 But I think there is another path and there's another possible future for humanity which actually could be very positive but it involves a certain kind of collapse not a collapse of civilization itself but a collapse of this capitalist system that is driving us to these bifurcations and driving us to this completely unsustainable path this notion of endless growth on a finite planet that we're on right now. And this path would be to actually move towards a civilization that some people and I've taken up this phrase myself because I love it and some people call it an ecological civilization. Basically I'm laying the groundwork for a civilization that's founded on a different basis rather than one that's based on wealth accumulation, exploitation and extraction one that's actually built on life affirming principles built on the same conditions that allow ecosystems to thrive for millions of years sustainably and in great health. And a civilization that actually starts off by setting the conditions for all humans to be able to flourish on a regenerative and on regenerated earth. Jeremy Lent is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Jeremy, described by Guardian journalist George Monboy as one of the greatest thinkers of our age, is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization, existential crisis and explores the future of our civilization and the future of our civilization. Existential crisis and explores pathways towards a life affirming future. His award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct, A Cultural History of Humanity Search for Meaning examines the way humans have made meaning from the cosmos, from hunter-gatherer times to the present day. His new book, The Web of Meaning, I've got it right here. I absolutely love it. I'm in love with this book. I've read both books, but this book is the tell-all. I absolutely love it. Integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe offers a solid foundation for an integrative worldview that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future. He is the founder of the non-profit Liligie Institute and writes topical articles exploring the deeper patterns of political and cultural developments of meeting. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you so much, Mark. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. Thanks. I am too. It's so good that we could connect and we're trying to collaborate and work on a few projects together. And for me, that's just so wonderful because there's so much alignment. I first and foremost want to start out kind of really basic for my guests and listeners who don't know you, who've never heard of you or your book. Kind of, if you don't mind, tell me how you got on this path of doing what you do. And when we spoke earlier offline, you said you're kind of new to the scene as far as the author and speaker in the subject matter. Yeah, yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. And maybe the place to begin is to just kind of notice that those two books you were just talking about, they both have the word meaning, like in their title or subtitle, like there's the patenting instinct, a cultural history of humanity's search for meaning and then this new book, the web of meaning. And I think that it's kind of, that's a key indicator of how I got to this place where I'm a writer and what I'm writing about is it was very much around my own search for meaning, about my own realization, sort of in the middle of my life, kind of a midlife crisis, if you want to label it like that, where I realized that the way I had been living my life was not fulfilling that sense of meaning. I really wanted to understand what that was about. Because in fact, the first half of my adult life was actually spent in business. I got an MBA, I started an internet company during that first dot com boom and took it public. I was CEO of the company and having a grand old time, flying around the country in the world. And then things began to kind of crash around me. My wife at the time, she passed away some years back, but she got very sick. And I left the company to look after her, but I left the company when it was too young and it then collapsed a year or two after I'd left it. Meanwhile, my wife had was suffering from cognitive decline. And so the person I loved that I'd been with ever since I was 21 years old, I was no longer even being able to relate to even though I was looking after her. So it's like everything collapsed around me. And that was terrifying. And I went through years of what felt like a purgatory, but it was also this opportunity to let things, like a crucible, to let things kind of melt. And I was determined that whatever I did in the rest of my life would really fulfill my sense of meaning and purpose. But what was that? That was the question I asked. And so I spent years basically trying to figure out these concepts that we just take around us, whether it's big ideas like God or soul or meaning itself or humanity or nature or all these things, what were they? And I began to try to look through history as to where these ideas evolved from and then realized that other cultures had very different ways of understanding started to look at science and neuroscience and cognitive science and anthropology to understand where humans got these ideas from in the first place. And all that led me to end up at some point going, it'd be really great if somebody could write a, if I'd come across a book that actually helped me to sort out all these things. And I realized, well, let me go ahead and do that. It's like I was putting this sort of jigsaw puzzle together, all of the different pieces. So that was this earlier book, The Patterning Instinct which is this history of humanitarian search for meaning. But perhaps most important for me was that this search actually did yield something. And I realized I came across a sense of deep meaning and purpose in life. I got to understand how meaning itself was this function of connectedness and how we live in our modern society according to a world view that we take as reality that is plain wrong. It's scientifically invalid even though we think that it's based on science. And I realized that there's another way of looking at things where traditional wisdom can truly point us to some of the same insights that modern science also points us to. And that's what this current book The Web of Meaning is about. Oh, absolutely love that. And so I'm so sorry for your loss in that you had to go through those hard times. It seems like it takes that for humanity to kind of get a wake-up call to kind of say, hey, something's wrong. What's the meaning of life? What's the purpose? This whole pandemic time has been a huge wake-up call for many people to say, hey, our systems, our civilization frameworks that we're operating on, they're just not working for us all anymore. And there's this dis-ease or discomfort around the world of people exiting and traveling and moving and trying to find new meanings and travel or different places around the world where they're just saying, hey, this where I live, where this structure is, where I was born is just the system's not working for me anymore. And I hope many of them aren't as tragic as what you had to go through, but the pandemic was pretty bad for many people. And I think it was also a big wake-up call that our infrastructures, our systems that we live in are just not working for us all anymore. They're not in harmony with the world or nature. And so I love that. I totally agree with George Montboy on what he said and many of the other accolades that you have in the book and reviews. I would almost have to say beyond a decade, I would have to say a century, I'm not a century old, obviously, but 51 years old, I would have to say this is the best book I have read and the last four years that brings it all together. And my question really is is, I've had that same experience in that same film that you had, where is the one history lesson or teacher or book out there that kind of puts all this complexity, all this science, all this big history together into one spot and gives us the state that humanity's living in and dealing with whether it's global citizen or New Yorker or someone from China that we're kind of all living in this crazy, crazy world that we've set up for each other. And I just haven't been able to find them. And the thing about your book, which was really fabulous, is all the individual books that I read that says, okay, here's one facet or two facets of this complex system, Joseph Campbell, Lynn Margulis, Peter Singer, Stefano Mancuso or many of the other great authors or writers that you've referenced in your book. And you say, okay, they talk about this and this is the big history, here's the story. But you put it all together in one book, you reference it. So if we wanna know more, we can go check it out there. But it's this big systems perspective of this true web of meaning. Besides all those individual books, did you run across any individual book out there that says that you'd say, wow, that came very close? Frick Holfkaper, and I'm a Kaper graduate, he does the four-word and patterning instincts and you've connected with him in many different ways. I would say probably he comes the closest, especially with his last book, the Patterns of Connection was his last book, is probably the closest book that I can think of. But other than that, is there any other sources out there that you said, boy, that comes really close or thought wisdoms out there? Yeah, that's a great question. And definitely if you hadn't mentioned Frick Holfkaper, I would have said that probably, yeah, he was one of the writers who I came across who have really pulled it together for me. It was really early in that sort of project, that multi-year project I was talking about that I came across his work. Initially it was just, I was really kind of didn't even know where to begin, but somewhere in my memory, I knew there was this great book called The Dow of Physics that had been written years ago that looked really cool. So I think let me make that one of my entry points, which I really enjoyed. And that's somewhat dated now after 50 years, but a great trailblazing work of its time. But then I came across some of his books from some decades back, like The Web of Life, for example, and The Turning Point, which talks about the system's view of life. And what's so kind of funny when I look back on it is I was reading this book of his and really getting a sense of, well, this is opening my mind. And then I came across this chapter called The System's View of Life or whatever it was called. And this looks really boring. Systems view, I don't even, I'm not sure why you would want to read this chapter. I wonder if I can skip it, but I figured let me just read it anyway. It opened my whole life up to a completely different way of making sense of things. But it's got such a, I always think systems thinking has a bad, like a marketing problem, in the sense that it's just sounds, for somebody who's not into it, it sounds so boring. Why do I want to think about systems? What's so interesting about that? And of course, for those of who do, who have entered into it, it opens up a whole different way of looking at the connectedness of all aspects of life that's profound. But other people, there have been some great writers, there have been so many, there's hard to even list them. One writer who really pulled a lot of things together for me in a very profound way is a philosopher, a biology called Evan Thompson, who wrote a deep book called Mind in Life. And it's Philosophical, and it's kind of hard slogging and if people who are not used to that kind of thing, but it was a brilliant book that showed some of the deeper connections that I really tried to make a little bit more easy to access whatever in my book, to web of meaning, like recognizing these deep interpenetration between these big concepts of life and mind and systems thinking, and also Buddhist thoughts. And he's one of the leading thinkers who looks at how Buddhism and systems orientation and life-based biology intersect. So, and there's others like that, but honestly, there's nobody that I've come across who's really done this kind of, tried to really encompass basically everything in this overall view, which is why I call it the web of meaning as the title of the book, because basically I don't view myself as having a great number of great insights of my own, like having done my research in this area and I need to tell the world, this is what this is about, that's about that. What I really view my own role and what hopefully I have some skill in is looking at these great insights from so many different, brilliant researchers and people in different fields, whether it's systems thinking, evolutionary biology or a deep analysis of wisdom traditions, whatever they might be, and weaving together the elements about them that show how they relate to each other, not to sort of create some overall kind of mishmash to sort of a lowest common denominator, but sort of the opposite by showing how one area enlightens our ability to really understand at a greater level, another area. And to really open this recognition that so many people in so many fields around the world are actually working together in this kind of more connected to create, to flesh out this more connected worldview and potentially offer a pathway for humanity that could be so much better into the future. Yeah, and I thank you for the recommends of the books and I just want the listeners to know that just the few that I mentioned, I mean, there's James Lovelock, there's so many people that you mentioned throughout the book and their wisdoms and writings that I think is probably the most complete, I don't know if compendium is the right word, compilation of this web of meaning and different thoughts and how we got to certain places and how we think those, in all my podcasts, I always ask all my guests and I've done this for several years, I ask them a couple of questions, I ask them the burning question WTF and it's not the swear word, although this pandemic time, we've probably been thinking it quite a bit. It's actually what's the futures, plural, what's the futures? And then the other one is what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? They're kind of very similar questions because if we don't know what the future is, we don't know what the goal or the journey or the path is or what the meaning is. It's most likely we're not working to get there but we also will never reach that because we don't have a clear path or a way to get there and to view the world. And eventually we hit a point in our lives, some all of us where we get that wake up call one way or the other where we start to ask ourselves those questions and whether that's the right time for us or not, the reason I ask those questions is because we don't learn this in school. I don't, are there schools out there? Are there schools of thoughts or places in this world where you get this operating manual for spaceship Earth kind of like our but minister Fuller where you can go and say, okay, this kind of gives you all the help and insight. Is there such a thing or is this kind of the human condition that we have to be in search of these questions? Yeah, well, it would be wonderful if this were the kind of standard graduate level course it was offered around the world. But I mean, to my knowledge, there's a couple of places that I think are attempting to offer something like this. One is actually here in the Bay Area where I live there's CIS Center for Integral Studies which tries to offer something like that, tries to look, it's called Integral Studies is tries to integrate different layers tying in religion with science, with studies of consciousness, with ecological awareness which and you know, it's a big task but I think they really are trying to offer that kind of scope. In the UK, there's Schumacher College which is similarly offers graduate courses in something approaching this kind of more integrated way of looking at our world but they're few and far between and we need a lot more of them without doubt. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely and they're not there and that's kind of also why I began this search is because a lot of the things that we learned and I've heard you talk about it not only in your book but offline you do some pretty good speeches and talks about your books and how to kind of make sense of certain things and how these patterns of instinct kind of develop is really asking the questions and diving into how they evolved and that you say a lot of them are wrong. These are things that we learned through life that are the way the world works but they're absolutely false. And the biggest one is and you talk about it in the book and I wanna talk to you about it now and it's basically that there's this kind of a Darwin misunderstanding that natural selection, survival of the fittest, severe competition only the strong survive type of mentality that's worked its way into corporations into our civilization frameworks where we were in this competition and marketing and fight with each other and struggle in this battle with each other to be successful and to make our way in the world but that's absolutely not how the world works. That's neo-liberalism, that's neo-Darwinism and our world doesn't work that way and Lynn Margolis and also through Fritholf Capra is how I came to Lynn Margolis and all her work and with Dorian Sagan, her son and she was the first wife of Carl Sagan just the wonderful things that we learned through there that that's not how the world works. And so I kind of would like to get that connection from you to explain it a little bit more to us all these misnomers or these fallacies. Absolutely and I think that's so critical and we were talking before about I was talking about my own journey and when I look back on the first years of that intellectual journey I was taking this is exactly where I was kind of what I was stuck with because I was determined in my own search for meaning that whatever place of meaning I came to would be truly integrated in the sense that I wasn't going to take somebody else's word for it and I had to really believe it in my brain it had to make sense to my heart, my heart, mine my being, but also I wasn't going to just take some woo woo oh trust me this is all nice and make you feel good that wasn't going to work for me. So I was looking at the hard science and surely these leading scientists can tell us where it's all about. And of course just like I came across Richard Capra very early on I came across Richard Dawkins very early on and oh the selfish gene that he's and everyone respects this guy so let me figure out how biology works through reading this and his message was racing and as I read this book which basically says that we are just kind of these machines dominated by our selfish genes and evolution works that each gene is as selfish as possible and out competes the other and that's the beauty of evolution and that's just the way it is. And where I was at that point was well if this is true then I'll have to work with it but it didn't make sense to my own core feeling tone about life but I was going to go where the science led me if you will. And then along with that is this kind of ontological reductionism which is similar to Dawkins type thinking saying ultimately the universe itself is meaningless it's just a bunch of billiard bulls hitting each other and that's what it's about. And so don't look for meaning if you're going to look for some sense of meaning in the universe then you're just going to kid yourself like you know but if you really want to take know what's true just accept what science tells you I was ready to do that but then I discovered that all that stuff is plain wrong. So in terms of Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene like as you mentioned I came across Lynn Margolis and her work and got to understand actually it's fundamentally different from what Dawkins says. For starters the gene itself doesn't actually direct evolution the way we're told. What we've now know from recent decades in cellular biology and evolutionary biology is that's actually this evolution itself as a complex system and as a complex system what it means is that there's feedback effects. So while the gene actually yes it carries a lot of information that affects how the organism is the organism itself or the cell in which the gene exists actually determines what parts of the gene to express what to turn on and off. So this is feedback flow nothing and it's not about the gene telling everything what it should be. That's the first flaw in that understanding that's common knowledge at this point or common lack of knowledge or whatever or common ignorance if you will. But the second one is that when people look at the timeline of evolution from when life first began on earth just over four billion years ago to now there's been like maybe just a few maybe four or five major steps in the increase in complexity of life that's led in the last few hundred million years to this incredible abundant world we live in today filled with rich ecosystems and all the miraculous and beauty of everything we see around us. Each of those steps in the increase of complexity of life came about not from competition but actually from different species different organisms learning how to cooperate with each other in a process is known as mutually beneficial symbiosis where two different organisms essentially get together and say I'm good at this you're good at that. Now if I try to outcompete you then that's not gonna last very well but if I actually can offer you something that will be really good for you and you can offer something that will be really good for me then it's like a positive some game and then we're all benefit and life discovered this in different layers all the way from cells learning how to become more complex to multicellular organisms to animals to collective intelligences like and colon is whatever all the way to humans. Every one of these steps is about cooperation. So this notion of the competitive gene is fundamentally flawed but so few people know about it right now. That is so amazing. And I try to speak I've been speaking about Lynn and Chris Holt and the symbiosis for a long time and people like what symbiotic or symbiosis what are you talking about? Mycorrhizomy, you know, all these things there like what is it? How does it work? Our human health, us you and I our health is as a microcosmos of the world around us this indigenous microorganisms about wherever we move ourselves around in this earth our health is really tied closely to the health of our planet and this microcosmos around us. And it's so interesting that, you know Lynn's first husband Carl Sagan, he said, you know, we're all star stuff and the basic elements of life oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen they're all, you know, the basic elements of life that are in our body that make up the human body but they also make up our planet. That's how our planet started informed and merged into a planet. And then the actual first life to spring up out of our planet was these microorganisms and, you know and bacteria basically that went from a single cell to a nucleated cell and the plants and involved and eventually we crawled out of this primordial soup, right? We are of this earth. We are the star dust, the star stuff that our planet's made up of we weren't dropped off from planet Germany or planet USA or China or whatever. We actually crawled out of this Gaia, this Mother Earth and of course, you know we were born from our mothers and that but the beginnings really started with these bacteria and this is a lot of what Lynn's work was based on was this microcosmos and it's just to me it's always so fascinating to say, you know Carl Sagan did the Cosmos show when he talked about these big things, you know that we were made in the interiors of collapsing stars and all these basic elements of life and that and then Lynn talked about the microcosmos and kind of dispelled. There was a lot of controversy between her and Dawkins and other scientists where she kind of disrupted the whole thing. She says, you guys are wrong. There is no neoliberalism, neo-darwism. There is no natural selection survival of the fittest, this selfish gene like you guys are talking about and they thought she was crazy or erratic. So, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, she for decades of her life she was frozen out of sort of mainstream thinking and it's one of those stories. Like here's this woman coming up with a different way of looking at things just totally discarded by mainstream society. And then now decades later and everything she says is orthodoxy and it's not even, there's no controversy left about her very notion that basically the nucleated cell which basically essentially is everything other than bacteria, everything we see around us is created by cells with a nucleus actually arose from this thing called endosymbiosis where one tiny little cell that was really good at energy production got consumed by another cell and rather than just being eaten and digested they figured out how to do this symbiosis together. So every one of our cells contains in it a mitochondrion or actually many mitochondria which come from a completely different lineage but they worked out how to live together. And in fact, what we find is the indigenous insight which is and many indigenous groups around the world throughout history have seen all of life as our relatives and they actually talk about animals and the trees as our relatives like that we're one big extended family. They're absolutely right. What modern biology actually now understands is that we share like about half of our genes with a fruit fly and we share about 40% of our genes with a banana. And it's like we rather than these things being like separate from us we actually all come from the same that same source of life itself. And in fact, we can really begin to see life rather than a thing like some sort of or just some concept as really an unfolding process. It's almost like this you can sort of imagine like a series of waterfalls that going over time over billions of years and each of us are just little edits within some overall grand process of life unfolding on this earth that it has done for billions of years it will do for billions of years into the future. And that helps to look at a very different context of what we are actually about in our lives. Yeah, it's so beautiful how it works. And when it's like this light bulb goes on when you read lens books when you read about her work when you read about the things that Carl Sagan talked about or any of those that you discuss in your book this light goes on and just it makes sense and you can see it in 2015, I believe it was we didn't until that point we didn't even discover a whole branch of the bacteria tree of life and also this bacteria tree of life there was this whole section and most of that section was the microbiome of our body our gut health and the bacteria that lives in our body that is so integrally connected to the beginnings of life of our planet and where people are saying now hey, your gut health or your good microbiome in your stomach and that's like your second brain is what they're calling it and it controls a lot of things and when we make those connections and we see how we're like, wow, how vital is that? I mean, we hurt our nature our atmosphere and our environment around us with chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, air pollution automotive pollution, fossil fuels that puts chemicals and things in the air that really affect that microbiome not only of our earth but our own microbiome and it weakens our immunity and weakens our gut health and weakens our ability to get through these pandemics to have that resilience, that regeneration and kind of live in this symbiosis because and this is what I love to go back to Fritz Hofelot is this systems view of life is that everything's made up of complex systems and systems of systems and there are so many multiple facets and complexities but that's how the world works our bodies made up of 11 systems digestive, skeletal, vertebral systems and if one of them fails the other 10 compensate to kind of recoup for that, right? But there's not one of those 11 systems that controls the other 10 they all were gooey and horny together and for too long we've kind of taken a siloed linear approach at solving our global grand challenges or life and we say, okay, no all's have to do is worry about breathing today no, you're functioning on thousands of different systems every single day work autonomously you're very adept at dealing with systems thinking and complexity you just need to understand how that connects to the rest of nature and life and the symbiosis those are the things that just in your book you bring them out so nicely and you connect them and you talk about how that works and I just absolutely love it My biggest question is what is your biggest hope with this book that you wanna achieve and you wanna give to people is it to educate them to give them a big U of history or to have the web of meaning? Well, my biggest hope really is a pretty large one which is to really help to lay the foundations for a fundamentally different worldview that could lead us to an absolutely different future for humanity on this earth. So it's a pretty big vision to hope that a book can do but basically we've been living for the last few hundred years according to this particular paradigm like this worldview of disconnection it's a worldview that has led to all kinds of positive things such as the development of science and just incredible improvements in many elements of the human experience improvements in understanding of hygiene and improvements in technology whereby you and I can speak to each other from thousands of miles away thanks to what science has brought to us all kinds of positive things has risen from it so this is not to disparage elements of our worldview but it's been a worldview of disconnection that is driving our society right now to our civilization toward a precipice and driving many of us in our own lived experience to this place of isolation, alienation and the sense of meaninglessness in our own lives and we absolutely have to shift the direction of where we're going and my hope for this book is that it lays a very solid intellectually rigorous coherent foundation for this different worldview of interconnectedness that if enough critical mass of people can begin to absorb and start to instill into their own lives we actually still have the possibility of shifting humanities trajectory. Oh, I love it, that's music to my ears so wonderful that that's what you wanna do and that's exactly how I see it that we can really reach this critical mass and make that shift but we don't have this knowledge sorry, my light keeps turning off here but yeah, we just need to shift our view on life and figure out how we can reach that critical mass to get to that point where we are more part of this symbiotic earth and more part of the solution and working together with nature and using a lot of this indigenous wisdom and different ways of thinking and a lot of that has to do with some of the models that we use and I wanted to discuss with you because patterning instincts talks about quite a bit religions and different sections of civilization frameworks and things but also the web of meaning goes through different models that we've had at different points or views in our life and it's just crazy that we're taking so long to figure it out and the question is my understanding of big history and I'm sure you've researched it in both of your books quite a bit is that all these civilization frameworks that we've had they've all collapsed, early antiquity, Mesopotamia, Inca, Aztec, Mayas, Greeks, Romans on and on and the majority of them collapsed because of ecological or environmental collapse a couple collapsed because of displacement or conflict or something like this but the next thing is is they all operated on this same structure, the same hierarchy structure model it wasn't a symbiotic type of structure, it wasn't regenerative, it wasn't kind of what we'd call today circular economy, donut economy you mentioned Kate Rowworth in your books and your works quite a bit so how does that work? The civilization frameworks that are we living this human condition that we just continue to repeat the same models over and over and over again hoping for different results or we're not getting that big history lesson of what failed in the past, you know I'm not understanding why that's occurring. Yeah, well, that's a fascinating topic in itself is like how do civilizations evolve and how do they collapse and why do they collapse and in my mind the person who's done the best research on that is an academic called Joseph Tainter like an anthropologist I believe is the natural discipline but he wrote a book called The Collapse of Complex Civilizations he spent decades really researching as well and I think he came up with a really clear on kind of principle of what happens with civilizations a lot of them, yes, they overshoot their ecological footprints and all that stuff but he kind of went deeper than that and he showed that basically what they do is they continue to invest in complexity and different civilizations can sort of find ways to basically bring in their energy sources in different ways like the Romans for example found the conquest war, conquer another country take the slaves, take their raw materials and keep doing that and our civilization obviously does that with fossil fuels and through technology but in all these different cases there's a certain point at which the investment in that extra complexity only yields diminishing returns and then you begin to find yourself having to run faster and faster and faster just to maintain and then even faster and you're still going down and that's of course when the society itself begins to crumble because people are unsatisfied they might have been accepting something where there was inequalities but it was some improvement going on but then things start falling apart and it's like generally what happens is civilizations hollow themselves out so by the time the collapse happens we might look back historically and say oh that's the thing collapsed but there was almost a non-event because there's very little left once there's the sack of Rome or whatever that was almost like an afterthought Rome had already collapsed decades earlier in terms of the actual infrastructure so we're seeing this with our civilization and similarly where we are aware that fossil fuels are causing climate breakdown and yet here are these fossil fuel companies going to the deep under the ocean or going to the tar sands in Canada or doing fracking to explode underground these massive cause of these massive earthquakes just to get methane out of the earth to all this crazy stuff when we're actually knowing that we can't afford to do that so that could lead to a sense of inevitability in terms of oh well here we go again nothing to do but sort of put your seatbelt on and just go for the ride and hope you make it out in one piece or whatever but I think that there's more to it than that because what we need to realize is that there are different alternatives to where our civilization is going to go and really to your WTF question that you had earlier it seems to kind of lead to that like what are the futures or whatever on my own view is I actually see well for starters I think one thing we can be clear about is that this century we are going to undergo some kind of phase transition that will be massive and that's we can talk about it in terms of like collapse of civilization or whatever but there's going to be a civilizational change that will be basically as large as just there's only been two or three major phase transitions in human history that it can be compared to like when nomadic hunter gatherers began to settle down and sedentism and agriculture arose about 10 to 12,000 years ago that was one of the greatest changes in all of human history and then a second change like that happened with the scientific revolution in Europe in the 17th century when this these kind of agrarian civilizations gave way to the modern world dominated by science also by capitalism and imperialism from the European powers, et cetera and we are going to experience something as big this century where all the different aspects of the human experience are going to be different fundamentally that's pretty much everyone who looks at the situation recognizes that it's not gonna be just this linear more of the same three, four or five decades from now the question is what is this change gonna lead to and I see three potential scenarios which roughly summarize where the only directions I see that are kind of possible one is just plain out and out collapse just like we've been kind of leaning towards that we have this growth-based society, it stops working we have climate breakdown, ecological breakdown massive famines, absolute societal breakdown billions of climate refugees things just start falling apart people can't get their food in cities and basically things crumble and that's an absolute disastrous scenario where we'd be looking at billions of people losing their lives in a horrendous way and it's a scenario that sometimes people will be on the cynical about it well, maybe it's just, maybe this has to happen and we can just start again or whatever no, this would be an absolute, the greatest tragedy the greatest cataclysm in all of human history and it's to be avoided at all costs if there's any way to avoid it but then there's this other scenario that's not too dissimilar from that which I believe many of the global elites actually think is gonna happen and are planning for which you might call like the gilded lifeboat scenario or the fortress earth scenario depending on your point which is that basically these are the elites who are looking at what's going on and say yeah, it's gonna be collapse in all these countries all these billions of people are gonna suffer from all this stuff but we can fence ourselves up from that and we can use our money and use technology and military force to create this kind of fortress basically, but we can do all these cool things and develop technology and find ways to communicate with each other become like basically cyborgs and maybe even genetically evolve ourselves to be and it's like transhumans and all that stuff and so if most of humanity dies well, that's too bad but look at this singularity this future that offers itself to us I believe that implicitly even though they might not even admitted to themselves a lot of the wealthy elites in the world are kind of leaning towards that as the scenario that gives them the future them and their children the future that they think is possible which is really explains why these elites are not like doing what Greg Thunberg asked them to do they're not running around saying the house is on fire because they're saying actually I've got a bunker down in the basement totally fine so you can burn up there but I'm gonna be fine so that's the second scenario I call it techno split in my writings and that scenario in my mind is morally even more egregious than the first scenario the first scenario is bad enough but this scenario is like equivalent to the Titanic sinking and the wealthy people getting on this gilded lifeboat and people scrapping to get on board and then just kicking them on their knuckles as they're trying to clamber up saying it's good for us but too bad for you I think that is an absolute moral crime that we need to be aware of and anyone who is somewhat awakened to what's going on needs to recognize this is happening and we need to stop that so what other alternatives are there? That's very dystopian the second one is so dystopian it's I mean yeah we're humanity even if it's the elites still survive but there weren't spacesuits they're living in bunkers I mean what kind of a life is that? I mean life of misery surrounded by money that's useless or bunkers that's not very great future. Well see I think they see it a different way I think they probably see it in terms of gigantic sort of fenced off nature preserves where they have their, yeah they find the areas whether it's in New Zealand or Canada wherever Siberia where and as things totally fall apart there are going to be some temperate areas left in the world and they figure if they've got enough wealth and power they can fence off all the suffering and still continue to actually have their version of a good life so I think that that's my sense of what they're kind of secretly figuring is the way out of this current scenario. So I view it more than anything as morally dystopian it's the very worst features of this kind of selfish greed driven Gordon Gekko greed is good type of mentality actually becoming a worldview becoming like the future of humanity. I think we need to do everything to not let that happen but the first thing to do is to recognize it and talk about it explicitly in order to not go down that path. But I think there is another path and there's another possible future for humanity which actually could be very positive but it involves a certain kind of collapse not a collapse of civilization itself but a collapse of this capitalist system that is driving us to these bifurcations and driving us to this completely unsustainable path this notion of endless growth on a finite planet that we're on right now. And this path would be to actually move towards a civilization that some people and I've taken up this phrase myself because I love it and some people call it an ecological civilization. Basically I'm laying the groundwork for a civilization that's founded on a different basis rather than one that's based on wealth accumulation exploitation and extraction. One that's actually built on life affirming principles built on the same conditions that allow ecosystems to thrive for millions of years sustainably and in great health. And a civilization that actually starts off by setting the conditions for all humans to be able to flourish on a regenerative and on regenerated earth. That's the notion of what an ecological civilization is and it's not only possible but it's actually and it's being done in certain and small places around the world right now people are living according to those principles of an ecological civilization. And it's absolutely available to us the technology and the economics and the education systems are all available to us to actually have that kind of civilization. And the real, I mean, there's two sort of major conundrums we need to get through to get to that place. One is for enough people to realize what's possible and actually start to shift their lives according to it. And the other maybe equally difficult is to actually build that life affirming civilization within the current civilization. So as the current global civilization collapses rather than it leading to this complete downfall of everything we know, the other civilization has already like begun to grow within it. So the collapse of that prior civilization becomes more like sort of shedding off a skin rather than everything falling in and disintegrating. I'm a big student or fan of Herman Daly one of the first ecological economists also Keith Boulding. We also did a lot around ecological economics. There's many more. I've had some on the podcast, Tim Jackson's a great ecological economist. Kate Rohworth, you've spoken about Mariana Matsukato, mission economics. We've heard the terms circular economy, donut economics. We've heard now with Dr. Johann Rockstrom planetary boundaries, which is kind of is very similar to Kate Rohworth's donut economics. And I think they kind of work together, but it's also a way of looking at this ecological way to live within the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries in harmony, in this symbiosis. And I absolutely love that. That's the direction. And so even though you've probably touched upon it before, I would like you to answer the question, what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? Is it this ecological civilization or is there a little bit more for that? Well, it is that ecological civilization. And it might be helpful to kind of flesh it out a little bit more so people can get a sense of what we're talking about. So we talked a little bit about just those principles of life of funding principles. But basically what that ecological civilization would look like would be one which is based on this principle of mutually beneficial symbiosis that we've described has been what life itself has discovered, works best in evolutionary terms, which is like different groups or different species or organisms realizing that the best way to actually work sustainably is to find out ways of relating to others which work for both, which is not in a zero sum game. And it's also based on this concept you were touching on before that I call fractal flourishing. And you were talking about how we realized that what's good for us is not like that if we cause harm to our environment, ultimately that's bad for us. Or if we are doing well in a society but it's causing our society itself to be disintegrating, that ends up being bad for us. The notion of fractal flourishing recognizes that in human society just like in ecosystems and we all live embedded in this what's called a holarchy that every system is a part of a bigger system. It's autonomous within itself but is also part of a bigger system which is part of a bigger system. So for us, we have each cell is a complete system which is then part of an organ or part of another system within our body which is part of our own bodies which is then part of our system of family and community and which is also part of our region. And ultimately it goes all the way to Gaia we're all part of that global system. And once we realize that we realize that fractal flourishing is this principle that we need to find ways that we can flourish that causes each of these layers in the system to also flourish. In just the same way that if I'm doing something in my body that's really bad for my legs and sort of causes me to harm my leg for example then that's gonna hurt other systems in my body then I can't emulate as well. And so that'll cause me to be sluggish my cardiovascular system will get and start to struggle and maybe I'll get overweight and all these kinds of things will happen in my whole system and relies on the other systems. So when we apply that to human society well it leads to very basic things. First off it leads to this recognition that we need to set the foundations for human dignity all of the things that Kate Rayworth talked about in donut economics, the lower part of the donut which relates to the basic conditions for true individual dignity and flourishing everything from ensuring that there is and each person has access to enough food and housing, physical security, education all of the different light healthcare all the different levels that lead to a basic life that should be with the foundational concept within a society what a society is founded on and all this done within those rockstone boundaries of those planetary boundaries that you were talking about done in a sustainable way that in itself is a huge challenge because right now there's not a single country that actually is able to offer those basics within anything even close to sustainability but it's shown that that is doable we have to move away from these incredible inequalities that we have right now that's one of the foundational ways in which our current system would be different and we'd move away from these mega billionaires there'd be a cap on the amount of wealth that a single person can accumulate based on this recognition that the vast amount of wealth that we have on this earth is actually belongs to all of us is a common wealth that we believe in normal mainstream thinking that well if some Mark Zuckerberg type person or Jeff Bezos becomes a centi-billionaire or whatever well they must have deserved it because like look what they value they've added to people, bullshit, no they haven't basically what they've done is added one tiny little tip on top of this accumulated mountain of wonderful miraculous brilliance that humans over multiple generations centuries and millennia have worked together to create for our global society that's what we can think of as the common wealth and once we realize that we realize there should be a cap on what those individuals can earn and similarly there should be a universal basic income that rather than these excessive wealth going to like a few people there should be basically and simply by being alive a person has the right as a human being to enough income to be able to afford those basics in life so that they can spend that time actually exploring what they want to do that's truly meaningful with their life and contrary to what people believe again, according to our mainstream thinking when people actually get access to this universal basic income that is unconditional they don't actually just go and waste it on drinking and drugs and get lazy and all this stuff quite the contrary it actually leads to a reduction in those negative behaviors and people invest in what's really meaningful to them they invest in community work they invest in working for their family they invest in entrepreneurial activities that they've always wanted to do and then they have the chance to do that so these are just some of the basics and I could go on talking about significant restructuring of corporations changes in education there's every single aspect of what we take as a given and how our life works right now could be revamped based on this notion of deep interconnectedness of all of us together on the earth. I absolutely love it it is so good to hear you speak about this and to get your vision of what a world that works for everyone looks like so without me kind of spilling the beans or kind of releasing anything basically this ecological civilizations and look in the coming possibly Okay, great. Absolutely and yeah, I'm fine to talk about that it's certainly not a secret from my perspective in fact the book The Web of Meaning and that we've been talking about ends on this vision of an ecological civilization like if you go through the book and you begin to realize that there is this alternative worldview that's actually scientifically valid and actually brings in the great insights of different wisdom traditions that founded on a deep interconnectedness then it naturally leads to say well, what would a civilization look like that was based on that? The answer is that ecological civilization so I give a little bit of a taster at the end of the book of what that might look like and actually right now I'm working on my next book in a way it's a bit like a trilogy in the sense that the patterning instinct looked historically like diagnosing the problem how do we get to this place? The Web of Meaning sets the foundations for a different worldview but this net book and my working title is future flourishing and pathways toward an ecological civilization and it's like shows like what is actually possible? Because you're probably well aware of that famous quote that sometimes is attributed to the slav of Gòéžek sometimes to other people but it's this notion that it's easier for most people to think about the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism which is really true because we all have this sense of these apocalyptic visions of everything collapsing but we're so used to our society being the way it is that we can't even conceive of a different form of human relationships rather than what we don't wanna go back to being an agrarian civilization or those hunter-gatherers that's not feasible, quite correct we don't wanna go back to that but nobody has a sense of what's possible but there is actually a very clear vision that again, this is not my vision so the vision of many different people in areas of economics and education and technology and agroecology all around doing their particular part of building this ecological civilization so what I wanna do with this book similarly to what I did with Web of Meaning is tie these things in together show how the research is and research being done for example in commons-based technological developments like for example, distributed autonomous organizations and things like that using the internet for new ways of relating how that relates to something like agroecology and how that relates to something like raising children to be more empathic and to not like just become part of a competitive system and all these things relate to each other. And I hope we stay in touch because as you know, we've talked offline I have a lot of views on this I've spoke to Tim Jackson and many others economists and those out there about my ideas I also believe that we need some form of universal basic income but I call it a twist I'd like to see us receive something that's just an alliable right that through birth and until death that we're guaranteed as human beings to always have the basics, the necessities so that we can, if we have worries if we wanna be creative it's not about the basic needs of how we live and security and health and food and the infrastructure that those things are taken care of so that we can truly make that evolutionary leap to be more creative, to be more symbiotic with our planet. You have also teased and tickled that you're working on releasing some things here on the mighty networks through deep transformation to keep people together connected talking about these to kind of get that wisdom and that knowledge that's out there but also to connect people together hopefully to reach the critical mass but also to come together can you tell us a little bit more about that and what that is and how that's coming along? Sure, absolutely. Thanks for asking that Mark and this is a work in process right now that I hope to actually initiate early in 2022 maybe by February and it's this notion we've been talking a lot about self-organized networks and a lot of people when I talk and when I've given classes in ecological civilization or on the themes of the web of meaning and find themselves really getting so excited being with others, sharing these ideas realizing that a lot of people wake up to these ideas and then feel very isolated wherever they are because others around them just aren't even on the same page and then you start wondering, well, am I like missing something but then you see other people sharing these ideas and you can build these ideas on what they're talking about. So people have been wanting to stay connected with each other and as a result of that I'm going to be initiating on this platform called Mighty Networks an online network for community building called deep transformation for anybody around the world who recognizes that we are in an unsustainable trajectory right now and recognize that we need the deep transformation for culture, civilization and within ourselves to be able to move humanity to a better place and for people to then connect with others who share those ideas one partly just to nurture their own sense of wellbeing and to feel part of a community but then just as importantly to actually engage with others to build these ideas so that and these ideas don't get created like lots of sort of little sparks of lights each of them just kind of getting lost in the wilderness but actually by working with each other's ideas we get to weave something far more effective far more powerful. In fact, I would hope to even be able to share as I'm working on this book on an ecological civilization share the chapters or whatever within the network get feedback from people. So the book itself can become part of a collaborative enterprise that we can co-create to really create that future together. Wow, that's beautiful. And I definitely would like an invitation and would love to join when it's when you're that far along. I'm excited to tell everyone and the listeners that you're gonna be contributing an ice piece to my book, Menu B with a bunch of other famous people that we've talked about today as well that are thought leaders and Menu B is about really global food reform and moving us into more of these regenerative economies is ecological civilizations like you discussed and how can we fix that? And as you write about in your book food is a big part of these collapses and about the problems and issues we have with our civilization frameworks that are failing us today and creating a lot of human suffering and as well as environmental problems. And so I'm so honored and glad that you're gonna participate with that and look forward to releasing the book of the first quarter of this year. I definitely wanna stay in touch and keep the dialogue going back and forth as you evolve with a new book and as the new book comes out I wanna have you back on the show but even before that time engage with you and maybe do some follow-ups and have another podcast and discussion. Before I let you go, I just have kind of three questions that are more or less for my listeners kind of a sustainable takeaway for them. And basically it is if you were to have one or two messages as a sustainable takeaway for my listeners that had the power to change their life or to shift their paradigm what would it be? Your message. Well, yeah, thank you. Basically I think it would be fundamentally that the future is not like some spectator sport it's not something that is happening out there. The future is actually something that we are co-creating. It's a process basically that each of us is part of and even more than that the future that we want is something that we can live into every day of our lives. It's not like, oh, you know and that's something that's happening in some future time and gotta work hard to try to make that happen. Actually every day we get to live into that emerging future that we want and it can feel sometimes and I certainly feel it when I look at the news when I look at what's going on in the world around us it can be very easy to move towards a sense of despair a sense that everything seems to be going in the wrong direction. And I do feel that there's a lot of truth in where we are headed right now but fundamentally we need to recognize that the future is non-linear and just like every other complex system it goes through the most unexpected moves and we never know what it is that which each actions that each of us is taking is actually making those moves, those directions happen. So that's the way in which we can live into each day with a sense of faith. There's a recognition that we're not doing this based on being attached to some outcome but we're doing this because this is what life is calling from us right now as we're looking at the world the way it is. So you reached a pretty hard point in your life with what you were going through with your wife and for other people who are in similar situations where they're like whether it's the pandemic or they're just saying, hey, this world's not working for me anymore and lost and hopeless and they're looking for these not only what I recommend, they give a book but what are some really important things for you or learning lessons that you had that helped you weather that time to help you get through and I take away that you're even though that tragedy you're still optimistic, you're hopeful you have a vision of where we could go. Yeah, yeah, well, I think maybe the most important treasure that I came across in my own path and as you said, I did go through in some incredibly difficult times. It was very simple concept as one that's available to all of us and simply kindness. And it's the recognition that as we're suffering and we go through all these parts within ourselves that we feel bad or wrong or difficult and we can get caught up in all this stuff we always have the opportunity to turn to those parts within ourselves with kindness. And once we begin to establish that practice within our own parts, then it begins to be second nature to then offer it to others around us. And when we see people that doing things whether it's people close to us or people on the political other side of the spectrum we see as enemies. When we see them doing things we don't like that we can actually have the ability to go to a deeper layer of compassionate connection and recognize that even when they're doing stuff to get us angry, we know we can recognize that every single human being has that soft beating heart that really ultimately wants love and tenderness and connection and a feeling of meaning and feeling of being part of something greater. And many people have been subverted, manipulated by this dominant culture to turn those needs to basically compress them, repress them and turn the energy that's needed into aggression all these things. But if we can reach to that deeper layer both within ourselves and with others that offers the ability for us to really begin to make a difference. Every one of those conversations that can happen or interactions on that place of compassion and kindness is an interaction that leads towards that flourishing future of an ecological civilization. Thank you for that there. The last question is really, what have you experienced or learned in your journey so far professional or life journey so far that you wish you would have known from the start? Well, that's interesting. Yeah, it's a lot of people say it's the journey in and of itself as you take that journey. And that's really itself. And so I have a lot of people kind of say that same thing. But is there anything that you said, boy, I wish I would have started 10 years earlier. I wish I would have known as I would have jumped on it a lot sooner. Exactly, exactly. I think, well, one thing that it took me years to discover and it would have been wonderful if I had realized it to begin with is that this whole way in which we make sense of the world right now is wrong. That it's such a mind blower too, because you just think, well, surely, and all these talking heads share these ideas and scientists seem to tell us these things and it must be true. And then we begin to once we realize that actually they're all part of the system that is this kind of self-reinforcing like wrong ideology, that's astonishing. But that takes a lot of years to really kind of unfold in a real sense of intentionality and curiosity. But I think maybe the thing that I, it took me some years myself to discover is just how many wonderful, incredible people are in the world right now actually creating a different world who have been through their own personal journeys of discovery, their own personal times of despair and moving towards something else. And that the project each of us have is not to sort of come up with our own solution and try to like bang that particular saucepan over one's head and say, this is the answer. But actually to look at the incredible, amazing and innovative, brilliant life-affirming work that's being done by so many communities, so many people around the world and connect with those to feel that sense of humility that comes with seeing we're part of something so much bigger. And then that allows the sense of empowerment to once we begin to like lose our own identity of selfhood and realize we're part of this incredible process. It's so much bigger than we are. Like, wow, how exciting it is to be able to offer my part to this incredible unfolding opportunity. The web of meaning, this is the book in my opinion, the book of the century, it's gonna go down in history. It's so fabulous. I recommend everybody pick it up. Jeremy, thank you so much for letting us inside of your ideas. It's been a sure pleasure. We could talk for days and hours because there's so much to cover. I love your visions. I love how you're helping us on this journey to find meaning and also get to this critical mass of these ecological civilizations. I really thank you very much and I hope we can talk again very soon. Thank you so much for being on the show. Well, thank you, Mark. It's been a great pleasure being in conversation with you. I look forward to a lot more in the future. Take care. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.