Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the true life podcast. Everybody's having a beautiful day. Hope the sun is shining. Hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. A quick note for everybody out there. Uh, check out district two, sixteen. It's like this premier incredible psychedelic club. They're taking members right now and they have what I think is the future of psychedelics and education and entertainment. That being said, let me jump in here. I got two incredible guests for you today. And let me bring in my friend Simon over here. He's a molecule whispering neuro dimensional code breaker who doesn't study the mind. He dives into the screaming abyss and pulls back symphonies composed entirely of your forgotten wholeness. He's what happens when the periodic table takes mushrooms and remembers it's God. Simon, thank you so much for being here today. We should have Zach jump in here a little while, but how are you, man? Yeah, pretty good, especially with that intro. So thank you again. It's always fun to hear what comes out. I'm doing pretty good, man. Yeah, yeah. I think we'll see if we can get into that, but I... It's been now a week or a bit more than a week since I went on a Bufo journey. And that was the first time for me. And that was a pretty, pretty mind bending and warping cathartic experience. So I'm fresh out of that. And I'm currently in the South of France with my girlfriend at her parents' place, checking out nature and just being outside most of the time. enjoying the wildlife here. And so that is great. So in general, I'm doing, I'm doing great and looking forward to just having a meandering conversation. So let's start there, man. A recent Bufo experience. Like you're fresh from it, man. Tell me about it. Yeah. So the main, for me, I've been thinking about doing that already for like five years. I didn't have any experience with DMT. still done only with ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms, these kind of things. And what I noticed always with the ayahuasca, also with the mushrooms, even high dose, always I will be still quite centered. So there was this sort of core, I think, to my ego structure or to my sort of sense making capacity that would always be there. observing let's say what was going on and that is both a strength and at the same time a weakness because um one of the main things is why I sort of stepped into the path that I'm on now or the things that I enjoy exploring now was out of necessity out of sort of existential depression and yeah um sort of quite heavy feelings one of the main culprits as I started figuring this out but I've been on this actively I think for seven years six years uh was my own sort of uh map making mind I would call it the an inner aspect of me which I would call uh I think the emperor emperor archetype that is just so exceptionally good at mapping, but also controlling because that's the main reason why it wants to map. It wants to control things. And I'm always active. I was always active with that part. And even if I would be very relaxed and calm, I would still notice like I'm putting fencing around my experience, even though the fencing are hidden by some trees or they're all the way across behind the hills. I know that I'm putting down fences and I'm limiting my sort of being in the moment experience and and it would also just express itself very strongly in um channeling or restricting emotional release easy emotional release and again for my practice that is quite a strength because it also allows me to when I work with people to channel hello zachary zachary and I was just talking about channeling and uh you know I I felt the pulse that's what happened here and uh you know I changed the channel Well done, man. Well done. Simon's just filling us in on this. He had a recent Bufo experience, man. He's just getting into how he got there and what's happening, man. Let's see what you got. I got Bufo stories. I was talking about the reason why and the main reason is that I've been interacting with an inner aspect which I would call the emperor, the sort of supreme ruler for left hemispherical dominance and controlling mapping reality, my inner world. And I noticed that it's mainly due to anxiety, due to heavy fear that that is happening, but it would also block my access to any fear. So I would have no clue what was going on, but living life mostly quite depressed, but having that on top. And I noticed with ayahuasca, I had some grueling ayahuasca journeys where I was lying and moments of dying let's say but just combat between whatever this Emperor was and ayahuasca and just not a lot directly happening all oftentimes I get a lot of things happening after those kind of experiences but yeah that kind of put me on the path of thinking about uh bufo that was like my main idea like okay if I truly want to experience an uh an ego death where any sense of resistance will be just pushed through within seconds. That's that's Bufo or five in the DMT. So I was sort of had that open that option and the timing was was great. And so it came on my path and I experienced it and I had just a complete whiteout. I just remember like inhaling and my peripheral vision fractaling Hearing this super loud rushing noise in my ears and then just gone. And then I woke up and the tyrant, the emperor immediately reasserted itself and thought that I was in some sort of black magic, um, ritual. So I was looking at the, uh, at the practitioner or the ceremonialist like, oh shit, this is bad juju. And so, but it didn't stick that projection and then it flipped back on me. And then I just had to vomit, like vomit a lot, bawling my eyes out. And it was like a complete birth that kind of happened. So I'm still sort of picking up pieces from the whole experience, but I, I've been noticed like, like something has been a major sort of note has been reached through this experience. And now there's no particular need, let's say to have the emperor in place. as the one who's controlling everything. So I've noticed a massive shift in everyday presence and yeah, less need for control or less fear. All that stuff is sort of way less. So great. Thanks for the Bufo. It's amazing, amazing experience. You know what I like when you set that up there? You talked about a little bit before, and I know because I read lots of your work, that you're a huge fan of Ian McGilchrist, the right brain, left brain. You and I have talked previously about the world that we're kind of living in, how it seems to be dominated by whether it's the capitalist view or it's the ceramic model of the universe view where you go out there and you create all these things that happen on some level. And I think that kind of takes us into some of Zachary's films a little bit. Do you think that maybe these things are connected? When you go into these altered states of awareness, we see what is possible and we get sickened by the world we're living in because we become aware of how built up this framework is that's just not serving anybody. Where should we take that? Zachary, what are your thoughts? First time I did DMT, I was in a little tiny trailer in Northern California. And it was like... It's like in an H.P. Lovecraft story where he describes like being in an ancient tomb or something. Yeah. Like just this this horrible, terrible emanation, this this holiness. Like every time I've held the DMT, I'm scared. Yeah. You know, I took it and I didn't like blast off. I've never been able to do that. But I felt like my body was a profound. limitation on my spirit and it was just like the soul was like trying to get out and I was I became very aware of that that there's a spirit that is not the body and that the body is a interface for and I just remembered like being on the floor of this trailer like these dudes like hey yeah you should do more dude and I'm like I'm good I'm good I'm good And we fear that. I think we fear the truth. We fear the reality of what is going on beneath the surface of what's really underneath the hood. And the that extends. Outward into the layers of projections and illusions and hallucinations that are our culture, that are the sort of dream states that are mapped to our neurochemicals and to our dopamine circuits and to our cortisol that are materialized to us. Through structures like money that make us feel like we're being chased by a cheetah if we don't have it. And that continually validated through other people saying, what do you mean? There could be another way of being. This is it. What are you talking about? Stop questioning it. Stop doing that. It's like when I, I mean, my life has been a psychedelic for a lot of other people. you know to take them on these journeys to these other places like even just like my instagram stories where I'm like hanging out with tribesmen in africa you know or like I'm taking train journeys across europe like that's kind of frustrating to somebody who's stuck in a life that doesn't feel like it's theirs and that they are contenting themselves with their artificial fireplace and you know tv that's catered to their sensibilities you know and so when we take these substances these you know numinous dream magical artifact you know spells um we we get more in touch with that real thing underneath us which is scary and human and vulnerable I did a bufo in a cave about a mile from here with my fiance and a shaman named ehud And we did the hape first, which I fucking hate. Hate it. Can't stand it. It's awful for me. It's like the most painful, unpleasant, just blech. And I was like puking my guts out. And then we took the DMT and it was like very beautiful and calm and serene and loving. And I just remembered putting my head in my... partner's lap and and um saying like I'm gonna throw up and she's like you can throw up on me and I just knew that moment that like oh this is this is my woman this is my this is my wife for me And it really showed me that. And before that, I'd been afraid of that. I'd been afraid of engagement. I'd been afraid of marriage because my parents' marriage fell apart. And because our civilization has created these weird relational constructs of ownership and control that even another human being can become an object that is contractually obligated to you. All of this is metaphysical arrangement. It's all metaphysical. It's all spiritual in a way. And yet we forget that. And it's scary to realize that. It's scary to step back into that. It is visceral. There is a visceral feeling of disgust and revulsion that comes over you when you come back into Walmart. After experiencing your godhood, after experiencing the infinite boundless reaches of imagination and possibility and conscious creation, to go and sit in Denny's and know that the food is poison and that everything around you is made of oil and that... you know it's just like there there's so many uh layers to it and I don't really know where to bring this full circle into something that's positive co-creative I'm not really sure what the theme of this show is but it it's it's our adventure to ritualize that discomfort and um own it and understand it and use it wisely so that we are making ourselves uncomfortable with the Omnicidal behaviors and roots and cultural conditionings that we're sort of wired into so that we can we can gradually Dispossess ourselves and leave the body of the body. I love to help Terrence McKenna says that the body is It's a prison. But yeah, we can free ourselves from the comforts of our systems, of the comfort to not have to think about our destiny, from the comfort to not have to question the meaning of life because there is no meaning of life, from all the false comforts that everything is figured out and all you have to do is just submit yourself to predictable suffering every day and everything's going to be fine. And in the afterlife, blah, blah, blah, you'll be able to retire. It's shedding ourselves of that so that we can come into a true reality that is uncomfortable to get there. It's like we're squeezing through a birth canal. But once we get out to the other side, it's a glorious meadow with flowers and birds and infinite possibilities and infinite us's. I love it. I know both of you guys, when I look at some of your guys work, you both talk about the meta crisis, but I can't help but sort of draw a through line through this idea of purging and then being disgusted. And then you're in the power to create stuff. I think both of you guys are doing that. Like, is that where you guys see where we are right now is like we are constantly in this purging phase. Are we waking up from this? This idea of like, holy shit, what are we doing to ourselves? Are we coming through that thing or are we going to get stuck right here? What are you guys' thoughts, man? I'd like to chime in a little bit. Yeah, please. Specifically because Zachary mentioned oil. And oil is quite fascinating. So I did a little bit of a... I've been coming in and out of this idea or this... Yeah, it's more of a feeling intuition. um trying to make sense of what oil and our use of oil is on a more guyan scale guyan consciousness scale and if we think about it um oil like this compressed hydro fossil hydrocarbons is death on a massive scale that hasn't returned to the circle of life. So it's compressed mass death of a lot of unicellular organisms. The coal is also trees, other beings, other creatures. And these occurred over many cycles in the planetary history. Bless you. Bless you. Over many, many cycles in the planetary history. So many moments of Um, mass suffering, I'd say, which haven't been, um, which weren't bioavailable. So they went sub they went subterranean, but let's call it subcutaneous in the layers of the earth, in the body of Gaia, uh, without being touched without, um, anything happening to it. And then homo sapiens, uh, at one point figures out how to. A, access oil, but also B, use it on a mass scale and then build all these different products of it. Gasoline, just everything that oil is. It's not only, I think, oil consuming. It is like we craft with oil. So we shape a world based on oil products, fossil carbons. Anytime I stepped into a heavy trauma release, either in ceremonial setting with blood medicine or with breath work or with sort of other methods, shamanic work, oftentimes if I tune into the energy of whatever is congealed around that wound, that sort of compressed energy that wasn't transmuted or wasn't part of life just yet, that feels oily. There's like a film of death around it, like frozen in time. And then all this coping structures are developed around it. And that is the stickiness that that to me is like the contagion or the the the that having fluid. uh but anyone will tell you who's had many of these sort of cycles where you stepped into a process of transmuting whatever pain is there um and at the end coming out in a sort of post tragic mindset learning to see like what what this what does this teach me what are the nutrients that were present there or what is the the energy that was captured there and that I just used to transmute whatever was inside of it to really appreciate that and learn from the process I think Gaia is in a certain sense in a massive, massive trauma-resolving state and at the same time being re-traumatized as we are in a human-induced mass extinction event. So it's the humans injecting all these hyper-fossil carbons, making them bioavailable again in some forms. In other forms, they're not bioavailable. They're plastics, microplastics, all these other kinds of chemicals. that aren't being taken up by the planet. But it's causing this, yeah, this state where everything is coated with sort of undeath. And well, I feel like, I feel and look at the state of the, let's say the human world, I think people are trying to keep up while at the same time also planetary skill that this is really part of a part of a process that was already set up let's say millions of years in the past let's yeah let's not be fully deterministic with that not necessarily set up for this moment but we are in this moment and we are doing the transmuting and I'm very curious how that might resonate with the both of you or if that makes any sense to you yeah well I can just say that uh oh go ahead george no I was just gonna I was gonna throw it back over to you I I think that anything a model built on extraction can't do anything but extract a model built on suffering can't do anything but create a product or service of suffering I'm just gonna throw it that way but what are your thoughts on that zachary I was gonna say that uh that oil is a one-time pulse that is uh we treat as a flow but it's really a stock it's a finite uh property that is you know not going to come back and I think about when we discovered that we discovered this unbelievable power to as you're saying literally reshape the world you know by allowing these sort of fossil servants to work in ways we could not that like a barrel of oil contains the work of so many humans working night and day um and the material science and the the plastics and the ways that this this material is embedded into probably just about everything we're looking at right now yeah there's plastic on the keyboard there's this pen is made of oil it's all made of oil I mean and that right there is a mind to just look at the world around you and see that everything plastic is made of oil and and on one hand you know hemp plastics can replace all of that that there are other hydrocarbons if you put two two uh atoms together basically I'm not gonna try to pretend I'm like a scientist but I'm not but um yeah um we can substitute all of that but just think about the fact that we got a genie's wish and we turned it into this we we used that wish to turn the world into anything we could imagine and we created the mall of america you know We created the New Jersey Turnpike. I often use jet skis and leaf blowers. I'm like, yeah, we have this incredible resource, and then just we're going to do this with it. But then we also create like the Taj Mahal and like beautiful works of art. Like if you look at oil painting, like there's cases where we've used it to make the world much more beautiful. I'm not saying I love where we are at right now, but like, is it a lack of imagination? Is it greed? Is it selfishness? Is it the human condition? Like the fuck are we doing? It's a, it's a lack of information and a lack of foresight and restraint and imagination and vision. The Taj Mahal, when was that built? don't know man I should probably know that but I don't I'm gonna I don't know I'm gonna get somewhere in the sixteen hundreds sixteen hundreds yeah there you go well before fossil fuels and yet look at what look at what we're building with fossil fuels today These cubes that just pop up. It's worse than Brutalist. I've seen these incredible carvings from Sri Lanka, from India, of these buildings that every bit of it, every facade, every edifice is sculpted with gargoyles and characters and gods. You look at the doorknobs in the past and they have angels on them. And yet today we have the power to three D print and to mold things out of natural materials and out of earth. And we have like machines that can like blast water that can like sculpt stone into whatever shape we can imagine automatically, like which we could create with a three D virtual rendering. And then, recreate these things and yet we don't even advance those technologies because it's more profitable for this abstraction of being able to extract money out of false scarcity to have a whole construction crew waste their time and sit around it that's just it's all so absurd but yeah the basic thing is that we could have turned the world into anything with with the gift of oil which we should be grateful for in a way and realize that we did not appreciate those gifts and we allowed systems that we didn't understand and powers and principalities and effectively entities to direct our design thinking because we weren't thinking as cathedral builders. We weren't thinking about the world that we're designing as something permanent. Or even as something fleeting. We're just seeing it as something that we're sort of mindlessly iterating toward numerical goals, not meaningful goals. I love that. That brings up this idea of healing as subversion. You know, when we talk about changing systems, but what if healing itself is the revolution? Simon, how does wholeness threaten power? And Zachary, how does art make systems obsolete? I think I can circle back to the, uh, the beginning, uh, something that Zachary was saying, um, and also in response to sort of my Bufo experiences, um, experiencing a wholeness that directly, uh, sort of becoming aware that we are more than just a body or that we are more than just a job or just a, uh, gender or just any role that we play any, any. upscaling towards wholeness where we become aware of that we are an enlivening field that we are a soul and potentially a soul I'm saying potentially that we are a soul that's incarnated many times over time in many different bodies many different ways of being maybe also places not here not earth and the more we become aware of those different skills yeah, that's destabilizing for any systems of control, any systems of power, because those are mainly built at, um, keeping, let's say consciousness and awareness low as in, um, if you are constantly afraid of death, for instance, afraid of pain and suffering, um, because you think, or you know, or you've been told or have been indoctrinated, um, that this is the only life you have. Um, and that all life in the past was misery and hardship and this is the best one that you're going to get and so you should be happy or because you're lucky and then you're going to try your damn best to avoid any hardship any pain and any suffering while at the same time if you become more and more aware or soul you can call different things but I think many cultures even in well I'm seeing us as coming from western European descent that even in western European cultures there was this consciousness around having a soul right and there was this other sensibility and well then you had the eternal heaven and all this kind of stuff we can go into the Abrahamic religious talk about but um Yeah, I'm feeling more and more that it's becoming quite apparent to me that. Yeah, living in these sort of systems of control and. It actively dampens, let's say, the aware part of us, it's built on frictionless interaction. as driving a car here and there and highways and work and blah blah all these all these interactions are made to be as frictionless as possible and as unconscious as possible while when we become conscious we start to experience the friction of being in a body and interacting with a body and interacting with other people and interacting when it hurts when other it physically especially if you are consciously there and want to express something or want to resonate, want to make contact. And it also, I feel like it hurts to walk around very consciously and be an active participant in this whole charade. So to feel that, um, so I think wholeness isn't well being able to experience wholeness or sitting with homes or feeling oneself being whole within, and that's doing the internal work, uh, with all the inner aspects and seeing if you can get a coherence where you don't exile parts of you, uh, that creates more capacity to be here. And that also creates, I feel, and in my experience, creates the capacity to look out and reach out more, to create wholeness within family structures, to create wholeness within friends, community, but also wholeness with a non-human world, non-human nature, rented thing it's it's the molecule cooking I've got a step out for just a sec I'll be right back yeah that I feel like the body is a rented thing so we pick up all these molecules and we build up our vessel from this and it's connected to everything right and especially I often focus on really earthly existence because we remember or to picture other kind of information and states of being but it's all about bringing it here and bringing it into this thing so that this thing is an anchor and that can evoke or express those energies or whatever that information and in that sense if you become in way more or if you become more and more conscious of inhabiting a body and inhabiting it consciously You also become more and more aware of any time you start to experience suffering, friction, and especially if it's designed suffering, if it's designed friction. And if you notice it, when you look at how systems are constructed or not necessarily constructed, how they sort of were developed. Yeah, you can't help but start to become cross and start to try to do things differently and not want to sort of step into that state. I often think about... We've talked about it like the super organism, and that is a term often used by Nate Akins and on his excellent show. I think Zachary is probably familiar, probably as well. George is the great simplification. And he talks about the super organism. And I. When you look at ant colonies, ants are super interesting, right? How did ants evolve? Because if you have, first, let's say you have individual insects. If you see a beetle, beetles don't swarm, right? But if you study the behavior of an ant colony, you can even do that, let's say, at home if you just have ants around the house. But if you watch a documentary or read a book on it, the behavior that they are capable of as a swarm, that is of a different order of what they will be capable of of individually. And again, then I feel like, okay, have the humans been, um, in some stage in development in civilizational development, have we been, uh, yeah, hijacked is often like a loaded term, but has a, has a, a, has a hive consciousness been projected on the earth as a sense, like, uh, uh, and, super and super organismal consciousness is projected on a group of ends as something like that occurs. And is are these systems that we're often fighting against? Or if you talk about the matrix and all this kind of there are many different frameworks I can relate to this. I try to look at it from that perspective of like, OK, it's a super organismal consciousness that runs like a cloud computer of sorts. And that tries to hijack, let's say, our physical bodies. So we're competing with it, let's say, for sovereignty of this, of our sort of biomechanical or whatever interface we have in this reality. It's competing with us. And as I think Zach was also telling at the beginning, what you have here in the main line, when the myth collapses, What happens is that super-organism structure is actively debasing and deconstructing the sort of basis it needs to survive, like a cancer at some point kills the host, and then there's nothing to grow on anymore. So it's kind of like we're... Yeah, I sort of get the feeling of consciousness being dipped down in order to be sort of subsumed in these super-organismal structures, and then you have the development of ideologies and these kind of things. Also feel very clearly to me structures like that. And is this coming out the other end, is becoming, let's say, more fully aware of that reality, but also of the sort of more metaphysical reality of How much influence does thinking and imagining and collective field work have on reality? And I think quite a lot. Probably that's the main thing that interacts with metaphysical layers or the substrate of reality that we constructed from. But this competition with this Moloch, Wetiko, or whatever you want to call it, I think That's one of the big struggles that we're in. And then I think wholeness is indeed an active move to see if you can step above that kind of programming within us. Yeah. First off, thank you for that. Sometimes I get lost in the world of wholeness because it seems on some level, if you look at us like some hive mind, it almost seems like a caste system. And all of a sudden we find ourselves in this caste system where there's no social mobility. And that's kind of where I think we are on so many levels, at least here in the Western world. There's no social mobility on some level. So you have to go out and create a parallel economy. You have to go out and create this thing. But then you run into the problem of Maybe the hero's journey again, you know, what what do you think zachary as as where we are right now as like a as wholeness as uh Sort of a fucking caste system we're in how do we think ourselves outside of this box, man? It seems like you're doing some stuff with that with all the work you're doing Well first I just want to say that a simple definition of a super organism is a organism whose children are raised by someone else and I'm thinking about the fact that uh um we are definitely a super organism in that capacity and we're not just a super organism we're like super mimetic because memes are raising our children literally um the television raises people um we send our children into a box we call school and someone then mass produced manufactures a consent for a whole program of identity and history and consciousness creation that is basically an automated memetic process where there's an idea a story that is being purveyed that raises the person and shapes them and molds them more than their parent um and that becomes the parent and so civilization and society as we know it becomes um our parent I don't really um know what the question was um something about wholeness um yeah I mean uh it's like the whole cycle of singularity into separation into becoming like the big bang or however the universe began as a nothingness becoming somethingness nothingness being whole something becoming uh separation of that and then all of us going from a unified consciousness into a separated individual consciousness so that we can go on this sort of journey back into the wholeness into the group into the collective as a process that evolves through the journey through the hero's journey I think that was something about the prompt for this conversation was about a hero's journey and I think that that archetypal structure of story is about that process from wholeness to individuation and then back into the whole and western civilization as we know it is just hasn't finished the story it hasn't finished the cycle and so our story that we are authors of insofar as we assert our imagination and choose to write the next chapter uh rather than just the the past or um the present moment man um to really be able to think in futures and to create our future does absolutely entail creating a parallel economy and a new structure and a new super organismic super memetic process and culture that can raise people right and raise ais right as other expressions of our consciousness And so the process of you asked about art and about, I think, filmmaking, these are mass produced ideas, mass produced trips. A film is a mass produced numinous experience that before would have been spoken around a fire or would have been scribbled into a book. But a film is not scarce in the way that a book is even. You don't have to hold it to have it. And it's this experience that in the internet, like the video that we're watching now, it exists in perpetuity as long as the servers that are hosting it and the channel that is playing it is out there. And so we have the imperative and opportunity to reshape the system that rears us and that shapes our consciousness And that brings us into wholeness out of our fractured state by recreating that culture and by spreading it and sharing it and repeating it and reifying it, which is a fancy sociological term for when you repeat something so much it becomes true. We reify the value of the dollar every time we spend it. We reify the preeminence of politicians and nation states because other people think that they're powerful. We think that they're powerful. And so it's like it could be a crazy practice like circumcision or something that you just repeated enough that it becomes like, oh yeah, that's normal. You know, human sacrifice. Oh yeah, well, we've got to make sacrifices to the gods. Or that won't happen. That's the sort of Moloch thing. Moloch is about child sacrifice, sacrificing the future for the present. Sacrificing the long term for the short term. Trading in tomorrow for today. That's kind of what our separation and fragmentation represents. But also in the spirit of wholeness, our story needs that. The story needs a fracture. It needs a separation. It needs a point where we leave the unity and the wholeness of an unbroken culture that no one can even see because they're inside of it. And so to be jettisoned out of that, as I have been, as I assume you have been, and as anybody dancing with psychedelics and films and great art and psychedelic rock and all these things that that uh bring us out of that that that shatter the uh wholeness the totality of that that story you know that is get up and go to work and seek meaning and look for love in a self-referential sweetheart um all of those things are are sort of made whole when you break out of them in the discomfort of a new story and of the reunification of the identity of re-identifying with something bigger than yourself. which is that meme that supersedes you that goes further. That is the transcendent identity that goes beyond the individual body that the psychedelic is there to help you escape from. Or that is the paradigm of the metabolism or the sort of like dopaminergic reinforcement systems of money, growth, followers, all of these... very interesting just that I'm thinking out loud that are like um expressions of uh the body politics uh dopamine cycles and neurochemistry that are reinforcing these things that may not be true in the same way that somebody who goes through a life altering trauma their neurochemicals are keeping that story going, even if it's not happening. In our way, likes and followers and numbers and dollars and customers, all of these numerical things are like the neurological chemistry that keeps these artificial stories going. And we need to create new reinforcing mechanisms and feedback loops and flood the good, happy chemicals in new directions so that we can reinforce a new story. You know on the surface level like it looks like everything is just collapsing. It's going to ship but maybe This is what birth looks like. Maybe this is what a new myth looks like Maybe this is what we're going to look back on those are the best times ever like that's when we created this whole new world You guys I know it's so easy to fall into like the doom scrolling or to fall into these patterns of everything is cracking and crumbling But is it possible that we're living through like the best time in history right now? you mind if I jump in there simon I was just telling this to uh a kid I've been mentoring since he was um that he is in the best time to be alive to be himself not in the fact that there are more slaves on this planet than ever before or that a child dies of hunger every five seconds or that we're destabilizing the fucking oceans and that there are mass die-off events all across the blue dot or the fact that people are destroying themselves in addictive cycles to compete to destroy their planet and themselves but The fact that he's here and we're here at the moment where we have the recognizance to make sense of that and we have the technological capacity and the critical mass all over the world as it's not yet organized to be the ones we've been waiting for and to actually step in at a transformative juncture in history where the old story is breaking apart and we can become the characters and the authors of that new story. And I'm sorry, I have to go pee again. Yeah, no worries, man. What do you think, Simon? Yeah, no, I... I love how we worded that. It's also kind of how I look at it. I sometimes get this image of that overshoot. You can also picture it as a sort of a launch or something. Right. That overshoot is a almost like a rocket. And then the amount of energy that's needed to get lift off that there is this maybe this brief moment of weightlessness. And in that weightlessness, we might have the opportunity to seek a new attractor state, like a new, almost like if you picture like you're on a planet and you leave the gravitational pull almost, and maybe there's another planetary body nearby. And then if you overshoot, let's say from being in the bounds of this one, then you become attracted to the other one. So you snap into another, let's say, consensus state. And I'm not talking about physical planets here, but more about. Yeah, coherent worldviews, coherent stories, and maybe the super organismal patterning like a different type of hive consciousness, maybe one that is life aligned and life with a capital L. And then I'm thinking more about Well, all the non-human denizens that we also depend upon, but which also have a right or right is in the wrong word, but also are here and deserve to be here and also deserve to continue on changing, diversifying and all those kind of things. And so it's it's. And in that sense, it pains me living in this time, because in that sense, it feels like it's one of the worst times. because we are seeing many things die and experiencing things, many, many other creatures and life forms perishing at a very fast rate. And at the same time, indeed, as far as we know, the human species hasn't been alive in these kind of numbers on the planet. And as the old contextual coherent stories are dying, the modern stories, city-states, empire, religious beliefs, even old religious stories, there's, of course, there's a lamentation about it, there's pity in it, and there are beautiful stories that might not be retold. But at the same time, And what Zachary was talking about is if these cracks appear within these sort of almost watertight stories, then water starts to seep in. And then maybe you could swim upstream through the incoming water and find yourself into the outside of this story, being reminded of, oh, what the hell was I in inside of? And where are we? And the more people we find together is that we can start sharing more stories. And I think stories and ways of seeing the world and these are as much created as received by us. So I think these are, these are things that move through us and then through us as sculptors, we might be able to well again channel channel certain stories and then they start to live here and as they start living here in this physical reality they start to evolve and being shaped by the conditions here and um I think that we are living also in a period of time where we are in heavy informational overshoot and at the same time that's also a boom because that means that there's quite a lot of different information in different ways sensing that we can inhabit and invite and through that invitation see what what what's to come through and well there's also quite a bit of joy in that because I I if I speak for me personally one of the main things I was heavily depressed by at my deepest points was like is this it just the general feeling of is this it everything is crumbling down yeah then I'm uh yeah that doesn't sound like a like a deal to me and then when it starts opening up like no this isn't it you there is actual space for authorship and for change and shifts and just doing we're also living in a time where yes there are a lot of systems of control but there's also a lot of personal freedom in just weird ways of expressing oneself and getting in contact with other weird people who are expressing themselves. I love it. I want to jump. We got some people coming in from the chat right here. This one comes to us from prior from Toronto. And she says, what's your favorite lie? Humanity still believes. Thank you. Probably has a beautiful question. Zachary, you want to take that one? My favorite lie that humanity still believes. Yeah. Um, I think, uh, my favorite, like what, what, what do they mean by that? I guess maybe when you say it out loud, it's, it's, I don't know if you should have a favorite lie, but like what lies do you think are out? What do you think is the most precious lie that humanity still believes? Shall I, shall I go second? Yeah. Yeah, go for it. It's the Protestant work ethic and whatever form it's taken now. It's that life here should be grueling hard work and that is it. That is how you should live. It should just be continuous brutal work and that is a great or you become a slave that exploits itself that doesn't need a master at all you just have to the slave master up in here so that's a very funny clip of uh of alex ramosi it's like a business coach guru and he's like uh slaves worked all hours of the day they worked from the time they woke up until the time they fell asleep in america and egypt all through history and if they did it so can i Yeah, I mean, Buckminster Fuller said we must do away with the absolutely specious notion that we must earn our right to live, that we extend to nature as well, that if nature is not working and producing and if we are not productive, then we don't deserve food, shelter, water. the things that we need to exist we don't deserve life if we're not being productive in a sort of suicidal paradox that we need to produce and that we need to produce more and that we're in scarcity I mean that's the ultimate lie that's the biggest one that's the big duh is that we are in scarcity and that we don't have enough and we have to compete to survive and that's the foundation of the whole market that there's not enough to go around and we have to compete over it and we have to go to war and there has to be a winner and a loser rather than this idea that we actually have enough for everybody we have way more than enough we have not infinite but resplendent bountiful abundance if we allocate it and utilize it properly and we don't over strip it Um, I think that's the big lie. The big lie is that we have to compete and we internalize that into our daily lives. We are exploiting ourselves. We are hustling. We are trying to compete in the market, uh, rather than cooperate, um, towards something better. And there is a, there is a motivational pathway into this, um, out of the existing burning building, um, that brings us back into the truth, you know? Although, you know, the lie, the favorite lie, I guess, is Pablo Picasso said art is the lie that tells the truth. I think that there is some element of like lying that is essential to human beings, that we lie about the world because we're seeing something better, that we have a delusion that things could be what they aren't. right now and that is always what drives the wheel of history forward meaningfully is those people who can see oh yeah you know late stage capitalist abomination you know man-made horrors beyond comprehension on a daily basis brought to me you know twenty four seven in a casino style endless scroll Cool. You know, again, ocean currents collapsing, biodiversity dying off, fascist tin pot dictators taking over. I mean, you can look around and see, OK, things suck. Things are terrible. Things are bad. Or you can be one of those people who's insulated by their money and say everything's great. What are you talking about? Stock market's doing great. These are all lies and we need better lies. I don't know. I was a pathological liar as a kid for a pace. I like threw ninja stars all in the wall and I just denied it flat out, you know? Wasn't me. And I think that there's something powerful in that. I think that there is in that impulse a desire to break down the world and bring it back up in something other, in a different shape, in a different form, to let the waves crash over the sandcastle and build it back up anew. And it does require a sort of insane delusion to think that you can change a world like this that's so intractable and so structured and so systematized and so totalitarian and so totalizing in its apparent victory. And yet we must dream. We must see beyond that. We have to lie to ourselves or we have to dispel the lie with new stories, with new fictions that become real because everything that we're dealing with is a fiction. Everything we're dealing with is a lie. You know, most of our culture and most of the memes that are raising us are not truthful. They're not rooted in reality. They're not ritualized, you know, mythic stories connecting us to the water system and to the generative capacities of our environment to produce for us. They are self-perpetuating illusions automatically and exponentially regenerated by essential falsets and stories and myths. and uh traumas that are still puppeting the entire human race or not the entire human race because most of us are the most of the billions of people in this world actually don't live by these lies they just live in them or they tolerate them or they grudge through them or they honk their horn at them in their car and they know that it's most people do know that they know that it sucks but it's we have to muscle through the discomfort to acknowledge that we've been duped And that things could be better. That it requires an admission that things are not great. And that we're in a subpar, subhuman situation for us to be able to say, okay, so things can be better. That's a big block. That's a big hurdle that people have. And then one more. I love that this is a lie because it's dispellable. Lies are powerful because truth can dispel them, right? And anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be and can be. And it's that we are not powerful enough to make the change. And that's a lie. And that's scary for people because they have to step into actual responsibility and authorship. I have to pee again. What the fuck did I drink this morning? It's almost like the ending of a poem to say, I have to pee again. It's like a Kipling, if. It blows my mind to think about where we are. But from where I sit as someone who's fifty, I have this rare vantage point where I can see what it is that was built before, and yet I can talk to some young men and women that are creating these new ideas. Maybe they're not really creating them as much as they are embodying them. And it's such an interesting perspective. When you look at this way and you go, oh, I see what it was. But then you can look at this and be like, oh, I see what it's becoming. I think that that is maybe the role of people like Gen Xers or something like that. You got to see both worlds. You got to see this one dying. You get to see this one emerging. And so you become sort of this... this sort of mediator or this someone who's translating like wait some of these old some of these ideas are not so bad you know you got to tell the older generation like do these kids have way more awareness than you've ever had like you have no idea what they're coming up and you don't understand what it's like so it's an interesting generational perspective what are your thoughts on the generational aspect of it simon it's nice you paint a bit of interesting image there like this bridging bridging function between yeah the old and the new yeah um so I'm I'm and sometimes it's difficult not to be a little I also do let's say I also facilitate workshops with uh the work of Joanna Macy like the work that reconnects and also for different audience lovely people in general but also in more let's say public like short workshops kind of things and then interacting with um elderly people there's often a how do I say this without it's generalizing but they're there there can be this sense of entitlement and this sense of uh well I'm old so I know there's this sense of entitlement to wisdom so that they they attribute them wisdom to themselves where I feel like look I've talked to twenty-year-olds who have way more wisdom than the way you are describing or feeling or thinking about things and that can be frustrating and then I can have this image of like okay with the old literally the old world dying and old ideas getting sent to pasture where I think it's fun that's also good That's it's part of the cycle. Um, you have this, uh, what is this book about? Um, also now hospicing modernity with, uh, like the composting of the old, and then you can midwife them. And that, that, yeah, that, that work to eight generation, Zachary was talking about how he's mentoring someone, uh, from, uh, since they were, it's super important work. Most of the work that I've done with young people, people that I help or that I support in that process, either with group work or individually. One of the main things that happens there is that they get taken seriously, their concerns. And that you give them space to unpack the thoughts that they have about the world and the feelings that they have about the world. And that they're not told to be that they're snowflakes or that they're overreacting or that it's always been like this, but it will be fine or blah, blah, blah, all these stories. And that kind of opens up this ability to, Well, start sending through like what situation are we in? And I'm seeing and maybe this is generalizing. Maybe the experience is different where you guys are at. I'm seeing the younger generations do this way more than the older generations. And that probably also has something to do with or a lot to do with different sort of biological factors, but also just material material factors. If if you have a pension, uh and if you have a mortgage or if you have your savings and everything's put down in into the system and into the system surviving of course you're what is the saying it's it's it's very it's very difficult to get a man to believe something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it yes yeah that that kind of thing so I I think the generational it's not absolute but I I do see that there is a there's a there's a difference exactly what do you think about the generational divide like we were I was saying I'm coming up on fifty so I have this sort of interesting seat where I can look at this last generation and see the things that they've done there and then I can see this new generation coming up and creating new things that are happening there and I feel like I'm a translator sometimes. I'm talking to this group of people and I'm like, you have no idea what these kids are coming up with. They have this whole new sense of awareness. And then I got to tell some of the young guys, wait, some of these people built some pretty incredible shit. Some of their values were pretty on point. But when you look at the generational divide, how does that play into your matrix? Well, I've always connected a lot more with older people than I have people my age. Um, because I don't know, um, I was, uh, successfully disassociated from, um, my culture, uh, through what you could call mental illness. I don't know, ADHD, uh, adaptation to distract myself and disassociate from everything around me, which is a precursor to the psychedelic experience, which, you know, insane people can, uh, endogenously produce. So I'm in that club. Lucky me. Yeah. Um, yeah, I always connected with teachers and with older people and my parents, friends. And now I, I spend my time, a lot of the people I'm working with, not just teenagers. I've just got up a call with Steve Keen, who I'm helping to mentor or guide through this navigate, navigating this landscape of new media and, you know, community building. And, and, uh, it's interesting to, to be, um, engage with those people with that perspective, because I really respect them. I respect their insight and their experience. While at the same time, things are changing so rapidly and radically, I think we really need the wisdom of elders and we need the novelty of youth And it's the sort of perpetual duty of youth to destroy everything that was created before. I think there's some anarchist that was saying like, I will be, if we succeed, I will be called conservative and hung for the society that I create. Jacque Fresco said, the cities that I design will be straitjackets to the children of the future. And so, yeah, it's like there's a rebellion embedded in the regenerative reproductive capacities of life and death. Death is necessary to innovate and evolve and move things forward generationally. And so, yeah, I just think we need a clear reconnection. I think materially, the older generations have accumulated a vast amount of wealth that is going to blow up their ass, I guess, or go to the grave with them if they don't transfer that. And yeah, like the boomer generation has an enormous amount of wealth. And the biggest wealth transfer in human history is incoming as they croak. And I'd like to help with that silver tsunami. I'd like it to be a wave that is positive and a wave that we can surf and a wave that, you know, brings prosperity to the new generation where we can have a handing off of the reins. I mean, like a lot of our politicians are geriatric. Literally, they're in their seventies and eighties and they are not successful. functioning properly and so we have a gerontocracy where the rich sorry well the rich old rule but the old rule that's a gerontocracy and that's not a just structure it's a structure that is that is strangling the youth and that is killing the future generations, that it really should be the responsibility of the older generations to guide and to aid and to make it so that the youth have a better life than they do. And there's a very serious disorder in our culture where they're trying to hold on to what they have and they don't necessarily want the next generation to have a better life. They think they need to struggle more. They think they need a war. You know, these are very popular ideas among that generation, even though to fire some shots, the boomer generation had it way easier in a material sense, even as they had it way harder in a spiritual sense, because they had such strong infrastructure to be born into and such steady tracks to just move through, just go to college and then get a job. And that McDonald's job can support a fucking two-car garage and a home home and you know you just gotta show up you know and you have there are plenty of jobs and there's plenty of opportunity and we don't have that today thankfully thankfully we don't have that thankfully our generation has to redefine wealth because transferring that wealth doesn't just mean giving money to a new generation and and giving them the reins to a broken system It means us redefining what that wealth means and basically regaining our true inheritance, which should be the earth. I love it. I love it gentlemen this conversation like I I should have scheduled more time and I feel like we're just kind of starting to get into um First off all the covers have been brilliant, but I really like where we're at right now but I got a my daughter's got guitar lessons coming up here and um, I gotta go play some uh, Led zeppelin, I guess is what we're working on today. So, uh Here I am, throwing back to the oldies, but it's still rebellious a little bit. But let me throw it back to each one of you to give you just a moment to wrap up and let people know where they can find you, what you're working on. Let me start with you, Simon. Yeah, so thank you both. Again, George, for hosting this and always being so gracious with your time, but also with just the questions and the fun introductions. So happy to be here. Happy to meet you, Zachary. It's been nice. I had a few... That's good. Yeah. It's been interesting talking in this conversation, seeing where this goes and the kind of stuff that we're getting into more and more. And maybe that's also the Bufo talking, but more and more I'm sort of letting the reins go a little bit on my theorizing about where things are going. And I'm trying to make more sense of where we are at while having a, let's say inner orientation towards a more life affirming future. And that one always includes more connection in a heartfelt way. But for me, it's very much through the more than you or more than you also then included the non-human and seeing if those can enter the picture more and that we can communicate more in a sense where it's less the human constantly soloing over the whole orchestra. And that's a little segue as well. Like, um, so people can find me on LinkedIn. I often post a little things there. My sub stack is, uh, like a little meager, but every now and then I'll write something down. If, uh, if I want to be more esoteric than my LinkedIn sort of allows and, um, yeah, I'm hosting, um, uh, sort of group ceremonial events where we do shape-shifting. That has been something that's been bringing me a lot of joy. And I got a lot of sort of very positive feedback just in general and how our experience life, but also from the people participating. And I'm slowly but surely figuring out ways of expanding that, how we can get the dialog going with interesting fields. We've we've we've gotten to be earth into the bedrock. We've talked with whales. become forced and just figuring out like, how do I get people who are interested in this, get them into these states of being and get them talking, get them talking to the subject that they are interested in. I have scientist friends with whom I'm aching to start shape-shifting into microbes and viruses and all these kinds of things to gain more insight. instead of trying to peer from the objective reductionist framework from the outside inwards. I want to get people in and experience. So that's one of the main things I'm super enthusiastic about. Very nice. Very nice. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Zachary, where can people find you? What do you got coming up, man? What's on the radar for you? I have a little low energy today. I haven't had breakfast yet. But I have a storytelling federation called Another World is Possible, and we're crafting the meta-myth as a storytelling system to guide conscious transformation and re-authorship of reality. We are changing the world one story at a time and working to guide people and organizations into their purpose and to regaining control of the story of their life, which is a holistic approach reorganizational process to reposition yourself cosmically, to stop competing in the marketplace and start standing ahead as a leader, waving your banner, holding up your shield and sword, cutting through the bullshit, striking to the heart of what really matters. And yeah, we're just plowing ahead, helping people as much as we can, young and old, to really get out of the internalization of all these problems, which is like just going inward, going inward, going inward. And the sort of bent that we only have the realm of language and philosophy to navigate these issues, which I reject because I've spent too much time navel gazing. I love a good navel gaze, but yeah, I mean, our quest is to leave the... imprisonment of the individual body and the sort of narrow confines of success that is one life or one company or one family. and to expand that into a truly planetary ambition that we can externalize as a journey, as a beacon to attract people into the story with us so that we can actually change the situation that we're in and create sustainable, regenerative livelihoods, positive growth, the spread of good ideas, the increase of the... the body politic neurochemicals of followers and engagements and sales and all of these other things as well, because that's the world we live in. Yeah, I'm kind of struggling to really bring this full circle in terms of the mythic diatribe we've had today. It's felt a bit sporadic and random for me. I mean, I'm just coming in, diving in here, making a little meaning on a Saturday afternoon, making a little sense. and um ultimately I think if there's one thing I could come back to it's this idea of the super meme or super memetics of what we're doing that stories drive everything around us in the world they are not physical they are metaphysical they are manifestational they are spiritual they are hallucinogenic they are lies and yet lies or uh lies that tell truth are extremely powerful and we have lost we have lost them we've lost our connection to them we have allowed ourselves to be characters in somebody else's story and we have forgotten that we are the authors of the story so if any of you are on a journey and you want to communicate that better or you want to expand it you want to raise the roof of what you're doing you want to take it to the next level you want to evolve or if you're not in that phase and you want to and you're a little bit scared but you you wonder what could be on the other side reach out and uh I will help you through that narrow passage because what's on the other side is truly amazing And we can make this world what we want it to. We are the ones we've been waiting for. And to add a little scarcity and urgency to the offer, the clock is ticking. There is a very narrow window. The Indiana Jones style door is closing on us. And we're in a civilization scale narrative reset. And if we don't author it, the story that has been destroying everything in the world autonomously without even really into any individual controller any person making it that's going to be the story that takes over and it's going to be a total victory of that story triumphing over the real world as we trawl the oceans and Devastate our landscapes and black the sun out with coal for a lack of imagination and insight and connection and just a better story. Last word is that when logic fails, people reach for their stories. And logic is failing the world. The stories that we've been born into and the structures around us don't make sense to most people. And so we have an obligation and a beautiful opportunity to present people with a way forward and to step into being leaders, to going from being the freaks and the misfits and the losers or the dreamers or the idealists or the people who are just getting by or maybe doing really well in that existing system. But you're still not authors. You're not waving the flag saying over here, over here. We have to be those people. All of us have to step into that role. and what a journey it is to get there if you can get through the discomfort and the psychedelics help so go to george for that I love it man I love it yeah um you know I had a conversation with a gentleman not too long ago and he said george listen if you want something from the world stand on top of a trash can and yell for it tell them you need it get out there and do it and so with that I say if you're listening and you enjoyed this conversation go to the show notes and click on the support True Life Podcast, because I need some help to bring these awesome conversations to all of you guys. I'm grateful for both of you and to all the listening audience that participated today. Thank you so much. Please support the show. That's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Hang on briefly afterwards, gentlemen, and everyone else, have a beautiful day. Aloha. Did I give you those marching orders about the trash can?