 Yeah, it's so beautiful to be here and you know what an incredible place and what an incredible project that you know Matthew and Brian and Joseph are engaged in here and incredible opportunity. And yes, so I mean it's brought up a lot of reflections, you know, on my part I live in New York City in the East Village among homeless people and rats and you know coordinated tap water and all that kind of stuff. So I always see things kind of through that urban perspective and also think about, you know, all the people, you know, in, you know, in New York and that urban environment, the kind of downtrodden and the, you know, people of different racial backgrounds were living in projects just a couple blocks away from me, you know, who also deserve, you know, just the same opportunities that we have and then the opportunities to breathe good air and live beautiful lives and so on that somehow our society has systemically denied them at this point. And anyway, so, you know, from that perspective, yeah, I mean, you know, when I think about what's happening on the earth, you know, I come from kind of the trajectory that I've gone through as an individual where I grew up, you know, in New York, kind of a secular materialist scientific background, and, you know, went through a kind of shamanic initiation process that I wrote about in my first book Breaking Open the Head that involved visiting tribal people around the world and going through initiation ceremonies with them involving visionary sacred plants like ayahuasca and iboga and psilocybin and so on. And that was a profound transition for me and ultimately, you know, led me to think a lot about this whole concept of initiation as something that the modern world has forfeited and lost and something that traditional tribal societies all around the world, you know, have had since time immemorial. And it's kind of, you know, when the modern world lost its kind of initiations, practices, anthropologists then in the 19th to 20th century documented them all around the world, whether it was aboriginal walkabouts or vision quests or the use of sacred plants or, you know, sun dances, you know, with the Native Americans in North America. And, you know, it was seen as sort of a cultural phenomenon. But more recently, some thinkers, particularly Joseph Chilton Pierce wrote about it really well in a book called The Biology of Transcendence, have suggested that this kind of initiation or rites of passage have more than just a cultural function. They might have like a sort of neurobiological or neurophysiological function in that, you know, as human beings, the aspect of the brain that makes us distinctly human is the prefrontal cortex or the neocortex, which just developed in the last 100,000 years. And that's what allows us to have our separate sense of identity, to, you know, sort of process symbols, abstract symbols to use language, to plan for the future, to have foresight and so on. But although it develops, you know, through adolescence and into our maturity, it may be that it requires a second shock that has to be kind of induced from outside, kind of either culturally or could be through some, you know, catastrophic or disastrous scenario. In a way, initiation is kind of like a self-willed, you know, culturally induced disaster for the individual to go to the edge of their own awareness and kind of see what lies beyond it, you know. So if you look at these initiations as kind of, you know, ways that these cultures created, that people were forced into visionary or transpersonal experiences, and that then they came back and you look at initiation as having like a several part process. You know, there's that separation, the young men or young women are taken out of the society. There's the vision quest, the whatever is done to push them to the edge so they have to get in that vision to kind of enter transpersonal states of consciousness. Then there's a return and a reintegration and a welcoming back into the community and the elders who actually then interpret the visions and place the whole experience in the context of that culture, of that society. And I think that, you know, modern culture, you know, since the 60s has been sort of seeking to go through a collective voyage of initiation. And we've, you know, many people have done their own version of the separation and the initiation, whether it's shamanism or, you know, even yoga practices or meditation. But there's still, it's like the culture still hasn't really figured out how to welcome back in that next level of perception. And on a larger scale, you know, maybe we could look at the ecological crisis as a kind of collective right of passage or planetary initiation for humanity as a whole. And it's even possible if you take this idea that it's something that is almost like a biological necessity, that it's something that humanity has subconsciously self-willed to bring about our mutation or metamorphosis or capacity to reach the next level of consciousness, the next level of organization as a species. Does that make sense? Okay. And, yeah, and so, you know, obviously it's like, without initiation, we can think about the different reasons why modern society lost those practices. You know, people are kind of adrift, you know, they don't have like a greater narrative, you know, they don't have a greater sense of meaning. And also, they don't have that reference point in a transpersonal state so they can go from just focusing on their own ego-centric desires, you know, their local interests to having a truly collective interest, you know. And so, you know, for tribal cultures, you couldn't be an adult if you went through an initiation. And in our society, maybe what we have on the mass scale is, you know, a global society of kiddults, you know, people who've been trapped in that egoic state. And therefore, they're not able to take responsibility collectively or to see themselves embedded in a larger framework. So, yeah, so, and I guess in a way, I think that we then have to, you know, maybe in a positive sense, you know, we're going to talk about story over the next few days, but you know, think about a kind of mythological reframing of our situation and then maybe embrace this idea of the ecological crisis as an initiation where we can, you know, reconnect with a larger field of meaning and, you know, become kind of, in a sense, midwives or servants for this planetary crisis, you know. Yeah, so, yeah, so in a way, the initiation for us, since we're not being welcomed back in that same sense, is to then transform the society that we've inherited to, you know, become harmonic with the biosphere and to kind of honor the deeper potentials that the human being has, which are kind of systemically suppressed by our society. And, you know, listening over the last few days, I mean, there's some brilliant and amazing talks. The talk about climate change was bracing, you know, the information around the Arctic and all that stuff is just getting more and more kind of difficult, you know, to take in. You know, it was also very interesting to hear the men from the airline speak, you know, and it's just something that I think we also need to be open to discussing is, you know, to what extent is the type of transformation that society faces considering what's happened with the ecological situation, something that's possible within the current capitalist system, you know, or whether we're going to need a deeper systemic paradigm shift of how we're exchanging value, you know, I mean, you know, you know, should, will people have, and these are questions that I ask, which I'm sure all of us are asking, so I'll just bring them to the surface, you know, like, you know, you know, will people be flying around the world in the same way five years from now or three years from now or 10 years from now? Should they be? You know, should, you know, should, you know, how do we create a system where, you know, the amount of meat that people are consuming is largely, you know, downscaled, you know? And so, you know, for me, I guess in my work with the book that I've been working on for the last number of years, it's been, first of all, recognizing this kind of, you know, understanding it systemically as this planetary initiation. And thinking about it also in a way almost like a biological metaphors I think are really useful. We could think about it as like, you know, maybe humanity is on the cusp of realizing itself to be a super organism, you know, that's one giant kind of planetary organism that's in a symbiotic relationship with the ecology of the earth as a whole system, you know, and that's the ecological crisis is almost going to force us into that state of collective awareness, collective unity. And then if we were to think about what it would mean to make that kind of leap in understanding or mutation, you know, then we would look at how we're sharing resources, how we're sharing information really differently. And, you know, I think we could then begin almost remap, you know, human society. And then, for instance, as part of that, you know, thinking experiment about what it would mean if we saw ourselves as a planetary super organism, you know, what we now call corporations, you know, might actually be kind of like the nascent organs of that collective body. You know, so, you know, an energy company is like the blood that circulates through an individual body. Or a media company is like the, you know, perceptual mechanisms that takes raw data and transfers it through the whole, through the whole, you know, system, you know, sanitation companies like the liver or kidney that's breaking down waste and so on. And if we look at the paradigm that we inherit from biological evolution, there's actually, you know, a transition that's common from competition and domination to cooperation and symbiosis. Right? And, you know, an example of that, that's very close at hand is our own bodies, you know, which were once, millions and millions of years ago, vast colonies of microorganisms that were, you know, competing against each other in the environment for scarce resources. And somehow in various states of crisis learned how to work together to create more complex organs and then mesh those organs together into these like unbelievable contraptions that we find ourselves in. Right? So it might be that, you know, at the moment corporations are, you know, meshed in a paradigm that's based on competition and domination. You know, they're forced to maximize profits. You know, we've created a kind of game for them, you know, called the stock market where a corporation has to survive, has to maximize profit, right? And maximize shareholder value, you know. But that may also just be the way we're at now with it, right? Like we could potentially redesign the underlying game machinery of the Wall Street system so that corporations become more like transparent cooperative infrastructures that are sharing resources, you know, sharing knowledge transparently, you know. So it may be that, you know, the ecological crisis is the trigger to bring about a deep, you know, structural transition of human society toward cooperation and symbiosis. That's kind of what I've been trying to map out in my book. And I think like, you know, maybe we could have, if anybody wants to have a discussion about it during the discussion later today, I'd be happy to host one. But we could think about like the three big wheels, I guess, from my perspective, which I created a wiki called the Center for Planetary Culture. We were looking at a regenerative society wiki. So what would be the way to transform the system? And so the three big circles that we defined were the technical infrastructure, you know, agriculture, industry, energy, transport, urban design. Then like the social, political, economic system, you know, the financial system, you know, governments and so on. How people make decisions together, let's say. And then the third would be consciousness, ideology, culture and media. And it's like these three wheels are all like turning each other, right? So in one changes, the other ones also undergo a change, you know. So then we can begin to map out like, you know, I mean, if we had a research center or think tank, you know, maybe we could map out the different ways to make these changes. And for me personally, as a media maker, I tend to think that at this point, you know, like actually the technical infrastructure stuff, you know, feels like it's moving towards solutions. You know, in that we know that in 10 or 15 years we could globally distribute, you know, solar renewable energy like that. That's becoming more and more available. You know, a lot of the solutions to the technical side are there. A lot of the social, political and economic kind of opportunities are also becoming more and more clear. As Ben Knight is going to be here later the next week talking about Lumio as ways that people can, you know, use the internet to make decisions together. Maybe we could look at the internet as like a collective nervous system. You know, if we think also about this evolutionary crisis that we're in, the psychological situation is almost like a birthing in a sense. Like maybe in a sense we're now in this kind of fetal development where like pushing through the birth canal, the crises are kind of like the, you know, the sort of contractions of the birthing process. And in a sense the internet, you know, self-organized as the nervous system for this collective super-organism. And now we actually have to, we're going to be forced to learn how to make use of it as we push into this new world. And, you know, ways that we can make decisions together collectively, you know, as a civil society without necessarily needing governments, top-down, centralized institutions. You know, that could be a big piece of the puzzle. Yeah, so anyway that's what I've been thinking about. For me, the media, the consciousness element is really also really key. You know, I think a big throttling is the media itself which is, you know, still basically putting out a paradigm that's based on fear and dependency. I really got fascinated by the work of an Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri. And his idea was that essentially, you know, we normally, people normally think of their subjectivity as something which they just gain through their own experience. But actually on a very large scale subjectivity itself is kind of constructed or mass produced by the media, you know, and the government to a certain extent, the corporate industrial complex. You can look at the media as almost like a factory that's producing and distributing a certain type of consciousness or a certain type of subjectivity. And it creates like a frequency effect, you know, a frequency of consciousness in that it tells people how they should respond to authority, you know, what they should value, you know, what types of relationships are workable or appropriate for them. You know, so people take a lot of guidelines, you know, from that mass media. And I think a big stumbling block if we wanted to bring about a rapid transition of global society is the lack of an alternative media that's on a scale, a solutions based, positive, proactive kind of media that's giving people a whole new insight into how they could live, how they could create healthy, resilient communities together, how they could do things like grow their own food. I mean, you know, in a way, you need a media that counteracts the sort of negative Fox News and CNN, you know, global programming, you know. All right, well, I got through most of what I wanted to say with about two minutes to spare. I hope that made some sense. Okay, cool.