Charles Eisenstein On The Coronation

One of the deepest integrative thinkers active today, today's guest is a voice both crucial and integral to this conversation. Meet Charles Eisenstein. A speaker, writer, and social philosopher focusing on themes of human cultural evolution, economics and consciousness, Charles is the author of several books, including Climate - A New Story, Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible, and The Ascent of Humanity. A graduate of Yale University, where he acquired degrees in both mathematics and philosophy, Charles is a counter-culture intellectual and proponent of alternative political and economic narratives that combine ecology, biology, philosophy & spirituality to challenge our current system. You can find his essays, videos, courses and podcasts at charleseisenstein.org. Recognizing the delicacy of this moment, I’ve been very careful about who I invite on the show to discuss it. The pandemic has cast a cosmic panic I am not interested in amplifying. Nor do I feel it appropriate to deliver an empty dose of conjectural optimism. I don’t hold myself out as knowing what exactly is happening. I don’t think any of us do. I can’t give you a prediction or a prescription. What I can offer is perception. Some perspective. And a broader aperture to reckon with the many ramifications of this most unusual global event. Last week I devoured a recent essay by Charles entitled The Coronation. I found it to be one of the most insightful and well-considered long reads on how to think expansively about our current moment. It’s a piece that has stayed with me -- and the motivation behind today's exchange. In the vein of my exchanges with Dr. Zach Bush, this is a thoughtful and at times metaphysical conversation about completely redefining our definition of normal. It's about the potential energy of this shared experience to unite humanity around reinventing society wholesale. It’s about asking questions. It’s about challenging the dominant narrative. Taking a hard look at our institutional failures. And the systems that perpetuate them. But more than anything, this a conversation about standing in our fear. As we delicately wade through the muddy waters of media calamity, conspiracy theories, and fake news, it's about learning how to listen. How to feel. And how to excite the senses around the quiet call that change is actualizing. Without minimizing the severity of what is and what is to come, this truly is our opportunity to cast a new world. May Charles Eisenstein be our gentle steward. Audio Note: This podcast was recorded remotely. Therefore, please excuse the audio quality, a somewhat eroded version of what you’ve come to expect. Facebook Group: I have been remiss in not previously announcing that I recently created a Facebook Group for fans of the show to to congregate. Click here to join. I'm honored to host today's discourse. May it leave you better than you were before. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  When the confining routines of normality waver or dissolve, when there's an earthquake, when there's a flood, when there's some natural disaster that sweeps away the structures of society, it's not what one might expect: dog-eat-dog, looting and chaos and the strong preying on the weak. Uh-uh. It's people getting together to take care of each other. This natural altruism and community and solidarity emerges, and you realize that it's been repressed all the time by our systems and ideologies of separation, but it's always laying there waiting for its moment to come back. And this is such a moment.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  It's showing us the future we could go to, a future where we're all in this together, where we understand that your well-being and my well-being are connected, and even the well-being of other creatures, and that health and happiness and even real wealth does not and cannot exist in isolation, but only in community. And so we can say, yeah, enough of this trajectory of separation. Now is the time to rejoin the community of humanity and to rejoin the community of life. That's the crossroads that we're at right now.

• 2:27Rich Roll?

  That's Charles Eisenstein, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:41Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:45Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. Welcome to the podcast. Okay, so a lot is happening right now.

• 2:56Rich Roll?

  At the risk of overstating the obvious, the world is truly enduring a surreal moment unlike anything I think any of us have ever previously experienced. Jobs are disappearing. Many are very sick. Some have perished. Most people are scared. Our movements are restricted. The streets are empty, and there is no business as usual. For many, there is no business at all. And if you're like me, quarantined in your home, physically separated from friends and loved ones, wondering if and when you too may fall ill, trying to maintain sanity amidst

• 3:39Rich Roll?

  all of this, struggling to make sense of it all, endeavoring to control the few controllables, perhaps attempting to also identify the opportunity, performing an inventory of your life, investing in what is working, discarding what's not, hopefully connecting with a little bit of gratitude. Without minimizing the extreme hardship that most are currently facing, I think it is important to also recognize this rare moment as something extraordinary, that we, as individual members of a global collective, are being delivered an opportunity to recognize

• 4:24Rich Roll?

  the fallacy of separateness, an opportunity to deconstruct this long-held idea that in so many ways has led us astray, that we exist independent of each other, outside of and exempt from the living, breathing biosphere that we inhabit as both participants and as guests. And if there's a silver lining in any of this, and I believe there is, it's that We're being marshaled to embrace with humility that we are but a very small part of a much greater whole, and that it is now incumbent upon us to rethink,

• 5:08Rich Roll?

  to reimagine and recreate the story we tell ourselves about who we are and who we aspire to be. In so many ways, this is like an initiation, a reset, a call to embrace our inherent divinity and innate interconnectedness as spiritual beings having a human experience in divine relationship with not only ourselves, but with every living thing, an opportunity to expand our awareness, to elevate our consciousness, and chart a more compassionate and sustainable and community-based normal going forward.

• 5:50Rich Roll?

  Today's guest, one of the deepest integrative thinkers active today is, to my mind at least, an important and integral voice in this very conversation. A speaker, a writer, and a social philosopher focusing on themes of human cultural evolution, economics, and consciousness. Charles Eisenstein is the author of several books, most recently Climate: A New Story, as well as Sacred Economics: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible and The Ascent of Humanity. A graduate of Yale University, where he acquired degrees in both mathematics and philosophy,

• 6:33Rich Roll?

  Charles is a counterculture intellectual, a proponent of alternative political and economic narratives that combine ecology, biology, philosophy, and spirituality to challenge our current system. You can find his essays, videos, and courses at charleseisenstein.org, and he hosts a podcast entitled A New and Ancient Story. In the vein of my exchanges with Dr. Zach Bush, this is an incredibly deep, thoughtful, and at times metaphysical conversation. I'm honored to share it, and it's coming up in a few. But first...

• 7:20Rich Roll?

  Okay. Recognizing the delicacy of this moment, I've been very careful about who I invite on the show to discuss it, because the pandemic has cast this cosmic panic. I really don't want to amplify that aspect of it. But I also don't feel it's appropriate to deliver a handful of conjectural optimism. I don't hold myself out as knowing exactly what is happening. I don't think any of us do. I can't give you a prediction or a pithy prescription, but what I can offer is a perception and some, perhaps, perspective.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  Last week, I devoured a recent essay by Charles entitled "The Coronation," and I found it to be one of, if not the, most insightful and intelligent long reads on how to think expansively about our current moment. And I highly suggest you give it a read. I'll link it in the show notes, of course. It's a piece that has stayed with me. I found myself going back to it a couple times. And although Charles and I had previously been discussing getting together this summer for an in-person podcast, it's this article, this long read, that inspired me to seek him out for today's show. So this is a conversation about many things.

• 8:40Rich Roll?

  It's about completely redefining our definition of normal, leveraging this experience to unite and reinvent our society. It's about asking questions. It's about challenging the dominant narrative and our cognitive biases. And it's about taking a hard look at our institutional failures and the systems that perpetuate them. But more than anything, this is about standing in our fear, wading through the muddy waters of media calamity, conspiracy theories, and fake news, to instead listen and feel the

• 9:21Rich Roll?

  quiet excitement that change is actualizing. Without minimizing the severity of what is and what is to come, this truly is our opportunity to create a new world. And may Charles Eisenstein be our gentle steward.

• 9:44Rich Roll?

  Thank you for doing this. I'm a longtime follower and admirer of your work, and I've wanted to meet you for some time. We began an email exchange some months ago about trying to align our schedules to podcast during your next visit to LA. That was looking like July.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:01Rich Roll?

  And then I read your latest piece, "The Coronation," and it really moved me. And I decided that now is the time. I think that your voice is much needed in this unprecedented and precarious moment of fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and also opportunity. And I think it's also fair to say that you're pretty ideally perfectly situated to speak to this calamity with a certain wisdom and breadth and perspective. As, from my perspective, this situation kind of weaves into keen focus and intersects so perfectly with so many of the themes and the ideas that you so eloquently speak to

• 10:46Rich Roll?

  and write about, from our increased separation from self and others and nature and our divinity, to the ills and the myopia of our economic and political systems and our inability to kind of problem solve from a perspective that transcends the polarization and the shared assumptions and kind of entrenched paradigms that we're currently sitting in. So, the reason and the kind of moment for this podcast is really to talk about what's happening now from your perspective and how you're thinking about this collective experience that we're all enduring.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Wow, that's an amazing summary. I couldn't have done it better myself.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, for years and years, I've been writing about what systems change actually looks like and how it corresponds. To something even deeper that you might call narrative change or mythology change. And then how that also interpenetrates our own psychology. Because we're not just these discreet individuals floating through a world, but the world becomes us and we become the world. So when the system changes or when it falls apart, like is seems to be happening now, then we fall apart in some way. Like, or at least we get this vertigo that how who am I now?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  When the reinforcing circumstances of my life disappear? And who I've been, how I've been thinking, how I've been speaking, what I've been doing doesn't really make sense anymore. Who am I now? And it's like disorienting, but also in a way empowering, because it reminds us that the things that we took for granted, both externally on a social, political level, but also in our own lives. Maybe those are coming up as conscious choices that had once been unconscious programs. So there's a certain ascension into a seat of,

• 12:59Speaker 01

  if not power, at least volition, at least choosing now. Like, people talk about a reset or a pause in normality, which gives us the opportunity to even ask, do we want to go back to normal? Like, we were stuck in normal. Generations of revolutionaries and people who wanted to make change, social reformers, have been getting burnt out, pretty frustrated, because no matter how hard their efforts, nothing really seems to be changed. And we're all, to some extent, stuck in a system that no one actually loves. No one thinks, I mean, look at members of Congress. Like, how many of them would say, yeah, I think Congress is really working well.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  This system is good. So now it's like this deliverance, not that it's going to automatically.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  usher in a more beautiful world. But at least it gives us this moment of choice. And we ask, do we even want to go back to normal? And if not, what is possible? If such a big change is possible, now it's possible.

• 14:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is interesting. I feel like there's a battle between this sense of enhanced volition or agency, as you mentioned, but also a countervailing force of loss of control or a lack of agency where we're seeing forces beyond ourselves taking the reins of power and we're seeing diminished liberties and a sense of disempowerment with an inability to go about our daily lives. And that's creating, at least in my own experience, like this emotional storm as to what to do next.

• 14:48Rich Roll?

  I'm certainly seizing the opportunity and the gift inherent in the pause to reflect and think more deeply about the choices that I've made and better choices that I could make. And also to think more broadly about the systems at play and trying to imagine a better system for the future. And it is a war between an optimistic voice and a pessimistic voice about what is to come. Because on some level, there is a light dusting of existential crisis about this, but at some point it will pass and we will be allowed to re-enter the world. And everybody's talking about a new normal. It's unclear what that new normal is

• 15:31Rich Roll?

  or whether there ever was a normal to begin with. And my fear is that people will be in a rush to resume business as usual and we will have missed the opportunity to set in motion the ideas that we're all thinking about right now to craft a better, more sustainable, kinder, gentler world.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, on a very immediate level, we are much less free and much less in choice than we ever have been. We can only even leave the house for things that the government deems are essential. And those things are the things that the most orthodox conventional mindset has applied, not only to health, but to what's important in life, validate. So if you want to take care of your health by going to the chiropractor, or the acupuncturist, or the herbalist, or the yoga class, or anything like that, the value of those things is not

• 16:34Speaker 01

  recognized by standard virology, or by the political authorities. So those are totally off the table. Mm hmm. All you're allowed to do are the most conventional orthodox things. So this restriction of our choice, and the limitation of things we've taken for granted, freedom of assembly, even to some extent, freedom of speech. You know, the internet censorship has ramped up to protect people from what the authorities deem to be misinformation or disinformation. And I lost the beginning of that sentence, but just saying that our freedom is restricted

• 17:15Speaker 01

  like never before, but in a way, it's doing us a favor by showing us where we've been going anyway. Mm hmm. Every response to COVID-19 is a continuation or an intensification of something that was already happening in society. Social distancing, people are congregating less and less in public spaces and living more and more online. The migration of commerce onto the internet, the migration of education onto online forums, the restriction of civil liberties, I mean, this has been happening, the monitoring of your whereabouts at all times, the regime of...

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Paranoia about germs, and I'm venturing into somewhat unorthodox territory here. But a few years ago, there was an article, I cited it in my essay, about the dangers of excessive hygiene. I think the article was titled, "Is Hygiene Making Us Sick?" Because our health, and especially the functioning of our immune systems, depends on constant interaction with the world of life, the microbial world, the viral world. And when we're cut off from that, and we are in isolation, then we lose the integrity and robustness of our

• 18:40Speaker 01

  immune system and our body ecology. In the same way that when we're cut off from social interaction, we lose the robustness of a connected self that's embedded in community. And so, all these trends are reaching this extreme to the point where, you know, we could imagine never going back to normal. Like, a lot of people are doing just fine in measurable ways, living at home, never going outside, getting everything delivered to their door. And we could imagine continuing this so that robots are doing the deliveries, and anytime you are in public, you're wearing a mask and protective gear, and the handshake

• 19:23Speaker 01

  and the hug are relegated to the history books. Because, why? Because we're too afraid now.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a rather depressing and dystopian extrapolation of what we're experiencing right now. And, you know, to the point about our receptivity to our natural environments, the separation, you know, when you look at it in a macro sense, the additional hygiene, the isolation, the separation, ultimately, you know, when you cast it out into the future creates a greater threat to our ability to weather a future pandemic because we've become so insulated and separated from the natural environment and preventing ourselves from

• 20:12Rich Roll?

  developing the natural immunities that come with being immersed and...

• 20:17Rich Roll?

  More interconnected.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  That's right. And so the response to that future pandemic would be an even tighter regime of control. And this is the

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  And it perpetuates.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  One of the deeper patterns of our civilization is that our reflexive response to a crisis is to impose and extend our control over the world. And when that generates further crises, we respond by extending even more control over the world. It's it's an addiction pattern. And we see it played out in every realm, as applied to school shootings, as applied to terrorism, you know, foreign policy, agriculture, medicine. You know, and say in agriculture, when the pesticides and herbicides and chemical fertilizers destroy the soil, leaving crops even more susceptible to disease, then we develop even

• 21:11Speaker 01

  new, more powerful pesticides.

• 21:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is interesting. It belies our hubris in the sense that we can't seem to learn our lesson from the great history of failed attempts at control. History is littered with these wars on various forms of illness, whether it's pestilence, or terrorism, or drugs, that have not reaped the benefits that have been promised. And yet, we seem to continue to resort back to control as the default mechanism for how we're going to navigate, you know, the next crisis that befalls us.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's part of a very deep myth that I would say defines our civilization, which is, I call it the myth of ascent, or the myth of technological utopia, that basically says we started out as these superstitious, primitive, helpless, ignorant creatures.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  At the mercy of natural forces and barely surviving amidst all the competition in the natural world, but thanks to our big brains, we developed science and technology and gradually, century by century, exerted more and more dominance over the world. And someday, this grand project will be complete when science develops a theory of everything, when nanotechnology and genetic engineering allows us to extend our control down to the nano level, then we will be completely safe and perhaps even win victory over death itself and attain to immortality and become the gods, become gods. And we're getting there.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  You know, we can already do things that only the gods used to be able to do, like communicate instantaneously over vast distances and fly through the air and build mountains called skyscrapers, you know, and change the course of rivers. And soon we're gonna solve everything and engineer all of our problems out of existence. And this has been the promise that probably reached its heyday mid 20th century, that science was gonna conquer all. And surely by the year 2000, we would have conquered all diseases. Mm hmm. This ambition, you know, this promise of technological and social utopia is 20

• 23:40Speaker 01

  years overdue. And people are getting angry when they realize that rather than life getting better and better, by each generation, it's getting in a lot of ways worse and worse. Are people healthier now and happier than they were a generation ago? Not according to the depression statistics, or the obesity, or addiction, or suicide, anxiety statistics, even longevity is starting to decline now. So. Mm hmm. What do we do about it?

• 24:15Rich Roll?

  Gods without the wisdom, wielding great power, but without the adequate, you know, amount of information or foresight to make the best decisions, I suppose.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And also, like, there may be inherent limitations to the kind of power that we have gained. I'm not saying that it's bad and that we should undo civilization and give up the lifesaving miracles that modern medicine has achieved. But we tend to apply what we're really good at outside of its proper domain. And try to, you know, we end up usurping the sovereignty of other ways of engaging the world that are not about imposing domination and imposing force on the world. This is getting super philosophical and I'm not sure how.

• 25:03Rich Roll?

  No, that's great. This is why, this is why I'm dialing you up. I want you to go as deep as you want to go.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  So, okay, I was saying like the ultimate triumph, the ultimate conquest would be to conquer death itself. Then we would have finally ascended over nature. This ambition of ascent has a technological rendition where we end up in space, you know, and uploading our consciousness to computers and things like that. And it also has a spiritual rendition, which sees spiritual progress analogously to technological progress as being more and more separate from the earth, from the world. And we see the same ambition register in socio economic terms, where the highest status professions are the ones that are further separated from the soil.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  The ones that deal in abstractions, the abstractions of financial derivatives or scientific equations. Those are the highest status. And the applied scientist has a little less status and the engineer even less and the plumber even less. And at the bottom is the peasant. And that's how it's been for thousands of years. And although there is a revolution in our stories right now, that is celebrating finally the farmer and wishing to reintegrate with materiality and the soil and the earth. So this is the turning that I've been serving my whole life. And so, yeah, like we see the signs of a new story.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  But it seems like the COVID-19 pandemic is showing us the old story in its most extreme form. One way that it's showing us that is.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  By revealing what price we pay to prolong life and minimize risk at all costs. That's this shadow of the attempt to conquer death, which of course, well, I would, I believe will never succeed, but if we can't conquer it, at least we deny it. We hide it with euphemisms and we pursue endless youth and money and property, which gives us the illusion that we're going to survive forever. So many ways that our culture denies and hides death. And, and one of those ways is medical, where the entire medical system is geared toward

• 27:31Speaker 01

  saving lives, preventing deaths. And I'm not being heartless here. I like being alive. I want my loved ones to be alive. My mother is in her late seventies and frail. If she got COVID, she would almost certainly pass away.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  But is that the most important value? To live as long as possible? What do we sacrifice when we pursue that? Or even just in our normal lives? What do we sacrifice when we put safety first above all else?

• 28:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in the article, you, you present this thought experiment about, you know, really pushing the boundaries of the precautions that we're taking, you know? At what point does it become no longer socially acceptable to isolate? If we're doing it to save a million lives? If we're doing it to save a hundred thousand lives? Or if we're doing it solely to save Charles's life or his mother's life? Should all of society be sequestered for that purpose alone? And somewhere in between rests the value that We will socially agree upon.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:46Rich Roll?

  But beneath it all is a conversation about the manner in which our culture whitewashes death, this death denial that you speak about, and our inability to kind of be comfortable confronting that reality. And I feel like COVID puts this in front of us and exposes our fears around death. Like, you qualify it as a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. And on some level, part of that addiction is our addiction to this denial that ultimately, you know, we will escape death. Even though we intellectually understand that we're going to die, I think all of us hold in the back of our minds some sense that perhaps we're going to find a way out of that.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Right. That's what I'm talking about. There are conflicting values here, and I don't think there's a simple formula that can resolve these conflicting values. Like, yeah, I mean, you could say, Charles, how dare you say that maybe we shouldn't socially isolate when that could cause an extra 5,000 deaths, or 10,000, or 50,000 deaths. And that could be your mother. I mean, you know, don't be so heartless. These are precious lives. But there are more important things than living as long as possible. There's something that you might call living as beautifully as possible, living a good life,

• 30:08Speaker 01

  living the right life. That is hard to recognize when we are immersed in a quantitative mindset. It's hard to value those things numerically. It's hard to fit them into costs and benefits. And when the society in general, I mean, this goes all the way down to who we know ourselves to be, who we think ourselves to be. The reigning ideology of civilization says that we are separate individuals. We are separate selves, which means that when

• 30:47Speaker 01

  you die, that's total annihilation. That's the ultimate catastrophe. So of course you want to prolong your life. But if we understand ourselves as not just limited to a skin-encapsulated ego, but as interrelational, interbeings.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Then death takes on a very different resonance. And prolonging the life of the separate self is no longer the highest priority. And this is something people recognize on a gut level. I mean, every time you go to a music festival or get in a car or go rock climbing, for God's sake, or do anything that is fun or that pushes your boundaries, that challenges your limits, that puts you into an uncertain, unknown realm, then you are in fact trading safety and security and risk minimization for a fuller experience of life. This is a trade off that different people resolve in different ways.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  I mean, some people err more on the side of safety and caution, and others like to take risks. But I don't think that there's a clear formula to make that determination.

• 32:06Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And our culture, over my lifetime, has gone more and more and more toward safety, toward risk minimization. And the price has been an impoverished experience of life, to the point where children are no longer playing outside with each other. I mean, this did not just start with COVID. For my whole life, I've seen the dwindling of that quintessential pack of kids outside, playing cops and robbers, playing in the world of the imagination.

• 32:43Rich Roll?

  I know, I would agree with that 100%. I mean, I think we're about the same age. And the era of, you know, leaving your house and riding your bike all day and coming home at dinner would would get you, you know, in trouble with child services in this day and age, which

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  you know, leaves me despairing. I mean, this is something that Jonathan Haidt talks about all the time. And one of the things that he also speaks to, I mean, it's basically, in a broader sense, it's another example of enhanced separation. We're separating ourselves more and more from each other and from our natural environments. And we're doing this now to our children out of a, you know, I guess you could contend laudable concern for their well being. But at the same time,

• 33:30Rich Roll?

  Much at their peril. And Jonathan also talks about the kind of end of shared experiences. He speaks to 9/11 being the last of our collective communal shared experiences because now, by dint of technology, everything is channeled based on our silos and those silos are separated. And when it comes to COVID-19, I think it's not too far off to say that there are two pandemics, or perhaps more. There's the pandemic that you'll experience if you're watching CNN, and there's a different pandemic if you're watching Fox News. There's the pandemic

• 34:11Rich Roll?

  that's visiting us in our homes and in our works. But I don't know, despite, you can go on social media and see people in Italy singing from their balconies, and we can see technology being leveraged to get people masks from the private sector. There are certainly positive aspects to this, but at the same time, our experiences are becoming more and more tribe-dependent. And that is an exacerbation of this separation that you speak to.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that this tribalism and social and political polarization is itself a symptom, as well as a cause, of separation. Because when place-based communities break down, and when we're no longer held in a web of stories and relationships to the people around us and to the nature around us, then our identity, which depends on relationships, shrinks. And we don't know who we are anymore. So then, when a political narrative comes along, along with an in-group that says, "Here's who you are,

• 35:23Speaker 01

  and the price of admission to join the club is to display certain opinions", then people are very vulnerable to that. And they get to get at least some identity through political identification. And then that identification is constantly reinforced in that particular silo or echo chamber. And it says, here's the way the world is. Here's who you are in that world. Here's what's important. Here's how to do this. Here are the good guys. Here are the bad guys. So we're really susceptible to that, especially the overlay template of good guys and bad guys.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  And that way of seeing the world is one of the strands of DNA of our civilization, one of the deep programs that the world is composed of good and bad, and that progress means overcoming the bad with the good. Goes back thousands of years. Overcoming the barbarians, expanding the domestic realm, conquering the wild, conquering the beasts, draining the wetlands. That was being done 5,000 years ago, cutting down the forests, tilling the soil, straightening the rivers, like imposing order onto chaos, overcoming every resistance, and then translating into the mentality of war

• 36:51Speaker 01

  and into medicine, too. Like, we are very comfortable as a culture with COVID-19, in a way, because it's something we can understand. There's a bad guy making us sick. And so we're, we mobilize on every level, from the political authorities down all the way to individual citizens self-isolating. We mobilize because we know what to do. In contrast, stark contrast to the silent epidemics that are killing way more people than COVID-19 ever will, such as autoimmunity, such as obesity, such as addiction. We don't, there's no enemy to fight

• 37:35Speaker 01

  for these epidemics. There's nothing, there's no pathogen. There's nothing to conquer. But there, the cause lies within.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Ourselves lies within our society. There's nothing to fight. So our customary approach to change, which is domination, find a bad guy and destroy it, doesn't work. And you can see just this tendency to look for a bad guy. And this almost nostalgic wish that there were a identifiable bad guy in American foreign policy. Where the Soviet Union, I mean, those were the good old days. You know, evil was evil, good was good, and we knew what it was. And ever since then, the foreign policy establishment has been groping around for a new bad guy. Islamic terror was it for a while.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  You know, after nine 11, okay, that was scary for a while. But after 20 years of endless war after that, people stopped being scared. So then they resurrected Russia, you know, and Vladimir Putin as the new bad guy. But aside from the talking heads on TV, no one's actually terrified of Vladimir Putin, not the way that we were, you and I were terrified of the Soviet Union when we were kids, you know? Do you remember like the big map with the Soviet Union, three times the size of America, bristling with missiles, you know, the Iron Curtain, the Gulag Archipelago? That was scary.

• 39:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was. And do you remember the movie The Day After?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:05Rich Roll?

  When we were kids?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  That was profound.

• 39:07Rich Roll?

  I have a very vivid memory of being, you know, quite terrified about that. And yet, here we are with an identifiable enemy that we actually are attempting to exert control over via domination, dominion.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:23Rich Roll?

  And yet, we're still unable to completely unify. In fact, I'm, you know, I'm seeing a more fractured culture around how to address this problem than perhaps we would have seen even a few decades prior.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, people do not trust authority, not nearly as much as they did 20 years ago. I think part of the reason is that our new happy lives, to take a line from Orwell that were promised to us, have not materialized. Even as we've done as we were told. We haven't gotten healthier and healthier despite getting all of our checkups and going to the doctor and doing as we've been told.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  So, and not to mention, you know, income inequality and things like that. Normal hasn't been working and there is a lot of latent anger, fury, I think, especially among the working classes,

• 40:18Speaker 01

  that makes them unwilling to really believe what the authorities are telling us. And like, I'm not sure if I believe it, you know, I've, I've gone into all of the conspiracy theories and all of the alternative narratives and the questioning of, I mean, it just, it's, it's a rabbit hole. It's a, it's a warrant of rabbit holes. When you look into, you know, are that many people dying well, you know, if someone dies and there's detachable COVID, then it's ascribed to COVID, even though they would have been dying of something else. And the tests, the PCR tests are not even reliable because they don't measure viral load and et cetera, et cetera. And I mean, there's just, it's just like this, this thicket of conflicting.

• 41:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, they, yeah, there's no end to the, you know, conspiracy theory rabbit hole when it comes to this for sure. But one of the things that I thought was super interesting in your piece was that whether or not any of these theories, uh, you know, hold merit is irrelevant because they represent this unconscious systemic tilt toward ever increasing control. In other words, there doesn't need to be an illuminati or some brain trust that's pulling, you know, that some puppet master who's controlling all of this. But our systems are set up to lean in this direction.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:44Rich Roll?

  So I thought, you know, if you could expound upon that, because I found that to be very interesting.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, all that's necessary for all of this to happen is to have a predisposition toward thinking that disease is caused by pathogens and systems set in place that can respond to that. So there's the preparation, there's the, the mindset, there's the opportunity to act on that. I, I use the metaphor of, it's a kind of a tired cliche, but if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  To the point where, you know, you might be. I mean, maybe it's, maybe it is a nail. Maybe this is a straightforward case of a dangerous pathogen and everything we're doing is appropriate to protect ourselves and to conquer it. But if it weren't a nail, we wouldn't know that because of the way that the media is working, because of the built-in biases of the medical system. In, in the essay, I go into a little bit into what's known as terrain theory, exemplified by the meme that I saw, which is, "Your fish is sick." Germ theory: Isolate the fish. Terrain theory: Clean the tank.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  So many diseases can be seen as, as symptoms, or, or the infectious agent can be seen as symptoms of a condition that makes you susceptible to that infection. And in some schools of thought, it's actually good for you to get colds and flus occasionally because it kind of cleans out your system. It is like this accelerated processing of stored-up metabolic wastes and toxins and things like that. And I'm throwing unscientific terms around very carelessly here, but metaphorically, like the fever, you know, burning off the waste,

• 43:42Speaker 01

  the mucus, discharging the junk, you know? And in some schools of thought, even the classic childhood diseases, measles, mumps, and chickenpox, put the child through a kind of initiation. For example, I can't remember which one it is, but one of them is like, after you've gone through that illness and you've gotten better by yourself, basically. No one can really do anything for you. It imparts to the child this confidence.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I can meet a challenge. I can do this. And it's even conceivable that viral diseases, especially, transmit DNA into our genome and are a way for genetic information to spread much more rapidly than standard Darwinian or Mendelian mechanisms would allow. Because, and this gets like, this is a whole nother rabbit hole, but viruses are extremely similar to extracellular vesicles that cells secrete or emit to signal each other and to transmit genetic information to each other. They make these little lipid-filled sacs that have DNA or RNA in them and they shoot those out, basically.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And that's one of the ways that cells communicate with each other within an organism and even across organism boundaries and even across species or kingdom boundaries. It's like this genetic communication system. And viruses are almost identical to these exosomes, to the point where it gets hard to tell, are viruses simply hijacking this cellular machinery that can create these extracellular vesicles? Or are they themselves a means of communication? And is there some kind of evolutionary possibility here with each new pandemic that visits humanity? Like, is it part of our genetic evolution and part of maybe some other form

• 45:41Speaker 01

  of evolution as well, collective initiation that we're going through? And this is, you know, very speculative, but when we open up our minds to a worldview that isn't us versus them, we're able to entertain such ideas. And I don't know if it's true or not, but I think that this way of thinking needs to be on the table. And it will become on the table as our technologies of control become more and more useless to deal with the real problems that we face today.

• 46:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. I would imagine a challenging one. You know, I want to be sensitive to anybody who's listening to this who is sick or has a loved one that's sick. I mean, at the same time, this is a very serious problem and people are dying and becoming very ill. And there's a lot of fear in the macro sense, like telescoping out and looking at it. From that perspective, you know, I imagine there's, there's truth in that, but it's not a salve to the, you know, the wound that people are feeling at the moment.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's scant comfort if you're the one sick or your loved one is sick. We have to take in all the data points and some of the alternative ones and the conspiracy ones, this is, you know, manufactured crisis to fulfill a totalitarian wish list and so forth. Like that leaves out data points as well, like the data points of there are people dying. There are people, there, something is happening. There is a new disease or way more people who are getting the shortness of breath and pneumonia and something's happening. And, and, and I'm just, one thing that disturbs me, and I mentioned in the essay, is just

• 47:27Speaker 01

  people's willingness to exclude data points that don't fit their narrative and that don't fit their worldview and don't fit their political identification. Cause I think that it's not only the alternative people and the conspiracy people who do that. I think the mainstream does that too, on an institutional level. And it has gone down a blind alley as well. And that the truth of this all, if we ever know what it is, is going to be beyond what anyone can even imagine right now.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  I think beyond the virus itself, it's really pulled the veil on the fragility of our systems, economic and political, you know, the fact that everything has ground to a halt and our economy is basically frozen in time at the moment and in essentially free fall. And we're now seeing what happens when an economic system that's premised on, you know, carrying, you know, large loads of debt and, you know, businesses that are overly leveraged. You know, this is potentially cataclysmic and could send us into a depression. At the very least, a moment of repression that we don't know how long it's going to last.

• 48:54Rich Roll?

  And it is opening up the conversation about what a better economic system would look like. And this is something that you spent a lot of time thinking about. You've written a book, Sacred Economics. So how are you thinking about this moment in the context of your economic thinking?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could go either way. Just like on the medical level, it could go either way toward, you know, doubling down on where we've already been going and finally getting rid of all that alternative and holistic stuff, you know? Or it could be like, wow, this wasn't working. Let's try something really different. Why are we so vulnerable? Why is our healthcare system so fragile? Like, we could go into this big reckoning and house cleaning and reassessment of everything, all the way down to the bottom. Same thing with economics. If nothing changes, if we just continue on the path we've been on,

• 49:53Speaker 01

  then this crisis is accelerating a long existing trend of concentration of wealth and the destruction of small business and the concentration of economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands. Because the crisis is decimating small and medium sized businesses. So, you know, the big ones can get bailed out, they can get supported by the government. It's a lot harder to do that for your, you know, local movie theater or yoga studio or whatever. Like, people are getting along okay without a lot of these small businesses. Some of them will probably come back.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  But we're looking at massive devastation for small businesses and the self-employed, even, you know, medium sized businesses and everything that depends on, you know, the brick and mortar world, like the local kinds of businesses. So we could see.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  A extension of this longstanding trend of concentration of wealth. People talk about, you know, with the stimulus checks and stuff, a universal basic income. This could be the start of a universal basic income, which could be a wonderful thing or it could be a terrible thing. It could be, well, sorry, you can't get a job anymore unless you're part of a shrinking elite. But we'll give you your monthly pittance as long as you do as you're told. Right. And, you know, don't misbehave and, you know, wear your ankle monitor to make sure that you're, you know, your electronic hall pass to make sure you're not at some unauthorized,

• 51:37Speaker 01

  unessential place, et cetera, et cetera, you know? And, and so most people are kind of on the dole, except for a small elite. And they can't get off it because the independent economy that's not controlled by government and huge corporations has been destroyed. Like, we could see that. Or we could see, analogously to a holistic revival, we could, we could take stock and say, wow, we don't want to keep going down this road. What do we do to bring economic power back to the people, to redress the concentration of wealth?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  And that could go along the lines of, and this is a moment where we could take a different path. We could institute some form of a debt jubilee, debt forgiveness, student loan forgiveness, refinancing mortgages at zero interest. There, there's many ways to bail out the debtors rather than bailing out the creditors and the banks and the large institutions. And I hope that, and this is one of the, one of the things I'd like to put, you know, onto the radar.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Is that we don't have to go back to normal. Normal sucked. Normal was like a road to hell. Things were getting worse and worse for more and more people. And not just people, but for the for ecosystems, for soil, for water, for the whales, for the elephants, for the oceans. Like, we don't want to go back to normal. And now that normal has been interrupted, maybe we can make a conscious choice to go in a different direction. That's the gift. And that's what makes it an initiation.

• 53:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's the gift.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:32Rich Roll?

  That's, yeah, it is the initiation. I mean, you've talked about and written about yourself being somebody who is sort of, you know, always perceived that just around the bend, you know, something like this would be coming and it never seemed to come. And now here it is. It's, you know, this, this moment in time that is so unique and unprecedented and yet rife with so much opportunity. I mean, the argument certainly can be made that this is the greatest opportunity for consolidation of power and wealth, you know, in our lifetime, certainly. And we're seeing that happening right now. And the large corporations are going to get their bailouts and there's going to be a decimation of small businesses across the board.

• 54:17Rich Roll?

  And if that scale tips too far in that direction, that becomes, you know, a scenario in which revolt and revolution becomes a potential reality.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:31Rich Roll?

  Short of that, we're also seeing on the other side, indicia of this gift economy. We're having conversations about universal basic income in a way we never have. We're seeing, you know, people on social media just getting out their Venmo and sending money to people and. Over tipping and doing all of these kind of, you know, engaging in these beautiful acts of humanity that are casting a spotlight on the beautiful aspects of what a different type of system could produce that would bring us together and cultivate that community and eradicate some of the separation. That's, you know, like you said, this is all an accelerant of these trends and things that are already, you know, happening.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:16Rich Roll?

  It's just being exacerbated right now. And that's allowed us to have a heightened level of attention. And with that, my hope is that we can take stock of that and really seize this moment where we're forced to stop when we're in repose to conceptualize this better system for all.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do see both of those things happening. On the one hand, this outburst of humanity, solidarity, that's what always happens when the confining routines of normality waver or dissolve. Rebecca Solnit writes about this so beautifully in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. When there's an earthquake, you know, when there's a flood, when there's some natural disaster that sweeps away the structures of society. It's not what one might expect. Dog eat dog, looting and chaos and the strong preying on the weak. Uh-uh. It's people getting together to take care of each other.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Whoever has, you know, some, a kerosene stove, they set up an outdoor kitchen and whoever has food brings the food and people, they start to take care of each other. This natural altruism and community and solidarity emerges. And you realize that it's been repressed all the time by our systems and ideologies of separation, but it's always laying there waiting for its moment to come back. And this is such a moment. As soon as normality waivers, people can act on their long repressed impulse to live the lives that we are in fact here to live, which are not to maximize self-interest.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  That is a substitute, a bribe, to keep us away from the lives that we're really here to live, which are lives of service to life and service to beauty and service to something meaningful to us. That's the only meaningful life and the only full life. And to sell that off, to mortgage that, to mirror survival, safety, security, self-protection, that is a poor bargain that we make that leaves us feeling that we didn't even live life. You know, instead, we lived the life we were paid to live. But what about my life? Where I'm not afraid to die? At least, yeah, maybe I have that fear,

• 57:51Speaker 01

  but there's something more important. So that gets liberated in times like these. And it's also showing us, when you take something that's happening unconsciously and put it starkly in front of your face by showing us the extreme of it, then the unconscious choice becomes conscious. And that's what we're seeing. It's like, okay, here's our destination. Here's where we were going to be going. A world of isolation, of distancing, of separation, of polarization, of concentration of wealth, of no human contact, of no community. Like, we've been silently, helplessly, unconsciously moving toward that

• 58:35Speaker 01

  as if it were an inevitability for a long time. And now it's like the alcoholic waking up and his spouse has left him and he's in the hospital or something like that. And it's like, wow, this is taking me to a bad place. And so it's a moment of reclaiming our sovereignty and our collective ability to choose.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Our future, rather than merely adapting to something that we see is inevitable. And what future will we choose? It's being shown us by precisely this humanity and solidarity that is breaking through the cracks in the system.

• 59:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  That it's showing us the future we could go to. A future where we're all in this together, where we understand that your well being and my well being are connected. And even the well being of other creatures and that health and happiness and even real wealth does not and cannot exist in isolation, but only in community. And so we can say, yeah, enough of this trajectory of separation. Now is the time to rejoin the community of humanity and to rejoin the community of life. That's the the crossroads that we're at right now.

• 59:56Rich Roll?

  To tell a new story. I mean, there is a sort of deconstruction and death of identity and ego and ambition right now. Everybody's been, you know, sort of put in the corner and told you're in timeout. And you need to reflect on what what got us to this point. And that's terrifying to be told, hey, I know you have this plan and you're trying to get this thing and do, you know, do this project or make your way in the world in a certain way. And all of that is now out the window for pretty much everybody. And what are we going to do with this time? And we can really reframe this story.

• 1:00:41Rich Roll?

  There is such a beautiful strain of hope, I think, and possibility that can come out of this if we leverage it properly. But if we instead resort to our devices and scroll endlessly and stoke our dopamine with, you know, the news feed, whatever information silo, you know, we prefer, the moment will lapse. And it will be a new normal, but it won't be the normal of greatest potential and possibility.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Now, it'll be a new normal that's an intensification of the old normal.

• 1:01:18Rich Roll?

  Right. An exacerbation of that.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Rich Roll?

  How do you think about this in terms of the thought that you've put into how we ponder climate change? Because this is another strain of your thinking that I want to probe a little bit. And you know, part of your thesis is this push to go beyond our paradigm of optimism versus despair, or, you know, this polarized kind of dialogue that we have about climate change. And I think your thinking around this is very relevant to how we're thinking about COVID.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of parallels that I could draw. I can just cherry pick a few of them. One is this reaction pattern of finding one thing to blame for a problem, one thing that can then be controlled, which in the case of climate change, I mean, with with COVID, it's obvious what that thing is. It's a virus. With climate change, it becomes carbon dioxide, or maybe, you know, greenhouse gases. And it becomes the one thing that if we could just control that, everything will be fine. Which taps into this kind

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  of mechanical model of climate and of the biosphere, which I think is actually dangerously inaccurate. So in my climate book, I say, you know, really, the planet is not a machine, it's alive, and its health depends on the health of its organs, the organs being ecosystems, soil, forests, wetlands, coral reefs, grasslands, I mean, every ecosystem, really, and species, you know, whales, elephants even are organs. And even if you can't put a good carbon number on, say, whales, we know from the living planet, organs of Gaia.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Perspective that if we decimate the whales and destroy these other organs in the planet, it's still going to die of organ failure. A death of a million cuts. Even if we somehow like cut down the Amazon, but offset that lost carbon sequestration with solar panels and carbon sucking machines and we bleach the sky white with sulfur aerosols to reflect sunlight, then things should be fine, right? Because according to the carbon numbers, they're fine. But no, that quantitative approach, that reductionistic approach commits the same violence that any reductionism commits, which is that it leaves out all of the things that are

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  reduced away, all of the things that cannot be measured by the numbers, all of the things that don't count, which in the end turn out to be the most important of all. And that our, I won't say our salvation, because this gets to another thing, but I will say that a future in a beautiful, living planet in which we are fully alive, it depends on bringing the excluded things back in. The excluded, not only the excluded places and species and cultures, but also excluded, I don't know, genders, races, excluded parts of ourselves, excluded parts of reality, all of those things that were not important in the age of reason. They need to be brought back in.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Non-human beings, the understanding that we're not alone here. We are among other conscious sacred beings on a sacred world. All that has to be brought in. And when we bring those in, then we make choices that may correspond to carbon reduction policy, but don't always correspond to that. So often they overlap. Like even, one thing I say in the book is even if carbon emissions weren't a problem, I still would oppose fracking. Mountain top removal, tar sands excavation, pipelines and so forth, because they also spill

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  oil and degrade ecosystems. Like to drill for oil offshore, you have to do seismic surveys of the continental shelf, which involves 150 decibel explosions every 10 seconds to map the geology, which deafens whales and interferes with their global communication network of these songs that can be heard for hundreds of kilometers that weave the ocean together into a mind and also perhaps coordinate the whales to transport nutrients from their feeding grounds to their birthing grounds. And like whales are an organ of the ocean.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  They make the ocean alive by feeding deep underwater and pooping on the surface and seeding plankton growth. And I mean, the whole, it's a physiology. So anyway, that's, that's one of the themes that also applies to how we, I think, should approach coronavirus, which is to understand that this virus is part of an ecosystem. Like, why are we so susceptible to it? And why are we focusing on this one health condition that is amenable

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  to control? When, I mean, look at the panic around it compared to the utter lack of panic around five million children a year dying from malnutrition. Why are we not radically changing our lifestyle for that? Five million children. Like, why have we not been in an uproar saying, oh, my God, we have to stop. Whatever we're doing, we have to stop because five million children are starving?

• 1:07:24Rich Roll?

  Well, I think it goes to the point that you made in the piece, which is that something like a virus is susceptible to the control mechanisms.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  Whereas issues like homelessness, the opioid crisis, mental health, depression, things like this are much more ephemeral and complicated. They're not as amenable to a reductionist solution. And I think that, you know, overall, what you're talking about...

• 1:07:56Rich Roll?

  Speaks to the sort of failures of reductionism. And what's challenging is that is how you square that with the fact that, you know, reductionism is at the very core of the scientific method. And, you know, that reductionist approach is how we've pursued science traditionally, and we've made tremendous progress in doing so. But it is at the cost of fully understanding the holistic nature of all things.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:26Rich Roll?

  And our inability to grok that is what has led us to this point. By focusing narrowly, we miss the larger picture.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Rich Roll?

  And to the extent that we're now in a crisis in which we're being required to think more broadly about the interdependency of all, we don't really have a system set up to deal with problems from that perspective.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it goes just that deep. You know, we could talk about systems theory and holism in science and so forth. Like, science is actually undergoing a metamorphosis, just like everything else. But fundamentally, science is the study of the measurable. If you can't measure it, it's not science. And measurement is inescapably a form of reductionism. So when we have a scientifically based society where everybody upholds scientific as the standard to strive for, scientific policy, for example, we want to be scientific in our policies.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  What that means is that we ultimately, what it means is we base it on numbers. So it's quite understandable then. This is part of the tilt of the playing field. It's quite understandable that we will gear public policy to minimize deaths or minimize infections, because those show up in the numbers, and we have a scientific policy. Whereas, quality of life, that doesn't really show up in the numbers. You know, if one person doesn't have a respirator, or chooses not to go on a respirator, and dies surrounded by their loved ones and says goodbye to them.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Then that is considered a worse outcome by the numbers than if their lives are prolonged for another month, hooked up to a machine that's breathing for them, behind glass in an ICU, saying goodbye to their friends and family on FaceTime. This is an image I got from Alyssa Rankin, MD, who wrote a piece on this. You know, she's like, "Do you really want to go on a respirator? Like, what are we choosing here?" But, you know, that's an extra month of life. And possibly, you'll get better and you can get off the respirator. Is it worth it?

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Like, whether somebody dies well is invisible to our statistics and therefore invisible to any policy apparatus that's based on the numbers. And so, you know, we could extend this to every realm, not just COVID-19. And then it brings up a tough question. If we don't want to, and I'm not saying always ignore numbers and, you know, forget science and so forth, it has its proper domain. And there are things that are beyond its reach that are important, such as quality of life. How shall we live? What's beautiful? How do we live in a beautiful way?

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Hospitals cannot keep records and form statistics on, "Did the patient die well?"

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  That's beyond the reach of science, probably forever. So, this brings up the question, okay, if we understand that, yeah, this whole way of making decisions, this whole way of seeing the world has limits. It has its proper domain, but there are other domains. It has limits. Then, how do we make decisions that don't ignore and discard science, but that give it just one seat in a larger circle? That question, I do not have a cut and dried answer for. I don't have an answer for it. But I do know that it's the right question to ask in these times.

• 1:12:27Rich Roll?

  As people are sequestered in their homes, what are some suggestions that you could give to people to engage in this process of thinking more deeply about themselves and their place in culture and in the world and and possibly the kind of changes that one might entertain right now?

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Hmm. It really depends on who I'm talking to, you know?

• 1:12:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, look, this is an inside job. It's a spiritual inquiry, you know? And I think, you know, in thinking about this for myself, it's about really doing an honest inventory of the decisions that I've been making and the choices that I've made about how to live my life and what's serving me and what isn't and what is in the interest of myself and my families and the greater good. And if I'm left with one thing, you know, I'm sitting here talking to you. My day to day is not that unchanged.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Rich Roll?

  You know, like, I can still do what I do and I'm podcasting from home and people aren't coming to my house, but I'm still able to pursue my living. And for the most part, I'm kind of going about my day as usual, which is a privilege, but has also allowed me to more deeply reflect on this kind of hermetic existence that I've carved out for myself.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  Has left me yearning for more community than I've availed myself previously. Like, that's one thing that I'm thinking about.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I'm thinking right now of of my dear friend, he's actually my ex-wife's husband, you know, who is a working class guy, you know, is a building maintenance guy, you know, for a group of juvenile justice system schools and things and.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  You know, he's been furloughed. Like that, their family, like they, you know, at the end of each month have like $50. They live paycheck to paycheck. Like tens of millions of other people. And for people like that, life has changed an awful lot.

• 1:14:39Rich Roll?

  And I think it's insensitive to ask somebody in that situation to be asking larger questions that, you know, extend beyond just mere survival at this point.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So that's what like what I'm saying is like what I would say to somebody, you know, depends on their situation. But I think even for, I mean, for, for everybody, it is, but especially for people who haven't been affected with acute physical privation and who maybe have something to share. I mean, you mentioned the people, you know, sharing on Venmo and stuff. And it does bring up a choice for everybody. How do we direct our energy and resources of time, of money, of everything that we have been gifted that allows us to be givers in turn? One response that we've been seeing is hoarding.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  How do I make sure that I'll be okay even whenever other people aren't? That's the mindset underneath hoarding. Or some of the financial responses. Ah, how do I make money off this? What's the best investment strategy that'll preserve my wealth? Same mindset. How am I going to be okay even if everybody else isn't? To think in that way is to align with the most dystopian future that you can imagine. It's to participate in that future. It is even to summon that future through our alignment with it, saying, yeah, that's what, that's what I'm choosing. I will be part of that. And we have the other choice too.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  The choice that is based on the interbeing story, the story of interbeing, the connected relational self that says, yeah, how can I help? How can I act from my knowledge that we're all in this together? How can I inhabit an understanding that I am here to give? That I am here to serve life? Not to martyr myself, but if I have more than I need, then what can I do with this? That makes the world more beautiful? And that lights up that part of me that knows that I am here for something bigger than just surviving?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  And that choice is available, I would even say, not just to the privileged, but I'm thinking of Viktor Frankl's stories of concentration camps. He wrote, "There were those in the camps," he said, "that would go from hut to hut, comforting others and giving away their last piece of bread." And he said, "There weren't a lot of those people, but they proved that everything can be taken from somebody except for their power to respond to circumstances, the power to choose. And that choice comes from who we know ourselves to be

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  and who we want to become. And yeah, that choice is conditioned by our trauma, by our circumstances, yet there is still an atom of choice that is inextinguishable, that becomes apparent. It's buried most of the time, but it rises to the surface in extraordinary circumstances, when normal has fallen apart and our usual conditioning no longer applies. We get these golden moments, these choice points, that have incredible potency to write the story of the rest of our lives. They're like these leverage points, these fulcrums,

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  that have huge influence decades in the future for ourselves and for the world. So what I would tell people is to treasure this time and know that your choices... That had been invisible before, but now are offered to you consciously that these have a magnified power to change individual and collective reality. And so to treasure these and to look for the opportunities that will be increasingly presented to us the more we orient to them. The opportunities, as Fred Rogers would have said, to be a helper. It's just that simple, to be a helper.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  That's the opportunity that's available to us now.

• 1:19:20Rich Roll?

  I think we'd all like to have Fred Rogers around right now.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:25Rich Roll?

  It is interesting how we see these things in the extreme right now, from the hoarder who is making off with all the toilet paper to, you know, the giver, the extreme giver. It's highlighting those polarities of humanity in a very interesting way. And I hope, you know, I am optimistic that we are in a moment that we can really capitalize on to reimagine a different kind of future, a more balanced, giving, heart-based, holistic,

• 1:20:06Rich Roll?

  sustainable system of economics and politics and social interaction that will create a better future for our children and children's children.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  May it be so.

• 1:20:20Rich Roll?

  And what is your instinct telling you?

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  I think that anything is possible right now. I don't think that COVID has come to rescue us. I think, I don't know, I cycle back and forth through hope and despondency and spending more of my time in uncertainty than either hope or despondency. And I see that we are standing at a crossroads, at a at a place where where the road that we've been on has ended and now it's radiating out into the future. A hundred paths are before us, radiating out into the future. And

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, like, it's almost like we've taken a step or two down the wrong path, down the path that points in the same direction that the road that we've been on has taken us.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  And it's not too late to just step over onto another path. It's right there and we can see it still through the fog. We can see it in the form of these, of the helpers, of the solidarity, of the suppressed but wanting to break loose holistic paradigms. The new economics, the economics of gift, the economics of solidarity, all of these things that are, that are just bubbling under the surface. That future is available to us too.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  But I don't know, like, this, I mean, I don't, neither of these futures are ordained or inevitable. We are indeed at a moment of choice, which means that any prediction that I make is a guess. And that doesn't mean that we're helpless. It's the opposite. It's that we have a choice. So the future that's going to happen depends on what we choose. And in a mysterious way, none of us are the helpless victims of the choice of everybody else. And this is where it gets really mystical.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  It's not like, well, okay, I'll choose the world of gift and the world of solidarity and the world of we're in this together and the beautiful world and a healed ecosystem. I'll choose that, but you know, it doesn't seem like everybody else is, so what does it matter? That despair is built on the same story of self that our ecocidal.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Civilization is built on. It's built on the same story of self that upholds survival and the denial of death as the highest goal. The story of a separate self that is therefore powerless to affect the world unless you have an awful lot of force under your command so that you can dominate all those others. Then you're powerful in the story of separation. But intuitively, we can also tap into another theory of change that doesn't depend on force and that recognizes our felt intuition that certain choices in certain moments in

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  life have cosmic significance, that no choice is ever wasted, and that our inner world and our private choices are mysteriously intimately connected to the outer world. And this is a paradox. Like, if the future that we will experience co-resonates with who I am choosing to be and the choices I am making and the healing that I've been given. Well, and that's true for somebody else too. And if they're choosing a different one than I am, then how does that work? You know, like, the mind of separation cannot grasp the power that we feel and know is

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  inherent in our choices.

• 1:24:39Rich Roll?

  I like that. It's beautifully put. It's sort of a theory of quantum agency on some level, right? And it's empowering.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:46Rich Roll?

  This idea that even when no one's looking and this sense of disempowerment that we all feel because of this system in which we find ourselves needs to be rethought and to understand that the thoughts that we entertain and the decisions that we make, although seemingly irrelevant in an infinite sea of possibilities, actually do have weight and meaning and valence.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, that's well put. It's, um, basically, I'm articulating the theory of morphic resonance. You know, Rupert Shaldes' idea that, that any change that happens in one place generates a field of change, and the same change starts happening other places. Even if you didn't make it happen with force, you are shape shifting reality into conformity with the change that you've perpetrated in your life through an act of kindness, or generosity, or healing, or love. You're propagating a field of generosity, kindness, healing, and love, and it starts happening everywhere else, too. But you didn't make it happen.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  It's like you're shifting into that reality in which it is happening. And, and I just want to say, like, that doesn't mean that I'm saying, okay, so forget about political change and social change and just operate in the personal realm. It's that principle gets applied on every level. And, and I am, so it's not an escape from the collective realm. Like, I am talking about debt forgiveness and things like that. But how do we make that happen? You know, we can talk about it, but really what I want to do is to invoke its reality,

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  invoke its possibility, to name that it is possible, so that we can align with it in the same way that I'm naming the felt knowledge that we carry that our choices are significant. These are truths that can be spoken into existence if they are, in fact, true. And I'm happy to see that it's not just me. You know, a lot of people are now speaking these, these truths into existence. And I guess I would, I would have to, you know, in my roundabout way, I would have to say that I am hopeful. Like, we've got a chance.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  We have a possibility of walking that path to a more beautiful world.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  It's something that we can choose.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  It's alive. That future is alive.

• 1:27:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's a good place to put a pin in it. I mean, this idea that it's a crossroads and an opportunity for a shift and an elevation of consciousness, because however the House and the Senate votes on whatever bill is before it, is really just evidence of a collective conscious awareness of a thing, right? And that begins with our individual decisions and behaviors and thoughts. This is something that we have control over in a world in which we have very little control, but it is the one thing that we can do.

• 1:28:14Rich Roll?

  And to the extent that we understand it's more powerful than perhaps we, we walk around believing, I think, is the beginnings of the change we want to see.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to load too much responsibility onto us, you know, like, yeah, we do have control over that. And it's also true that our choices are conditioned by our circumstances, by our trauma, by our unmet needs and our unhealed wounds. And so to say, well, you know, I'm choosing it and so and so over there, they just didn't make that choice, that is not kind or compassionate. And instead, we might ask, well, why didn't they make that choice? What are they choosing from? And how can I change the conditions from which they are choosing?

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  But that still doesn't invalidate that there is a choice and that our dormant choice-making apparatus comes to life when we do receive new information, when a truth that had been hidden becomes visible, when a pattern that had been unconscious becomes conscious, when we see that it's not working anymore, when we are shown where we are going.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  That we had not questioned, that it seemed just inevitable. Like when we receive some kind of healing, when we hear words that resonate with our secret knowing, like all of these things change the conditions from which we choose and offer us one of those golden moments that I spoke of before. So, yeah, I just want to like make sure that this isn't being received as, you know, some big responsibility that you have to do right. But it's more of just an invitation to notice that, wow, a choice is available to me right

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  now and to receive that opportunity with gratitude and maybe even with a prayer that I will receive what I need in order to choose the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

• 1:30:31Rich Roll?

  I think that's a great place to end it. Thank you. That was wonderful. I really appreciate you sharing with me today. It was very meaningful and thank you for that.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, Rich. I appreciate you giving me so much space, you know, to go on and on and.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, of course. Well, that's one of the things with, with, with like these, these remote platforms, you have to be careful of not talking over each other too much, which makes it less of a conversation and more of a back and forth. But I was more than happy to, you know, allow you the space to think out loud and I appreciate it. My only regret being that we didn't get to meet in person. So I hope that at some point when we're on the other side of this, we could make that happen. I'd love to have you share in person with me at some point in the future if you're keen. Yeah, I would like that, too. Yeah, thank you. So, in the meantime, everybody can learn more about Charles by going to charleseisenstein.org.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  You can read his essays, watch his videos. You have courses there as well. You have a podcast, A New and Ancient Story. People can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. Is there anything else you want to direct people towards? No, not really. You can just, you know, find it all in the interwebs. Right. And all the books and everything, I'll link all that up in the show notes, so you can find that on the episode page. And with that, I'm gonna let you return to your life. Thank you, Charles. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Rich. All right. Take care. Thanks.

• 1:32:08Rich Roll?

  How'd that one land for you guys? How's your noodle doing? Is it bending? My hope is that you found this conversation nourishing. Charles is wise beyond his years. Truly a Yoda for our times and a total gift to humanity. If his words reverberated in your soul, I encourage you to give one of his many books a read. Listen to Charles's podcast, A New and Ancient Story. You can check out the show notes for links and resources to plumb deeper, including a link to his amazing essay, The Coronation. And of course, you can follow him on the socials, @charles_eeisenstein on Instagram and @c-eisenstein on Twitter. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate,

• 1:32:52Rich Roll?

  and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin, who typically video the show, although today, our show was done remotely, no video. Although, we'll put up the audio on YouTube as an audio only. Jessica Miranda for graphics, Ally Rogers, who typically does portraits, but again, this was remote. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thank you for the love, you

• 1:33:33Rich Roll?

  guys. I hope you are safe. I hope you are finding a way to navigate this experience with grace and gratitude, that you are reaching out to your loved ones, staying socially connected in this moment of physical distancing.

• 1:33:51Rich Roll?

  And that you really take to heart Charles's words today. Thanks for your attention. I appreciate you. I love you. And I'll see you back here in a couple of days with another great episode. Until then, peace. Plants. Namaste.