Giancarlo
Hello. Welcome to the third episode of the mangu.tv podcast. We have my friend Daniel Pinchbeck, who is a writer and author. Mangusta production produced a documentary based on his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Welcome, Daniel.
Daniel
Hey, thanks, Giancarlo. Good to see you. We're privileged to see you these days.
Giancarlo
Thanks very much. So let's start with, they say the 30,000 feet view, but I would say, even more, imagine you are on a faraway planet and you're a very intelligent alien and you have been following the history of humankind for the last million years. What do you see in this blue planet spinning around? How do we think we're doing as humans?
Daniel
Yeah, I guess there've been times when I felt very strident like I had all the answers or whatever, I'm not really in one of those times right now. We have a lot of people on the planet, we have a lot of problems, I guess, we have a lot of new concerns and some old concerns.
Giancarlo
But generally speaking, do you think we have been evolving the last two, 3000 years, 10,000 years. 50,000 years?
Daniel
Yes, I've looked at that in different ways. I wrote a book called 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and we looked at the philosopher Jean Gebser, who had a book called The Ever-Present Origin, Part One: Foundations of the Aperspectival World kind of a very germanic way of looking at things. He looked at the evolution of consciousness in terms of these different structures that reach a certain point and then there is a crisis. There are forces, like mutation to new forms of consciousness. So he enumerated the past ones, like the Aboriginal or the archaic structure of consciousness, and there was kind of the magical tribal consciousness, then there was the mythological kind of more like a cyclical vision, then we came into the mental rational structure of consciousness where, we became very obsessed with space and matter and science and technology and empiricism and Gebser who was writing back in the fifties, thought that we were slowly approaching the end of the mental rational structure that would force a mutational break, during a crisis into a type of consciousness when she called integral or a perspectival. So these different structures of consciousness are different ways of realizing our relationship to space and time and so on, and we have different abilities and different structures, so yes I still like that map.
Ken Wilber was a philosopher who used Gebser a lot. So it does feel to me that we're seeing the end of this sort of mental rationalism. We've been looking at time in a very linear way, and we've been looking at progress in a very quantifiable way, and now at least, you know the elites of society are beginning to question this direction so yes, maybe something is evolving.
Giancarlo
Maybe we went too far with the enlightenment and the sovereignty of reason, and so now there's a sort of a rebalancing towards more like spirit and the more intuitive mind rather than the rational, abstract, analytical mind.
Daniel
The course I'm doing right now, on ideas of continuing of consciousness after death, and how you can't really even talk about that unless you interrogate scientific materialism which is the productive idea that consciousness is just an expression of physical matter like the complexity of the brain and so on.
Through quantum physics, we actually have a way of understanding the nature of reality, which is different that accords with a lot of mystical traditions and shamanic traditions. So it still feels like we're trying to break out of this obstruction or this log jam of reductive materialism.
That could lead to a lot of changes. Scientific materialism has also led to consumerism, this idea that if this life is, and there's nothing beyond that, then you might as well just try to get whatever you can for yourself and your family and so on. If we went back into an understanding of these larger cycles that we're participating in larger cycles maybe it was good evidence for reincarnation and so on.
And then maybe it begins to shift our whole way of understanding ourselves. And that actually leads to changes in our structures in society and education and technology and so on.
Giancarlo
It seems very difficult though, society is still very much based on scientific materialism and reductionism and how we can structure a life for ourselves which is participatory with society, but it's a little bit detached from the current paradigm. Do you have a view on that? How are you coping with being in New York? For example, Yuval Harari says that people accuse him of being a pessimist because he thinks that humans inevitably fall into a power structure. And he says that that happens when you have to organize a few hundred thousand or millions of people. And he says that, in order to really live a non-self-centered consumeristic life, the only way it's really to live in a small community like 150 people.
Daniel
The famous Dunbar number.
Giancarlo
Yes. How do you see this evolution to this phase of less materialistic and more empathic, less concentrated just on this life? What is the advice you have for people to try to explore these, these, this domain?
Daniel
I always struggle with trying to give advice to people because everybody's so different. I'm from New York City. I feel like an Eskimo back in my igloo here in a way, I feel a lot of connection to like the cultural history of the city and the different artistic and cultural movements that happened here. And it was actually really good for me to be away for like 18 months. I was in Austria, then I was in Mexico, and coming back, I actually feel a lot of tenderness for the city and the fit city feels kind of like layers have been peeled away. Like people feel very authentic and open, the pandemic, and all the riots, and Trump, and all this stuff has led to a beautiful uncertainty, you don't feel anymore that people are as interested in the old games, they don't even know what the new game is, but they know that something is, is shifting. So it feels like a great time to be in the city. I've thought about it, I'm in my mid-fifties now, I feel I'm more of an urban person. I have friends who are building off-the-grid communities in Costa Rica and in New Zealand and so on, and I respect that, they have a whole vision, but I don't know if that's going to be my path.
Maybe I'm just going to be more of an urban person. I loved Mexico. I was super curious about that society, I started screaming about the ecological emergency, way back and even my first book Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, I was like, what are we going to do? This is fucked. I was hoping that the psychedelic awakening would bring about a reckoning with the ecological crisis. I don't think that has happened. I guess in the sixties, Timothy Leary had a lot of hopes for LSD as being this tool that would awaken the masses and change the direction of human society.
When I was exploring it, there was Ayahuasca and Iboga were these new phenomena that seem to have the ability to shift people into a more ecological awareness. But I have seen people change, you've changed, I've seen a lot of people struggle with a lot of resources, rethink how they're using their money and what they want to direct it at and how they want to build, and so on.
But it does feel like the cycle of destruction, kali yuga or whatever it is, these types of energies are unstoppable at this point. So probably we're going to see some meltdown and hopefully some kind of reconfiguration. I recently reposted this presentation and an interview I did with Christopher Bache, who wrote some really interesting books, one was called LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Another one was called a Dark Night, Early Dawn. He put himself on this, (I don't know anybody who's done as much), 75 high dose LSD sessions with a therapist, and as part of those experiences
Giancarlo
In the course of 20 years.
Daniel
Exactly. And I'm part of those experiences. He's had a lot of visions of the near future and he saw humanity go through this initiatory dismemberment and rebirth. And everything falling apart and then that leading to new mycelial connections, a new web of consciousness forming, and maybe in smaller communities.
I totally could see that happening. Breakdowns are not fun, it wouldn't be fun to be living in Syria right now, it wouldn't be fun to be living in Afghanistan. And now we're seeing (which I had predicted), which is why I was like screaming so much about it is that even some of the worst projections of like 10 or 15 years around go around climate change are turning out to be not as bad as what's actually happening in terms of, these huge spikes in temperature.
So at a certain point, we have to ask ourselves if California or Europe has like 125 degree days, you know, what happens to agriculture in that region? Like a lot of, a lot of plants are just not going to make it, you know, so could we then go into a situation where there's a lot of hunger, a lot of desperation, that doesn't necessarily lead to a nice situation.
Giancarlo
I'm familiar with Christopher Bache. Sometimes I feel that this idea of the apocalypse as a rebirth might create a sense of disengagement. So are we going to wait for the breakdown? Or what are we supposed to do to facilitate this shift to a more
Daniel
I gave it my best shot. I created a company Evolver Social Movement I made a whole vision of how you could have a combination of a media network and the social movements and try to stimulate self-organizing local communities that were learning about all these transformational practices and actually then beginning to do permaculture together, creating like local currencies, also exploring like shamanism and consciousness shifting the focus away from mind-numbing entertainment spectacles, and so on.
Part of what I learned in my efforts to do that is there's so much inertia in the system and then also there's psychological situations where people when they see you as an authority figure in some way, they start projecting, they want to take you down or some of them do, you know? So it just felt both financially and psychologically, I just reached a point where it was impossible and I was like, crushed, you know? So I've had to step back and be like, well maybe we're not going to save the world. I still think that idea is great. We would need a media / social network that was designed to both to give people a lot of great new information, but then also give them the tools so that they could rebuild their local communities. I think it's quite possible, we're already seeing it, it's happening through COVID people aren't going to be traveling as much. It's kind of weird, I don't really quite understand why they're making it so hard for Europeans and Americans to visit each other anymore.
It feels a little bit excessive. We can get into whether there are conspiratorial elements or whether it's simply just the cumbersome bureaucracies that they don't know what to do or something, but I feel that it's like a foreshadowing of a time when yeah, we're not going to be maybe traveling so much, the reality of it is, is that we're not addressing the ecological emergency. If we seriously wanted to take a shot at doing that, you know, everybody would have to accept huge restrictions on their lifestyle for several decades while the planet somehow rebalanced itself, it would have to be like a long time out. We saw a short time out with this COVID thing, but it's hard to imagine a long time out and in some ways, governments would actually be necessary to move resources around, to rescue different populations, and so on.
We'll see what happens, emergencies also create new circumstances like the second world war, suddenly the U.S. redirected all of its factory production and taxed the wealthy like 93%. You might not like that, I guess so much, but it did happen and it allowed everybody to feel they were part of a common cause. That's actually something I've liked about the COVID thing in New York, you do feel that people have this sort of more of commonality, like a sense of like we're all in this together somehow. So maybe that's a foreshadowing of something good that will emerge in the future.
Giancarlo
Interesting and what do you think about, there are communities like in Ibiza, Bali, or Goa or Tulum where there's a little bit of a resurgence of what some historians called the Eleusinian Mysteries, wherein Greece for a few hundred years, there were these yearly ceremonies around this substance similar to the Ergot fungus, which is similar to LSD is it possible that these kinds of ceremonies create a morphogenetic field that then we create an expansion of consciousness that can accelerate, or is just towards esoteric stuff? I don't know too much, what to believe?
Daniel
Spending time in Tulum, I ended up getting almost depressed. I guess from what I saw there, it felt like a certain kind of neoshamanic spirituality has become a new comfort zone for people of privilege and culture and beauty and it becomes a little bit of its own little bubble,
Giancarlo
A spiritual materialism.
Daniel
For instance, in Tulum people were doing all these ceremonies, but yet not only is the environment they're going to hell, but nobody's looking after the indigenous people, that they're co-opting the symbols of the Maya and the language and stuff. The Maya are the worst paid people in the hotels and the indigenous cultures never have title to their lands. They were just living on the land. So they're the expendable ones. When they want to build a hotel or development, if there's a bunch of indigenous communities living there, you just kick them out.
They don't really have any recourse. I just began to feel that, this whole neo-burning man, neo spiritual, shamanic movement. It’s more just an elitist thrill-seeking, it's not really doing much of any value. I'd love to have a different perspective.
Giancarlo
So energetically you don't believe that there can be a ripple effect on the psyche and the collective consciousness.
Daniel
It feels like it leads to a lot of insularities, people are like, ‘oh, like we have a good thing, and we're like special because we got the shaman from Peru and we're doing this together’. I feel less drawn to it right now.
Giancarlo
The problem I feel with the medicalization of psychedelics, and also with this explosion of shamanism, there are always difficulties to integrate with the Game Theory. John Nash won a Nobel Prize on Game Theory, this idea that in this game, there's going to be an asshole and it would rather be me. So, this has affected the medicalization of psychedelics, the fact that companies.
Daniel
Corporatization of psychedelics
Giancarlo
And now people have been in competition to copyright a certain type of usage
Daniel
That's such a drag. It's funny because when I trace back, obviously MAPS is amazing and there was the horizon conference in New York, but I never really liked how they were trying to figure out how to get psychedelics accepted by the mainstream. There was this idea that you could have to get rid of things like the paranormal stuff and the cult stuff and the telepathic stuff. And just focus on the fact that there are measurable benefits for people through therapy or something.
It's kind of ironic because, in a way, I had to step back from psychedelics. I think they had some negative effects on my character over time. And I never actually did the therapeutic route which maybe I probably should have or something, but I still feel that this therapy model, the medicalization model, it has is a way of containing the discourse around psychedelics and limiting the potential of what might be possible. Most people who have profound psychedelic experiences will also admit to having profound paranormal experiences and stuff that could happen that's totally outside the box. And that for me is an edge I find really, really fascinating.
Giancarlo
We go back to the problem of the reductionist.
Daniel
Yes, it had to fit into the game theory model of the society in a way.
Giancarlo
And also the health system is designed to address one pathology in a very reductionist way. So it can be accepted, you can get the grant, you can get the research and you can get the one pill. For medicalization that's the path that the company has to take with their limits.
Daniel
Yeah. And it just feels a little creepy because you could imagine a situation where you have someone like Peter Thiel and these other guys who are going to create the Amazon or the Uber of psychedelics. So they'll end up with a monopoly situation like Amazon or Facebook, where they'll be the ones who are determining the set and setting for the majority of people.
Obviously, there are other social networks sites, Facebook, you can buy a book somewhere besides Amazon, but they become the massive umbrella so that's my fear with the psychedelic movement. That could also become very brave new worldish. There'll be a soma for this and it could even be for the masses, but it'll just support the current system of inequality.
Giancarlo
What I'm hearing is that the medicalization of psychedelics is really happening now.
Right? So MAPS expects MDMA to be legal for licensed psychotherapists by next year, and then psilocybin maybe a year after. So that's really happening now. The next step is the application of these compounds can be more for ontological inquiry to find this on purpose. And because as you know, we have a little bit of a reputation of, of psychedelic producer in my case.
So I hear, and people ask me for recommendations for shamans and I see pockets of these kinds of practice popping up a little everywhere in Europe. And in America. Not just for addressing depression, anxiety, and PTSD, but for people looking for meaning. And so I think it's a good development, this application of purpose. And then the next application may be for transcendence.
Daniel
It's definitely interesting. Things in life are often ambiguous, they have good and bad sides to it. You know what's happening with psychedelics is really very fascinating. When I wrote Breaking Open The Head, which came out in 2002, I wouldn't have imagined this massive growth of neo-shamanism and then the corporatization of psychedelics, and yeah, it's quite interesting.
Giancarlo
It's becoming super mainstream. There is a major TV show now called Nine Perfect Strangers with Nicole Kidman who runs a wellness center. For 10 days, she puts together nine people and that you microdose psilocybin. What about another topic that you were the first to talk about, which is very controversial, is this idea of consensual non-monogamy. You were the first one to talk about that already many years ago and now also in the mainstream, there's more and more movies and books on this idea that it's very difficult to find one person that can be for the rest of your life, your companion, your best friend, your confidant, the co-parenting, sharing a bank account, sharing a mortgage. It's putting a lot of pressure on one person. And marriage came from a Judeo-Christian morality that is a little bit fading. What do you think is the future for sex love, desire, and relationship? Do you see, like in, psychedelics, do you see this approach to love and relationship spreading or…?
Daniel
It's a good question. The experiment that I found most interesting was this community called Tamera in Portugal, they're very radical, and they're still going strong. It's like 350 people or something. It started, with Germans who had maybe gone through their childhood at the end of the second world war and seeing the wreckage of Nazi-ism and so on. They were then part of the sixties and they were trying to figure out why the movements of the sixties didn't yield a great utopia and the promise that was. When they started to analyze it, they actually began to realize that sex and love was at the core of it. There was jealousy, possessiveness, envy that led to the breakdown of communities or left-wing movements and so on. So they felt that they needed to focus on that question first; you couldn't actually build a healthy human society unless you addressed the question of love and erotic satisfaction and so on.
There, it is very rigid in a way, but also they've set up a structure that allows for a lot of experimentation, younger people have somebody in the group, in the community, who's their love adviser. And they can even go with a fantasy and they can say ‘I'd love to make love with somebody and I'll be blindfolded and I'll never know who that person was’. And if the advisor thinks that's a good idea for you they'll set it up or if you're like, ‘I'm very attracted to Juliet, but I don't have room for a relationship, but I would love to have a sexual contact with her, but I'm, you know, I'm too scared, shy to talk to her’. If your counselor could go and intercede for you and that idea of just having sexual contact without necessarily being in an emotional relationship was also something. It's kind of a form of communism there. We're seeing all sorts of things happening in the relationship world, obviously the effect of social media and online dating, I feel like with the younger generation, there's all sorts of breakdowns, kids in their twenties, I think maybe that's the morphogenetic fields, has just strengthened for it, seem to be much more fine with open relationships with different models and so on.
I think there's a lot of change happening. I loved the sort of discipline and the rigor of Tamera and how they saw this liberation of eros as a crucial component of bringing a true liberation of society. Herbert Marcuse who wrote One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, thought in the fifties, when it was very repressed that if you could have a sexual liberation that would lead to the transformation of society and so on. And then when the sixties happened and there was sexual liberation, then he was disappointed because it didn't actually lead to the dominant structure changing. So he coined a term called repressive desublimation, sublimation was this idea from Freud instead of having sex we ended up building cathedrals or businesses or whatever we focus our sexual energy doing things for society or we have to, to survive. He said that we've had a desublimation in the 60’s - 70’s, but it ended up being repressive because it was re-folded back into these structures of dominance. I feel like the liberation of love and eros and sexuality is like an incomplete process. We don't really have a roadmap for it, a lot of things are obviously happening in big cities, you have like Tinder, you have sugar, daddy, sugar baby relationships. They're not necessarily healthy, but they're, they're pointing towards the breaking up of these structures and that people do have more choice. In particular when they're young.
Giancarlo
Is it possible that the new map of sexuality for the third millennium could be based on tantra?
Daniel
Yeah, I think that would have to be a piece of it. I know you've done a number of tantra workshops, but I did ISTA and I found it very challenging, but also very profound. I'd like to do another experience like that. What does tantra mean in terms of people's lived experience? Instead of just getting drunk and making love, you're more conscious, you move slower, you eye gaze. There's Neo tantra, which is still very much about pleasure, but then if you read people like very controversial cult writer Julius Evola, he said actually the purpose of tantra was not to enhance pleasure, it was actually to cauterize the egoic impulse, using sexual energy as a way to break through the ego.
I don't really see that being done in the modern Western tantra, it feels like actually even like the ISTA teachers, had that very addictive complexes around sexuality, so it didn't necessarily feel, even though they were having multiple partners and you had figured out different techniques and so on, it didn't necessarily feel like liberation. It felt like another layer of addiction.
Giancarlo
My interpretation of tantra is a way to transcend using that energy and then a way to use sexuality in a more altruistic way. So seeing sexuality as almost a form of service, so more a form of giving than taking. Margot Anand, a French tantra teacher, says that the enlightenment philosophy will tell you not to look below the waist because it's dangerous. And I think that this form of tantra, new tantra, either from the Veda from India or from a teacher from Lao Tzu from China. I think they create a moment of presence which then can focus the attention more on finding yourself than losing yourself, if it makes any sense. In Ibiza and in some of these more alternative places.
Daniel
Traditionally, Eastern tantra wasn't even something you would do with your wife or your husband, you'd have a tantrica. It would be a different relationship. It's not about you, it's just about something else. I liked what you said about service, that's something that in Tamera they actually built into their structure, people have 10 multi-partner relationships there, maybe you go move there in your twenties or thirties, you have a significant relationship, but then the energy begins to diminish or the sexual attraction, and then you might have other relationships, but there you don't forfeit that initial partnership necessarily.
Giancarlo
You were saying traditionally tantra is not an activity you do with your partner?
Daniel
I hate to say it, but that's my understanding, there is a separate role for tantrica relationships. The experience of the divine feminine or the goddess, it's not such a domestic thing, because we have this strong orientation towards, as you said, the partner is supposed to be everything, she or he is supposed to be your best friend, your lover, it's a lot to put into that basket.
Giancarlo
Can you elaborate a little bit on this concept of the morphogenetic field? You mentioned this new form of being together, non exclusively, but consensually and ethically has been around now for a few years. So you mentioned that because of the morphogenetic field, it may be spreading. Can you elaborate on this concept? I think it's interesting.
Daniel
That's the model of change that Tamera is holding. I don't know if the idea originated from Rupert Sheldrake, but he's become the main proponent of the idea. Sheldrake's idea is that there aren't really fixed laws in nature, that this idea that nature has fixed laws is actually just that idea of the human mind. He actually looks at different constants, like the speed of light and he proposes that they’re actually not quite as constant as we think. And he says that actually it's not about laws, which comes from jurisprudence, which comes from the Christian idea of God and the holy court of angels or something.
But it's more like patterns, nature's patterns and principles, patterns have become more coherent over time. So they begin to feel like fixed laws. So you have like a group of molecules that have assembled that leads to a crystal formation. So that creates a new morphogenic pattern for crystal formation. It's the theory of formative causation. So then when that happens a number of times, then it feels like a law because it's so consistent and coherent, but actually, it's just a pattern that's self-reinforced. So he thinks this explains a lot of things like embryo development, the DNA and every cell is the same so how do the cells know to differentiate into all of these organs? like ears and hearts and so on. He thinks that the information is actually contained in these invisible morphogenic fields, which I guess maybe it could be considered something like quantum phenomenon or something like that.
So when he thinks it is not just true for a natural phenomenon, but also for social phenomena, for ideas. So he's done studies where there's a crossword puzzle, that's really hard. And a few people do it and it takes them hours and the next group of people can do it in like an hour. Then the next bigger group would do it in like 15 minutes. So it becomes easier and easier. Then the same thing with a species. A monkey develops a way to use a tool, and then all the monkeys on that island are able to do it. But even monkeys across the world, the same monkeys on a different island, thousands of miles away or something are able to use a tool in that way.
A new pattern for human relationships, could be something that creates a new morphogenic field that then other people can beam into it more easily.
Giancarlo
Like a form of cosmic memory bank? Where you can store stuff that other people can access subconsciously?
Daniel
Yeah.
Giancarlo
Very interesting. What about more practical issues like our democracy and blockchain technology and participatory democracy. Do you see this idea of the chain and decentralized technology with blockchain to revolutionize our society in terms of creating digital scarcity and being able to disintermediate the government, and maybe even the FDA, maybe even the SCC?
What'd you think about that? Have you thought about that?
Daniel
I actually wrote about that a bit in one of my books How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation. Once again as I said phenomenon is sort of complex and often kind of ambiguous, so far I almost feel like even though I’ve tentatively, put a little bit of money into crypto, I almost feel that I still don't really understand what's happening, and a lot of the arguments for it seemed quite weak.
You know, Nouriel Roubini, he's had these discussions against crypto, with some of the major players and actually his arguments seem to be very strong. Bitcoin is a store of digital value. You can look at these images from around the world of these Bitcoin mining farms that are using as much energy as a whole country.
It almost feels like a form of insanity and then the argument that a friend of mine just wrote an article and he's like, ‘well, the Bitcoin is just like the dollar, like the dollar. It doesn't have anything backing it. So what's any difference between crypto?’ I actually don't think that argument stands up because actually the dollar has a lot backing it, it has highways, schools, infrastructure, institutions, military. Yes, we're probably too much in debt. and so on. A lot of the crypto ideology supports a very kind of libertarian self interested, privacy-oriented. Like everyone has private wealth and the government should be removed and then you'd have just people hiring their own security forces. It doesn't really seem like a very pleasant vision, but in theory, the problem we have which I've read about a lot is that the economic system, the way it just evolved, doesn't really account for externalities.
Basically corporations who are trading in the stock market, the public traded companies, have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, which means just maximize financial profit. So that means they have to behave to do that, meaning if you're an energy company like British Petroleum, you know what you're doing in the Gulf of Mexico to the point, there's like some huge spill or a pharmaceutical company will release a product like Vioxx because they've done the stats and even though it's going to cause a lot of heart attacks and kill a lot of people, it's still gonna make them more money and they'll find a way to avoid the liability or tobacco companies. And so we see over and over again because the economic system really is oriented towards only financial return. Then the companies are sent for us almost like robots. They have to behave like psychopaths, they don't support the health of local communities or local ecosystems.
For me, it's like a system design problem. Yeah, people can do philanthropy. You can try to help this tribe or help these albinos and Mount Everest or whatever it was that Anton was doing. But the system itself is oriented towards exploitation and domination in its intrinsic logic. We would actually have to address that, how do you address something like that? I didn't know. You'd have to get people aware of the fact that it's like a fundamental emergency because a system that's based on extracting financial value increasingly is coming into direct conflict with the life support systems of the planet or already has.
Giancarlo
Yeah. I mean the crypto guys would say that that's exactly what you can use this cryptocurrency for where you'll have the value of the currency, which is linked, not just to the bottom line, but to some externalities that you can mine in the contract of the currency. So it's a little bit like this idea of public cooperation, like MAPS is doing where you have investors in a public corporation.
Their target is profit, but also to increase awareness on the psychedelics or a certain number of licensing therapies. Or for example, we're doing something in Ibiza with regenerative agriculture (Terra Viva Ibiza), where we recieve charitable donations. And the donors would measure the outcome of this venture, not just with profit, but with three equal targets: water retention, the CO2 absorption and the creation of organic matter.
Daniel
Is that going to be a blockchain thing or a crypto thing?
Giancarlo
For now. It's not just going to be.
Daniel
That would be great if that then became a coin and people could invest into it or something like that, that's the promise. But I've been hearing about that promise for a number of years now, and when I actually see what crypto is doing in the world so far, I don't really see the ecological or social benefit, kind of the opposite. It's not decreasing wealth inequality, it allowed for cunning, mainly white, mainly men, who had an engineering background to make a huge amount of money. Because they got in there early and they understood the dynamics of this kind of stuff or something, and then they moved out to Puerto Rico where they're hiding their money from taxes or whatever, nothing about it to me is really, you know, and then they talk about these other subjects.
Giancarlo
The judgment is out.
Daniel
Yeah. Everybody wants to try to make themselves feel good about themselves.
Giancarlo
And another hot topic in this country is gender politics and gender identity. My son goes to a very politically correct college on the east coast, in Connecticut, Wesleyan University.
Daniel
I went to Wesleyan University.
Giancarlo
Yeah. Nice. But it's considered white powered. He has to be very careful how he talks to certain people. So let me ask you a very direct question, you know how there is this difference between, equality of outcome, equality of opportunity. I am going to try to simplify it, so that the two arguments go like that.
People like Sam Harris believe you need equality of opportunity, but you cannot pretend equality of outcome, because for example, for boards at universities, or for boards of corporations, you want to give the same opportunity to everybody. But ultimately the board would be chosen based on merit and skills, whereas what you can call the Woke movement would like to see equality of outcome bringing this idea of reparation.
Daniel
But reparation is another thing.
Giancarlo
Don't you think that race should be something like the color of your hair? You know, if you have blue hair or yellow hair or brown hair, it doesn't really matter. So would you really have a quota per race in boards of corporations or universities where you need to fill the quota of Asian, Latinos?
Daniel
Yeah, I guess I don't feel super attracted to the quota model, but I do kind of understand what you're dealing with (I think African-Americans like 13% of the population, it's not that much I think?) You're dealing with a history of multi-generational, physical, and psychological violence, which has led to people feeling profoundly disempowered and people still get beaten up and imprisoned, first and so on, or they were disenfranchised from the vote or they make some little mistake when they're a teenager and they're never allowed to vote again in Florida or whatever. It is a crap system, for them, and it is true that our European and American hegemony is a result of imperialism and colonialism that was originally kind of military and then became based on economic means. Like I was living in Mexico, why is Mexico so cheap for Americans? It's because the world trade organization, is that the big economic body that issues loans? A number of times they issued these huge loans,
Giancarlo
World Bank.
Daniel
Exactly. That's it, World Bank to Mexico. And when Mexico defaulted, which they could have predicted, because they had a corrupt government, and the money gets siphoned off, then they're like, okay, well now you have to privatize your industry and you have to cut your social services. So twice Mexico, which is a very resource-rich country that could be totally as successful as the US or Germany or Italy or whatever, was forced to reduce the standard of living for people by like 25%. So the problem is that we're dealing with these legacies of many many forms of exploitation and domination that have been intricately devised by the people who had the power. I don't like the quota system, but I do feel like a lot of the energy of the left has gotten kind of trapped in this Woke identity politics stuff. That to me is kind of tangential and feels too cultural, it's all based on these cultural, signifiers and so on.
I love somebody like Richard Wolff who's a left-wing economist and his analysis (that's where I learned about the Mexican debt crisis and so on) that to me is the reality of our global situation, you know? Europe and America have maintained a much higher standard of living by utilizing the tools of economic control and so on. A Lot of the people who were part of the calculus of power, feel disempowered, disenfranchised, stomped on, and in fact, they are, obviously, if we were to ever try to have a just society, we would have to figure out some way to rebalance that and maybe this quota is like an initial crude way, but it doesn't rock my word either.
Giancarlo
We've been together for almost an hour. I know you say you don't like to give advice, but for this to suffer more or for kids that are just starting college, like my son, like your daughter, and are a bit lost in terms of what major, their prospect for a profession looks very bleak now. When I went to university, this idea of finance and entrepreneurship was still very appealing. Now for some of those kids, they think that the system is like a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
Daniel
Yeah, which is and we know, I mean, look at the 2008 financial crash, those guys were celebrating as they like got huge advances, even though everybody lost their homes and so on.
Giancarlo
And with COVID the same thing.
Daniel
Exactly.
Giancarlo
So Yuval Harari says, for example.
Daniel
Because I also like him so much.
Giancarlo
I quote him because
Daniel
He's like the mainstream Neoliberalogist, he's Obama's guy.
Giancarlo
I resonate with his idea that with artificial intelligence, we're gonna need specialization in ethics and philosophy
Daniel
That's so funny that's what I've been trying to sell my daughter on the idea of becoming a technology ethicist. I think she would be, but she's not interested. I mean normally whenever you try to tell your kids to do it, they're not going to do it.
Giancarlo
Yeah. Technology, what Yuval Harari was saying was that they should make ethical courses compulsory for programmers. So if you are a computer programmer at MIT or something.
Daniel
As soon as somebody says they should, it jigs up.
Giancarlo
So what advice do you have for kids that are finishing school and going to university? How do they choose what to study?
Daniel
I tried to encourage my daughter to maybe do a more ecological subject matter, but she's tilted in the direction of me and my mother, towards English and literature and so on. Ultimately people should follow their bliss, right? You try to stop people from doing that. It's not so nice.
Giancarlo
It's difficult to find this bliss.
Daniel
On the other hand, no because what I'm discovering is that you've actually a lot of new creative opportunities but it's possible to build your own reality through the internet. In a way you can create your own hub, your own platform. If you have a message, as a creative person or you can create your own blockchain, or NFT, there's a lot of creativity to be explored in a lot of these new areas. If you decide that you want to create a community of the future, you could probably find a way to contribute to one or start one. I think it's probably less of value is going to be trying to do things like entry-level jobs and these kinds of legacy companies and so on. It's more about flexibility and creativity and stuff like that. So it's kind of good in a way, it's an exciting time to be a young person. If you're open to untraditional and unorthodox approaches.
Giancarlo
Yes. Daniel, thank you very much. Is there anything you want to leave the mangu.tv audience with?
Daniel
I am doing these course The Liminal Institute
Giancarlo
And are they still in time to sign up for consciousness?
Daniel
Yes they are in time, and there are other ones I'm there. All the other older ones are also there as legacies. And then I have a Newsletter on substack that can, I don't know the exact URL, but if they look up my name and Substack, they can join the newsletter and hear more of my sagacious wisdom.
Giancarlo
Perfect. Thank you very much for your time and we'll be back with some more esoteric topics.
Daniel
Sounds good.
Giancarlo
Thank you very much.
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