 In my lifetime, women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people from the closet to the altar. Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? Because the greatest curse in the history of humanity, a curse that goes back to the dawn of awareness, is cultural myopia. The idea that my world is a real world and everybody else has a failed attempt of being me. My point is that cultural myopia, not just a curse of humanity, but it's one horrific trait of humanity that in a multicultural, pluralistic, interconnected world we can no longer indulge, as if literally all of the glory of the rainforest and the natural wealth, the natural capital of the forest, was just sort of being put into a grinder and ground out to produce money, you know. Let me ask you a question. What's the formula of photosynthesis? Carbon dioxide and water sparked by photons of light creates carbohydrate and releases oxygen. But you could easily graduate not just from this undergraduate university, but from law school, from business school, without knowing the formula of life. So just think of it. Half the languages of the world that were spoken the day you were born are not being taught to children, which means they're on the road of extinction. To lose half the languages in a generation is to literally lose half of humanity's collective knowledge. Every fortnight some elder passes away and carries with them into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. You know, if God's all powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in the universe? Lord Krishna said to thicken the plot, but I took psychedelics and I'm proud to say that I wouldn't write the way I write. I wouldn't think the way I think. Likewise. I wouldn't have understood the nature of cultural relativism as an anthropologist. I wouldn't treat women the way I do. Our parents used to say, don't take these things, you'll never come back the same. That was a whole bloody point. Right? To involve. The fact that the genies out of the bottle ain't going back and the tsunami of social change and transformation and spiritual growth and the reinvention of our entire sense of ourselves on the planet, it's rolling forward and, you know, get out of the way if you're not prepared because it'll drown you if you're not prepared to float upon it. I know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? One, two, three, four. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are on site at the University of British Columbia at the Anthropology and Sociology Building in the beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. We are now going to be speaking with Dr. Wade Davis. Hi, Wade. Hey, Alan. How are you? Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. It's an honor. I'm so excited for this. Sweet of you. I'm so, so pumped. For those that don't know Wade's background, he is a world renowned anthropologist and ethnobotanist focused on worldwide indigenous cultures and psychoactive plants. He's a multiple-time award-winning author, filmmaker, photographer, former National Geographic Explorer in residence, professor of anthropology and BC leadership chair in cultures and ecosystems at risk at the University of British Columbia. His work has taken him from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Africa to Polynesia. He is a member of the Order of Canada and recently became an honorary Colombian citizen. You can find his links in the bio, davis, Wade.com, as well as his Instagram page. All right, Wade, we're going to start off with our very big picture questions that we love asking our guests. The first one is, are we really all one? I mean, that is a big question. But I would say, Alan, if you think about it, there have been two moments of illumination in our lifetimes that will be spoken about 10,000 years hence. One famously occurred on Christmas Eve, 1968, when Apollo went around the dark side of the moon for the first time in human history. We saw not a sunrise or a moon rise, but an earth rise. And suddenly this idea that we're on a flat, infinite horizon was replaced by this rather haunting image of a blue planet as the astronauts so beautifully put it, floating in the velvet void of space. And that really sparked a wave of illumination that we can sense around the world. I mean, when I was a kid, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was an environmental victory. Nobody spoke about biodiversity or the biosphere. Now these are terms used by children, you know. No country had a ministry of the environment. Now everyone does, effective or not, they have one. And at a more profound level, it precipitated a wave of change, a kind of paradigm shift, the full dimensions of which are difficult to identify, but I do know this. In my lifetime, women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom. People of color from the woodshed to the White House. Gay people from the closet to the altar. What is not to like about a world capable of such social reinvention? Now, the second great point of illumination also occurred at the end of a long journey, but not a journey into space, but into the very fiber of our being. And over the course of the last generation, geneticists have finally proven it to be true. Something that philosophers have always hoped to be true. And that is the fact that we're all brothers and sisters. And I don't mean that in the spirit of hippie ethnography. I mean quite literally studies of the human genome in the last generation has shown no doubt whatsoever that the genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum. Race has been exposed as an utter fiction. We're all cut from the same genetic cloth. We are all in fact descendants of that same handful of people who walked out of Africa some 65,000, 70,000 years ago and embarked on this extraordinary hygiura. A journey 40,000 years in duration, roughly 2,500 human generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world. But here's the important revelation. If you accept that scientific truth, it means that by definition, all human populations share the same raw genius, the same mental acuity, the same basic human potential. And critically, whether that human genius is invested in technological wizardry, which has been the great achievement of the West, or placed instead into the complex task of unraveling the mystic threads of memory inherent in a myth, is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. There is no hierarchy in the affairs of culture. The old Victorian idea that we somehow went from the savage to the barbarian, to the civilized, of the strand of London. You know that European societies stood at the apex of a pyramid that sloped down to the so-called primitives of the world, has been absolutely debunked by modern science and reduced to an element of the 19th century as distant from our lives and as irrelevant to our lives as the old colonial conceit. Or the old religious idea that the earth was about 6,000 years old. In the stunning affirmation of the connectedness of humanity, science has come to the fore to prove the truth of the central revelation of anthropology, the central revelation of Franz Boaz, the idea that the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being you, they're not failed attempts at being modern. Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? And when the peoples of the world answer that, they do so in 7,000 different languages. Those languages and those answers become our collective human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the coming centuries. Every culture has something to say. Each deserves to be heard just as none has monopoly on the root to the divine. And we often think of, you know, if you want to think of the individual streams of thought that cracked open the European mind in the lifetime of our great grandparents, you know, you had Darwin showing that species were mutable. You had Einstein showing that an apple doesn't fall from the tree quite as Newton thought it did. You had Freud suggesting that we don't even control the sanctity of our own thoughts, but the fourth and the individual who in many ways was more important than all those guys, at least from my point of view, was Franz Boaz because Franz Boaz recognized that there was no hierarchy, that every culture had something to say. Each voice was important and that every culture was a product of its own history and adaptive choices. And that is so important because the greatest curse in the history of humanity, a curse that goes back to the dawn of awareness, is cultural myopia. The idea that my world is a real world and everybody else is a failed attempt of being me. And, you know, many societies, the United States amongst them, you know, are often accused of being culturally myopic in that sense. But it's almost unfair because every culture is. I mean, most indigenous people, you translate the name for themselves and it comes out the people, the implication being that the blokes beyond the horizon are savages beyond the pale. The word barbarian comes from the Greek word barbarus, one who babbles. If you didn't speak Greek, you didn't exist. When Herodotus famously came back 400 years before the Christian era, having traveled to the ends of the known world and had the audacity to say in Athens that there was actually something going on there of interest in that Persian court, Plato wanted him eliminated, killed, if not killed, exiled for having the audacity to say that something interesting could go on anywhere in the world that was not within the splendor of Greece. And, but the Aztec had the same thing in the Wattle, you know. So my point is that cultural myopia not just occurs to humanity, but it's one horrific trait of humanity that in a multicultural and pluralistic interconnected world, we can no longer indulge. And anthropology is the antidote to cultural myopia. Anthropology is the antidote to nativism. Anthropology is the antidote to Donald Trump. I really appreciated you bringing up to start this profound moment of the earth rise and this understanding of the beautiful green and blue marble here that we share with the other 10 million species, all the biodiversity here and how the awakening to the stewardship being so critical. And then also the idea of the progress that we've been making and the amount of ethics that have been evolving, morals and philosophies that have been evolving over time to lead us towards a more just world. And then how if we will be evolving our technologies to be able to really experientially embody the wisdoms of true interconnectedness and true unconditional love, true presence as we do build these general intelligences and as we enter into that hockey sticking exponential technology age and then furthermore, you bring up the 7000 languages that are here and you're and you're avidly talking about how the human gets to express itself so beautifully. The consciousness and spirit expresses itself through all of these beautiful cultures and languages and that we are going through a process of the condensation of culture, of language to the degree at which it's so rapid that so many people in the world are learning English, learning Mandarin. And the in a sense, these are some of these languages are not being taught. You say about half or so, 3,500 of them not being taught to children. And there are projects like the Rosetta project that are trying to log them. And we are trying to at least retain them of an archaeological record, a catalog of them, which is very beautiful. Yet to be able to find what are the profound ways of seeing the world, of being human through those languages and ways of experiencing the world and the spirit expressing itself and being able to find what could potentially be the best, like you said, there's no monopoly on the path to the divine, on recommuning with the divine. I love that that phrase. And so to live in a pluralistic, to live in a coexisting way of enabling all people to reach the divine and also to make it so that all people get to express their own unique gifts into the world. The divine's already right here in us all around us and to awaken to that and to build the social fabric that's conducive to people figuring that out and also to unleashing their gifts into the world is paramount. And I want to see if maybe you think this is true, then, that is then the root, the most upstream issue that we face, that we have forgotten that interconnectedness, that we've put that to the side, that we have separation. Well, you know, every culture, Frans Boas would say is a product of its history and its choices. And we're no exception. You know, I wrote a book called The Wayfinders. And an editor put a snappy title on why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world, forcing me to answer that question. And I did so implicitly in the book, but I did so explicitly at the end of the book in two words, climate change. And what I meant by that is that we forget that climate change may become humanity's problem, but it wasn't caused by humanity. It was caused by a very narrow subset of humanity with a particular ideology and worldview that for the last 400 years have been stealing the ancient sunlight of the world. And the reason that these other voices of humanity matter, these other ways of being, the evidence of alternative visions of life itself, in one small measure, they're essential because they remind us that our way is not the only way and they put the lie to those of us within our own society who say that we cannot change as we know we all must change the fundamental way we inhabit this planet. So what is it about this Western idea that brought us to this point? Well, you can trace it in our own history. You know, during, I mean, you can go back to Aristotle, but even if you just go back to the Enlightenment, when Descartes said that all that existed was mind and matter in a single gesture he deanimated the world. And part of that was our desperate attempt to escape the tyranny of absolute faith and to allow the mind of man, as it was put at the time, to triumph over notions of myth, magic, mysticism and so on. But we also swept away all notions of metaphor. And in a single gesture, we deanimated the world. And as Saul Bellow would eventually say, science would make a host cleaning of belief and if phenomena couldn't be measured, they couldn't exist. And the idea that the flight of a bird could have meaning was dismissed as ridiculous and ridiculed. But we forget that metaphor is what actually drives human relationships with the natural world for most of our history. What do I mean by metaphor? If you, Alan, are raised in California to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined, you're going to have a different relationship to it than if you're my godson in the mountains of Peru raised to believe that a mountain is an apodiety that will direct his or her destiny. The issue isn't who's right and who's wrong. It's how the belief system mediates the relationship between the natural landmark, in the case of a mountain, and the aspirations of human beings. I was raised in these forests of British Columbia to believe that they existed to be cut. That was the foundation of the ideology of scientific forestry that I learned at this university and practiced in the forests of British Columbia as a logger for a long time. That made me fundamentally different than my friends amongst the Haida and N'Chown at the Kwakwakhwakh, who believed that the forest of the abode of deities, huk-huk and the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits, it would be threatening the Hamata initiate. Now, the interesting thing isn't who's right and who's wrong. Is this forest outside this window just so you lose some board feet? Is it the domain of the spirits? The interesting thing is the metaphor. In other words, if you believe it's just cellulose and board feet, you're going to treat it appropriately, which is why my tradition, my way of thinking inherited from my father about these forests has led to them being torn asunder in three generations. Whereas my friends amongst the First Nations, their story, as told to them by their elders, allowed them to have a very modest ecological footprint because of their beliefs and their beliefs meaning it. So it's not about whether these beliefs are true or not. It's the consequences of the beliefs. Now, in our society, once we de-animated the world, all other sentient beings became just sort of props on a theater set upon which the human drama unfolded. That's not how most societies around the world view other life forms. Most other societies, again, mediated by the notion of metaphor, have very strong sense of reciprocity with the natural world whereby human beings are not seen as part of the problem as we do, but rather the only solution because it's only through the human imagination that the desires of the divinity can come through. I mean, the Kogi and the Arawakos, the elder brothers, the descendants of the ancient Tyrone civilization who to this day in the Sierra de Santa Marta in Colombia, the highest coastal mountain range on earth, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood and the society truly maintains and believes that their prayers and rituals literally maintain the cosmic balance of the world. You find this in the southern Andes where every gesture from economic exchange to spiritual exchange to politics is mediated by reciprocity. You see it in the Northwest Amazon where the Barasana and the Makuna really do believe that plants are just people in another dimension of reality. You see it in the Athabascan peoples of Northern Canada, the Boyle Forest, who literally believe that human beings were taught by the animals and the animals were taught by human beings. You see it in the High Arctic amongst the Inuit who believe that if if a animal is not treated properly, it will not allow itself to be hung. But if animals are not hunted, they too will suffer. Again, these ideas are reciprocity. You see it in the Outback of Australia in the way that a tankeroo killed by a hunter is ritualistically prepared before it is gutted. You see in the High Arctic a hunter of a seal, if he does not drip fresh water into the mouth of a dead seal, he will never get another one. So the point is you have all these wonderful gestures that are gestures of reciprocity. I mean hunting myths, as Joseph Campbell famously said, are expressions of a covenant between the hunter and the prey, between predator and prey, and a way of hunting societies rationalizing the terrible fact that to live they have to kill the thing they love most, which is the animals upon which they depend. I mean, I worked for years learning mythology from an old Gitsaan elder in northern British Columbia, and he spoke English as a sixth language. And it was really interesting to pay attention to how what his choice of language, which is always a case of someone speaking a foreign tongue, and he would never say, for example, we must never hurt animals because a hunter by definition has to kill the prey upon which his life depends. Alec would always say, you must not suffer an animal. You use that verb because suffer something else that involves dominance, humiliation, cruelty, sadism, right? And so most of most of the world's populations have been motivated by some kind of sense of reciprocity. It doesn't mean that people around the world are kind of ecological natives or that they haven't had an impact on their environment. Of course they have, but this kind of scale of industrialized consumption of the planet as if literally all of the glory of the rain forest and the natural wealth, the natural capital of the forest was just sort of being put into a grinder and ground out to produce money. You know, this is a uniquely modern phenomenon. And if we look around the world, for example, it's very poignant and very moving that indigenous people who played no role whatsoever in the creation of the problem of climate change are not only the ones suffering the most from it and the implications of it, but are also in their own way doing more dramatically addressing it. I'll give you an example in the southern mountains of the Andes. There's a fantastic syncretic ritual, pilgrimage, that we know existed for hundreds, not thousands of years before the arrival of the Spaniards. And it's called the Coyeriti, the Star Snow Festival. And once each year, and of course with the arrival of the Spanish, like so many of those rituals, it was co-opted by the Catholic Church. And now it's kind of a perfect expression of the fusion of the two faiths, five hundred years of Catholic belief and pre-Columbian ideas. That is a complete amalgam of the Andes today. I mean, I once asked a friend of mine who's from one of the communities outside of Cusco, which she felt when anthropologists tried to separate what was pre-Columbian from what was Catholic. She said, it just gives us a headache because it's a fusion. But today, so the pilgrimage has all kinds of Christian elements to it. You carry the crosses of your communities up to the Sacred Valley past the stations of the cross right out of the Bible. But you're in the shadow of Asingati, the most sacred mountain of the Inca. And then the crosses are carried by the Pablitos, who are symbols of the kind of the wild heart of humanity, but also the source of order for humanity. They're carried into the glaciers and planted for two days and two nights to absorb the power and energy of Pachamama. And then they're carried back to the community, reinvigorated for a coming year. There's a classic sort of pre-Columbian and the ritual. And the penultimate stage of that pilgrimage was always to chip small blocks of ice from the glaciers to carry back to the community to kind of complete the cycle of the divine, but also to allow those elderly and frail in the community to unable to travel or to climb to participate in the collective ritual. Now, witnessing the incredible recession of those glaciers, the people have felt that they had to do something about it. And so they've unilaterally ceased the taking of those trivial bits of ice from the glaciers. Now, that points out something really important for us. Climate change and its repercussions is sort of, you know, it's a scientific debate. Some people maintain or it's a political debate, certainly. You know, it's a technical challenge. It's an economic opportunity. Whatever you want to say of it. But for those who really believe that they are responsible for the well being of the earth, it is a profound psychological and existential crisis because it's their fault if the earth is not doing well. And so one of the things I've noticed in my own travels is that from the deserts of Australia to the high arctic, where, you know, in places like Conak in northwest Greenland, the highest community in the most northerly community in the world, where the ice used to come in September and stayed in July, now it comes in in November and is gone by March. The whole world is melting from beneath the people. And everywhere in the Andes and in Tibet, where they're seeing glacial recession, there's this kind of upsurge of ritual activity as people, by the terms of reference of their own societies, are actually trying to do something about the problem, investing their time and energy and their faith and their hopes and their dreams in a way that puts us to shame. And it's very tragic and it's very poignant because, of course, we're the ones responsible for the, you know, imminent catastrophe. We should go to language. I'll just let me just roll. There's so many points, though, that I want to address what you said and then hit it back, just that you gave this beautiful idea about if you believe that if you pass down, if you pass down to your children when they're birthed into the world, the idea that the air that you breathe in comes from phytoplankton and trees breathing out. And if you pass them that instead of and things like when you take a bite out of the apple, it's powered by the sun versus just exchanging the sheet of paper for the apple at the store and not knowing anything else about this whole interconnected problem. Let me ask you a question. What's the formula of photosynthesis? Well, I know the Krebs cycle is really important, but photosynthesis, chlorophyll is what enables parts of photosynthesis. This is very hard. We should know how plants eat light. I'm not being provocative or in any way dismissive at all, Alan. I'm just, you know, it's just that's a problem, isn't it? You're right. I mean, I mean, photosynthesis is just the idea that carbon dioxide and water sparked by photons of light creates carbohydrate and releases oxygen. Simple as that. Simple as that. Simple as that. Now, not one person in a million knows that formula. And that's why I was sort of teasing you with that. Right? Yeah. We let's go through this one more time. It's that important. You're absolutely right. Yes. So photosynthesis, photosynthesis is just this miracle whereby plants can eat light and all that really what it means is that carbon dioxide comes together with water sparked by photons of light to produce carbohydrate food for them and releasing oxygen, right? And my point is that CO2 plus water, photons of light, creates carbohydrate for food for the plant and food for us and food for us when we eat it. And then it sparks oxygen, which oxygenates the environment upon which we breathe. It's also interconnected because that's the breath cycle, the air cycle, but also the nutrition cycle. Yeah, but I mean, just focus on the science. Yes. In other words, in other words, sometimes we can spin the stuff off into flowery things and forget how just basic. Now, obviously, photosynthesis is much more complicated than that in terms of the pathways and so on. But my point is that here's the university. This university of British Columbia is ranked, I think, 37th in the world. But take any university, major university, any university, any high school, you could not possibly graduate from this university if you didn't know the difference between a poem and a work of prose, if you didn't know the difference between a photograph and a painting, if you didn't know the difference between a verb and a noun, but you could easily graduate not just from this undergraduate university, but from law school, from business school without knowing the formula of life. And how can you, a friend of mine here, an old wonderful environmentalist, Paul George, a hero of British Columbia, once said to me, I said, how do we get people to appreciate nature more? He said, he said, very simply, get them into it. How do we get people? How can we possibly get people to understand the profundity of biological relationships, the profundity of ecological connections, the interdependence of life itself if they are utterly scientifically illiterate? If you're allowed to go through university without ever studying biology. And I say that as someone who easily could have done it. You know, I. If we pass all our time in a concrete jungle. No, no, no, it's not about that. It's not about the concrete jungle. It's about the pedagogies of institutions of learning. You are not allowed to graduate from college if you can't read and write. Correct? You know, you can't, you're not allowed to, you're not. But we accept that someone can be fully educated, who has not the slightest idea of anything to do with biology. Think about that. And Gary Snyder, the poet, once said to me, of course, the only two things worth studying are biology and anthropology. So, so, you know, I think, you know, how can we expect? I mean, we're not and I'm not talking about people who are unfortunate enough not to even finish high school or not even to have a dream of going to college. I mean, that that that's a whole another issue that the society has to confront. I'm talking among the most highly educated people have gone to Yale, Princeton, Stanford, you know, that are now sitting in Congress. People in Silicon Valley. How many how many people in Silicon Valley? How many people running these companies that have two billion eyeballs that they work with every day? Can, can, you know, I'm not saying you couldn't. But I mean, my point is not to be judgmental. It's just that I know I went off to college and I never studied biology in high school. I went through two and a half years at Harvard, never had to study biology. And I just happened to go to the Amazon and fall in love with plants. Yes. And you mentioned the Krebs cycle. Well, the night I I came back from the Amazon after 15 months in that first sojourn, so completely fascinated by botany, that that's all I studied. And on the night that I understood the Krebs cycle, I was thrown out of the Science Library at Harvard for making so much noise. I was racing like a like an idiot from table to table, disturbing other students as they studied Chaucer or something or whatever. They're studying. Did you know? Did you know this, you know, I was just like, I was like on a kind of a psychotic high of illumination and my point is, again, not to be judgmental, but, you know, we we we forget how how just amazingly scientifically illiterate we are. And and when you think of, for example, notions of the flow of water and the significance of water that people like the Mamos or the Kogi have, all of their ideas, which are so baroque, Byzantine in their complexity, actually are remarkably reflective of exactly what we know about water. I mean, how many people know that water is never created or nor destroyed? The water that slakes your thirst today is the same water that satisfied the needs of the dinosaurs, right? You know, water only beads up because of the oxygen atoms around the surface. That's why a tear can flow. That's why a woman's blood can flow. That's why we are all part of the hydrological cycle. Squeeze down your body, extract the sinew and the cartilage and a bit of bone and you would flow as readily to the ocean as a river, you know. And so to me, getting people to understand the the the the the brilliance of life itself, we now understand, for example, when you if you walked out of this office and walked in front of that tree, your footstep would be on top of 300 miles of mycelia, one footstep, one boot, one shoe would be standing on 300 miles of mycelia, fungal filaments that are the the nerve center, the nexus, the internet, if you will, of the Northwest Coast forest. We now know that these there's research going on at this university by this fantastic woman showing that trees communicate amongst each other, that that that a mother tree will differentially direct nutrients through the the symbiotic relations going on with those fungal mycorrhizae deliberately putting more nutrients into a seedling from herself, secondarily to a seedling from the same species and in a tertiary way to other denizens of the forest. I mean, these these miracles of biological relations that that Professor Simone has figured out are simply mind blowing. And and and so the point is we can't we can't and that's why I come down harshly on the fuzzy language of of the new age or, you know, like, you know, we have to be precise in our language. We can't just invoke kind of, you know, phantasmagoric fantasies, you know, because the truth is so much better and the truth is revealed by science and, you know, and that's when we we and I think that, you know, the one of the things about anthropology is that you know, I remember once I was in the Orinoco Delta with the Winikina Warau with a friend of mine, Werner Wilbert, whose dad was also an anthropologist and Werner was an anthropologist. And we just we paddled the dugout past a grave of a shaman. And I just remember Werner said to me, you know, Don Antonio taught my father to look beneath the surface of things. And that's what anthropology does. And and so if we think of language, you know, one of the things that maybe just before we get there, there's so many things that just still unpack. And I know we're going to get to that. There was this. Disunderstanding of it's not only that the air that I breathe in comes from flight of plane trees. And the way that I bite the apple is powered by the sun. But it's also understanding the science, being scientifically literate. Furthermore, is you give this idea that that as we have progressed, it's been millions of years of human evolution. And then agrarian times start about 10,000ish years ago. And then these brand new industrial times are only a couple hundred years old. And we're piling in this process of billions of people into metropolises and building the exponential technology age. We're piling all of civilization's answers. We think are coming from just the last couple hundred years and all of the immediate return hunter gathering, all of the agrarian, all of this. These millions of years. We're not necessarily looking for understanding how to harmoniously live in an interconnected way with each other and the other 10 million species in this biosphere and be good stewards. There's that. And then this last part that you got to that's so important is that when you take a look at the ways that trees sequester carbon and then and then distribute them amongst their amongst the roots plus mycelium networks to trees that need it more than they do, that similar style process can actually be applied to wealth and equality today. That if you're going out and purchasing, you know, a fifth yard, a fifth car, fifth plane, etc. with house, that there's plenty of ways to distribute the excess disposable income to other artists, entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, just building a better social fabric that is conducive to people unleashing their gifts around the world that just requires that understanding. Like you said, it's a it's a process of scientific literacy. It's a process of understanding these most fundamental ways that we are interconnected, interdependent and become better stewards of that said process. So you gave this point again that it's actually the most upstream issue is the pedagogy that we that we teach that the pedagogical processes of bringing our children into the world. And then what they learn is the most upstream issue and the design of the fabric that we live in being towards that stewardship. I am a huge, huge proponent of understanding that most upstream issue. And then next, I feel like is understanding the purpose. I mean, the the purpose it seems of this reality. What does it seem like to you after doing all of your work in the last several decades, what does it seem like is the point of all this? Well, I mean, let me let me just address your issue of nomads. And, you know, if you were to take the roughly, you know, 300,000 years since we've sort of been a identifiable species or so, you know, from Homo erectus and and made it a kind of a 24 hour clock. Agriculture doesn't come until 1154 p.m. So for most of our history, we were wanderers, you know, nomads on a pristine planet. And nomadic societies are really profoundly different. I mean, how do you measure wealth in a community where there's no incentive to accumulate anything? Now, nomadic societies doesn't mean they just wandered, you know, from space to space, indifferently. No, nomadic nomadic people almost invariably live in time honored territories where their movement is seasonal between known features and a landscape, which can be everything from a sacred space to a particular resource, a cost of seagull palm or whatever. But the bottom line is that societies that have to keep on the move have no incentive to accumulate anything. So if you think of a group like the man of Southeast Asia of Sarawak in Malaysia, their literal definition of wealth is the strength of social relations between people. They there is no word for thank you in their language, because sharing is a reflexive act. They really do live by the adage of the poor man. I don't think that shames us all when several Panin came to Vancouver in the late 1980s as part of this effort we had to sort of draw attention to the destruction of their rainforest homeland. Nothing impressed them in Vancouver whatsoever, even though not one of the three had been outside of the forest, really. Nothing impressed them in Vancouver save homelessness. They just could not grok how a place of such abundance could allow such scarcity. And again, back to this sort of this kind of myth making in the West that that life has been a constant evolutionary kind of set of social improvements with agriculture being identified as the great advance. Well, you can build an argument quite to the contrary, that agriculture is the greatest disaster ever to befall humanity in the sense that we talk about the Neolithic Revolution. Well, it wasn't a revolution. It was just a gradual shift. But what did that actually bring us? It brought us into close along with animal domestication. It brought us into close proximity with animals and every major disease we have from smallpox to AIDS was vectored into our population by that close proximity with animals going back to Lord knows how long for smallpox. I mean, polio is more recent, AIDS is 1959. Nutrition dropped dramatically. If we look at the the statute of paleolithic individuals in a place like Greece or Turkey, it took them till deep into the 20th century for modern man to catch up because generally agriculture implied heavy dependence on a handful of grasses, wheat, rice, millet, whatever, that were high in carbohydrate, not high in protein, and were highly susceptible to disease and to drought and to crop failure. And therefore famine became an issue. And of course, agriculture did create surplus, so surplus wasn't necessary for high civilization as we've seen on the Pacific Northwest of North America where the Sam and the Ullican, the Red Cedar allowed for civilization in the absence of the cult of the seed, but with so-called surplus, for the most part, also came hierarchy, power, exploitation and so many things. So I'm not I'm not arguing against agriculture, but it just happened. But the idea that it was this fantastic advance is not so clear. You know, we have this idea of the of the gentle farmer in the Glen, you know, nurturing his or her land. Well, the truth is the nomadic people are the ones who really looked after the natural world and agriculture, if you think about it, has been an ongoing going spreading cancer since its inception that has consumed a wild space as the planet. Again, I'm not judging. It's just what happened. So I think, again, it gets back to this idea of looking beneath the surface of things, not to say that we should all give up on agriculture. No one's talking about going to a pre-industrial pass. But again, when we the reason this stuff becomes important is that when you have sort of nation states like Malaysia being embarrassed by the nomadic panan and and and seeing their inculturation as being for the good of everybody involved, when really what it is an excuse to get indigenous people off of landscapes to open up resource exploitation on lands where they have lived for a long time and on lands upon which their presence is an impediment to those industrial developments, that's really what the whole rap of development is. The whole development paradigm is is questionable. I mean, genocide, the physical extermination of the people is universally condemned. Ethnicide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's embraced in many quarters as appropriate development policy, no pastoral nomads or or or or hunters and gatherers don't fit the image of the nation state and therefore they have to be eliminated and that that process is is something that is is occurring around the world. I mean, there's a fire burning over the earth, taking with it cultures and languages and and again, the biological analogy is apropos, extinction is a natural phenomena in nature, but but in general over the last 600 million years, speciation, the creation of new forms of life has outpaced extinction, creating a more diverse place in the biodiversity crisis we're seeing today is an aberration and anomaly and a horrific moment in time. By the same token, languages have come and gone through history. We don't speak Babylonian anymore as Syrian. We don't speak Latin in the streets of Rome. But critically, these languages slipped away at a pace which allowed them to leave descendants in the case of Latin, the Romance languages of Europe. Now languages like species are being eradicated at a pace at which they have no chance to leave descendants. I mean, just think of it. Half the languages of the world that were spoken the day you were born are not being taught to children, which means they're on the road of extinction. Now it's really important to recognize that a language is not just vocabulary or grammar, a language is a flash to the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes in the material world. Every language is an old growth forest of the mind of watershed of thought and ecosystem of social, spiritual, psychological, ecological possibilities. And to lose half the languages in generation is to literally lose half of humanity's collective knowledge, because the importance of a language is not a correlate of the number of people who speak it. The importance of a language is the fact that by definition, it is a branch in the human tree that goes back for multiple generations. Yes. And there are many people who say, wouldn't the world be a better place if we all spoke one or two languages, wouldn't communication be facilitated? And my answer to that is to always say, what a great idea, but let's make that universal language in noptituk. Let's make it Quechua. Let's make it Haida. Let's make it Lakota and so on. And you suddenly begin to feel as a native speaker of English, what it'd be like to be enveloped in silence, to have no means or ability to pass on the wisdom of your ancestry or to anticipate the promise of your descendants, but that dreadful fate is supplied if somewhere on earth every two weeks, because on average, according to linguists, every fortnight, some elder passes away and carries with them into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. And the question that is so haunting is given the fact that this consensus has been shared by linguists without really any doubt on their part for a long time. I certainly stumbled upon it. I mean, it was really first brought up by Michael Krause. I think it was 1992 in his seminal paper, academic paper, I can't remember even where it was published, but I think it was called The Death of Languages. You know, he was the one and then and then Ken Hale at MIT. But no one was screaming about it, you know, until, you know, I came along to the National Geographic and began to scream about it because not that I was a linguist, but the fact is that I was concerned with the erosion of cultural diversity and that the issue of language loss was something that audiences could really understand. You know, you could talk vaguely about the importance of culture. But if you actually said to people, how would you feel if you couldn't pass on your wisdom to your children? You know, that really got people. And, you know, the reason, I mean, you know, when people ask me, well, why didn't people cry out about the crisis? And the answer really is two words, Noam Chomsky. You know, Noam Chomsky was a brilliant linguist. He was also a wonderfully progressive and remains a wonderfully progressive figure whose credentials as one of the consistent opponents to Vietnam, you know, were burnished as already formidable credentials as an academic linguist and and made him almost beyond reproach for good and bad reasons. And Chomsky's original insight was really brilliant. He basically said, you know, this idea that languages are acquired by children as a kind of reward system and a kind of behavioral sense like Skinner might report, you know, that, you know, Johnny says, I love your dad and gets an apple, you know, as a reward. Chomsky, I think really was brilliant and saying that's ridiculous. He said language acquisition is an incredibly complex thing. And it happens in all cultures at roughly the same age. And he quite brilliantly said, well, there's got to be some kind of hard wiring. We've got to be hardwired as a species for language acquisition. And what that wiring consisted of was unclear. It wasn't a physical organ like your heart or lungs, but it was like a cognitive space. He hypothesized what he called a universal grammar that were whereby people could really make this extraordinary adaptation and acquire language at the age of two, you know, walk, one, talk to your father. Now, now that was all brilliant. But the problem was that, again, going back to the biological analogy, you know, if you are a biologist and you want to study the origin of life and molecular biologists, what do you study? You study DNA and you don't really care if the DNA comes from, you know, a common fruit fly or rare panda bear because DNA is basically consistent, right? So you go for the fruit fly because it's easier. Doesn't mean that your same panda bears aren't important, but their survival is in the realm of conservation biologists or ecologists or whatever, right? Environmentalists. I'm focused on the essence of life, DNA, and I can get it from fruit flies. Well, in a way, Chomsky was saying, the really important thing we need to understand is the universal grammar. This we need to approach this cognitive space and try to delineate its parameters, its dimensions through theoretical inquiry, right? And and how that, in a way, genotype of language, if you will, is expressed really doesn't matter. Or if it does, you know, I'm not interested. But the real message was it doesn't really matter. And it got as far as them saying that to run around the world trying to document and record the the syntax, the grammar, the word list, the vocabularies, the dictionaries of all these dying languages spoken by 15 people or a thousand people or whatever was fundamentally kind of a waste of time. And that was never said explicitly, but it was from everything I gather from people like Michael Cross and Ken Hale, who was a colleague of Chomsky at MIT. It was kind of the message that Chomsky was just so powerful and so brilliant and so politically popular because of his positions on Vietnam and other progressive issues, that he was kind of untouchable. And so as a linguist friend said to me not too many years ago, if we had all the money in the world, limitless budget, just to document the dying languages of the world or the fading languages or the threatened languages better because I like the idea that languages never die. They just sleep. They can always be brought back. But if we had all the money in the world to document all the extant languages of humanity, we couldn't do it because there are literally not enough linguists trained to do that kind of work. There are millions of linguists trained to do theoretical work with elements of language and so on. And so the whole that Chomsky had on the profession, for whatever the theoretical advances that he was able to inspire and more power to him for that, from everything I understand from colleagues who are linguists, it held back things for at least 20 years. And then in 1998, when I came along and read Michael Cross's paper, which I think was 1992, so I was late to the game and I started to scream about it from my bully pulpit of the National Geographic. And I was just one of many voices, but in a certain sense, it kind of damn broke. It was like the old proverbial, what if the emperor has no clothes? And beginning in the first decade of this century, there was this kind of amazing tsunami of publications by people like my friend David Harrison and David Crystal and just a slew of books. Now I've literally got a shelf of books on language loss. Lyle Campbell at University of Utah was brilliant. He's now at Hawaii. You know, the shelf of books, but most of those got published after 2000, in other words, there was an amazing dearth of literature because it wasn't considered to be important. And then suddenly this new generation came along of real field linguists who were saying, you're damn right, it's important. And now there's been this really gratifying counter-revolution, if you will, where language revitalization, documentation is happening all around the world. I mean, there's a wonderful group called Wikitunks, where a young kid, I forget what the school was. I think it was trying to remember what school it was in New York State. I lectured, gave a guest speech back in the late 90s, and this kid was in the audience. And he just got turned on to this issue of language. He started this global grassroots thing called Wikitunks, where they send young, backpacking kids all around the world recording languages. And they're getting to be more than just backpackers, highly skilled young kids. Yeah, that's a really beautiful way of putting it, that the way that we get to endeavor into consciousness and express ourselves and communicate with each other, to be able to capture that. Those the languages prior to the ethnographic condensation that's occurring, just like we are so passionate about the biodiversity, saving that and cataloging that and restoring that, revitalizing that. To be similarly passionate about language like that, to understand how the spirit engages with the world and with each other through language. And I also wanted to say this, there's a way that places like Silicon Valley and the genius of engineers and artificial intelligence actually help with processes like this, which is that there are some cultures around the world that are beginning to use indigenous cultures around the world that are beginning to use voice memos on their smartphone technology. And so to be able to parse those voice memos using natural language processing and then be able to make a power law distribution of the most common words used and try and parse further about what the words actually mean and get, like you said, train more people on linguistics to be able to assist with that process and to begin cataloging through these voice memos that they're sending each other. That's a really great way to leverage technology for something like capturing the languages of the world. And then and this may even be the pressing question of our time is it may be the purpose of this reality is exactly what we're going through right now. This very interesting time of transition that we're going through and being able to make it through this. You know, I mean, I think I think you're right in a sense. Look, it's one of the things that really has helped me in my life is a quote from Peter Matheson, one of my favorite writers who said anyone who thinks they can change the world is both wrong and dangerous. And what he meant was obviously people like Mao, Hitler and Stalin, Paul Pot, for that matter, didn't mean that we didn't have an obligation to bear witness to the world. But if you if you have this expectation that you know how the world should be and you try to impose it on people, it almost never is for the betterment of anyone. And by the same token, if you if you get wrapped up in the latest sort of current of discouraging news, it doesn't really allow you to stay long in the game. In other words, when I was a young man, deeply involved in the anti-war movement, I would get so disappointed or the environmental movement if we lost an environmental battle. It was it was it could be devastating, you know. And then I began to adopt a more what might be Cullum's more Buddhist perspective that, you know, you're not in it to win. You're in it for the path. In other words, you're you don't have any expectation of the destination or the goal, let alone a victory. You just do it because it's the right thing to do. And that that was really helpful to me because it didn't make me any less engaged or any less effective. It just lowered my expectations in a way that that reduced exposure to disappointment, in a sense, and allowed me to keep going. And you realize that you do this because it's just what you want to do. And it reminded me of my father, who was not a religious or let alone a Christian person, but he always said to me, you know, the sun, there's good and evil in the world and pick your side and get on with it. We have this sort of thing in in in Christianity that that evil will be somewhat eventually vanquished by the Christ child, right? But that's never going to happen and it never has happened. And people, for example, in the Hindu faith would never expect it to happen. Lord Krishna was asked the famous question that caused heretics and medieval France to be burned at the stake. If God's all powerful, why does he allow evil to exist in the universe? Lord Krishna said to thicken the plot. In other words, we know this is the thick in the plot. And and it's always going to be there. So you know, in that sense, I think you you you can you can it can help you weather storms like the one we're going through now, where things seem to be so discouraging, where, you know, democracy thrives in the truth and autocracy thrives on on lies. You know, the bigger, the better. And we can see this in in countries like Turkey and Russia and the United States, where where where really the forces of our of darkness are ascended in some sense. But at a deeper level, what we're really seeing, I think, is and certainly in the United States, it seems to me that the kind of the classic schism between the two halves of the American reality right now still fundamentally come down to whether you're opposed to or on the side of these this remarkable set of social transformations that occurred beginning in the 1960s and through the whole process of change. And I mean, it's not just in 1960s of women getting the birth control pill. People changing attitudes towards race. But I mean, you know, whenever the right wing gets sort of nostalgic for the 1950s, I often wonder what world they think they lived in. It was an absolutely horrible time if you were gay, if you were a woman, if you were black and it was stultifying even if you were from a privileged white upper class family. I mean, I can't imagine how tedious and horrible the 1950s must have been. How confining. And I think a lot of the classic kind of divide is, you know, it's not like the 60s were some kind of golden era. Lord knows we we elected Nixon twice, you know, more people looked like Trisha Nixon than Joni Mitchell, you know. But the point is there was a sea change of attitudes, which for better or for worse. And it seems to me that a lot of what the divide is about now, those who are comfortable with those changes fundamentally and those for whom those changes remain an incredible threat. Like, even if you look at the evangelical right, I mean, one of the most fascinating things that's going on within the evangelical right in America right now is how young people from that world are turning their backs on it. In other words, the the the number of young millennials who are moving in those circles is plummeting, right, even if it means abandoning their beliefs of their families, because they're they're looking around and they are actually seen evangelical Christianity as synonymous with the hypocrisy of Donald Trump. And they're not having any of it. So the actual far right evangelical right, you know, where you can have some like Billy Graham's son literally say that Donald Trump is the second coming of Christ. I mean, I've heard that. I mean, I've had missionaries in the jungle of South America tell me that Henry Kissinger was the second coming of Christ literally in the wake of the Yankees per war that I remember when I I heard that I thought, well, there are two men in the world who now think that, you know, we have so many other topics that I want to cover with you. So this is something that's very near and dear to many of our hearts. So we have the difference between cultural exchange versus appropriation. And this is something that anthropologists are trying to figure out how to do in a way that's harmonious. And there's a couple of movements here. One of them is like a fashion anthropology, which we think is very interesting, which is people going into indigenous subcultures and understanding how they harmonize with their environments, what they do with their sacred arts. And then if the indigenous, you know, you ask and you engage with in their community, you understand the power balance and dynamic that's happening. You do research on that. And then sometimes you maybe take, if they're interested, take and try and spread their messages of their indigenous subculture around the world, but then to be able to do that in a way that's truly harmonious versus feeling like it's appropriation. So my question about that is you had something that came up as well for you with the serpent in the rainbow, because this is interesting. You went in trying to understand Haitian voodoo and try and share that with the rest of the world and then sold the rights to the Hollywood, who then you said also egregiously misappropriated it. What do we do? Yeah, I mean, that was a tricky one because, you know, my entire mission was to try to take this religion that had been used, exploding in explicitly racist way. You know, I mean, the idea that voodoo was somehow black magic was so outrageous. I mean, if I ask you to name the great religions of the world, what continent do we always leave out? Sub-Saharan Africa and of course voodoo was just the religion of that region of the world in the quintessentially democratic faith in which the believer not only has direct access to the divine, but actually becomes a God, which is why Haitians always said to me, you know, white people go to church and speak about God, we dance in the temple and become God. So I really was on a kind of mission to use a zombie phenomena that in particular had been used to exploit the voodoo faith and try to make sense out of sensation. And that's what I really did try to do in my books. And ironically, one of the reasons that we had this cliche about voodoo came from the fact that in the 1920s, the US Marine Corps occupied Haiti and everybody above the rank sergeant got a book contract and the books had names like Cannibal Cousins, Black Bag Bed and they gave rise to the RKO movies of the 40s, Night of the Living Dead and so on, which created and perpetuated this cliche of children bred for the cauldron zombies crying out of the grave to attack people, voodoo dolls, pins and needles and so on. And then I write this book and it was well received and someone wanted to buy the film rights. And the the producer, who's a great friend of mine to this day, David Ladd, thought that he had Peter Weir. I was told Peter Weir would be the director and and a year of living dangerously was kind of a perfect prototype for the film. So I thought that was really exciting. So I signed away the rights and with the studio and Peter Weir just on Mosquito Coast, it goes down the line and ends up in West Craven sand. Even West is a good guy, late died. But West wanted to make a real A picture, but by the time the film gets back to Universal Studios, a voodoo zombie, they got it up and the film came out in the way the film, although it remains very popular, was certainly in my eyes sort of a betrayal of the sentiment of the book in that very important way. How do we ensure its cultural exchange? What are some main principles for anthropologists? Well, I first of all, I don't think, you know, it's like it's we have this idea that these cultures are so fragile and delicate, they must be protected from us, you know, and I think that's an incredibly conceited, patronizing, colonial idea. I mean, I've spent all of my life amongst indigenous people and I've never had an experience where I wasn't absolutely certain that if I misbehaved or offended people or simply was my presence was no longer required or desired, they would just tell me to leave. I mean, I just this there's a kind of a precious conceit in this idea that these all these poor people, I find it really repugnant, you know. And in that sense, you know, information and and and cultural diffusion has always happened, you know. You know, I think, you know, cultural appropriation is a tricky thing, because on the one hand, we want the messages of the elder brothers, for example, to spread around the world. They want, they feel this idea that these societies are isolated. I mean, there are certain isolated societies and they're very very clear issues there about how do you how do you make sure that those societies are not ravaged by contact or with diseases or exploited or, you know, and no one's got the answer for that, frankly. But spiritual awareness with trying to share what the elder brother knows with the younger brother? Well, I mean, I mean, I think that, you know, you talk to the mammals, they want what they're they want people to be spokespeople, you know, I find I find it, first of all, you know, this idea of the anthropologists going in to study them. That's like 50 years out of date. No one does that. You know, everything I've ever done. I'm a storyteller studying ourselves. We're studying ourselves and and we're we're as a storyteller. I tell stories and I never tell stories without full collaboration of the people among whom I'm living as a guest. I mean, every film I've ever been made has always been based on strict protocols and agreements and compensation and and training and everything else. It's all, you know, I have the strongest sense that it, you know, that that that it's about it's not the traditional versus the modern. It's what kind of world do we all want to live in? And in that sense, I may be seen as old fashioned or blind to what they like to call my privilege, you know, which is a notion I completely reject. You know, I, you know, I I've been a storyteller since, you know, I went off to South America when I was 19, you know, living on three dollars a day on the streets of South America. You know, I didn't feel very privileged much at that time, you know. And, you know, I think I think there are issues when, you know, I mean, a classic example would be ayahuasca, you know, which has gone from this incredibly obscure, traditional, sacred potion to being sort of dispensed on every street corner by legitimate people and also by mail order mystics. You know, I mean, the the international acclaim of ayahuasca just is shocking to me when I came back from Columbia in 1975, I mean, I lived there 15 months on that first trip and take an ayahuasca in traditional context a couple, three times, you know, I mean, I could have mentioned the word ayahuasca no one in a million would have heard it, you know. And now it's sort of I just gave a keynote at a conference in Barcelona with an ayahuasca, 2000 people there, you know. You know, I mean, I think cultural appropriation ranges from stealing the Belgian marbles, you know, from Greece to an ongoing serious epidemic of marketing of rare treasures through illicit smuggling, you know, rings, which should be heavily policed and heavily condemned to more subtle things. But I reject the idea that ever places a cloak of fragility and and around peoples that are, in fact, in my experience, indescribably strong. Yeah, this gets this gets back to this fundamental idea, you know, that, you know, what's, you know, we have this idea that these cultures quaint and colorful are sort of destined to fade away as if by natural laws, if they're failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at keeping up when nothing could be further from the truth. In every case, these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces and those forces can be ideological, the cult of modernity, the Marxist mania of Beijing or whatever, or they can be industrial, as we well know. But the exciting thing is that if human beings are actually the cultural diversity is being lost by actions of human beings, we can also be the facilitators of cultural survival. That's right. And so I think I think that's where I come down on. You know, it's not about us versus them. It's about what kind of world are we all going to live in? Where is our directional arrow pointed and the preservation and the revival and the cataloging of that is crucial? And we didn't get too deep into psychoactive. But oh, my goodness, the way that just quickly the way that psychedelics and entheogens play into the evolution of consciousness and to be I think one of the most democratized fruits of those upcoming. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I find so fascinating is that when we look at those sort of social transformations of the last 40 years that we've identified, you know, the role of women, the position of people of color, the unbelievable fact that gay men and women can marry inconceivable in my youth. That's right. The idea that we could really look at the earth as Gaia, you know, a living interactive planet, which is what so threatens the people of the more traditional far right. I mean, these ideas, I mean, let me do that again. I mean, the thing that we forget is that this incredible social transformation, women in a generation going from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people, men and women from the closet to the altar, schoolchildren talking of biodiversity, the biosphere of Gaia, people beginning to abandon traditional patriarchal religion for the subtle nuances of the Dharma in Buddhism, which is one of the fastest growing religions in the West. The fact that we really are seeing the earth in almost metaphysical terms as a living entity. Now, all of the things from above that I mentioned are profoundly threatening to someone who isn't prepared to accept them. I mean, my gosh, I mean, you know, someone who still hasn't, for lack of a better word, an old fashioned notion of gender roles, of biblical creation, of the static, you know, I mean, people always, as Bobby, Robert Kennedy always said, you know, people always invoke and astound, people who are afraid of the future, uncertain of the present, always invoke nostalgia for the past, for a world of the past that never existed, but has to be assumed to have existed to rationalize their fears of today and tomorrow, right? And so people have been asked to absorb a lot, right? But that said, when we look at the genesis of those transformations, I find it fascinating that the one ingredient in the recipe of social change that is constantly expunged from the record is that millions of us lay prostrate before the gates of awe, having taken some psychedelic. I don't use drugs. I never really have gotten into marijuana. I have no interest. But I took psychedelics and I'm proud to say that I wouldn't write the way I write. I wouldn't think the way I think likewise. I wouldn't have understood the nature of cultural relativism as an anthropologist. I wouldn't treat women the way I do. Our parents used to say, don't take these things. You'll never come back the same. That was a whole bloody point, right? And so so so I think that the one of the very positive things going on today is a very judicious and cautious, it feels cautious, revitalization of the use of psychedelics. And finally, the recognition that these substances can be legitimate tools for clinical use in certain cases and for, you know, research. So so I mean, all this stuff is moving ahead. It's just it's not going to be smooth because the changes that we're endorsing are profoundly unsettling to those not prepared to recognize. And the fact that the genies out of the bottle ain't going back. And the tsunami of social change and transformation and spiritual growth and reinvention of our entire sense of ourselves on the planet. It's rolling forward and, you know, get out of the way if you're not prepared because it'll drown you if you're not prepared to float upon it. Yeah, the awakening is happening with a myriad of tools and that the transition we are going to succeed in. I'm very proud that that collectively the awakening is happening, given the timeliness of the time of transition. I mean, it's just it's so beautiful. And Wade, thank you very much for coming on the program. Oh, thanks, Alex. It's been fun. It's been such an honor. I really appreciate you. My pleasure. Thanks for making the effort. And I look forward to our future conversations. I know that you have a you have an upcoming book that we didn't get to, but that we will potentially later when when it does come up. Magdalena River of Dreams. It's your love story to Colombia. Yeah, I mean, you know, Colombia hasn't deserved its agonies. You know, it's it's it's worth just pointing out before we go that how would America feel if Canada's patterns of drug consumption and its laws, which did not curb that consumption, but facilitated black market in that set of drugs resulted in eighty five million Americans, eighty five million Americans being driven from their homes. Well, that's what happened in Colombia. Most Colombians have never seen cocaine, used cocaine, and the engine that's been driving the entire conflict in Colombia is cocaine and the engine that drives the production and consumption of cocaine is consumption. That's the engine. And so everybody you know who uses cocaine as a blood of Colombian people on their hands. Wow, that's going to be a wild book. Yeah. And we talked about this before we were starting, but the importance of of writing with the with the passion for Awakening, something that's going to leave a big mark on on Awakening. Wow. I ask this question a lot on the program. So I'm curious just to hear your quick thoughts on it. Does it feel like humanity is a biological bootloader for digital super intelligence? I'm not sure what that means. Does it feel like we're all building super intelligence or general intelligence that that's our destiny to build that? No, I very thought terrifies me. Very thought terrifies me. And why? Because it's abundantly clear that we have lost our ability to. To monitor and control. Even the initial wave of transformation that the digital frontier has allowed us. You know, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, six basically six billionaires in Silicon Valley have within their hands the ability to protect or frankly destroy democratic traditions that have developed in such a powerful way, but always on by definition a fragile foundation. You know, the minute the minute that that truth no longer is grounded in reality, that people can invent their own realities. That's a that's a terrifying, terrifying frontier. Not a place I ever want to live. Yeah, to be able to take deep spiritual, moral, ethical, philosophical roots and embed them into the exponential technology age is paramount. And we need to do that with greater vigor moving forward. Imagine defending, defending using the language of free speech to defend individuals who are prepared to get on a public podium and lie or promote the most horrific of of of aberrant behaviors to compromise to compromise all the dreams of our forefathers and to allow that to happen for profit and to use the gloss of freedom of speech to defend your personal desire for maintaining a flow of profits as opposed to proper responsibilities is just abhorrent. If we don't get the top of the hierarchy of the 1500 billionaires at the top, the ones that owned the corporations, I would start with six, I would start with six men in Silicon Valley. Yeah, forget about the 15 and government leaders in general. Yeah, the government leaders have no role in it. They're not they're not doing anything. Well, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, I mean, these are just period. I mean, Donald Trump, et cetera. But then also just the top, like you said, these top six billionaires. But the irony, the irony is women, I was just saying that just in general, just the getting those top people, having feelings of ego loss or interconnectedness, well, that's not going to happen. That's like asking for empathy from Hitler. But the point is that you can point to these global leaders, but we can't control Putin. We can't control Xi. But we're talking now about six Americans in Silicon Valley who have in their hands the capacity to tame the Internet and to truly eliminate it as a place where truth does not matter. And those six men have a responsibility. And if they turn their backs on it, then the problems of the Internet will have died in their lifetimes. Yeah, they are American, they are Americans, they are Californians. You know, forget about Putin. I mean, we can't control Putin anyway. You're focused on that. I love that. OK, that's that's that's that's a wrap. OK, good. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below in the episode. Let us know what you're thinking on all of the different things that Wade was teaching us. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Also, check out the links in the bio below to Wade's work. Check out those links. Go watch his films on his website. Please go watch those. They are so profoundly awakening. Go and check those out and support his other works, please. Also, support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the spiritual leaders, the organizations in your communities and around the world that you believe in, support them and help them flourish, help the collective awakening happen, support them, please and help them grow. You can find all of our links to our show in the bio below. You can support us as well. So continue doing cool things like coming on site to interview great people. Wade and go and manifest that next world. Everyone, let's get there together. We love you very much. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you soon. Peace. You're so sweet, man. That's it. You're so nice. That's it. And it's so nice to see the way you're doing this.