:19:28

Now we know that it's all true, that it lowers your IQ.

How about the UFO stuff?

I mean, for the longest time, it was like if you were into that boy, you were on the fringe.

And now it's like the government is releasing the files, right?

And we're seeing people in Congress, actual sitting Congress people talking about not just the stuff that the government's leaking out in their released files, but talking about real far out stuff, right?

1:19:54

So we have like Congress people saying you need to read the Book of Enoch, talking about things they've seen in skiffs that they can only hint at, but but they hint at things like human hybrid breeding programs with extraterrestrials, talking about interdimensional entities and non human intelligences.

1:20:10

Like this stuff's coming out of government level, you know?

Not just like hearings, but individual Congress people.

So turns out that's not just a crazy conspiracy theory.

I think the Epstein stuff, I mean, I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because it's really gross, but but shocking.

1:20:29

It's just like, let's face it, it's all true, right?

Like this stuff's true.

COVID is another great example.

I think we, you know, I remember if you go back into the Wild Fed podcast, I did an episode with a very well known and famous virologist early, early into the beginning of that whole fiasco.

1:20:52

And it was right about the time that we were hearing about this lab in Wuhan.

And I remember saying to him, hey, is there any, you know, this is a guy, by the way, who's a colleague of, you know, Fauci and connected to that whole world.

1:21:08

So anyway, I had said to him, hey, is there any chance this has come out of a lab?

And he kind of lost it on me and tried to, like, sort of demean me a little bit.

And I was really shocked at, like, the emotional intensity of his response.

But then as the whole thing played out, it became more and more obvious why.

1:21:27

And then eventually we have our own government agencies like the FBI and the Department of Energy coming out and saying the most likely origin was in fact the lab if like as if anybody needed to be told that.

But but you know, again, my point is all of these conspiracies are turning out to be true and more and more information is coming out all the time.

1:21:49

And so if we follow that trend line, it's kind of obvious that more and more stuff is going to turn out to be true as well.

So all of that's contributing to this sort of dystopia that's being set up, right?

So another example of the formerly A conspiracy theory is the idea that that we were going to be living in a kind of nonstop 24/7 surveillance state, some kind of hybrid between Orwells 1984 and Brave New world or something like that.

1:22:20

Well, it turns out like that's what's happening, right.

So whether it's, you know, the data centers or the flock cameras or any number of these, you know, facial recognition, all these things are are coming together to create the panopticon that the formerly, you know, people we formerly called conspiracy theories were theorists were always predicting that world's now here and it wasn't a conspiracy theory.

1:22:42

So what else isn't a conspiracy theory?

That's very dystopian that we're barreling towards.

Which kind of brings me to the topic of spirituality.

Because, you know, I've always been a spiritual person.

1:22:57

I've always believed in God.

I, I've never been somebody who was an atheist.

I have never.

I just can't be that.

It's just, I have such a strong internal sense of a higher power and a higher intelligence, and my experience in the natural world makes it impossible for me to believe that there isn't an intelligence in the design of the world for multiple reasons.

1:23:24

But one of those reasons is because we know that biology is based on a code.

We, you know, DNA is a code.

And like computer code, somebody has to do the coding.

And I don't believe that nothing exploded and became everything and then became a self organizing code.

1:23:45

And when I say self organizing, please keep in mind we're told that because of entropy, right?

The second law of thermodynamics, that entropy causes all systems to tend towards decay.

But in the face of that entropy, as the whole universe was expanding and losing energy, somehow in the face of that, on Earth, some kind of code writes itself that does the opposite thing of entropy and creates entropy, where species become more and more highly organized as time goes on.

1:24:14

In the face of entropy.

How does that make sense?

Well, it doesn't.

It just doesn't.

And I always had this very strong belief in God and a prayer has always been part of my life at different levels throughout my life.

There's times where I've been further from that, particularly times where I've been like more megalomaniacal and arrogant.

1:24:38

And there's been times where I've been more humble in my life and and that was a more forefront thing for me.

But it's always been there for me.

But in recent years, this kind of all, I'm going to go back to 2022.

Let me just say this, actually, I grew up.

1:24:55

My mother is like a Bible believing Christian, but she is not somebody who fits into any of the churches.

So she's not a Catholic, she's not an Orthodox.

And I guess she would maybe be closest to Protestant, but she's, you know, an alien abductee.

1:25:11

I always say that it's kind of like quotes.

I don't really know what all that means, what that actually is.

But she had those experiences growing up and and you know, I grew up hearing about those things from her well before this stuff was mainstream, way before, you know, we knew about how many people had these kinds of experiences.

1:25:27

But her experiences are just like the ones we hear about constantly now from all of these reports that we now have access to.

So whatever that is, she grew up around that.

That gave her a very interesting, unusual, unorthodox, maybe even heretical take on Christendom.

1:25:45

And I kind of grew up in that meal use.

So that's always been part of my background.

I went to some private schools, thankfully, because my education was pretty truncated, but I I had a several years in private Christian schools where I got inculcated in some of that as well.

1:26:01

And then I had a couple other phases in my life where I became involved in Christianity.

So this has been a through line for me.

But back in 2022, I was probably the furthest I'd ever been from it.

This is years of doing, you know, studying this idea of domestication and rewilding.

1:26:20

And at that point, I had come to see all of these different spiritual traditions as different forms of domestication.

They didn't seem natural to me.

They didn't really seem even valuable to me anymore.

But then our culture started changing really fast, and things that I started to see seemed dark and evil in a way that didn't really make sense to me at all.

1:26:46

Like I couldn't really understand why evil for evil sake.

But the more I looked into it, wow, the more I started to see that there's these play that were unmasking themselves.

If you again, if you follow conspiracy stuff over the years, if you've had an alternative worldview, you knew these things were there cooking, but they started unmasking themselves in their twenty 20s.

1:27:09

And it was in 2022.

I had I was I remember I was right in this room watching a documentary, like a long kind of poorly produced documentary about the music industry.

And it was showing in various ways.

1:27:29

How?

Much of the music industry is influenced by kind of what I would call, I guess I would just call Satanism, not saying that these people as.

Individual artists really believe in a.

Real like, you know, Cloven hooved Baphomet looking like devil.

1:27:46

But but certainly there's a ritual component, there's a magical component.

There's hesitate to use the word demonic, but they're sort of like a, a summoning kind of quality.

And you'll notice how many of these artists today, right now, we're seeing it a lot in hip hop actually, which is interesting because for a long time it was like sort of in rock'n'roll and then in industrial music and in metal music.

1:28:10

But now we're seeing it in hip hop as well.

And R&B is like this very strong satanic component.

And anyway, I was watching this documentary and I just had one of those come to Jesus moments where it was like, I just, I looked over and I had a Bible in the room.

And I remember thinking, not thinking.

1:28:26

I remember like feeling just surrounded by darkness and thinking, wow, if it wasn't for that book, I that book was like a lighthouse to me in that moment.

It's kind of a scary moment.

It was a really strong and potent moment where I thought for a second, like, wait a second, am I in hell?

1:28:42

Is this dimension that we're in like a hell realm?

Why is there so much evil and why is there why are we being kind of parasitized?

Why are we being physically and cognitively diminished?

Why are humans not thriving even though we have the capability to?

1:28:59

We could turn this whole earth into a beautiful permaculture where everyone could be fed, everyone could be healthy every day could be wonderful.

And yet we have turned it into we we've kind of gone into this world like, like if you look back in history, slavery is always existed.

1:29:17

It's not just the chattel slavery that took place in the United States in its early years.

It's a worldwide phenomena still taking place today.

In fact, there's more slaves today than at any other time in human history.

So that's important to know.

But we've moved into this era where explicitly it looks like we're abolishing.

1:29:39

All forms of slavery.

But really what we're doing is we're kind of enslaving everybody.

Like I mentioned before, everyone's addicted to this technology.

Everyone's hooked up to the Internet.

Now you see homeless people on the street and they've got mobile phones, you know, smartphones, it's like, and they're, they're just heads or, and faces are in them.

1:29:58

Like everybody's being pulled into this system that is requiring more and more of our time and more and more of our attention and we're being sort of mentally enslaved to something.

What is this and why is this happening when we could be flourishing?

1:30:15

Well, in my opinion, it's because there's dark forces at work here and there is a countervailing force that I don't want to act like they're equal levels.

I don't believe they are, but but there is God in my opinion.

And I've just in that moment became utterly convinced and I have since learned so much that has truly rocked my world and sort of shocked me.

1:30:42

Now, a lot of people get upset about this.

I just, you know, you have a growing contingent of people who are turning towards spirituality.

But but the idea of any of the organized religions of the world are huge turn off probably none more so than Christianity.

1:31:00

It's really interesting.

So I get a lot of questions like how on earth if you become a Christian.

Now I want to say like at the outset that I just like my I said about my mother, I don't really consider myself part of the religion of Christianity.

I love the original term.

It's in the book of Acts.

1:31:17

It it calls, you know, those those people who are following Christ's in his way.

They called it the way they said they were practicing the way.

And I really like that language because when I hear Christianity, it makes me think of religion and I'm hyper allergic to religion.

I think religion is one of the most toxic things on the earth.

1:31:35

I think Jesus Christ thought that religion was one of the more toxic things as well.

And he's seemed quite against it in my reading.

But but I want to point something out for people who are atheists, for people who are on the fence about this or people who are against the idea of any of these kind of organized spiritual traditions.

1:31:54

It's important to note that, and this is fundamental to my world view.

So my world view has been, hey, if we look at natural people, let me back up.

If we want to understand how to take care of our dogs, it's helpful to look at wolves.

Why?

Because dogs are wolves.

Now, they might be the domesticated form of the wolf, but if we want our dogs to be healthy, they need the same kind of things, the same inputs that not just food inputs, but behavioral inputs and environmental inputs that wolves had, right?

1:32:22

And if we give them that, they become healthier.

Similarly, if we want to understand what human beings need to thrive, what we need to be healthy, it's helpful to look at our ancestors or to look at still living indigenous groups or traditional societies.

How do they live?

1:32:37

And then we can kind of go like, oh, how do we incorporate some of that back into out the domesticated form, the home Homo sapien domestico fragilis into us, right.

So ancestrally, looking back through human history, something like 10 to 20% of all your time was dedicated to explicitly religious ceremonies or activities.

1:32:59

Now you can't just separate it out into like an even pie chart where it's like, OK, here's my pie chart and a 20% slice went to religion.

It's not that simple because it wasn't like people had a spiritual on off switch.

Their spirituality was fully integrated into every aspect of their life.

1:33:14

So it's a lot more than the 10 or 20%, but we have removed that completely.

And what fills that 20% vacuum for us?

Like think about the things that if you don't have God in that 20%, what do you fill that in with?

1:33:31

Cause we've had about 150 years now of our fully secular sciences, right?

Science, divorce.

You know, you look back into the origins of science and these were all primarily Christians and also a lot of Muslims, you know, in early chemical sciences and astronomical sciences.

1:33:49

But these were religious people.

But this secular science, this science divorced from the spiritual is about 150 years old.

Look what happened in our in our world in 150 years.

The lens that we've all been taught through says, wow, look how much better the world has gotten.

1:34:09

Everybody's richer, everybody's living easier.

You know, there's all this ways of looking at it through kind of rose colored glasses.

But from where I look at it, I'm not so sure.

What I see happened is people were broken up from bigger families into nuclear families and now into individuals.

1:34:27

We're breaking apart the nuclear family to the point that many people think the nuclear family is like a patriarchal racist structure, right?

It's just crazy.

Or that the kids should belong to the state.

We are losing our ability to reproduce.

We're sicker than ever.

1:34:44

We're getting stupider than ever.

Lifespan's actually starting to go down here in the United States.

You could try to spin it that this has been positive.

But in my opinion.

This has not been a positive thing.

Now, the other aspect of this is that atheism is really new.

So keep in mind that the only atheism we see historically until recently was a very small scale, and it was amongst elite philosophers.

1:35:07

So can you look back on Greece and Rome and find some atheists?

Yeah.

But like, this is in a very small circle of of, you know, elite mind masturbators who are this was not like at scale.

This was not at a population level that doesn't start until like 1917.

1:35:25

That's when we first start to see population level atheism.

The consequences of it have been devastating.

I mean, like truly devastating.

And that's because human beings have an impulse to the spiritual.

We have an impulse to worship the divine.

1:35:42

In the same way that you have thirst because you need water, you have hunger because you need food, you have attraction because you need to find a mate and you want to reproduce.

Similarly we have an impulse to worship the divine.

Now if there is no divine, then you're going to fill that space with something else.

1:36:04

And how do we worship?

Like we sing, we pray, we fast, we seek God, we we seek to strengthen our moral compass in our discernment between right and wrong.

But again, if you remove that, then what you end up replacing the infinite with is something finite.

1:36:25

And so we start to worship money, we start to worship fame, we start to worship power or sex or status symbols.

We worship ourselves or we worship our icons, right?

Like our idols.

I mean, that's incredible language that we use.

Like think about that show American Idol and then think about the biblical perspective on idols and what that is and how we are at our, we have in the way that I said before that a domesticated animal is a biological artifact.

1:36:53

We have these biological idols.

We, you know, we call them the stars.

There's a there's a whole that's a whole episode unto itself.

So I'm going to move on from that.

But it's fascinating, the language we use around this.

So we replace our devotion to God with devotion to things that are much more, that are finite instead of infinite, that are inferior.

1:37:14

So maybe your devotion goes to a political party, or it goes to a sports ball team, or it's the economy, or it's the nation state, But it's something fallible, it's something corrupt.

It's a human construct, and I think that we're doing that because we have a need for God the way we have a need for sleep, like I said, the way we have a need for food or we have a need for water.

1:37:37

But because we've been told that that doesn't exist, that it's unscientific, we don't realize that scientism is our new religion that we've tried to replace God with.

And so people are trying to find their spiritual compass or meaning in things that can't really provide that for us.

1:37:59

So as I said before, a lot of people have been really.

Curious about my.

Conversion and it's been hard for people to understand, which I definitely get.

So again, I'm not religious, but I am having a relationship with the divine and I think that that's something that we all need right now.

1:38:17

You know, I've been keeping behind me here in my studio.

You know that there's the picture right there.

If you're watching this on video, I'm pointing at it.

That is the Shroud of Turin.

That is what I believe is essentially an ancient 2000 year old photograph of Jesus Christ at the moment of his resurrection.

1:38:36

Now, if you think that that's ridiculous that I just said that, I want to point something out to you.

The most published book in all of human.

History.

Beyond like there's no competitor.

1:38:52

The most published book in the all of human history is the Bible.

The most written about topic in all of human history by far is Christianity actually.

And the most written about human being of all time is Jesus of Nazareth.

1:39:09

So I understand that, man.

I've been this person over the years too, you know, I understand if somebody's like that's stupid, that's made-up, that's impossible, that's ridiculous, that's unscientific, that's fantasy, that's make believe.

I just want to say if the most, if this is the most written about and talked about thing of all of human history, if that many human beings, brilliant human beings through time have dedicated their lives to this, that should at least give you pause before you immediately criticize it, right?

1:39:44

Because it would be pretty foolish to think that in this modern era, as a person who no matter how well you live compared to your ancestors, you're physically diminished, cognitively diminished, nutritionally diminished, hormonally diminished.

1:40:00

You've got, you know, plastic coursing through your veins and glyphosate and forever chemicals in your brain that you're so smart.

As to know that all of these people in all of history were just stupid and wrong and what a silly thing.

1:40:15

How could they think that It's superstition.

It's like, hey, maybe you should pause and go like, wow, I don't understand it.

I don't agree with it, but I should probably be slow to criticize it until I've deeply investigated it because how could so many human beings have put so much time into it that I just think that that should give people pause.

1:40:36

And I think the other component of it is to understand that, you know, when it comes to Jesus Christ specifically, that there's not really debated anymore that this was a real person.

So if you think like he never lived, like, then you need to investigate a little bit more because it's pretty much agreed upon even in the secular world that this was a real person, that it's just not really possible that this much has been.

1:41:03

You know, he's the historicity of Jesus Christ is stronger than the historicity for Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or any number of these people that we believe were real people, even though most of what was written about them wasn't for hundreds of years later.

1:41:20

And there's only a handful of documents.

Jesus Christ is extremely well attested, in fact, might be the most well attested person in ancient history.

So I want to kind of like provide that as well.

But before I said to you, I'm not religious.

And so people kind of are like, what is it?

How does that work?

1:41:36

What do you mean?

I'll just say this, I think that this has a lot to do not with religion, which to me is like a set of rules and precepts.

And I live a certain way according to a sort of a script.

It's about relationship with God and the condition of my heart.

1:41:54

So let me try to draw an allegory here.

It's like with my marriage.

Is my wife going to be content in our marriage if I go through, if I do all the things right, but the condition of my heart is not loving towards her if I'm not actually in true intimate relation with her, but I show up to everything and I I I go through all the motions of a marriage, but actually the condition of my heart isn't oriented towards her.

1:42:22

Will she know that?

Yeah.

Will she feel that?

Yeah.

Will my marriage last?

Probably not.

She doesn't care as much about me following the letter of the law as much as she cares about the condition of my heart.

And I believe that that our relationship with God is like that.

1:42:38

So that's why I say it's not a religion.

It has to do with the condition of my heart and the orientation of my heart.

It's not about rules for me.

It's not about religion because I think a lot of times what religion is, is people going through the motions, but not necessarily having a heart that's been transformed or a spirit that's been transformed by relationship with God and love as well.

1:43:05

Now, another component of this is like people will say they'll struggle with the idea from a scientific perspective of this being a world created by God, which I also can really understand when I hear the word creation.

1:43:22

Just to be clear to me, a creation and a simulation are very, very similar terms.

So you know, when you hear about this like idea of a simulation theory, to me I'm like, oh, you mean a creation?

And one of the interesting things about a simulation, a simulation be like, let's say it's a video game and you're a character in the video game.

1:43:45

Let's say that video game was created last week and now you're a character that has consciousness and free will inside that video game.

If as a character, instead of playing the game, you instead decide from within the game to investigate the back story.

1:44:01

Like, wait a second, how did this game come to be?

And you start investigating into the history of the world that you're living in.

Well, what will you find?

Well, there will be a whole history, right?

The game was only invented last week.

But in the game, there's a whole back story in history that's been programmed in.

1:44:20

So a lot of people will like look, or for instance, let's say that you live in a game where you, instead of playing the game, decide.

To look.

Into what's very big and very small.

So like through the telescope and the microscope to investigate the game that you're in, you're going to find things, right?

1:44:39

You're going to find things because the game will be programmed in such a way that if you do, those things will be created as you seek.

And so I think that there's all of these tools that we're using scientifically to try to understand the simulation we're in, but it's still a simulation or what I'll call a creation.

1:44:55

So to me, the fact that we can see the age of the Earth or we can look out, you know, into space or look down into the subatomic and find things does not mean that this is a meaningless nihilistic world that came out of a Big Bang explosion.

I just don't believe that.

1:45:11

And I also want to say that I don't think that the purpose of the game is to hack the game.

So I think that's what we've gotten caught up in.

We're trying to hack the game, figure out how to manipulate the game, and we want to become gods within the game.

1:45:26

And what's so interesting about, and we want to do that, by the way, with these technologies, I was talking about AI, nanotech, biotech and robotics.

And we want to use that to become gods in the game that we're in, which very interestingly is how the whole Bible starts.

1:45:43

So for people who are like would like to just discount the entire biblical narrative, I would offer maybe we should stop as a species playing it out right in front of ourselves because the whole Bible ends up being really about human beings trying to become gods through forbidden knowledge and technology.

1:46:04

And this comes up multiple times.

And here we are kind of doing that exact same thing.

So I'll also say that I think in our simulation or.

Creation or this?

World that we're living in, this rich biological world, there are these Easter eggs that have been kind of hidden and those would be the entheogenic substances that we find in plants and sometimes in animals, right?

1:46:31

What we call the psychedelics.

Typically in Christianity in particular, you'll get this sort of immediate on the face rejection of those things.

I don't have that perspective.

I don't, I, I to me, it's not like evil entities made psychedelic plants.

1:46:48

That doesn't make any sense, right?

They're part of this creation and they open our eyes now.

I think they're very powerful and I think that they need to be used very judiciously.

But but I've had experiences with plant medicine and with animal medicines that have made it very real.

1:47:05

For me that this.

Entire experience we're having of this world and of ourselves is like one frequency band on our radio where you can just keep like tuning to different frequencies.

I've had just experiences that are so much realer than real that you can't convince me that this is all there is.

1:47:26

I just have had experiences so that you know, and you could be like, well, those were just, you were just high.

It's like, well, I don't personally think that a chemical based on serotonin can radically alter your understanding of the universe like that.

I just don't think it quite works like that.

1:47:41

I think that they work probably more like some kind of an antenna enhancement that allow you to experience greater aspects, things that you'd normally tune out.

And again, I've just, I've had experiences that tell me that this is for me personally, this is more of a simulation.

1:47:57

Than it is a physical real.

Thing It's like a light show.

It's like a hologram, It's like a, it's like a video game.

It's like a projection.

And it feels very real and it looks very real.

And if you investigated, it appears to be real until you investigated enough that you realize everything's kind of made out of empty space and light.

1:48:15

I mean, the further our sciences go, the weirder all this stuff starts getting.

And at some point I just had to accept that this is got a spiritual dimension.

So that's kind of where I'm at with that.

It's very difficult for me to believe in the realness of this reality.

1:48:34

I'll also say that one of the things, and I'll be exploring this as this show goes on, it'll be a theme that'll come up for me, but it's very difficult for me to.

I think the biggest challenge I had with the teachings of Christ or was the idea of him as the Good Shepherd, because to me, a shepherd looks over sheep and sheep are domesticated.

1:48:54

So I really struggle with that.

It's like, how do I and I still do?

How do we integrate everything I've learned about wild and indigenous living and wild and indigenous people?

Because there's things that are that are so good that we have lost in our modern world and that have been suppressed by religion.

1:49:14

And then there's these aspects of that life that are not good.

And we have a tendency today to gloss over those things because we have this theme now in our culture, this alignment against hierarchy and the patriarchy and, you know, anything that ends in our key.

1:49:32

And so it's like this, this idea that that society has only suppressed goodness in the way that it's attempted to civilize the world, but there's this other reality when we look at those.

1:49:49

Cultures we.

Often see horrifying torture, horrifying warfare, horrifying human sacrifice around the world.

I mean, it's pretty shocking when you dig in on this stuff, and we still have a lot of that going on today.

But I don't want to paint an unrealistic picture of the indigenous world.

1:50:08

And so I think that there are things that are really good from that, but I've been trying to figure out how it integrates with the kind of auto domestication that I feel that Christ calls people to.

But I had this realization, and I've talked about this in a couple of podcasts in the past, other people's shows.

1:50:28

But I had this realization because I have dogs here at home.

And one of the things I realized is that my dogs, I don't want them to behave like wild animals in my house.

So as much as I appreciate wild animals, my dog is not allowed to shit on the floor in my house.

1:50:46

My dog's not allowed to just go out and mate with just any other dog.

Kind of it wants to, there's rules like if you want to live in my house, you have to live by certain rules here, right?

That's just a reality.

And so similarly, I was, so I used to bristle at the idea of any kind of like domestication, but now I realize a couple of things.

1:51:09

One is that we can't go back now to the wild world.

Like the Pandora's box is open, the wild world is gone.

What's left is on the fringes and margins of the most difficult places to access or live in.

The places that are easy to live in have been hyper built up to the point that, you know, as a forager and a hunter, you quickly realize like you couldn't really live on the landscape as it is today as a foraging band.

1:51:37

There's just not enough space.

There's not enough resources.

We can't go back to the wild world.

So we are have been domesticated and there's two kind of forces that I see and two ways of being domesticated.

1:51:53

One way is the way that culture and what I was referring to before as sort of dark spiritual entities that I see behind a lot of what's happening in our culture.

There's the way they seek to diminish us, which is through cognitive and physical diminishment and stupefying us through lies and through deception and through addiction, not just to substances, but to technology.

1:52:19

And then there's the kind of auto domestication I feel that Christ calls us to, which is like a, a kind of like, hey, when you're in my house, you can't shit on the floor.

It's asking us to step up our behavior to go to the next level so that we're ready to graduate from this world into a higher world.

1:52:40

And that's a kind of domestication process I can get down with.

The one I can't get down with is the one the social engineers are using to try to turn brilliant and beautiful human beings into kind of dumbed down herd animals.

So that's kind of how I'm looking at that right now.

1:52:59

But there's a lot more to say on this.

And so as my podcast unfolds over the next few years, I'm going to be sprinkling this in, and I'm in particular excited to share with you some of the things that I'm learning about underlying beliefs in many of the world, if not most of the world's indigenous cultures that dovetail with all of what I'm talking about.

1:53:23

So this was information that anthropologists have known for some time, what's been very suppressed, and I think it'd be exciting to dig into some of that.

So lots to talk about on that front.

I also want to say that I arrived.

1:53:39

At all of this.

Supernaturally so not.

Through like a decision.

Tree matrix or something like that.

So you know, there's historical reasons that I believe this.

There's there's artifacts like I mentioned the Shroud of Turin earlier, which by the way, if you hear that, you think that's just like, what is this guy talking about?

1:53:59

You need to look into the Shroud of Turin.

You know, I'll just say this.

Go debunk it.

Please go debunk it.

Because the it's the most studied artifact on the planet.

It's been studied by more, More hours of interdisciplinary scientific research have been done on the Shadow Turin than any other human artifact.

1:54:19

And this thing is truly inexplicable.

So I would encourage you to look into that.

In fact, I'll have some episodes coming up about that.

So, you know, there's that component, there's the historicity I was talking about before.

All of these things bolster my faith, but that's not how.

1:54:39

I arrived here.

I arrived.

At this through supernatural means and so I don't want to pretend like I logic to my way into any of this.

That's not it at all.

But I think it's important to say that because a lot of people want to be convinced, but they want to be convinced logically and I don't think that that's how faith works or can work.

1:54:57

I think actually it can be a hindrance.

So so I don't want to give the impression that I I just found the information and logically arrived there.

That's just that would be kind of silly.

But but I'll get again.

I just want to say one more time.

You would be foolish to just write off the most written about human being in all of history.

1:55:17

That would be a mistake.

So at least give the respect deserved by all of the millions of people whose lives have gone into this, because you don't know what you don't know, and neither do I.

So I will say that the religion of scientism has replaced most of the world's other religions, and it's LED us to a much worse place, in my opinion.

1:55:43

So, and it's also surprisingly.

You would think.

Because scientism is the rejection of the supernatural, so you would think that it would lead you to caring about the natural.

But it hasn't, right?

It's broken our relationship to the natural world.

1:56:00

It's broken our relationship to all aspects.

Of wonder you.

Know it's we have used scientism to cut ourselves off from the natural world in a meaningful way.

1:56:19

And for most of us today, we are so deep in the built in artificial environment because of science such that we're like aliens to our own ecosystem at this point.

And we have these beliefs like that we're going to go to the moon and live there.

1:56:38

We're going to go to Mars and live there.

And I'm always thinking like, how could like when we can't even take care of our own planet, how are we going to go to Mars or the moon we are going to take with?

So are we going to take the planet destroying paradigm that we have here with us?

1:56:59

Does that even make sense?

I always say that's like.

A person who's just goes from relationship to relationship, never heals the problem that causes their relationship to end, jumps into a new relationship, creates the same problem till they can't take it anymore, jumps to the next relationship.

Or is that our planetary path?

1:57:16

Is that what we're going to do?

We'll do it on the moon 1st, and then we'll do it on the Mars, on Mars, and then we'll just keep jumping around because we can't learn how to take care of our own home.

I think that we need to learn how to live here first, and science is not helping us do that.

In fact, it's quite the opposite.

1:57:31

Science is causing us to disassemble our world and then try to rebuild out of it a kind of artificial life forms and artificial beings, and maybe even undermine our own place here on our own planet as well.

So I think that we need to be developing a healthy relationship to nature and I don't think that our spiritual lives need to be in opposition to that.

1:57:58

In fact, you know from again, from my like sort of biblical worldview, we should be human beings, should be permaculturing.

This Earth that's.

Kind of what we're here to do.

We're here to take care of this planet.

We're here to nurture this wild environment.

1:58:14

And instead we've turned against it.

So that's another aspect of this show.

It's sort of a call to return to a simpler life where we take care of rather than exploit.

And that's why I believe really in letting our bodies be as natural as possible.

1:58:32

That's why I believe in minimal intervention, minimal technical intervention, minimal medical intervention.

You know, my wife and I are always joking about Team Natty, right?

It's like just trying to stay natural.

I mean, we find like, for instance, at the gym that we go to, you know, it's just like getting very common for people to be on hormones, to be on steroids, to be filled with Botox and fillers and implants and doing all this kind of augmentation.

1:58:56

And soon we're going to see people really technologically augmenting themselves.

Maybe that's neural link, maybe that's augmenting themselves with, you know, could be like augmented reality glasses or, you know, heads up displays or, you know, I see more and more people whose watches are tied to their phones.

1:59:19

Like they just cannot get out of the technology.

They're becoming like cyborgs.

I just believe that we need to be minimizing that, not maximizing that.

And that's just going to be another big theme here.

So I've been looking at this issue for probably shockingly, it's been 3233 years.

1:59:39

I've been doing it professionally now for 20 years.

I can't even believe it.

But as my beard gets grayer and grayer, it's the reality is like setting in, you know, and I'm watching and I've watched over those 20 years more and more loss of our humanity, more and more human domestication.

1:59:56

And then this, this constant increase in the technology that we're using, creating more and more problems.

And we just can't seem to get out of this feedback loop.

So again, this show is to encourage you as an individual to break that pattern and get out of this sort of exponential acceleration.

2:00:18

Into the encroachment.

Of technology on all our human, you know, core human faculties.

So yeah, that's what this show is going to be about.

I really appreciate you.

If you've gone through this whole thing with me and you've kind of listened to this whole rant.

Like I said, you know, people have accused me of saying the sky is falling.

2:00:36

I don't think that's what's happening.

But I do think that our species is in a critical moment.

And I think that if we continue on this path, there won't be much left of us.

Again.

I don't believe I can right this ship personally, or that any group or organization or government or religion is going to right this ship either.

2:00:59

I can.

I don't just don't think that's how this plays out, but I'm not also, I'm not pessimistic.

I'm filled with a deep, deep hope and actually quite a lot of peace as well.

Internally, like the pieces within, but externally I see a lot of chaos.

2:01:16

And so my hope is that I can share some of that peace with other folks, but also impart tools that can help people to be healthier and more balanced in themselves as well.

So, so this is about helping people at the personal level and not at the macro level.

2:01:35

And that's why, you know, my first show was called Rewild Yourself, because I think that that's one of the areas people are hyper domesticated.

My second show is Wild Fed because it's like, hey, we need to feed ourselves with wildness again.

That's why my product line is called Sir Thrival, because it's like, hey, it's a survival situation.

2:01:54

But I think that we can survive, go beyond just surviving, and we can thrive even in a survival situation.

I don't want to just get by.

I want to thrive no matter how dystopian it actually becomes.

And so that's going to be all of that's going to be integrated under this umbrella of the Daniel Vitalis show.

2:02:12

And it's really about aligning yourself with nature.

And more and more I'm going to it's about aligning yourself with your creator and the plan that this creator actually has for us.

Because I think that forces aligned against that creator have seized the reins of the world that we live in.

2:02:28

And we don't need to let that happen.

OK, so.

I have a couple requests.

Again, I said it at the beginning, if you are interested in the show and seeing the show become a success, you can help me by just subscribing.

2:02:44

It really, really does help.

That's not just something I know.

You hear that from every content creator.

We all say it for a reason, and that's because we just can't get these shows ahead.

If that doesn't happen, your comments really mean something.

You're rating the show.

If you give it a four or five star rating, that really, really helps.

2:03:01

So, but the other thing I want to ask you for are your guest recommendations.

As you've heard me talking, if you've been thinking, oh man, I would love to hear Daniel have a conversation with this guest or with that guest or I keep seeing this person.

I think you'd have a great conversation.

Send those over to us.

Write me at info@danielvitalis.com.

2:03:19

Write me on my Instagram account as a comment or Adm.

Leave it as a comment on this show or on any of the shows.

But let me know who you want to hear from because I want to get as many perspectives on this topic, on these topics as I can and keep filling in that mosaic that is our mind map that I was talking about before.

2:03:40

So again, whatever you can do to help support this show, just sharing it with somebody you know who might like it.

It's really appreciated.

You're really appreciated.

Thank you again for your time because I know how much contents out there, I know that you could spend every day listening to 10 different podcasts and never make a dent in what's coming out just every single day.

2:03:59

So if you're taking any time to listen to this show, that means a lot to me.

You're very, very appreciated and will drop a new episode next Tuesday, so please tune in again.