62: Daniel Pinchbeck on Global Transformation & Consciousness Evolution

Substack 
Liminal News

Queztlcatl Returns – Pinchbeck
Evolver Network – Ken Jordan
2012: Time for Change
Notes from the Edge of Time – essays
‘The World You See is the Myth You Are In
How Soon Is Now? (2016) – Pinchbeck
Scientific Materialism  
Isaac Newton
‘God is Dead’ – Nietzsche
Human Personality – F.Myers
Reductive Materialism – Betran Russell
Rudolf Steiner
‘Why Materialism Is Baloney’ – Bernardo Kastrup
‘The Idea of the World’ – Bernardo Kastrup
Nobel prize 2022
Self-Aware Universe – Amit Goswami
Kogi people
Morphic Resonance – Sheldrake
www.theelevator.earth
The Rainbow Body – Tibetan Buddhism
‘Reincarnation and Karma’ – Rudolf Steiner
Morphogenetic field

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello. Hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I have my friend Daniel Pinchback back for the third time and I will let him introduce himself this time. 

Daniel: Okay. Well, as you know, as we, as Giancarlo knows, I mean, I’m the author of a number of books, Breaking Open the Head, which came out in 2002.

Which helped to reintroduce psychedelics to the modern Western society when it was still very repressed. Then in 2006, I released 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which we’ve now republished as Quetzalcoatl [00:01:00] Returns with an audiobook. And yeah, that book was a bestseller. Then I was, like, featured in Rolling Stone.

I was on the Colbert Report. Then, I perhaps, unfortunately, tried to start a company and a non profit. We had a Reality Sandwich, which I’m not involved with anymore, a web magazine, Evolver Network, where we had a social network, but also a network of local community groups. And I actually started that with Ken Jordan my, who recently passed away on maybe COVID complications.

And yeah. So then I made this film with Giancarlo, 2012, Time for Change, with directed by João Amarim. And what else did I do? I wrote a book called How Soon Is Now in 2016 that was attempting to look at the path to dealing with the ecological catastrophe that we’re facing through a systemic redesign of

framework or like a sort of analytic idealist paradigm, which I still feel, and I’m still very much involved with trying to [00:02:00] propagate that as a, you know, great option for us. And right now I have a newsletter which is like my, my focus, danielpinchbeck. substack. com. It’s called Liminal News. I also offer courses and I have different products, including audiobooks and so on at liminal.

news, if you want to, if you want to book up with my ideas and my work. There was that book that I like, it was a little booklet, like Notes from the Edge Time. That was a long time ago. Yeah, that was a book I did. Yeah, but there’s a number of other little books. Notes from the Edge Times was one. It was very biographical, 

Giancarlo: I remember.

Daniel: That was like essays. But I’ve also got like a book called Afterlife. Actually, I just published a collection of essays called The World You See is the Myth You Are In from the last couple of years of the newsletter. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Daniel was a real visionary. He was the first one who really understood the potential of psychedelic for not just personal growth and medical, but also for a, for a potential change of paradigm, which what I would like to focus on today.

So Daniel, just for the, for people that are not familiar, you know, when, when, [00:03:00] when we say that, you know, our current paradigm is scientific materialism. People get confused, they think that, you know, they confuse materialism with capitalism and, you know, scientific materialism means, means that our institution, our academia, you know, in terms of like getting funding, getting peer review, they don’t believe, they believe that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain.

So there is no really scientific research around. This idea of cosmic consciousness or this idea that you know, there are life after death, paranormal phenomenon, but this is changing. This is changing now. Right. Why not just for the people who are like new to this topic? Can you, can you take us a little bit towards the, the, this scientific materialism, where it comes from?

You know, it was, it’s a Newtonian Cartesian, this idea of a gigantic clock that came from the, from the enlightenment. Just take us five minutes to, to explain what is scientific materialism. 

Daniel: Sure. I mean, I guess the kind of scientific method, you know, emerged from, you know, [00:04:00] Christian, Western Christian context and alchemy and so like Isaac Newton, you know, was both a scientist and an alchemist and so on.

And then as we discovered the extraordinary power of the scientific method, it became less clear why we needed to posit, you know, a theological dimension. And over time, Yeah, they’re just, as you say, the Enlightenment I mean, Kant and Hegel were still had a still, a transcendental philosophy. By the late 19th century, I mean, famously Nietzsche declared God is dead.

You know, kind of the Anglo European world had settled on this paradigm of empiricism and a reductive materialism, kind of dismissing this idea of a psychic phenomena, the supernatural. And there were a bunch of scientists who I’m fascinated with, even in the late 19th and early 20th century. A lot of them were actually You know, incredibly, you know, intellectually advanced and academic.

They started the Society for Psychic Research. with Frederick Meyers, and you know, they were, they were [00:05:00] studying like mediumship and near death experience. Meyers wrote this incredible opus The Survival of the Human Personality After Bodily Death. But they made some mistakes. Some of the mediums that they were looking at turned out to be frauds, and somehow they got sort of discredited.

It still exists, actually. But by, yeah, by the early 20th century, Then you had the logical positivists, you had Wittgenstein, you had Bertrand Russell, and so on. We’d really settled on this cultural model or this ontology of reductive materialism, which basically argues that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain function.

There’s no possibility of, you know, connection, you know, consciousness to consciousness. There’s no possibility of the survival of any kind of, you know, aspect of ourselves after death. And that’s been pretty much entrenched in the Academies and the media like the New York times, the New Yorker and so on.

And now, yeah, that’s slowly becoming challenged. I think that, you know, psychedelics help, so many people are having, you know, these types of experiences. [00:06:00] Also a new philosophy that I’m very much inspired by and excited by is sort of, What’s not really new, I mean, Rudolf Steiner was a monistic idealist back in the 1890s or something.

He wrote his first book. But Bernardo Castrop is one very good kind of spokesperson for this position. He’s written a whole series of books that I highly recommend. One is called Why Materialism is Baloney. Another one is called The Idea of the World. So this idea that actually the world is mental in nature, which is also what the quantum physics kind of recognized from their studies.

And in fact, the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics went to experiments that have demonstrated over the last half century that the universe is quote unquote not locally real. So, when there’s not an observer making an observation, there isn’t really stuff. There’s more like energetic patterns fluctuations and so on, at least on the sub quantum level.

Giancarlo: It’s when, it’s when, it’s when, it was when electrons behave as particles or as waves, right? That was from 

Daniel: Yeah, well, to collapse the, the wave into a particle requires an observation. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: It’s crazy. Yeah. But the 22 Nobel Prize, I [00:07:00] thought it was more to do with like entanglement, this idea that when two particles were connected, and then they were like divided even like thousands miles away, they would automatically change them.

They find this idea of, of speed of light. 

Daniel: I don’t know, maybe that’s another way of saying it, but my, you know, if you look it up, like Scientific American, it’s, the discovery was that the universe is just not locally real. That’s how they’re simple, simple, simply stating it, you know, entanglement. Experiments and demonstrating over and over these things over and over again.

Giancarlo: But, but so, but, but the skeptic, they say that it happens in such a small scale that is not relevant. 

Daniel: Sure. But that small quantum scale is already, you know, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have a computer or microprocessor. I mean, we’re already using the discoveries of quantum physics and all of our, you know, things and they’re all based.

So it’s like. You know, just because something, yeah, you can’t say that just because it works on the micro scale it doesn’t have relevance on the macro scale, it doesn’t make any sense. 

Giancarlo: I’m just very surprised that there hasn’t been a debate, there hasn’t been media about it, nobody knows about it. 

Daniel: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, we know, like, Thomas Kuhn wrote that book about the structure of, like, scientific revolutions, and, [00:08:00] you know, once a paradigm is very entrenched, it takes a long time to dislodge it.

And, you know, it took centuries to move from, you know, Christianity, you know, theology to, you know, empiricism and materialism. That was seen as a great and a forward movement of Humanity. So to now go back, you know, there’s a lot of fear that will lead to like, you know, kind of religious, you know fervor or cultism or something.

So you have a lot of people like Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchenson, Yuval Noah Harari. They’re all kind of protecting the the materialist model. In fact, I just went to a talk on Sunday by you know, somebody who’s a philosopher in the psychedelic space at Utrecht and he’s come up with a theory called the new materialism, you know?

So it’s like. Even, you know, it’s just constantly kind of re entrenching this materialist idea, because it’s a big jump. And you know, it’s Kastrup, you know, what’s nice about Kastrup is, I mean, I wrote about all this stuff in 2012, looking at Steiner and also Amit Goswami, the physicist who wrote The Self Aware Universe and so on, but what’s nice about Kastrup, yeah, he just formalizes it to another degree.

And he himself was [00:09:00] a scientist at CERN, so he has a very rational, and I don’t agree with him on like everything, but you know, basically the monistic or analytic idealist idea. is identical to, like, Tibetan Buddhism, or Buddhism in general, this idea that, you know, the primordial awareness is the fundamental reality, and everything kind of emerges out of this instinctive consciousness or awareness, and we’re just kind of like dream characters in this dream that this consciousness is having, just as when we dream, we have dream characters in our dream who seem to have, you know, kind of reality in a way.

So but this also allows us to you know, look at the world symbolically and allegorically. ’cause if, if the whole universe and the physical world is like a dream that consciousness is having, then we can interpret everything that happens as like dream symbols in, in, in the dream narrative as we would assemble, like as a Freudian or youngian interpret a dream.

So this actually allows us then to understand reality as symbolic and allegorical, which is the way all the mystical and esoteric traditions [00:10:00] understand it, the. Hermeticists, the Western alchemists, the indigenous people with their animism and so on. Like, if you visit like an indigenous culture like the Kogi, you know, if a hummingbird comes into your house with like a butterfly in its mouth, they’d be like, Oh, that means like your, your, your brother is sick, you know, in another town.

And you know, so, so they have this deep understanding. on, of sort of you know, how the psyche operates and how symbol structures operate. And so, you know, now, you know, I’ve been writing recently in the newsletter about how if we combine analytic idealism with Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas around morphogenic fields and morphic resonance, then really things start to make a lot of sense.

Like, like, you know, you know, cause it’s, I mean, it’s confusing. Like, why do these indifferent indigenous societies. seem to have these different magical powers that exist in their local framework. But, you know, if the universe’s consciousness experiencing itself, and if these cultures are [00:11:00] existing in thousands of years in, like, resonance and reciprocity with the local ecosystem, weaving, you know, language, weaving myth, weaving story, you know, weaving ritual, you know, that would ultimately allow, yeah, maybe for completely different things to manifest than we can imagine.

In our, in our logos, in our, in our world of Western materialism and rationalism, where, you know, we don’t yeah, we don’t have a place for those things. So, yeah, I think that actually there’s a powerful new paradigm. In fact, I have a little bit of a think tank called The Elevator, www. theelevator. earth.

And we just published our first kind of position paper, which basically argues that this monistic, you know, idealism as a new ontology is so much more coherent than materialism and actually could be transformative for human civilization, you know, if we’re going to survive this ecological destructive situation that we’ve unleashed, [00:12:00] which maybe we’ve unleashed subconsciously to bring about some kind of transformation, you know, sorry, I went on for a bit.

No, no, no, no, that’s, that’s 

Giancarlo: great. I just would like, maybe if you could just clarify a little bit these terms for people, monistic idealism, what’s the etymology of the word monistic? 

Daniel: Analytic or monistic. Monistic is monism. I mean, materialism is a monism. Materialism argues that everything is, is material, you know, ultimately.

Munistic idealism argues that consciousness, which is, you know, all that we experience, like every experience that we have is an experience through consciousness or of consciousness, perceiving something, you know, if I, if I, if I hit this table, you know, it’s, it’s consciousness that has that experience. So it actually makes much more just plain sense.

To understand that, you know, consciousness is the foundational layer rather than materiality, which we just, which is really just an inference. Yeah. So. 

Giancarlo: Okay. So what do you see as practical example that this theory makes more sense? I mean, there is like, you know, magical episode from these indigenous tribes that you describe that, you know, they, [00:13:00] they can navigate the structure of reality with like a different, a different code, you know, they, they code what’s happening.

you know, like you said, more symbolically, the hummingbird with a butterfly will affect their action in a certain way, which in the West, we will not, we will not understand that. What, what else? There is like, you know, this memory of, of, of past lives. There’s a lot of that. There’s a University of Virginia.

I think they have a specific center where they have like such a huge statistics about that. This idea of synchronicity, synchronicities that, that seems to be really almost sometimes impossible to be coincidence. What else do you see in terms of practical example in, in, in reality that would confirm this theory?

Daniel: Yeah. Well, I’m not sure there’s actually, you know, when you get right down to it, a limit, like we don’t know what the limit is. I mean you know, I mean, as Kastrup talks about, Yeah, there’s a lot of you know, like, or, or the, let’s say the morphogenetic fields for things are very strong. You know, so for instance, like Sheldrake would talk about like [00:14:00] crystal formation, right?

Like so yeah, one of Sheldrake’s big ideas is that there are not really fixed laws in nature. That when, that when we thought there were fixed laws. We were basically taking this human idea of laws and legal structures and we were kind of turning it over to nature. Like, you know, but that was basically based on our, you know, courts and, you know, we thought of God as like the Supreme Court and the angels, you know, having this court of angels in heaven and these fixed immutable laws that are eternal.

But actually it’s much more sensible to understand that they’re not laws of nature, they’re more like patterns or principles that become more coherent. over time, so they seem like immutable laws. So for instance if you have a few molecules in a certain configuration and like a crystal forms, that creates a new pattern for crystal formation.

So whenever molecules come into that, into that organization, they’re, they’re quite likely to form a crystal. That becomes so regulated that it feels like a law. And, you know, Sheldrake has, yeah, gotten into this in depth, but that’s not only true in in terms [00:15:00] of, you know, purely material things, but also in terms of cultural things.

Like he’s done studies on solving crossword puzzles. How at first, you know, crossword puzzle may be extremely difficult, but then like one person gets it, then 10 people get it, and suddenly a million people get it, you know, 

Giancarlo: suddenly. Or SAT for students. 

Daniel: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so all around the world we have, often anecdotal, but sometimes other forms of evidence for paranormal and psychic phenomena, whether it’s, you know, the masters of Qi in the East who can throw people across, across the room with their, with their Qi.

Or the rainbow body in Tibetan Buddhism, where highly developed monks die, they can either just maintain their body in a non decayed condition for months, because they have this sort of subtle consciousness layer, or their body actually dissolves, and all that’s left are hair and fingernails, and often there’s like a, you know, manifestations of rainbows.

I think this is probably true, to be honest. And another example from the Sequoia, who are this indigenous community I visited in the Amazon, they said that earlier, when their culture [00:16:00] was still more intact, you know, when they worked with ayahuasca and worked with the spirits that, that they knew, and you know, their whole language was based on bird songs and these spirits and so on.

Like, let’s say somebody in the tribe was sick with an illness that they didn’t have a cure for, they would pray and sing all night for something to help that person. And at the end of the night, the head shaman would look down at his head and there would be like a seed, and they would plant the seed, and it would be like a new plant they’d never seen before that could actually like treat that condition.

So I, you know, for reasons that are complicated to explain, perhaps I completely think that they’re just telling the truth. And the way they said it was really straightforward. You know, and also, like, even in Ibiza, I met this Tibetan Lama who was talking about I know I talked to him about lucid dreaming and reincarnation, and he talked about his father.

His father was also a big Lama. His father had passed away, and he said that he went, after his father died, he, in deep meditation, he visited his father in the sort of, you know, nirvana. [00:17:00] And his dad was like, I’m done. I’m not coming back. That’s it. I can’t do it anymore. And his son was like, no, dad, you got to come back.

I need you right now. Like, things are really difficult. And then he looked at me and he was like, yeah, now my father is a 10 year old boy in Bhutan, you know. And you know, I think that he just, you know, knew that they have a very evolved science of reincarnation. And this is like, you know, Rudolf Steiner, who’s one of my central figures.

You know, he said that the, the, the mission of his life on earth, I think he lived from like 1865 to 1925, was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West, that we’d lost it with the transition to Christianity. And he actually wrote a whole series of books called Karmic Relationships, where he, from his readings of the Akashic records, could trace a different Western dualities back through history.

So he could show you who Goethe was in like the Middle Ages or the Roman times or whatever. You know, I don’t know if it’s literally true in the way, you know. We see truth. Yeah, exactly. But it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But so forgive me, just for people that are a little bit less [00:18:00] comfortable with this, with this with this theory and concept, you know, one way I understood the, the morphogenetic field is that this idea of like memory cosmic bank, it’s like, what is happening or what’s ever happening.

It’s sort of like stored somewhere like the Akashic records. So, I remember Rupert Sheldrake was saying that, you know, when, when, when you have this, when you repeat the same ritual for thousands of years, you create like a field. Yeah. That then you can, but so how, how can, how can you connect this morphogenetic field theory with the monistic idealism?

Daniel: I mean, it just seems very natural to me. I mean, it would be like if, if the universe is consciousness experiencing itself, you know, that makes a lot of sense that these patterns would become more coherent with it within consciousness. So they seem like permanent structures, but, but actually they’re just patterns that have become very coherent.

Giancarlo: You know, there’s a little bit of a trend, I don’t know about in New York, but you know, in, in EBSci, in the new age community about. You know just [00:19:00] relaxing your nervous system. You know, there’s the work of Stephen Borges about the autonomous nervous system, the polyvagal theory, the parasympathetic and the sympathetic.

So now, You know, there’s a lot of talk. I was, went to a conference in Ibiza, like 100 percent of the speakers mentioned this polyvagal nerve that connect with brain and the lungs and the throat and the ears. But so what I wanted to ask you is that how do we, if we embrace this idea that consciousness is primordial, is it possible that we humans learn to navigate this consciousness field?

In a more harmonious way, by calming our nervous system, surrender, in Dao they call it Wu Wei. Have you heard about Wu Wei? It’s like the art of not forcing, and you know, I hear a lot of people using this idea of being engaged but not forcing, not being attached to the outcome. Is it possible that with this new theory that you just described, we have a different relationship with reality?

Because [00:20:00] what we have been taught in the scientific materialism is that We have to work very, very hard to change the structure of reality. And you know, there is this like rush mentality or scarcity mentality. And this I create like an epidemic in this planet of people not being able to make meets and, and, and being a little bit crushed by reality.

Okay. If what I’m trying to ask you is that, how do we use this change of paradigm for us to live a better life? 

Daniel: Yeah, it’s good. You asked me that. I mean, So I have to be honest and say that I struggle a lot with this whole, like, Ibiza reality. Whereas it seems to me that a lot of people I know who are, you know, highly intelligent, highly skilled, and also have a lot of capital resources have sort of sequestered themselves, in a way, on this island.

And it makes me sad because I feel like like I’m, I’m living on 7th Street and Avenue B. On my corner, I’m seeing these African guys line up every day because, you know, they can’t live in their countries anymore. [00:21:00] And 

Giancarlo: Because of, of environmental disaster. 

Daniel: Yeah, but, but a lot of that environmental disaster is actually our fault.

You know, like I don’t see, for me, like a true spirituality at this point in time. You know, it only begins not when you’re trying to always relax your nervous system, or feel better about yourself, or doing anything with yourself, but really trying to address these systemic Helping 

Giancarlo: others. 

Daniel: Daishi. Yeah, but I mean, not just helping the others who look like you and, you know, are well dressed and have, like, fancy clothes and all that kind of stuff.

That’s not spirituality, from my perspective. You know, so like, So like these guys, like a lot of ’em came from the Ivory Coast, you know what’s ha So then I did some research, like, why are they coming from the Ivory Coast? And some of them, like, they fly to like Brazil or like Peru, then they march. Like some of them walk for a year, you know, without any food.

You know, starving almost. They have to come to the Mexican border. They, they, they, they then, you know, find a way to get across. Then the governor of Texas has been busing them here because we have an we have an asylum law and also they wanna like, you know, give it to the Western and to the you know, eastern [00:22:00] liberal establishment or whatever.

But it’s what’s happening in the Ivory Coast, you know, 50 percent of the world’s chocolate is grown there, right? Do you like chocolate? 

Speaker 5: Yeah. 

Daniel: I love chocolate. I mean, I, I learned about this while I was eating a chocolate croissant at my local cafe that cost me 12 bucks, you know, to buy this coffee and croissant.

So, you know, Nestle’s and Hershey’s, which are, you know, American companies that, you know, a lot of stock portfolios have, have shares and that, so on. They’re responsible for, you know, growing all this cacao, and they’ve made a lot of corrupt deals with the government there. And 80 percent deforestation now.

Guess how much the average worker in the cacao farm makes per day? 5. 78 cents. So, you know, we’re eating these delicious chocolate bonbons and, you know, flying to Switzerland and having all these experiences. These people are traumatized and living in hell. And then you add on to that, you know, climate change, global warming, onto the deforestation and the sort of domination of [00:23:00] Western companies that have allowed us to lead these very privileged you know, lifestyles of health and wellness and spirituality, quote unquote.

So I just, you know, for me, it’s like, you know, it’s painful. Like I w I would love to see, you know, people like all you guys in Ibiza, you know, kind of like shift from this constant focus on self and like, how do I get better or look better or be healthier? It’s like. It feels just kind of, like, unfair to me, because we’re really, like, our benefits have come from this, like destruction of the world, like, that we’ve, that we’ve, that we’ve sort of allowed to happen on our watch, you know?

So unless we’re not really trying to wrestle with that, we’re not really being spiritual. We’re just kidding ourselves, you know? It’s like, And we really, I mean, now it’s like really, you know, and I started, you know, warning everybody about this back in 2002 and, you know, kind of destroyed my, myself and my career in a weird way by insisting on this as a focus, but now it’s like really severe.

I mean, like if you read what’s happening with agriculture, like. You know in [00:24:00] Europe, right? Like, huge deluges in Northern Europe and England, you know, a lot of these places are not going to be able to produce food anymore. Like, James Lovelock. David Well, the land is still corrupted, 

Giancarlo: and with the front of Morocco.

Daniel: David Well, it’s, yeah, it’s also the climate change and the, and the unpredictable effects. Like, plants need reliability, you know, or they don’t. So Like James, James Lovelock who’s the founder of the Gaia hypothesis, like super respected scientists in England, he’s saying that by 2040 to 2050, there will be no agriculture possible in Europe, you know?

So where are we going to get our food from? You know? Like, I mean, I don’t understand why people aren’t freaking out about this, like organizing around it. Like, you know, and I, I know you’re doing permaculture, which, which is great, but This is like systemic, like we can’t let millions and millions of people just perish, you know, because of this insanity.

You know? Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Anyhow, I feel drawn a little bit to, to specify that, of course, in the new spiritual scene there’s a lot of privilege and, and maybe self centeredness, but you know, what I, from what [00:25:00] I see in Ibiza and in other places is this attempt. To create community and, and, and to mirror each other on the community level, which, which I find that it’s very helpful for, for growth and for, you know, helping others.

Yeah, for personal growth. But the growth of the community, like for having like, you know, conscious parenting, conscious decoupling. I mean, in Ibiza, people, I mean, in New York, people break up and there is like lawyers and How about conscious systems change? Me and you, we always a little bit like not completely agree on that, but Can we try to connect?

this new paradigm, the morphogenetic, the monistic idealism, into the environmental crisis. Do you see a way to use this new paradigm change to solve the environmental crisis? Yeah, I mean, 

Daniel: it’s a great question. I mean, you know, in a weird way, I’m much more peaceful and happier than I’ve ever been. Yeah, you look good.

Yeah. Thank you. I’m going to the gym also. Yeah. Partially because I’ve just like [00:26:00] surrendered, you know, I have reached this kind of Wu Wei like non attachment, like go with the flow, you know, but I mean so, you know, if I look at it, you know, rationally it seems most likely that you know, humanity is like here today gone tomorrow, pretty much.

I mean, I don’t, you know, it’s like if you combine the, you know, microplastics, the ecological devastation, the disappearance of the insects. You know, with, you know, sociopaths and psychopaths like Putin, you know, with millions of, you know, nuclear weapons, poised at everybody, you know, and then you have, you know, these kind of like, you know, even like Sam Altman, who I liked at first, he looks more and more like creepy to me, and all of his like ethics people just left OpenAI, like, you know, with all these concerns about, yeah, how OpenAI could allow for like, for instance, infinitely stable dictatorships, you know.

Yeah, just, you know, we already see that in China, these sort of technocratic control systems that are very difficult to escape. So yeah, I feel, you know, there’s a high probability that we don’t make it. I mean, but on the other hand, I get very inspired by [00:27:00] Christopher Bosch LSD and the Mind of the Universe, and this kind of Vision that he had over and over again, that, you know, things were gonna get very bad.

And, you know, I think we’re a few years away from that. Like, like, we’re not gonna be playing games anymore. We’re gonna be like, how do I get enough like lima beans to, to, to eat? You know? I mean, not everybody, but it’s gonna become more and more, you know, problem 

Giancarlo: around, around the e equator when it’s hotter.

I think 

Daniel: even, I think even in a lot of Europe, I mean England, you know, I mean even in, in America now, do you know how many people suffer from, kind of food scarcity. It’s like one in four people in the U. S. suffer from some degree of food scarcity. This is supposed to be the richest country in the world.

That’s how Because this food is not nutritious. Well, it’s not just that. It’s also because capital has extracted all the wealth to the top of the pyramid. You know, you have like you know, it’s unbelievable. You have, you have like a few, a small group of people have taken all the wealth. And in a system where you have to buy everything, you know, through, through money, you know.

I mean, I think Zuckerberg has more wealth than like 27 percent of the other Millennials. You know, all of the other Millennials put together. The system, I mean, I, [00:28:00] you know, that’s why I believe that we need to break. capitalism in some way, which is even more difficult now that we’ve had this multipolar world and we have, like, Putin, you know, off the charts in terms of his you know, desire to wreak vengeance against the West.

And, you know, anyways, a lot of things are happening. But okay, so, you know, yes, there is, I think, this alternative line, but we’re not taking it seriously enough. I mean, you know, Dean Radin talked about the number generator. Well, Dean Radin was the chief scientist at Institute of Noetic Sciences. He’s a very cool guy, but one of his points that he made over and over again, which I love, which we had in the 2012 film, is that we might be at a point with like, with psi, psychic energy.

where we were with electricity back in the, you know, late 19th century. When Franklin was playing. Yeah, we, we, Franklin got zapped and then they were like, okay, this is an amazing power. But then it took like generations of experiments. to like channel it, to transmit it, and once we figured out how to do that with electricity, we were able to transform the whole like geophysical nature of our world [00:29:00] in, you know, 50, 100 years.

It’s like incredibly fast. Like once we get something, we can move fast. So, you know, if there’s some way that psi or psychic energy, you know, is available as a transformational force, if we could figure it out, and anchor it, you know, maybe that becomes, and that becomes like part of this new morphogenic field effect.

You know, maybe that is something that, that, that could work. I don’t know exactly how. Even, even if we go extinct physically, you know, we might also be entering some other dimension. I mean, like Rudolf Steiner talked about that, like he talked about different incarnations of the earth and that we were approaching the fifth incarnation of And he also, of course, saw kind of like different spiritual kind of Things that we’re gonna have, like he talked about the incarnation of this being that he called Aramon, which represented kind of rationality the, the, the, you know, sterility, minerality, materiality, so it could be that AI developing a body, developing autonomy, is this Aramonic incarnation that Steiner warned about?

that [00:30:00] he believed was going to happen. We couldn’t really prevent it, but what made a difference was how many people understood it in this occult or spiritual way. So I think that’s interesting. Anyway, yeah, so I think there’s some potential there that we should certainly harness, and we should like work a lot faster and with a lot more coordination to get there, now that we’ve begun to have the idea.

And yeah, I mean, I’m talking to some, a friend, Miguel, who is out interested in building like a consciousness research center in Portugal, I mean, but Abiza, this could be a great use for Abiza like, you know, could you construct, centers where people are going through like dark retreats, you know, extended state DMT, like moving towards this new paradigm, interacting with it, developing new language and mythology around it, you know, so that, that, that all really interests me.

Giancarlo: Yeah. But you know, since I know you for many years now, I feel you have a little bit this like, you know, duality in your, in your, in your thinking. You have on one side, You have your curiosity for the new paradigm, consciousness being [00:31:00] primordial. This, this new, this new psychic energy that we can learn to now harness for supernatural power.

And then there’s your activist identity, which is what the fuck are we doing? We’re like our, you know, we’re so greedy. Our consumerism that we don’t see that we are depleting the. The planet of resources with this extraction mentality. We are like, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the Bangladesh and the maldive and the people that are already, there’s already major environmental migration.

But then when we look at, you know, for example, the psychedelic. Movement that yes, it’s mostly medical. I see now more and more research about psychedelic for a change of ontology, for understanding this new ontology of this animist ontology like And, and, and, and it’s happening, you know, I, we have so many in, in some of this, you know, it’s not super public because this compound is still illegal in [00:32:00] most country, but there is friends of ours that are opening center in, in, in, in San Giorgio, in Cappadocia, they’re doing like a institute of research around in the shamanism.

There is Matteo with the Shipibo, you know, he’s like rewriting the constitution of the Shipibo and they are trying to open a center to use the Shipibo cosmovision and ontology to help children education. You know, there is like a retreat in, in the like, you know, community. Starting in, in Turkey, in Bali, I mean, I, you know, you, you saw it first, right?

You, you were saying there is a tipping point in consciousness is happening, but you don’t seem to be satisfied. 

Daniel: No, I’m not satisfied. No, I mean, you know, definitely not. Are you satisfied? I mean, it’s like, one thing that slightly concerns me in a way is like, I feel like the kind of elite sector, who’ve now, you know, powered up on psychedelics and understand the value of these things, are, you know, in a way making an alliance with these, you know, precious indigenous cultures, [00:33:00] which converge on a new form of like, sort of like Well, neocolonialism in a way, but it’s also kind of like What about everybody else?

And, you know, I mean, I, you know, I guess I, I, you know, sometimes I feel that I love humanity in the abstract, but not necessarily so much in the particular. Like when you go to the airport and suddenly you’re like, who are all these terrible people? Do I even really care about what happens to them? The kids with their like video game consoles and all that stuff.

But I mean, I think we should still like, you know, we don’t want to see, you know, like you know, this catastrophic end point. But to you, there will be that. 

Giancarlo: you know, we were, we were teenagers in the eighties, right? And who was your model back then? I don’t know. I mean, you were probably the son of, of, of, of artists and writer and painter, but you know, in my environment in the eighties, they was all about Gordon Gekko and Oliver Stone.

If you want a friend, buy a dog. And it was this idea of like, you know, capitalism and, and, and wealth. 

Daniel: I guess actually my archetypes in those days were artists like Ginsberg, who I knew a little bit, but people like David Byrne or Laurie Anderson or Lou [00:34:00] Reed you know, those are the people that I really looked up to come to think of it.

Now that I think about it in retrospect, Godard, you know, even Woody Allen back then. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: I mean, your mother was a writer, your father was a painter, but you know, most of the people, there was this, like the yuppies was the prevalent culture, right? the young urban professional making money. I mean, now look at kids.

They don’t want to like, they want to have a planet. Look at Lily and Stefano. They’re graduating. They want to help the other, the art or they don’t have, I feel there’s been a change in consciousness in the new generation in terms of like wanting to help people. 

Daniel: Yeah. I don’t, I mean, you know, I live in this neighborhood, so I’m constantly surrounded by 25 to 33 year olds or whatever.

22 year old. I mean, but yeah, I think a lot of people are just, you know, they’re just trying to, people, well, first of all, I mean, you know, people are very confused right now and a lot of people have a, you know, very negative feeling about that. If you scratch the surface, people feel that we’re headed for doom.

Yeah. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty intense, you know? I don’t [00:35:00] know, it feels like, you know, in a weird way, like one of the like I’m always, yeah, but I’m, you know, some, a part of me is like Lenin or something like Stalin or Trotsky or something. I’m thinking about how do you create like a revolutionary movement.

You know, because I tried to do that with Evolver and, you know, if we’d had a little bit more runway and, you know, we might’ve gotten somewhere. But you know, what we’re seeing right now with AI, it’s a little bit of an overreach in terms of the amount of, you know, kind of talented and skilled and, and resourced people who are just being made obsolete or, or laid off, you know, that, that could be the basis for, for a new, you know, kind of class or the cognitariat, my friend Warren calls them.

You know, people who might have a little bit of latitude to kind of think about the system and that apply their, their talents to, to, to changing it in some way 

Giancarlo: for, for pro social behavior. 

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I mean the, you know, the problem we have is the the underlying structure of the financial system, which kind of holds.

The whole thing together. I mean, I’ve always been interested in like, you know, I’ve talked about [00:36:00] corporations as being actually kind of like the nascent organs of the human body. Like you know, like oil companies are kind of like the blood, you know, circulation system. Then you have like media is like the, the you know, the you know what are these sensory apparatus, turning it into kind of memes that then the whole system like reacts upon.

And then the financial system is like the nervous system of the collective human organism. And that’s not maybe the hardest to change because you know, everything like, you know, we have to have this constant growth because of debt. You know, like you know, everybody has to keep fulfilling the past obligations and so on.

And you know, I mean, the, if you look at the chart of money creation in the US since like 2008, it’s like a hockey stick. It’s like gone up, you know, so much. How could that be sustainable? Yeah. It just seems like when that kind of thing happens, ultimately you’re headed for some massive meltdown. 

Giancarlo: So on a good day, when you’re optimistic, where your optimist comes from?

Daniel: I’m not really, I mean, I’m, well, you know, I’m not really. Am I [00:37:00] optimistic? I don’t really like those terms anymore, like pessimistic, optimistic. I’m joyful. Like, I love life. Like, if I get, you know, creams tomorrow, it was still, like, amazing. Like, this was quite a ride. You know, if everybody, you know, if the whole thing goes down in flames, you know, that’s just what had to happen.

That’s the evolutionary trajectory. 

Giancarlo: What’s that? A little bit like fatalist. 

Daniel: Not even fatalist. I mean I’m, I’m, I’m curious, you know, I mean, I, but I, I think like sometimes we get, you know, I, I, you know, I don’t like the word hope. I feel like Obama really kind of contaminate that word anyway, but you know, I think we need to get beyond kind of like some of these dualisms.

Like, It’s amazing what’s happening. I’m so grateful to be alive right now, to know the people that I know, to see these contradictions, to have my own little archetypal role in this evolutionary process, you know. Yeah, it’s interesting. 

Giancarlo: And you have, and I see your following increasing, people resonate with your ideas.

You know, you have like 200 people at your, at your recent online workshop. I mean, your, your ideas are getting more [00:38:00] popular. 

Daniel: I don’t know about that. I mean, I feel kind of like surprisingly kind of left out of a lot of discourses. It’s interesting. So I think there’s something about me. I’ve never played like politics, like cultural politics, I’m kind of a curmudgeon.

I’m kind of a, you know, weirdo. I don’t know. It’s like I feel a little bit But there’s something good about that too, in a weird way, because you’re 

Giancarlo: navigating this two world, right? The environmental activism, but then also the more esoteric new ontology. 

Daniel: I don’t know. 

Giancarlo: Do you know anybody else like that?

I mean, I feel that you have the, you know, the Castro, the, the, the, the, you know, philosophy of mind, the academic that studied that, but then they don’t, they’re not environmental activists. I think you have this too. Well, I 

Daniel: mean, I, you know, I’ve had the fun of kind of just giving myself, because I was really impressed with Buckminster Fuller and his ideas that we have too many specialists, that hyper specialization is part of our social problem.

So like, you know, somebody who’s an [00:39:00] economist or a day trader or whatever, like a biologist studying like what happens on like one side, you know, strand of one gene or something. but not really thinking holistically. So, you know, Buckminster Fuller’s idea is that we needed more comprehensive generalists.

And I’d already written like a book or two when I read that. I’m like, yeah, that’s what I’m going to like set out to do. So, you know, I keep expanding, you know, maybe I don’t go as deep as some people, like, you know, I mean, recently I’m like rereading some of Deleuze and Guattari, like, you know, A Thousand Plateaus and the Rhizome, and like You know, just like synthesize.

I feel like, yeah, like almost like a DJ who can synthesize, you know, I’m still very interested in sexuality and gender, which we’ve also discussed, kind of like, you know, I’m interested in it anthropologically, because like, There’s so much change happening between men and women right now, and then you have this sort of you know, other genders and the trans situation and so on.

And then there’s, yeah, I mean identity politics on the left seems kind of like a dead end, but it’s really hard to figure out how you reunite people to [00:40:00] accept, you know, when they don’t agree with other people and just like, but still, you know, be with them and love them. And work with you know, so yeah, I mean it’s cool.

I, I, you know, by, I haven’t given myself any, any limits. I mean, I wish I had, you know, three brains instead of just one. But let’s, so let’s discuss a little bit 

Giancarlo: your, your, what’s, what’s your take on, on current state of sexuality? 

Daniel: Well, a lot has happened. There’s a bit, I mean, I guess it depends on which generation, I mean, in a way, like, I’m looking more like, you know, thinking more about the 20s, 30s.

But, you know, there’s a big kind of retraction back into more conservative ideas. There’s a book called Against the Sexual Revolution. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, like Louis Perry. Yeah, it’s an 

Daniel: interesting, you know, interesting book. I don’t think it quite, you know, works because I mean, I’m also very much inspired by You know, Osho and you know, kind of polyamorous neotantra and Tamara, Dieter Duhm’s book, Eros Unredeemed, you know, like that was like, you know, where I got into trouble was I had this like, almost like ideological idea that sexual, you know, emancipation was the [00:41:00] road forward.

Giancarlo: It was, it was the road forward and also the responsibility of the community. 

Daniel: Yeah. Well, that’s Like very politicized, 

Giancarlo: like in 

Daniel: Tamara. In Tamara. Well, Tamara, that’s, that I think, I didn’t, you know, have that in my own life, but I think that’s an interesting point. They believe that you can only have that in a community that’s holding it.

But also frankly, I don’t know how great it’s going for them. Like, I think the older women are not like super happy there. I noticed that when you go there, everybody’s like chain smoking. I want to go back, but you know, and if you’re smoking so much, it means there’s like repressed energy or anger or grief or something, you know?

So, you know, so yeah, but I try to observe, you know, you know, the sort of totality of a system, I guess. Yeah. I mean, so. So like, you know, women have increased their power in society they’re becoming much better educated than men. Women are becoming, you know, more liberal and progressive. Men are becoming more right wing and reactionary, and there’s like the incel movement, and men moving into their, like, basements and playing video games, and You know, but then yeah, it’s just like there’s, I mean, we could go, I mean, we could do a whole nother discussion around that, but it’s, [00:42:00] there’s so many layers to it.

Giancarlo: What I heard, you know, one of these ISTA teacher from this Institute of Temple Art Mystery School, he says that, you know, like in a, in a, in a relationship preference, you have all these different way to, to, to, you know, to interact like poly, open, swinging, don’t ask, don’t tell, but the umbrella term is non monogamy.

And then you have all these different way. And they told me that, you know, in, in, in tantra, neotantra, sexual liberation, the Kashmir massage, the Kashmir approach, the lingam, the, the armoring, you know, the, the, the umbrella term would be spiritual embodiment. And, and that stayed with me because, you know, like, the word sexuality and Eros always, always loaded.

But, you know, I, I’ve been to some of this retreat where the objective is really embody spirituality is the idea of using your body, interacting with other people, not necessarily for pleasure, but for transcendence. [00:43:00] And, and, and, and, and that happened in this ISTA course, there is like this. Opening of like energetic portals, 

Daniel: you 

Giancarlo: know, 

Daniel: even it’s, I mean, it’s just as powerful as 

Giancarlo: like an ayahuasca.

It’s so powerful. And it’s, and, and, you know, they call it transpersonal. So, you know, when, when, you know, I had the opportunity to interact with the man and, you know, I’m. Not bisexual, and I’m actually a little bit like 

Daniel: gotta make that claim pretty quick. Get that out there 

Giancarlo: But anyhow, I don’t want to disclose what you 

Daniel: might be wearing a dress five years from now.

You never know 

Giancarlo: That’s what my friends from Rome says But anyhow, there was like this this exercise this interaction. It was one of the most beautiful moment of my life You know, he was crying you were crying but not because of me because this care and, and, and, and, and attention and gratitude was triggering, you know, archetypal energy of, of, of, of healing and wholeness.

And when you have that on the, on the, on the, as a group with the, with the right music, where [00:44:00] everybody’s, you know, regulating the autonomous nervous system through vulnerability, you know, and so, I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe it’s not always like that, but if you’re surrounded by people in the vulnerable state.

You feel safe. You don’t feel threatened by people that are processing vulnerability and all that stuff. So, I find that, you know, like, I feel for this spiritual embodiment movement the same enthusiasm I had 20 years ago for ayahuasca. Because I see to what extent sexuality is everywhere, but Everybody’s misusing it because men has been, you know, because, because of the, because it’s so many environments, sex is still something men take and woman give.

And in this, in this, in this dynamics, there is, you know, there’s a, there’s a protocol of question to regulate the way you interact, which prevent from being hurt. You know, there is like BD or some, you share your desire, [00:45:00] your boundary, your aftercare, your pre care. Some people say, okay, it takes a little bit of magic away of this.

Life seems very clinical, but then it avoids a lot of pain of people having different tension, different expectation, and yeah, I’m a big fan of Vista. I mean, you were, you were the one away. Oh yeah. I’m 

Daniel: going to level two in July. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

Daniel: Yeah. Finally. 

Giancarlo: Where? Turkey. Turkey. I’m, I’m going, I’m going with I’m doing in June level two in June.

With Bruce Lyon. I’m doing Yeah. Bruce Lyon is in, is in 

Daniel: Where, where are you doing that? 

Giancarlo: In England. Oh, cool. In, 

Daniel: yeah, I mean, yeah, it just feels like yeah, there’s, it’s, it’s an interesting, you know, PO posts, you know, me, me too, and sort of, we’re still in cancellation culture, but it’s sort of abating.

And I feel like men and women don’t quite know what to do with each other. Yeah. It’s very interesting. 

Giancarlo: I feel that maybe the, the spiritual embodiment folks, it’s more about spirituality and transcendence and out of body experience and connect with the divine and I’m, I’m generalizing, I’m just [00:46:00] brainstorming, but maybe, maybe the, the, the non monogamy is more about freedom and, and, and.

And self realization and independence and I don’t know if I don’t see much overlapping. 

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t really been tracking. I mean, I don’t know, not many of my friends are doing the sort of ethical non monogamy right now. You know, they’re like, you know, either they’re single or they’re, or they’re partnered.

I think people partially don’t have the time for it. It’s like, it’s like, unless you live in a place, I mean, in Tamara, it’s like what they do instead of like going to the movies or television, it’s like, they have these like endless processes, otherwise it’s just, you know, it’s often going to just lead to polyagony.

Giancarlo: But so, so this morning I found you in a particularly good mood and you share that you’re, you’re feeling like excited and enthusiastic and inspired about what? 

Daniel: Well, I mean, I am seeing that I can make more use of the creative tools. I mean, it’s just a very good time to be a creative entrepreneur. You know, I can, you know, like, 

Giancarlo: Yeah, I mean, 

Daniel: [00:47:00] you know, I can create a course, do all the imaging, all the marketing, you know, I don’t need anybody else.

I mean, you know, sometimes I get people to help me just for safe time and, you know, I can live, you know, decently off of even, you know, better and better off of that. Plus my newsletter. And now I see other pieces that I can bring in. Like now it’s like I’m having people, like somebody just, you know, wants me to start a new magazine with them.

And I’m like, do I even have like the time? Like, you know, unless they’re really paying me well, I just think it’s like I’m better off just building my own ship right now that I made a mistake in the past with like, you know, wanting to collaborate and so on. Like every, every time I do that, it actually feels like a step back.

Whereas I think for a year or two, I really should just focus on building my own ship. Networking. And so, so what’s that? 

Giancarlo: Building your own network. Well, 

Daniel: and also kind of you know, cause I feel like, you know, some of the ideas in Breaking Open the Head in 2012, you know, we’re now a while back. And so for instance, I could, [00:48:00] you know, create like a YouTube documentary, like Zeitgeist style.

to try to like explain to the new generation, you know, why these, these ideas are important and even kind of advance them, you know, in terms of that, you know, I think, you know, we are in this prophetic time and if you understand the sort of. You know, Kastrupian, you know, Jungian, kind of archetypal dimension of the situation, how myth and allegory structure reality.

You know, it could really be profoundly helpful. It gives people a whole, whole reframing of what’s happening on the planet. And yeah, I mean does provide like a very different type of hope. I mean, if we, if we were able to, as we, as we’ve been discussing, somehow make use of the psychic field, I mean yeah, and also kind of yeah, have other kinds of breakthroughs.

But I still think that you know, like, I mean, Rebecca Soldat wrote that book, A Paradise Built in Hell. I mean, as the scale of the emergency, you know, dawns on people, that also will create a lot of freedom. People will really feel that they want to live for the now, [00:49:00] whether that’s eroticism or mysticism or just creativity.

Could be a great, great, great time. 

Giancarlo: Instead of producing and consuming. 

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. Like that’s just, yeah, that’s feeling kind of like old hat. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Because like, you know, I can’t remember in which podcast someone asked Bernardo Castro, but so how do you integrate all these ideas? of monistic idealism in your life.

And then he says I don’t plan anything. He says he works up in the morning and he’s really going with the flow. He says sometimes, you know, he’s writing, he’s writing a new book, but sometimes he doesn’t write for two months. He says that is breakfast and then he just follow whatever sign. Yeah. But so if enough people lives in this like, you know, radical in the present moment without planning.

So how is that going to affect? There’s going to be maybe, you know, a bit like less production. 

Daniel: Right. Well, I mean, you know, I’m not averse against planning. I mean it’s just, what are you planning for? So, but yeah, I mean, how can [00:50:00] we use 

Giancarlo: the psychic field? 

Daniel: How can we navigate? I mean, yeah, well, I mean, I think you know, one of the problems I’m having with the way the whole psychedelic renaissance has advanced is, you know, if you look at these indigenous societies, it’s not like you just, like, take the psychedelic and you’re healed. It’s actually, like, you go through an initiation and a very important part of the initiation is you have to speak your visions to the, to the, to the elders and the elders, you know, kind of, like, give you context, you know, for what those mean.

And sometimes they even, like, change the society because of the visions that people have. So, so, you know, 

Giancarlo: that’s how they’re using the psychic field. 

Daniel: Yeah. So we should be doing something like that. We need to figure out what the context is for me. It also, you know, everything is political just as much as it’s, as it’s spiritual.

So you know, you know, at the moment. I think what happens is people go through these profound, you know, psychedelic journeys. There’s like some, you know, personal healing, but then the [00:51:00] ego, which is incredibly supple, manages to kind of like figure out how to game the, the, the, the energy of that experience.

Then the more you do it, the less transformative it is. The more, the more your, your, your ego is figured out a structure. Then finally, like. You know, people are doing it and, you know, they’re having, you know, quote unquote, these amazing experiences, but it’s not really leading to much. That’s kind of why I stopped, you know, for the time being, you know.

Giancarlo: Yeah. I mean, the way we are using the psychedelic experience now, my wife and I, is this idea of like developing trust. Yeah. And, you know, because we are both come from a history of, of, of addiction and anxiety and fear. You know, fear for the future, you know, we, we, we both had physically like panic attack.

And so this idea is that, you know, when you navigate in this realm, you feel like, you know, it’s a bit of a cliche, but they say, you know, the universe has your back. This idea that, you know, life happens for you and not to you. And this is something that, you know, it’s, it’s it’s something that you, [00:52:00] you know, the, the brain is plastic.

There is neuroplasticity, but you have to put the effort. You know, so, so we, every day we work on this idea of like surrender and even if they are catastrophic, you know, like, you know, what was the book from, from a singer on radical acceptance, you know, he went to jail, he went, there was like a big lawsuit I’m sure if I, I’ll put, I’ll put it on the show notes and this, this idea that, Everything’s gonna be okay when you’re gonna be okay with everything.

And this is something that you learn and and the psychedelic experience helps 

Daniel: I mean your parents are old or have you passed away? Are they still? No, but they’re like Mom’s like 88 and when you like see that that’s just where it goes like ultimately you either you know are the one of the ones who dies earlier or You kind of like hang on and you watch your whole world kind of like crumble away.

I mean, it’s That’s so hardcore, you know, like, I mean, we’re in our fifties now, but we’re not like, [00:53:00] you know, a million years away from that phase of life. So, you know, that’s like an ultimate, I mean, yeah, to be alive at 88 and deal with all the health stuff. It’s like, it’s like running like a, like a, like a marathon.

I mean, I’m also, you know, like you interested in longevity. Cause I do feel that life’s a little too short. You know, like now I feel like I kind of know what I’m doing. Like when I was trying to build. my stuff in the past. Like, Evolver, I had a lot of my shadow material I hadn’t even looked at, or I didn’t even know how to address it.

I just felt this urgency and so on. You know, now I’m like, you know, much more chill and feel much more in a state of, like, self mastery. But, you know, but it’s also hard to justify, like, let’s say we could figure out how to extend our lives for another 50 years, you know, is that even, like, fair? You know, is there something kind of, like, diabolical about that, you know, when we’re kind of, like, vampirically feeding on, you know, all these corpses of, you know, the, Plants of the past through fossil fuels and all these people who don’t get those, you know that, that those type of breaks.

Giancarlo: Yeah. There’s in am in America. There’s that guy, I think Brian [00:54:00] Johnson, something like that, who sold this company for a hundred million, 200 million. Yeah. He seems like kind of a sad case though. His idea was to progress his biological age to 18 years old. Yeah. And he did that. Did he? Yeah. And he says that number one is the quality of your sleep.

So apparently with the order ring, he had like six months of consecutive. A hundred percent. And that depends mostly by what time you eat. He stops eating 10 hours before going to bed. And then, I mean, he’s got like a team of 20 doctors, every doctor for an organ. And yeah, I just go through a divorce.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe he’ll start going out with some hedonistic lady who’s like, come on, let’s drink martinis. But once again, that’s, to me, is another example of this kind of like, you know, and I think it tends to happen, you know, when you have a lot of, you know, material resources or wealth. It’s like self, the self focus kicks in.

Yeah, where it’s like, I just would, you know, like to see more of those resources go to those, you know yeah. I mean, I don’t even like need, but like yeah, I don’t know. It’s painful. It’s painful just to see the inequities, [00:55:00] you know, doesn’t feel right. Particularly for all the same consciousness.

Just, you know, like we’re going to be them next time around if we don’t take care of it, you know. So, you know, that’s not going to be fun. 

Giancarlo: Anyway, we’ve been, we passed the hour. Thank you, Daniel. It’s always a pleasure and inspiring to chat with you. Is there anything else on your mind that you want to share or any, you know?

Daniel: Sure. Just, you know, merciless self aggrandizement, you know, like people should subscribe to my sub stack, DanielPinchpeck at substack. com. They should take my courses, Liminal. News. They should read my books, which are awesome. And Are you going 

Giancarlo: to do a writing course again? 

Daniel: Yeah, I’ll do a writing course again.

Yeah, I want to 

Giancarlo: do that. I want 

Daniel: to Oh, cool. It’d be fun to have you. I want to sign up for that. It’s been great. It’s been, those have been great. And I’ve seen people get a lot better. What I’ve, what I’ve seen is like, yes, I had some friends who joined and their writing was kind of wobbly and then they got really good.

I was like, wow, they could actually like do it now. Yeah. And they kind of lost focus again. So I think a lot of people can, can do it. Particularly if like, people had like a lot of, you know, [00:56:00] profound life experience, they could all write a book, but It’s a, it’s a marathon. It’s like, it requires like a lot of self discipline and kind of like, you have to just be willing to like sit there.

It’s boring in a way. But AI 

Giancarlo: can help you, right? I mean, not writing for you, but you know, you will write the 50 pages and then you can ask, you upload on AI and you can say, can you expand part in your style? That wouldn’t be like cheeky. 

Daniel: It, so far, it has a kind of generic quality when it takes off in the writing, but it can be, it’s incredibly useful for research and for maybe organizing, for doing things like marketing copy, you know, but you know, it’s also a little bit frightening because you know, the, the universe is just getting flooded with, with crap and the internet is becoming like a giant flood of like AI generated content and AI generated books.

I mean, this one guy talks about how, like, he went on Amazon, he’d written a book. about consciousness, actually. There were like, all these like, manuals on like, about his book, or workbooks, that people just generated with AI in like, [00:57:00] 20 minutes, and just tried to sell. So it’s, it’s, it’s really yeah, it’s kind of a mess right now.

But yeah, I think there are some useful uses for it. But I think that like, you know, still, with art, with creativity, we’re going to want to, you know, make sure that we’re in touch with like a, like a, like a human soul, you know, when, when we read, or listen, or watch something. So as soon as the kind of You kind of feel that there’s like an intuition, like you feel this sort of metallic twang to it, you know, so I don’t, I don’t think we can outsource much writing to it in that sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Giancarlo: I just finished this book, you know, Elizabeth Gilbert, she wrote It Pray Love, and this last book is a little book you can listen in four hours, and it’s it’s called Big Magic. She makes this theory that ideas. They’re like independent sentient beings. They’re like supernatural being that come to you when they feel you deserve it, when you feel you are in integrity and you’re going to give the right attention to this idea.

And then if you get distracted and if you don’t, don’t follow up, then the idea leaves. It’s interesting. And, and, and she, I agree 

Daniel: with that. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. And, [00:58:00] and so I felt inspired because she said, listen, you know, we are all creative. We come from million years of creativity. It’s only in the last few hundred years that we are.

Some people are purely consumer and, and, you know, like with TV and, and, you know, we have in our genes, the, the, they should call it the creative lifestyle. So this idea of creative living, which is not something that, you know, you want to sell necessarily, of course, but this idea of just create, create, create, create.

Daniel: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean I mean, one, one way I’m experimenting with AI also is I’m doing these, these videos and now you can get an instant transcription and then I can, you know, edit those transcriptions and, you know, I think that sometimes my writing may be a little too intellectually intricate for, you know, some readers.

Yeah. But when I speak, it’s not, it’s not like that. So, you know, if I take a transcript and then edit it maybe that’s a median, you know, between my, my normal writing tone and something that actually more people can just, can just access. So I’m experimenting with that too. Yeah. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Amazing. Yeah. Thank you 

Daniel: Daniel.

Yeah, good hang out. Thank you very much, 

Giancarlo: I’ll [00:59:00] come back in six months. Sounds good. Thank you.

Jingle: Ko ka sunaray sunarayenthi Ko ka sunaray sunarayenthi Ko ka sunaray sunarayenthi Ko ka sunaray sunarayenthi Ko ka sunaray sunarayenthi Ko ka sunaray sunarayenthi Coca zonada, it’s zonada and tea. Coca zonada, it’s zonada and 

tea.