Episode 82 - The Alien & The Robot - Earth

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let me ask you a question would you be surprised if we were sitting together having lunch and i reached over removed my arm tightened two screws in my shoulder and then reattached my arm revealing suddenly and surprisingly that i was in fact an android no it would not would you be surprised if you were having lunch with michael gunger i mean vishnu das and he took off a mask revealing a set of tentacles and a floating orb above his head revealing that he was in fact extraterrestrial in origin you asked my wife that question i did my wife and my daughter and both of them said no they would not be surprised um and this this train of thought became a little bit of a thing with our other podcast that we have for our patrons those of you that give on patreon um to the show and make the show happen we've had a bonus contest a bonus podcast that we've been doing every other week and it became this kind of thing the alien and the robot and then recently we decided to just go with it stop fighting destiny and that's now the name of that podcast which is a weekly program now every week we put out a new episode of the alien and the robot wherein the two of us explore some theme generally understood by humans [Laughter] our first episode was on sports which was fantastic and we thought we'd give you a special peek into that show today well and you'll hear in a moment what it's about so uh this was a special one where we actually got to have hillary and william in with us normally the conversation is based on just mike and i um talking about stuff but sometimes we have guests and since we had all four hosts of the liturgist podcast in the room we thought this would be a good one to share on the main feed as well if you like it go to theliturgists.com click on the support button i think join us join us it's only like button button on the site really she's got big box around it in the menu and if you want to hear more of us cause you know we don't we don't give you weekly podcasts on the main podcast feed here because we just don't have that much to give you um but we're a little less scrupulous on the alien the robot we kind of just go where it goes and if you get really freaked out or stressed out by this episode which you may i did uh we can also help you with that because hillary mcbride made a course on managing stress and anxiety look at you advertising guru so you'll listen this episode you get freaked out you don't what to do so just go ahead and go to findingcalmworkshop.com where the one and only hillary mcbride offers her insight as a practicing psychotherapist and researcher on how to manage stress and anxiety in our lives which certainly makes sense in this era of hot hot geopolitics and truly terrifying social media all right well enjoy oh and wait you're gonna this this theme song we're just we're real happy about this theme song because i think it's the best thing we've ever done he and i sat in the studio last week i guess because this is the second alien in the robot episode that you're about to hear um and we sat in the studio and made this and laughed the whole time so enjoy the second episode of the alien and the in the year robot an extraterrestrial and an android encountered each other in a human village since that time they've worked together to understand the strange fascinating primates that dominate the earth today's episode that's a perfect thing to go on the literature's conversations is still setting levels yeah that's how you know what's not staged although we could have staged that oh we're not that talented guys we're not that wealthy if you can hear the air conditioner it's real hot in los angeles it's so hot not here mike and i had a lunch the other day where most people would have found a depressing lunch i enjoyed it tell us more i mean he just really went into into the depths on how bad climate change is at this point oh yeah yeah it's real it's real bad it's like to the point i struggle like should we even care about justice anymore we're like potentially as many as 10 as few as two generations from the end of human civilization see i was the only one that laughed maybe double that in the end of the species i'm sorry no sometimes go ahead you yeah i was just gonna say sometimes i actually wonder if uh uh republicans believe that too so they're just like we're just gonna get what's ours right now because we we kind of know what's going on if they don't want to acknowledge it though i think a lot of people business-wise are doing that right now corporations are i got mine yep i'm getting it while i can yep yep can you um re re-say what you said when i asked if you were elected president or you just forgiven the emperor of america or whatever what is what are the policies that you enact take all the defense spending all of it and channel it into research and that government funded research would primarily focus on one fusion power and two the production and scaling of atmospheric carbon scrubbers and a lot of people would say but wait what about education and healthcare and all those things believe me are super important to me they're just not important if we all die so that'd be my top order then after that i'd restructure the remaining money in a democratic socialist framework that focused on the things that people tend to campaign on but my point is i'm i'm getting to the point where anthropomorphic climate change is not an important issue it is the defining issue and i'm very worried maybe us in our older years but definitely our children our children's children are going to look back even on climate advocates today and say you weren't doing anything and you knew how bad it was going to get because the signs started when we're creating cat a new category for hurricanes called category six because category four five isn't enough a statistical outlier anymore when every year is record wildfire wildfires when the hottest year on record was an el nino year which is something we anticipate but when the next year isn't an el nino year and it's the second hottest year we have in recorded history that's when you see climate scientists for the first time saying i'm not concerned anymore what happens to my great grandchildren or my grandchildren i'm realizing i'm going to have to wrestle with the effects and impacts of severe climate change in my lifetime starting now uh one one person said we're no longer looking at warning signs we're looking at what is but don't make the mistake of calling these summers the new normal these are the base of the mountain not a new plateau praise the name just just taking a praise break guys i i certainly put myself in this category but i know there's lots of people who are thinking about whether they have kids or not because of you know is are you bringing a life into a world that that actually is just going to guarantee more suffering i i struggle with that though because i i mean when is life not suffering like i mean if you live during the age of the black plagues i mean like yeah i think you just you just have kids and hope for the best speaking as the guy that doesn't have kids it has no intention of having kids any time soon but i bet i bet more and more people will start thinking like that as we see climate refugees starting to be a thing and and economy is collapsing and all that there's i mean there's a fair argument to be made that uh the syrian refugee crisis came because of an unseasonal drought that probably had to do with climate change so climate refugees are a thing now i mean see how that destabilized europe how that completely destabilized europe yeah that i mean i think you're right that is the base of the mountains more to we will see more to come it was uh recently there was a fire here in northern california in redding where i used to live and it's still going right yeah it's still going uh it's moved up closer to shasta so it's left the city of reading which is probably one of the biggest towns closest to the oregon border in at the top of california anyway the fight the there were walls of fire upwards of a hundred feet and then there were fire tornadoes seriously you can walk you can see what's called the car fire but um and and about a third or half the town had to be evacuated and so it just here in california there was tens of thousands of wildfire refugees i mean people that i knew uh i know people that lost their homes people who every maybe every home on their block got lost but theirs was okay and they all like went to sacramento for like a week you know and they were all like refugees so i'm here to clean wildfires here's my concern we've talked about some of the heaviest weightiest most significant issues out there on the liturgist podcast and what encourages me stepped on a dog what encourages me is uh how much when we do a podcast despite any controversy that comes up people shift on issues and people take action that's like my pride in the show and the way it's produced and the way it's structured but when we did an episode on climate change which was incredibly well downloaded and we had a call to action that was very clear and nonpartisan that should have engaged people universally very easy so i expected huge participation response and we did have a huge response in downloads seven figures of people downloaded the pale blue dot episode but in terms of people who actually went to the landing page it was less than 500 wow and of the people who actually went to the landing page less than 100 people used the tool to look up how to call their congressperson and ask them to join the climate solutions caucus so when compared to every other episode we've ever done and we did everything you're supposed to do we painted an optimistic picture we told stories we did everything we've done in this program to drive action effectively when we did that about climate change the result was dramatically different than anything we've ever done in the deafening lack of response like people are more shut down talking about climate change then they are white supremacy or patriarchy like those are really deeply rooted difficult topics that often seem paralyzing and hopeless but apparently by the data not as paralyzing and as hopeless as a warming globe and that caucus the one that we were supporting it just got reported yesterday that uh the climate caucus is at risk of losing its bipartisan support because all the republicans that are on it are either uh retiring or they're probably going to lose their seats to democrats oh wow yeah well there you go there you go congress just did it i saw it yesterday putting a nice little bow on it we're doomed and i think the thing you're saying about the defense budget is interesting because we have all these defense trillions of dollars of world spending in defense budgets against other human beings in case they get attacked it would be as if we had trillions of dollars of alien defense against ufos in the middle of world war ii or something like guys the earth is uh is going to warm to the point where human civilization ends [Laughter] so i get it there's theoretical you know maybe russia might invade someday but uh we know the climate is going to end human civilization if we don't do something so what a lot of people don't yeah and especially the people that support defense spending deny the notion that the climate is changing or if it's changing that it's related to human activity so there's some not knowing and then there's some denial yeah what else does that play interest psychically sociopolitically that stops us from doing something or getting engaged i mean i think hopelessness it's almost like we need hope so hopelessness feels too big of a problem yeah it's just it feels too too vague and it's like people already have a hard time grabbing a hold of something if they can't figure out how it impacts them like really even though we can say this will impact lands and territories but it still feels we just don't think planetary we don't have like a planetary mind if that makes sense to grapple with what hurt you hurts me actually and how all those things are interconnected so if the global south is experiencing you know uh major problems due to climate change or the the poor of the earth are we don't understand how that will affect our economy or and how it will affect our way of life and way of being so i i just don't think i think we just take everything for convenience versus actually interrogating how our world actually works and how people how we're all interconnected in that way and the globe is interconnected so yeah planetary issues it's like uh uh too big i would normally say that if a problem feels like it's too big then people might avoid participating it's kind of like we there's a thing that people do to run marathons and we call the the psychological technique chunking so you say to the next mile marker not the next 10 because 10 is too big but you did the episode you gave people a small enough chunk you gave them a small mile marker and nothing so there's more going on here than just it's too big it's too big and there's a billion dollar machine that is waging an information type of warfare over the hearts and minds of whole nations so there's money keeping this conversation one-sided or keeping people feeling apathetic or hopeless too this corporations are spending that money in order to downplay the effects of climate change while they secretly understand it you know what's going on and so i think we also too in our media era like we don't understand how you might hear ray of sunshine like that podcast which is like this there this is the problem here's da da da but then you go back into the real world where you're being bombarded with messaging information that says it doesn't matter it's not that important your whole communities of people that don't think it's important and also when we talk about climate change i think ultimately we're talking about a whole other type of dawn of human industry because renewable energy is going to completely revolutionize the whole globe or has the capacity to revolutionize the whole globe but that will completely change all the power dynamics it will change where all the money flows and so there is billions if not trillions of dollars invested in keeping the status quo the status quo because solar wind hydro energy will completely revolutionize the whole planet and they know it you said mike the other day is that if we stop if we stopped all carbon emission if we stop if we stopped at all today we'd still be in significant warming ahead yes yes absolutely right and i think that's like the hopelessness i think and that i feel for me like i do what i can i could do more i know i could do more but for me honestly it feels like taking my towel into the ocean and really just trying to stay dry just really wiping my legs off furiously that's a good image it's like this is coming this is happening i that's why i wonder if less fewer people call their congress because like congress people don't give a shit and if they did what are they going to do it's it just feels hopeless it's going to take such drastic like i would vote yes raise my taxes 20 for all fusion and carbon scrubbing research i would vote yes on that and gladly pay 20 30 whatever more taxes but when it comes down to like call your congressperson turn off a light it's good we should and i should more but i'm just saying in the little things like you were saying that you give people little chunks to do it's like yeah i could drive my ankle off here while i'm standing in this tsunami but i think we live in this we live in a scarcity of heart and mind like we don't understand that problems can be fixed even problems that feel unfixable can be fixed like i feel like that has to be the motivating factor internally the apathy the people just not actually believing in abundance believing that we can actually fix the problems that are right in front of us and maybe it's because of past trauma and experiences with that but just simply living as if that's too big or that's impossible i don't know i feel like we just as a culture as we just lack moral clarity we lack imagination we lack i don't know maybe it's just the belief that we can we can do it i mean if you believe the moon landing is real which i do if we could go to the moon we can clean the oceans like that's not you know and so yeah the effects we're gonna feel effects but they can be mitigated they can be yeah i don't know what that is outside of just a pure lack of a moral moral imagination inside of us as a culture thinking back to our conversation in the in the man episode i was talking about terry cooper's arrhythmicity the pathological arithmeticity yes that was well six tries the first time that is a hard thing to say for me arithmetic ethnicity yeah i won't even try but this idea that we are disconnected from cycles of the earth and that's a function of both colonization and patriarchy that there has been this disconnection from imminence as simone devar puts it imminence being the kind of earthiness and the rawness of life and versus transcendence the intellectual the the bigger than and those parallels that that conversation parallels to how we think about the divine as well but it seems like maybe we've lost something even in our understanding of what matters in life in in the way we think about things mike you and i were having a conversation in vancouver about the first nations people and and about land being the primary currency of value as opposed to money it seems like it might not even be on our radar sometimes to think about earth as something that sustains us we think about mind or machine or economy there's some really interesting movements like the eco-feminism movement which look at veganism and real commitment to doing something about climate change as a central component of feminism because of the way that colonization and patriarchy have created this disconnection with self and the earth and other there's a really good book called staying alive for those of you who are interested i feel like that notion hits on something essential that gets ignored in this conversation people talk about positioning the economy versus the environment or the economy versus the ecosystem but human economies are something that happens within the ecosystem they are in no way separate from it and they are completely 100 percent subordinate to it already the there's a documentary on fusion i watched recently on an airplane and it opens up with someone who works at eter which is the international project to build a fusion reactor and he was talking about yeast and how you put yeast and dough they will consume all the sugars available and reproduce as quickly as they possibly can and not until the sugar runs out until their own waste byproducts kill them even when there's sugar remaining in the dough that's how we make bread and his thing was that you couldn't see any difference in the behavior of yeast and dough and homo sapiens in ecosystems that's where migration and colonization arose from is the way that rarely if ever over time does this species find an equilibrium with his environment and so his question is like and an open question for him was are we a sustainable species was the structure of our brains a positive move in evolution or or our brains something that right now are being actively selected against based on the way that we change the environment and the only hope for us being a timely lasting part of the global ecology is to embody and execute these notions we find in movements like eco-feminism to erase this pretend false division between economic activity and the core ecology that supports it and contains it so good do you guys remember speaking on a political level but do you remember uh during the 2016 election when the wikileaks dumps were happening and there was a transcript that got released of hillary clinton talking to some investment bankers about open borders you remember that and that clip that transcript got used on the left and the right to like bash her where she was talking about the like she was like my dream is like hemispheric open borders like eventually kind of thing and she and she said all that in the context to renewable energy she was talking about how this power was going to revolutionize the globe create economic like dignity for everyone it was going to change economies and it would create some free market trade stuff that got used as some like see she wants criminals and the ms-16 you know gangs to come and the way that the the open borders they still trump on twitter to this day still brings up democrats want open borders that whole notion was purely from hillary clinton talking about that i say that to say everything you're saying about just the the evolutionary question of like of where we're at and there's so many people that have a hard time hearing that because of the messaging and the information and the billions of dollars that are being spent to like create this alternative narrative to the truth of our place in the global ecology and i i think it doesn't change until we reverse that narrative i'm not saying we can outspend it but i do think on a local like practical level we can start to have conversations like this that begin to talk about the dream of renewable energy and the dream of how that's going to affect global markets and economies in a positive way and start talking about how nourishing and caring for the earth is actually profitable for the human race like we actually will profit more and actually lift more people out of poverty by embracing these types of ideas but they're just truth about how we relate to our environment and seeing ourselves holistically in that way you don't have to pick between doing the right thing and also being like profitable i feel like we've made that that's part of the disinformation is that's a distinction like no we cannot actually all flourish and economically by taking care of our ecology well you brought up something that a few times used the word truth yeah that feels central to this for me what like what's true do we get to decide are we post-truth uh what's real it's really hard to separate separate the things that we hear and the spin from what's really happening the some of the things that i do feel like are real and are true and in spite of all sorts of different constructivist arguments i could make i think about there being something important about naming the truth and the validity of the climate change problem but again i'm i'm just stuck on that word true because i wonder if there's because people value truth differently now then perhaps they did it's my favorite definition of truth came from walter brewingman and walter brugerman defines truth as a cluster of relationships cluster of dignity security well-being and respect that that is actually from from the biblical perspective but as well as from maybe an ultimate reality perspective like that is truth so when i say truth and talking about this or the truth of our ecology the truth of climate change the truth to me it's it's the truth of the land like it's the truth of the evidence of like what we're seeing in front of us and also how we haven't been given dignity respect well-being security to the land also to each other and like you said earlier about patriarchy um white supremacy colonialism being the forces that distorted truth distorted those cluster of relationships of security and dignity and respect and created economic structures that that raped and pillaged and plundered the planet i think we have to restore those notions of truth we have to take meaning into our own hands and and define that as truth and say this is truth this is what this is this is how the land has been and here's what we can do to to heal it here's what we can do to create that respect with our environment because that that trust has been broken and i do believe the planet's a living thing i like that phrase our trust our trust in our relationship with the planet has been broken [Music] hey everyone it's william matthews and i'm really excited to tell you that i am going on tour september 6th through the 20th i'm doing a west coast tour i'll be hitting los angeles san diego san francisco reading eugene oregon portland seattle vancouver bc i'm going to hang out with hillary she's coming to the show so make sure you grab tickets you can go to my website williammathewsmusic.com and uh yeah come out support it's going to be a night of music conversation we're going to talk about justice cosmology maybe do a little liturgy so we'd love to see all of you it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists what about the alarmist issue i know one thing that we focused on was not being too alarmist with the first episode with the dot episode we we did that intentionally trying to put people's minds in the place where they would move to action and not just panic and inaction but at some point wendy you know like if if the tsunami is coming it's rolling in like not to alarm everybody let's just stay calm here but start packing up your belongings let's let's make some action towards the exit and then 10 minutes later they're all just still sitting there all right now everybody i don't know if you heard me 10 minutes ago i caught you i get the imperative to stay calm but we're getting to the place i think we're going to need the geniuses the human geniuses of society to make this their project this is like yes we all can play a part and do our our thing but we're going to need some political geniuses our next al einsteins and all those are going to need to invent climate stuff our finest minds are going to have to go into fusion and and start thinking about these systematically we're going to need our next steve jobs to not just be about capitalism but to save the humans of race so on that level getting the word out about how urgent this is for the people that are working in fields that maybe they are working in things right now that could be shifted if they understood the gravity of what's going on so wait are you saying we it's a it's appropriate to be alarmed i'm bringing it up as maybe maybe some alarmist panic is warranted so i've been working with climate activists who've been doing this far longer than i've been like people 10 plus years 20 years and they find being an alarmist like people shut down on that too like they they don't they feel like it's a conspiracy theory or they feel like it's just this like fear that's being blown up it's probably not as bad as they're saying it like and so when they do raise the alarm and they do like i mean al gore did it you know like how many like we've seen like major political leaders do it you know make it like in this country uh make it a priority i think people have a general understanding of climate change now than they did 10 years ago but they they're still not mobilized or willing to mobilize you say no mike no i'm saying the tsunami example was a great one because raising an alarm about actual tsunamis doesn't work so when when as before a tsunami happens often the ocean recedes in an incredible and dramatic way and we have footage of people getting running out into the ocean to grab shells with people saying this is a tsunami [Laughter] and they go what are you talking about do you see those shells and you see people sitting there with iphones filming and the water starts coming back and what do they do they stand there and film all the way until the water reaches them at which point you see the video drop and they start running so like we are primates and we act like primates the enlightenment was wrong we are in no way rational we never ever ever ever ever behave rationally we literally operate on impulses and emotions and then our rational hardware justifies that with fancy language and that's all we do everybody me i i accept no one there's no one i'm more distrustful of than someone who tells me that they're objective and unemotional because i'm like oh you are super self-deceived and i get you i used to be too but like that's why alarmism doesn't work alarmism neurologically shuts us down we can't accept why do you think we have religious mythologies we can't stand the idea of thinking we could die so when you raise any issue that's truly existential people will create narratives be their religious be they cultural whatever that release the need to grapple with mortality of the individual and the individual's offspring and it's not just yeast that generally fails to find equilibrium with environment all life if ecosystem variables change will reproduce to a point where its own population crashes it makes a lot of sense if you started out as a little ball of protein in a hostile earth to consume as many resources as possible and reproduce as fast as possible and let the chips fall where they may there's been one organism with the capacity to impact the atmosphere as much as we have the other organism was trees and algae when algae learned to bloom and trees grew pervasively those were the first organisms that could engineer the entire atmosphere it just so happens we're better at it and we're decimating both of those populations even though their atmospheric engineering is what allowed us to evolve in the first place and what allows us to continue being alive so what i was getting at with the alarmist thing i i don't have a lot of hope that we're going to convince seven billion people standing on the beach looking at the seashells to not be on the beach but if i can convince a police officer to forcibly remove all those people from the beach somebody that actually believes and actually can do something about it that that actually can make people leave the beach so you know like we need a shepherd for the sheep we need technology we need climate messiah climate yeah we need somebody we need a voting generation that's going to realize that the defense budget is absurd compared to what we're talking about like need to know that internally and how who's going to communicate that who are the who are the beyonces of the world who are the people that all that a generation's going to look to they need to believe it so some on some level i'm also thinking about okay people aren't going to believe this as a species we're not going to believe this is anybody out there going to believe this yeah i do believe it i have approached it as a chunking problem in my own life i've dramatically diminished not enough but dramatically diminished my carbon footprint and if other people in my life circumstances were doing that we'd be making meaningful progress even without government action yeah so the trick here is the problem is not caused by a few actors the problem is literally caused basically by most economic activity in the developed world any western nation per capita is among the highest carbon polluters on the globe even those that are taking progressivist policy stances on climate change so and the other thing is like if it's if the thing is like well we need we need a police officer to get people off the beach like that's the road to leftist authoritarianism like because both the right and the left have their tendency towards authoritarianism and what i've noticed right now is this rise of authoritarianism on the right and the trump era and then there has been kind of like an echo authoritarian leaning on in some portions of the left as well which i'm not necessarily completely opposed to authoritarianism except that i don't trust people enough to be authoritarians and take that responsibility well i just haven't seen it happen in the arc of human civilization i don't even think in america though we need authoritarianism we just need we just have a segment of the population was it close to 40 to 50 percent that just don't vote when you poll like how many you know americans believe in medicare for all it's it's like 60 of americans believe in medicare for all yet we can't even get past legislation you know like about that the the need for authoritarianism to me comes from the lack of democratic participation that's happening because if people were actually engaged and and voted and put people in office with their value system i think democracy would work and we would actually be able to pass meaningful legislation and pass a lot of legislation right now we're so stalled and i think we've come very apathetic to that in the last few years pretty much since obama took office uh maybe four years into that we the government began to like here in this country begin to like it's stalled we can't pass real significant meaningful legislation anymore and we haven't been able to now for what six years i think that the authoritarian thing is just the the angst and the frustration around a process that's broken and is slow moving and is halted and if we can get those people if we can encourage enough people like you're saying michael the non-voters particularly that 40 50 percent who are like just peace like checked out of the process for whatever reason if we can actually communicate a message to them versus trying to change republicans minds or at least we can communicate to those people why this is important and an agenda and a plan economically but as well as for the environment for human dignity and security well-being and respect truth then i think we actually can get democracy moving again and we can actually begin to i don't know take those meaningful steps i don't need a trump on the on the right or a i don't think bernie is this way but like i don't need a bernie on the left well yeah i don't need trump on the right or a bernie on the left so i don't think bernie is authoritarian on any level but compared to trump but in terms of the way people do look at bernie they kind of want him to be that authoritarian for the left like value system and it's like we don't need that we just need us to show up and vote well let's go back to alarmism do we need urgency is urgency different than alarmism urgency is better yeah don't get me wrong i'm not advocating for alarmist authoritarianism i didn't and i didn't think no um i'm just saying do we turn up the volume of i i've heard from those advocates as well of people say when you when you stay too much too fast people just shut it down and i get that but it's also not working the current strategy is not working and by i don't think by police officers getting people off the beach i don't think the only way to get people off the beach is to put a gun in their face i think if the people that help us imagine what's most true what's most beautiful what's most important in our society the filmmakers the authors the podcasters the teachers the parents the everybody that's forming imaginations and that's probably a generation or two down the line i don't see how just this is only going to be grass roots people just yeah everybody kind of shuts more lights off and eats a less one less cheeseburger a month and that's how we fix climate change um i think it's going to need more drastic yeah it's going to need both for sure yeah as you're talking i keep thinking about motivation like what we're trying to do i think with climate change strategies and advocacy is to motivate people away from something but really the most effective way of motivating people is towards something but when you're motivating people towards something and the thing that you're motivating people towards is a less bad existence it's not going to give you the same kind of dopamine hit as if you're motivated towards a lottery win and you get this huge payout at the end like the payout of us doing a ton is less bad existence yeah so it's like how do we even envision the prize at the end that we're working towards when we don't even know what that would look like and it doesn't even seem better than now it would just be less bad that it could be in the future it's so it's so intangible it's so abstract and might not actually experientially translate to the sense of like this was meaningful for me because it is so hypothetical at this point so i wonder if we need to to find a way to motivate people towards not away from something but towards something that feels like it has a payoff that can actually be enjoyed and experienced i mean i i don't know how to do that what are you gonna say what let me on fire about climate change was i started watching vice when it came out on hbo the original show like five six years ago and they did a lot of climate features so they took you to gree you know greenland and the en the arctics or whatever so i felt like i got a visual of on the ground how fast the ice was melting what was happening you know and and subsequent stories they did but what sealed the deal for me was when i went to paris for the climate uh agreement the summit that happened in the cop 21 and there's like this science fair outside of the actual like private delegation meetings where scientists were creating visuals around what will the world look like on renewable energy or whole cities that were fueled by renewable energy transportation education parks you still have city but it's also connected to the environment in nature everyone i mean you would sit there they had like these things where like you sit at a table and then like there would be bike pedals and you would charge your phone by like pedaling like sitting and pedaling a bike like you know there was all these really visuals so for me i felt like i saw a clear picture of the world we could live in like just in a weird like microcosm like this is very small and like kind of weird and goofy science fair but to me i feel like we need artists and we need scientists and political people to create visions and like a new moral imagination for hey what kind of world do we want to look like in a hundred years what if los angeles was a green city powered by like solar and i mean it's so hot here like it's it's wild i think that we don't have that vision like that we can't create it because i think we easily can to me that's what hillary clinton was actually saying in that thing was like hey this is the dream so maybe i think we just need to create art to give people the prize like you said at the end of like hey you experienced some temporary suffering now maybe you get higher taxes a little bit or maybe you get this but hey at the end this is what we do we completely lift whole like regions out of poverty and we give them dignity and we give them access to resource and to because energy i think maybe energy is going to be the new commodity that could be in a hundred years what if people are trading you know free trading energy with each other like the way we do information that feels like a wild crazy thought but like imagine if you live you know in the outback in australia right or you live in kenya and you have the capacity to to store energy are you doing anything mike you're you're kind of a survival guy though no i mean like storing water jugs oh right right yeah it'll come from my wall yeah don't promote his address now but are you doing anything to like prepare your kids do they need to know more survival shit than we did do they need to know how to grow their own food there's this whole survivalist movement online which is like about the collapse of civilization and surviving it that has a real strong race component and they not only they're called preppers a lot of times and they not only learn survival skills and store food and water they get a lot of guns and knives i'm not that kind of prepper i'm the kind of prepper who has prepared for a statistically likely natural disaster and potentially as long as four weeks wherein government services are interrupted and the reason i'm a prepper is so that i'm not a burden on an overburdened system so that people of less socioeconomic privilege don't miss their chance at the water on the truck because i'm thirsty so that's why i prep and prep the way i do i really literally just follow the minimum guidelines that's set out by the federal government for survival and preparation i don't have collapse of civilization contingency plans other than trying to ensure that i'm as close to the beginning of any great die off as possible if it looks like everything's going down if it's nukes i want a front row seat uh you know what i mean like i just i'm not i'm not about clawing out of the ashes and just doing anything to get species alive i'm voluntarily sterile at this point i can't help with repopulation efforts i'm just a burden on everyone if it gets to that in terms of my children we do talk about climate and sustainable living but i'm more interested in trying to prepare my children for social cooperation than a rugged individualist survivalism so we talk about the aggregate of small actions in our own lives we talk about gallons of water saved just in our household if we all take fewer showers we talk about specifically how much less electricity we use by setting the thermostat at 78 instead of 72 and we all just wear looser clothing or cooler clothing around the home so i'm trying to prepare them more for civic participation than the end of all things and if it gets to that the human animal is a pretty amazing thing i just don't want to see what humanity looks like where you're at the point that without question the most violent mammal in evolutionary history is universally strapped e for not a good world to be a nope there are seven or eight billion of them at that time yeah or say no like we're two billion down so there's that much angst and fear that's not a homo sapien i want to encounter i want the domesticated tamed well-fed homo sapien and which is why the way i want to structure society is to make sure every human on the planet is properly yeah domesticated crazy me how we talk about like cutting social security and medicare and like all this stuff and how you know a lot of republicans want to do that and cut the social safety net because i'm going you don't want to see a world where people are going hungry because if they do they're coming after you like they're gonna and you know if you're wealthy in mexico like you have to walk around with security like because the wealth inequality is so massive and so it's crazy to me that we even have conversations where we talk about cutting social benefits it's it's it's literally wild because an undomesticated human like you said is like you think we have a crime problem now right you think a hungry tiger is bad yeah yeah give me a break hungry people there's a real chance someone can interpret that and contextualize it and i'm not saying that like marginalized people are vicious no i'm saying all people if in a sustained state of need it measurably changes the way our bodies and brains function yep if you can't get access to enough glucose or enough carbohydrates to create glucose for more than 16 hours as little as eight if your glycogen stores go down the way your brain metabolizes energy changes in a way that affects your cognition and increases feelings of hopelessness and aggression yep six to eight hours and then draw that out a little bit you've got homicidality psychotic symptoms people cutting their hands off anyone who's curious read about the minnesota starvation experiment like what do things happen in chicago when you have cities that have been economically divested from and people have been left to fend for themselves with no food very little access to clean water and then people want to talk shit about gang violence in chicago when you're like no this is a human rights violation going on people who suburban houses are built with wealth that came from those people's bodies who were kidnapped and brought here in the first goddamn place are the ones complaining about black and black crime when they're creating this socioeconomic and biological and metabolic circumstances in which that exists and ignoring the system that brought it there it drives me crazy yeah sorry i if someone says black on black crime you know you get a god damn from me within 45 seconds the amygdala just goes it even affected your recording technique i was like mike you're bounding on the table i'm sorry i got but yeah i genuinely get angry which by the way i'll say this since this delicious conversation i have the good fortune of when i get a lyft driver i'm extremely likely to have a black evangelical republican lyft driver i've had like seven in the last year and it's really fun when they start a conversation they hear i'm oh you're an author what do you write about spirituality oh christian things yeah christian things and then they think i'm an evangelical and so they talk in ways they think that'll be fine for mutual evangelicalism and then i just can't stand it and three times i found myself in this weird inverted racial justice conversation with a black person where like they would say something like uh well people just got to work harder and take accountability for their actions i'm like what about the systemic discrimination against people of color and the wealth that was built through slave labor in this country and what guy said to me i think that's wildly overstated i was like i don't know what to do right now i'm real off my map yeah that internalized how do you think i feel when i talk to those black people i literally look at them like this nah bro you're wrong nah dude that's what are you talking about shut up shut up wow wow without question when i get to that point the person is former military by the way oh there's like a huge institutional indoctrination should be charting this doing a linear regression and give them a psych assessment a political scoring assessment my conversation with jamal here's an area too where i think we can grow in maybe this will help religion if anybody has the capacity to shift hearts and minds on this it has to be the church it has to be religious institutions here's why because i think there's a narrative inside of that book about god redeeming all things talking about purpose in life you got me on that one i meant the bible oh yeah yeah that is pretty much that's right that's even that's the evangelical bible right there you're right yeah part two the revelation continues um you know there's stories in in the text that talk about a god who redeems all things that redeems history that redeems land that redeems uh you know prophetic promise for whole people groups you also have this whole end of the book that describes a new jerusalem that talks about you know the an apocalyptic story that really gives some type of hope for a equitable peaceable society i think we see that in the text so i i kind of wonder where did the christian imagination go wrong where it forgot that its own texts and the prophetic promises from old and new testament like you seen isaiah it talks about rebuilding ancient cities and former foundations that that god was going to create bloom in the desert like there's this whole thing where it's like where there is despair where there's wilderness that god wants to create oasis and that what is our job and our responsibility you know in that to care for people but also care for the land and care for uh revitalizing the land rebuilding the land and i see a lot of christians today talk like that a little bit but always in the capitalistic sense of like kingdom building represents you know growing our ministry's economy you know more than it does actually revitalizing areas and lands and cities like if the church took all their money and started investing economically into cities if they end at poverty like if we know for planting trees planting trees like we know for a fact seven it they say it costs about seven billion to end poverty in america seven billion what the church in america gets that alone in tax breaks in one year the amount of tax breaks the government gives to 501 c 3 churches has been tallied up closer close to 7 billion imagine if the church decided we're going to in poverty in america wow we're going to die you know we we are pro-life so we're going to adopt every every child that needs a home has a home and then we're going to revitalize the land we're going to create urban gardens we're going to a lot like we're going to go to chicago and actually help them create urban gardens and create food centers so they can grow their own food they have no food there turn your church buildings into urban gardens yeah yeah you're useful yeah and don't just adopt children create circumstances where families don't have to give with their children in the first place exactly yes well if we step back from religion if we step back from christianity spirituality depends on the definition that you use but is about the connection of all things it's about the weaving together of these threads that somehow got pulled apart that are actually all part of the same fabric and so thinking about spirituality it has real life implications for climate for how we treat the earth for experiencing and seeing the connection between us and everything and everyone around us and how we actually need to be part of the same story the threads need to come together to be part of the fabric for actually our spirituality to be healthy there there is praxis yes on the ground that relates to the earth if our spirituality is healthy and i don't think it is so we're just simply yeah when you bring it to even like seminaries and theology and the philosophies that people within religious power structures and just social power structures are operating from we need to start seeing the natural consequences of an inherent egocentric universe that the bible was written out of that we have this sort of feeling that all of this was for us and that's here you go ahead and name the animals and you go ahead and this earth is literally the center of the cosmos and there's this flat disc in the middle of and underneath us is the place of death and over us is god and they all kind of everything circles around me the human ego and this is only six thousand years old and that's all the kind of like this very human-centric universe where the earth is our plaything rather than a view a philosophy a theology where we are the earth we are god's manifestation of creativity and love and shalom that have this tremendous power to create more shalom or to take it away to create chaos we need to update the cosmology you do need to update the cosmos exactly that we're coming from and that that all that stuff that comes into those that are writing church songs and those that are teaching in seminaries and we have a lot of those people that listen to this show pay attention to your cosmology pay attention to your uh eschatology to the view of the end what is this just some temporary stage that we're going to leave and go backstage into the big heavenly real place and if that's the case why would we love this place why would we take care of it all that stuff has effect it affects our theology it makes it make more sense why church budgets are what they are and why curriculums are what they are at religious institutions and what it all comes from these from these roots and so there's some root work i think that that we need to go back to some of our most fundamental assumptions about reality and earth and ourselves and god that needs some some work which is kind of what you were trying to do when you kind of talked about the genesis narrative that ended up becoming a stupid viral article was you were doing that right like you were deconstructing those like ideas of adam and eve and and what that represent which i have this weird thought experiment tell me if i'm totally off on this but i thought recently about adam and eve and let's just take the story literal for a moment i wonder though if taking eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil if the sin of that was primarily not about just disobeying god and doing something he told you not to do but if the call was to name the garden the creation eating of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil to me would be like naming god's creation without god because if i name god's creation without god then i'm gonna distort it like if i call you know some this wrong and god's actually think that's right to me that's how we get the transatlantic slave trade because i think christians are taking on themselves to call something by like their authority god's given us dominion we're gonna call that and say this is right this is wrong and this is da da da when actually they're doing it apart from relationship to the environment they're doing it apart from relationship with other people so therefore they're you know attacking lgbt people and they're attacking like this and saying and raping and pillaging the land because they just think god has given it to them when actually i think it the sin so to speak would be naming god's creation without relationship to god and i define god probably as the the cosmic being that is within us of us of this planet and and more cosmic christ stuff but well so to get back to your your statement vishnu i'm wondering are you saying and this this is just for me to clarify um although it might have some theological implications but are you saying that that if we had a right theology that it would lead us back to the earth or that we need to change our theology so that it does that i don't i don't i i don't know about original christian theology and how different it is you know what time period are you talking about i assume that jesus is and paul's and peter's and i assume their view of reality was a lot different than most christians today view of reality but i know for my life in my experience when my theology changed it very much impacted my feelings about the earth my feelings about myself and and how i create and what i create and what i spend my imagination dwelling on when the world was a sinking boat that we had to get as many people off off the titanic into the heavenly lifeboats everything was different for me when the theology changed to a more incarnated god within creation that cosmic christ stuff that william was talking about i think i just think that view the fundamental view of reality gives rise to so much of how we operate not just individually but collectively what we spend our money on how what we create together what we imagine to be the ultimate good i think all that stuff springs from our deepest assumptions about reality i wholeheartedly agree it makes me wonder about people who have a conversion experience towards a a thing that feels outside of them that feels disconnected where i think about your story and what i know about vishnu about connectivity and this path of spirituality towards oneness i'd be curious to know if people who believed who had a conversion experience who had a spiritual experience to a thing or someone that they felt was outside of them where the fundamental the framework is that i am distinct from it if that within the root of the belief system is separation and distance as opposed to connection and oneness yeah my childhood self would laugh at myself now and make fun of me i would literally see if some if i saw some people cutting down a forest of trees i would cry now that would make me weep to watch that and i would laugh at myself as a kid you're crying because trees are cutting down a tree hugger or whatever no those i would also cry watching someone amputate my daughter's legs like that's part of us that's part of our life that is that's us that's me that's that's what's giving us life these trees and we're cutting them down for just a temporary prophet just to feel that not to just think of it but to feel the earth as me to feel the earth as part of my own skin i had a picture in my mind probably about two weeks ago i was walking to work one morning i have a mentor who's like a spiritual aunt or spiritual mother for me and she's the granddaughter of a first nations chief in vancouver and we meet regularly and we've been talking a little bit about connection with the earth as a piece of how i can sustain the healing work that i do and how actually the earth gives energy to me to support me to do the things that i do and kind of stretch my arms out towards other people and i was walking to work and i had this picture in my mind of myself as a tree and i had really deep roots and really tall branches and i remember feeling this sense of responsibility with tall branches that there are many people who i work with who eat from the fruit of my branches and for the branches to be healthy my roots need to be deep and secure and to have enough space to stretch out to ground me and this sense of pulling in and sending out at the same time took over and gave me a new understanding of myself but it was through the image of a tree and i remember after that the tree and i were not so different from each other and it changed my relationship to the tree to trees but to the tree because i and the tree were not different and i wonder if to go back to the conversation we were having about motivation towards something and then to add in the peace that you're talking about if we see ourselves in the earth because of our egocentrism if that will be the thing that helps us protect us to see ourselves as the earth to use our ego yeah extend it a little bit yeah extend our ego in a way that makes us do the self-protection survival stuff for the earth because we believe we are it in a new way yeah you don't have to talk yourself into not cutting off your own hand it's like i work with some people who do okay yeah most of the time but then but then that's even that we say something has gone wrong yeah and these people need to be supported and yet when it comes to the earth we see dollar bills not ah there's something wrong here heretic i have so much lament that this is not a video show right now you needed the facial expression with that heretic i really want it to feel it [Laughter] the sass william face oh my gosh that's good priceless that's right i need to make a gif of it i want a gif of it and i want to send it to people who ask for you for outrageous things yeah that look was yeah but that's but that's how people think and feel about this like you say that i i'm like yesterday my heart my spirit my everything is like yes amen amen yes but i think five six or seven years ago i'd have been like that's heresy that is evil that is satan like legitimately like and i think a lot of people the reason why we can't have a religious conversation about oneness and about the idea of oneness and separation is because we have a whole most of our monotheistic religions are built on like attaining god and trying to get to god versus realizing i think on the mystical level they're saying all those things but like on the surface practical level they're very much teaching people how to like sacrifice in order to be okay with god you know like on some level but even if we pull it back a level if it's just symbolic the symbolism of us being the earth has to mean something otherwise communion means nothing then too i agree with you the symbol of the body and the blood we actually take that as if it's real some people more so than others yeah and i think that's what's you know hypocritical inside of those religious institutions and the thought structure of that right like is we can we're okay with symbolism here but we're not okay with it over here i think if you if we can get to the root of that for people that opens up a whole nother religious dialogue um and a way of seeing yourself as a part of everything which is good i would say is good religion can you talk more about that hillary what did you mean with communion i'm still yeah let me work it out in my head as i'm talking i think i think the idea that we can't say that some things are meaningful symbols and are connected but other things aren't like either the symbols mean something or they don't either the symbols are actually a part of our spirituality and a path to us experiencing the divine or they're not and so why i guess i'm confused about why we would say that some symbols over here are okay but the other ones would be heretical you're saying it's all at a metaphorical level and so why do you care so much about one metaphor over the other i think if if the oneness argument is heretical for you then take a step back and think of it from a symbolic perspective it's often lost in the post rob bell world that heresy is a specific thing right heresy is going against the teachings of the church so the church prescribes a set of beliefs which are theologically right or correct as embodied through idea and traditional expression and going against that is heresy and heresy was used as a specific term to understand that sometimes the church can be wrong and sometimes occasionally heresy can be godly and lead to a necessary reformation and it's supposed to be a distinct concept from blasphemy which is going against god's idea or truth or rejecting god so uh in that contextual framework that does provide a means by where something like oneness can be heretical but not blasphemous or both depending on the theological tradition and i only say that because so many people say we don't take theology seriously on the liturgist podcast that's good i would also say too that uh most modern expressions of christianity to me are blasphemous like seriously like when you when you put it in that understanding of profaning god when we when we kill the planet that is profaning god when we lie and gossip on people and slander people that's profaning the image of god in somebody else and we have whole structures that just allow that sort of stuff you know that don't connect that for people and so yeah it's not even to me controversial to say that because to me is so obvious especially in in the context of what you just said i agree yeah you you are taking the saying god damn isn't taking god's name in vain you take god's name in vain when you don't love like you you take god's name in vain when you when you dismiss the poor like we see that in the the story of the the good samaritan like that is profaning god i i don't care i don't care if you curse or not like and i think somehow our priorities have gotten for whatever reason somewhere else because damn goddamn goddamn [Laughter] one of my favorite beyonce lyrics by the way he did that just for me [Music] you