Good. Hey fellow G& Do selector spirituality with a twist. So this episode of our little pod is sort of especially a passion project of Daniels which is kind of to like not let the events of COVID just go. Like there was literally this global event, this global earthquake with all these reverberating aftershocks carrying down to the present day. And yet this sort of gets ignored more and more over time. And so Daniel talked about this and he has this strong feeling of like let's continue to explore what's happened with this. Um so every time we get to what we're calling OG co time in the spring, Daniel's idea is like hey let's remember that this affected people so deeply and it's still carrying forward. Let's not just let this go. So our idea is to do an episode which is remember that whole co thing. It's the episode. Remember that whole CO thing episode. Um, and it's a little bit of a spontaneous episode in the sense that Daniel and I just both jotted down our thoughts and talked a little bit about this ahead of time. So, some spontaneity in this, but really kind of revisiting kind of an important important an important world shaking event. Um, but before all of that, there is the um ultimate uh memory editor that we have to deal with, the thing that's always trying to fog our brains and make us forget everything, the algorithm. So to help uh our little pod deal with that, if you could do all the things that people always ask you to do, uh like, subscribe, write a review, share an episode with a friend, all the beautiful things everybody asked, that would help us out a lot and would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much. Okay, so Daniel, we were like going to divide this conversation up in a couple of parts. One is a kind of a more personal part to see how this seemed to affect people individually and where it put them in sort of their own individual psychosspiritual headspaces. But we also wanted to do kind of a big picture piece looking at like what happened sort of in the culture like overall, right? And we're seeing a lot of the sort of toxic after effects

that in an interesting way are like going right back to what happened over that span of time, right? Which is

people have like a kind of an amnesia around it. So, I know as a lead in uh we were talking about this beforehand and I had this thought I you know when when when I was talking with friends about like how dark could like the social political cultural stuff go and I you was talking with a couple of friends. We were texting around about this and we were talking about like, well, how how totalian, totalitarian, how fascist, how authoritarian things could re could things really get, you know, because usually you need some kind of crisis trigger. And we were having these sort of like text messages back and forth with a couple of friends who are interested in history. And we were kind of going, well, you know, when you look back at like a lot of the things where things go very dark and of course one of the obvious things things you think about is like a Nazi Germany thing, which I suppose is an overused thing, but like still was on people's minds. And so we were talking about it and we thought, well, you know, you needed like a real crisis. You needed like a great depression. You needed like true crises to bring out these darker forces. And it just didn't seem realistic that we had had the really dark crisis. And now you look I look back at it like we were talking about before we hit record. It seems like CO was like the part of the crisis,

right? CO was that trigger and I don't think even in our conversations like kind of going down memory lane and thinking about them of a few years ago. I don't think we were thinking about that. And in a way there was like sort of this underestimating of how you know deeply traumatic and crisis inducing this really was. So that was sort of like you know my my lead into that part. I know you had a lot of stuff you thought that was related to these things too really around how it affected people in like very specific ways changing people's relationships to truth and changing people's relationships to power and all these ideas that you wanted to explore. So I'll throw it over to you but that kind of is like a little bit of a my recollections around these things and I guess kind of a setup in a way.

Yeah. So I think that's that's a good way to set it up, right? It's like what was co was sort of the the condensing force that that was cross-sectional to all layers of society and then looking at like what you know what comes out of that what came out of that. And for me the first there's kind of like a couple things and we we'll go over this over this episode and probably another one. So one is yeah this relationship between like power, truth, believability, you know, then the fragmentation of kind of society over that and then this the next idea that'll probably next time a little bit foreshadowing is kind of work ideas of self and identity. Um and then kind of decentralization and then now with AI and things like this this recentralization actually. Um and then the last part is like our views on reality, you know, which will kind of come into the conversation here with with power and truth. So the I want to open this part by saying that um I think that truth is now plural and competitive. And I will hearken back to uh one Kelly Anne Conway or maybe just

Oh my god.

Kelly I don't know her I don't know her last name. Kelly with her on Saturday Night Live where they had her dressed up as like the evil clown from It living in the sewer. So whenever she comes up, I always see her as like the little evil clown, you know, that wants to like trick the kid.

Yeah.

Take his arm or whatever. Yeah.

So she said uh an interesting thing back in in Trump's first term, which was, "Well, we have alternative facts."

Yes. The alternative

and Right. and and the the the news person was sort of like I can use a large word flabbergasted at this response and they you know that that sort of has lived on in infamy but that's why I say truth is plural and competitive meaning that there are multiple truths and they don't they don't vibe with each other so then the question is like we are kind of in a posttruth time Actually there is uh viable truth to the experience and what is happening but then when you know one person is having their own experience someone else is having a different experience then they're going to disagree on things and when you extrapolate that into a larger society those disagreements are going to become even more and those are just with people who don't have a whole lot of skin in the game. If you're trying to manipulate society or or keep a narrative going that's against another narrative that you don't want to be brought up, you have a lot invested actually in continuing this alternative truth if we want to use that uh that that those words does that is that vibe.

Yeah. How does that like I don't want to put you on the spot with a weird question to ask, but when you think about like different segments that are holding their own truths, um what are some examples that come to your mind that are like, you know, major streams of thought where you're like, "Oh, that's really an alternative version of reality." I have some ideas that come to my mind, but I thought I'd throw it to you, too.

Yeah. So we can say, you know, if we're looking back at COVID, we'll say that, you know, the the lab leak theory,

right, is one that it was not accepted uh from a from a governmental governmental perspective, but then and pretty much many, well, not everybody, but many other people were like, well, that's a viable thing as opposed to somebody ate a bat at a wet market and now we're in the like that seems less less likely. But you weren't even able to say that. That was not that was like you were at that point, which was still sort of frowned upon, a conspiracy person.

Yeah, that's true.

So that that's that's kind of one of them.

It ended up being really dark because I was following that story through and it kind of in a weird way kind of just died on the vine. But as things went along, it got to be like a lot of the people who were involved in trying to frame that opposition to that idea ended up people and it being people who, as you said earlier, had skin in the game.

Yeah. There was the whole dark undercurrent of like, wait a minute, I think there were people in the United States within health research who were like involved in trying to dodge regulations that were set up for high-risk research and they were pushing it over into these labs in China.

Which included one Anthony Fouchy in that list of people, you know,

and like it's bizarre. I was thinking about it when you brought up the episode because I was like that [...] all died. No one did anything about that.

No.

But it was like, you know, again,

seems to be true that what was happening was there was this funneling of like these this research is too high-risisk and prohibited in the United States. And so people did like a dodge round and they pushed this stuff overseas

into these foreign this foreign lab. And then this thing like very likely jumped out of that lab and not out of like a pangaloon or whatever the animal was in the wet market or whatever was supposed to be. I don't remember the name of the animal. It was a bat or it was something else.

I think it was a bat. Yeah.

Yeah. There's some other I don't know pangalore or some other animals. Yeah. Pengalin. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. So that's a good example of something like that. And if you trace that forward and I don't know how you want to organize all this conversation, Daniel, take it where you want to go.

Yeah. I have

like that like actually had the weird effect as far as like establishing truth of undermining a whole bunch of like trust and like expertise.

That's exactly

when I was writing my notes on this I was like yeah that was one of the things that happened

and it had this weird effect also to my eyes of like undermining like almost like knowledge or something.

Yes. like knowledge itself because there was this corruption within the flow of knowledge but it like had had this deeper impact of like just undermining knowledge somehow. You could say expertise in quotes but I think it went deeper. I think it like just like started undermining like knowledge.

Yes.

And facts and like research and reality all started go down started to go down to [...]

Yes.

Because there was this weird morbid response to this. Well, I'll throw it back to you. Yeah. No, no, that's that's totally true. I mean, and there's yeah, there's so many different there's so many different pieces even wrapped up in that in those couple sentences, right? So, on one hand, you no longer have uh universally accepted authority. So, that this is now this is now gone, right? Um and then what ends up happening is that you have various groups of people who still want guidance, who are still looking for uh not an authoritative figure, but somewhere to go for information. Whether that information be guidance or whether that information just be education, right? And so you end up developing different groups. And what I what I sort of noticed is that like the groups are are insist are are consistent inside of the group, but in comparison to other groups, they're inconsistent. So that's why I said it's it's plural and competitive. So you have multiple things happening but they don't vibe with each other and this was an so society was already moving in in different ways right again because of previous administrations and and how you know the politization and the moving of the right and the left and things like this right as society pushes and pulls on itself but now you had a an inclusion of people who are in even further disbelief of the government and this time over something that was very tangible to their lives their health and their ability to live and make money and take their kids to school and be told what to do in terms of vaccines and masks and where to go and how you you couldn't go into this restaurant without a mask on, but you could totally go to the g alcohol store and buy a bunch of booze and cigarettes and you know what I'm saying? So you had a a lot of these people who are now finding new bedside fellows that they never thought that they had before and you're creating new alliances where there were none previously and these people are very animated now. But I can trace it in a way and I don't know you want to go in different directions with this but I'll I'm gonna do one thing that maybe gives this a little bit of like a tantric Buddhist context and then

I'll give like how I see this flowing forward and things now. So to me one of the things that happens when you look at like Buddhist philosophy right Asian philosophy is this idea that you have like what they sometimes call the two truths.

Yeah.

One level of truth is directed at like ultimate questions. What's the ultimate nature of reality? ultimate truth and that's you know like your big picture things like what's the nature of a human being what's the nature of consciousness what's the nature of the spirit you know these big questions what's the fundamental natures of reality ultimate things and then you have the other side which is what they call conventional truth and conventional truth is part of truth too it doesn't have the same ultimate truth status it doesn't carry the same weight but you still have to be able to figure out on a relative level like what's going on in the world, right? And that's part of the wisdom of a Buddha too be able to do ultimate truths and to understand relative truths or sometimes I say conventional truths.

So in its you know if you want to be a thoughtful spiritual person you're functioning on both of these levels.

So you know obvious things would be like if you're a doctor and we both in medicine you have to know which medicine is appropriate for which illness. That's not an ultimate truth. That's a conventional truth, right? But that's like part of the responsibility of a spiritual person to understand that level of reality too. And both of those things are operative. So what you could see is there was sort of a destruction of the conventional level of truth.

Yeah.

Started to get destroyed and one could have various degrees of suspicion around this. I'm going to tell an anecdote maybe though just for some context of what I'm trying to say about this and we'll see where this goes. But I, you know, we're recording this during the time when the Iran war is like going off the rails. It's turning into a complete shitow, right? And um

surprise.

Yes. Shocker. And uh as I've been watching this, my first instincts when this started because there's some people I sort of trust on like military history and military strategy and geopolitics. So there's a guy named

Mirshimer, John Mirshimer out of Chicago. Professor John Mirshimer. There's a professor Robert Pap who's done a lot of research on like military things and like they're like objective sources.

Yes.

So I didn't turn to like

what did this inflammatory or other inflammatory group think about what was happening.

I went to like okay here's people who this is their thing right they spent decades trying to understand this.

And I had some interesting conversations again with one of the friends I was talking about earlier when we were debating like okay how dark will it get? How dark will Trump 2.0 0 potentially be and we were having conversations and I think he was just in a different headsp space. So his thing was look at all the tactical victories of the United States. Everything's getting bombed. Everything's getting destroyed. He was in that headsp space and I was like in this different space where I was like this is turning out shitty y'all. This isn't going good at all. This is not going to be a short war by any stretch of the imagination. This is going to be long and difficult and complicated. And I was listening to the people that I would say would be expert opinions, right? It wasn't just my thought. It was like, I'm going to trust people who spend their lives thinking about this, you know,

and so that was my like instinctive way of going, okay, this is a conventional truth. I need to understand what's happening. Let me go to people who look at this part of conventional truth.

And so I had a students, you know, uh we're both TCM clinicians. I teach a lot. So I was on campus, good dude. He's like in his mid20s, mid to late 20s. We happen to come from the same hometown. So, if you listen to this episode, go Bengals. That was our high school team. Whenever this comes up, I always say, "Go Bengals." Uh, whenever we're in the Clint together. Uh, but in any case, you know, I was like, "Hey, man. Why don't you listen to some of this stuff?" And he was like, "Good. Send me some episodes. I like to know, you know, like what these people say." Cuz, you know, he was acknowledging like, "I'm getting things, but I don't know if it's entirely reliable or I don't know. I'd like to have other opinions about this." And I was like, "Cool. I'll set you up." Right? And that's an investigation into conventional truth. And if you want to frame it

in the overall arching themes of our podcast, you're supposed to know if you're trying to get enlightened in the world, you're supposed to understand ultimate truths, but you're also trying to do your best to understand conventional truths so you can be of most optimal val optimal value to people. Anyways, I thought I'd throw that out as an example because I'm literally having these conversations here like here's some people, they've studied this for decades. see what they have to say, you know, as opposed to just getting everything from just rando media sources that a lot of times are propagandist.

Correct.

And we can maybe start to reestablish some shared level of truth. But anyways, that's an example to my mind of

No, that's a good And so then I can I can tie that in then when the authority was weakened or I don't want to say authority, let's say that the the intelligencia, right? the people who said and some of it verifiably so because you know again the Fouchies of the world are telling you one thing when they're doing something else. So there was some bit of this but the other part is that like they were having to um what does it say action cannot wait for certainty. So you're having to act at a moment where there is not um certain footing. It's not clear as to what to do. The answers are not clear. I mean that's how the present always is. We can always look back and say, "Okay, what could we have done better? How can we learn from this moving forward?" So on and so forth, but in the moment that it's unfolding, you're kind of doing your best. I know that's a little bit of like a a easy way out, but it's the truth. The problem, however, is that there's just repeated mistakes over and over again, and you eventually you have to look at the intention of the people who are sharing this quote unquote information or truth for this conversation. And that's kind of where people stop trusting. They said, "Well, yeah, okay, you're yes, you're educated on this thing, but like [...] education. It's making you jaded. You have now inconsistent ideas about everybody else. You feel you're better than people." So, they started to poke holes at their education. And so, therefore, education didn't have uh as much value as it did before. But to your point, it's like maybe those people have other motivations in what they're sharing. we can all agree on this, but that doesn't make their opinion or their views completely invalid.

You're talking about the undermining of like knowledge and expertise in this really way that it was.

Yeah. And I suppose like and again I don't know if you want to go in this direction too yet Daniel but if one is like looking at this through a more skeptical cynical lens you know part of my reaction to that was okay this is um this is part of like a set of power moves.

Yes.

Part of the thing is like we're going to undermine and this is like okay this is not even conspiratorial. is like stated that part of the goal for those people who do have more authoritarian uh uh drives is to undermine truth, reality, expertise, conventional truth. That's like that's part of the modus operandi.

Yes,

we haven't done any episodes on this in particular, but at a certain point I got interested in like trying to figure out well how do you diagnose totalitarianism or fascism? And there's like some books I did in preparation for our podcast. Always researching, fellow G&Ters, for our audience. Always researching. So, I kind of came up with like a little checklist. We don't have to do the whole thing, but part of it was like there has to be propaganda, right?

And there has to be um a kind of like a destruction of uh reality along with the propaganda. And you have to be anti-intellectual in a way, right? You have to destroy reliable ideas and that's part of like an authoritarian

set of moves and we kind of watched that unfold. Going back to the beginning, I think the part that was interesting to me was I don't think I appreciate how deep that was. It took a while to really recognize all the implications of that, at least for me. Maybe other people saw that faster. I saw pieces,

but to the extent of like how deep that was, you know, that that took a little bit to fully come home to me if I like want to look at myself,

you know, and like in the mirror and be critical about my own assessment of conventional truth. I thought, well, this could go dark. But I don't think I saw how much the co thing had destroyed some of these props so much,

these positive factors so much that it like opened the door in a more um in a more uh powerful way in a more devastating way than I think I recognized initially.

So I'll I'll weave I'll weave in what you're saying and then and and then we'll bring it I'll take one step back and then weave it right back in. So essentially I think what what ended up happening is as you sort of had this decaying of expertise you have politization of decision-m where it began you began now to get your information from your political ideology and you sought out experts that also believed in you in your political views. And this makes things much much worse because now you might have subject matter experts, but you have subject matter experts who believe the way that you do. Or maybe I could say it more specifically for those who are feeling some kind of way. You believe the way they do. They tell you what you believe. Um, and I totally have something in my contact. So there's there's that. Um, okay.

Yeah, I might have to one quick second. Uh, take a quick Well, I don't know how to pause, but okay, we'll keep going. That's how it goes. Show goes on.

Okay. All right.

Yeah. So, that so that happens and therefore that influences the way in which they're going to report things because they're going to skew it in order to go to their audience and that doesn't help the actual narrative for what's happening. that doesn't help to find the actual middle ground of what is occurring without any um kind of bi political bias just like at some point the news became about prediction whereas it used to be about reflection and I prefer my news to be about reflection less than about prediction and I feel like that this politization of uh of decisionm became far more about prediction. And so the predictive aspect of this then influences how people think and it gets them to feel more snugly about their particular political viewpoint. And so then what ends up happening is that things are less reliable. Outside sources are less reliable. I have to go to where my sources I'm going to do my own research. Right? And so then you get mis misinformation, right? And there was all this misinformation campaign during COVID um amplification of certain people who knew more or less but they just had a following. And so now you hear from them and and then you know suppression of other people who might have known [...] but they don't have a large following. So we're going to just tell them to shut the [...] up. And then you have this um what I'm calling is coordination of the truth which is to you know what what you were getting at earlier is um propaganda and co-opting on one hand. On the other hand you have the the now the complete erosion of trust for the other side. So we could be looking at the same exact thing and because one person who I have more of an affiliation with tells me that's bad. I go, "Well, that's obviously bad." And then somebody else who I don't agree with will say, "Well, that's good." And I'll say, "That person's totally full of shit." And now we have just a complete completely separate views of reality. And this is being uh absolutely taken advantage of and has been now for for quite some time.

Yeah. I guess like the part of the pain of it is again uh I was having a conversation with some this is going to be about like maha I guess a little bit, right? the whole like health movement that is part of the the deeper Trumpism thing like the the RFK Jr. kind of movement stuff, right? And um and I was talking with someone like during the week and like you know she's a molecular biologist minded person. She was like, you know, there's polio coming back in Europe.

Yeah.

And I was like, huh? What? I hadn't heard that. Measles coming back. Making a comeback, right? come back kids. Um, but I hadn't heard the polio one. And you know, as someone who's involved in medicine and biology, she was like, you know, uh, that's not going to stay isolated. That's going to start moving around like crazy. You know, you start letting those things out of the bag. And so, you know, you get to this part of like the part that's painful on some level to me, and I'll try to do the best I can like just tapping into this, is I think there's probably sincere people within those groups. There could be someone who's like sincerely concerned about health and sincere sincerely concerned about, you know, aspects that could fit under that broad idea of like a maha thing. And then, you know, the painful part is you can get people coming in with a lot of sincerity and then I'm going to be the cynical person in this. There's a manipulation campaign going on to try to skew their positive motivations and essentially get Mavelian on people. get kind of dark triad macchavelia on people and manipulate them and sometimes it's very hard to say like I can uh flashback I don't know how what your relationship was I can remember RFK Jr. from back in the day where he was an environmental crusader.

Yeah.

I would have been said like okay he seems like a decent dude. I don't know too much about the guy but I certainly know he was trying to do a lot of uh things that seem to be pro- environment in a way that I would support. So I can't even tell if he's sincere or not. I can't tell anymore. And that's very disorienting. You'd think you have to you'd have to think no because the [...] looks crazy. Well, and that's but that's

Did you see the thing with him and Kid Rock where they're like doing plunges in their jeans and

drinking raw milk in the sauna?

It's everything.

Obviously, it looks crazy. Whatever is motivating people, but I do think whether you look at the people in power and if you want to just see them cynically, which would be an appropriate response, but I think there's a lot of sincere people within that, right, who probably have legitimate concerns.

Yeah. Well, that's what what ends up happening is that you have to have more energy output into keeping these narratives to tight and so this has to continually occur. So

like creating these multiple narrative streams that you're talking about, you have to constantly keep putting energy to reinforce them.

Yes.

To keep feeding into these sort of these lines of ideas. Yeah. And then and then that just it just continues this further hardening of their position and eroding the trust of other people who might be sort of you know ambivalent about their political views but you know willing to suspend disbelief for a moment and maybe they're providing something of value but now you can't anymore because you're like well this person is obviously completely disingenuous because they said one thing now or one thing or many things previously over and over and over in we won't go to war with Iran and then all of a sudden the complete opposite and like you're like there is literally zero ideological consistency a and okay so people's opinion the counterargument to that is oh well people's opinions change over time with new information and whatever sure that's fine but there are very few people who can um make those arguments with any kind of logical backing or or any kind of reasoning that makes sense that they actually present. They just say different [...] and then everybody is, you know, supposed to either believe it, which many do, and more importantly, many even many more do not. And so then we end up in this place where like things are not parallel. They're always intersecting and they don't fit and things don't fit. And you're at least for me I'm like my brain goes you know like you said earlier this conventional truth like these are not uh this is a puzzle that is not solvable actually not from the outside not from a person who's just observing. I would have to know the intentions of what's going on behind the thing. And now that makes me sound conspiratorial. And yet for many years people said no there's nobody who owns an island where they do all kind of weird [...] and all these rich people go to it. That's crazy. Oh, but wait, there is. And so then you end up in a place where now it's like if you tell somebody they're conspiratorial, that's not even an insult anymore.

Yeah. No, that's just like u it's a compliment to like how would you describe it's like you're probably looking at things the right way then.

Yes. Yeah. It's positive skepticism at this point.

Yeah. Okay. So, I've had again that looking at how people have adjusted to these last few years. I'm going to go back and I I'll try to like make it personal in the sense that I can I think can talk about having conversations with people about these things.

So, I had one person in my life who got very into sort of like the anti-wokeism movement, which was another kind of weirdass movement that just exploded out, right, and was very influential for people, this anti-wokeism. And so I had to listen for years about this [...] anti-wokeism. But I at one point I was like, listen, you know, these people you're listening to, I know, his philosophy was, I'm going to be an objective person and listen to things objectively from all sides. And I was like, okay, cool. You're sending me these things that are kind of these anti-woke things, and I'm telling you, these people are propagandists. This is not an honest conversation. I know your idea is we're having a debate about like different possible alternative ways of thinking about something. I know you think this is an honest debate. It's not. What you're sending me is propaganda that's designed to like grab on to issues that are like wedge issues and controversial issues and try to like use this stuff to tease off enough people to get them to flip in some way that can sort that will ultimately support what I would see as being authoritarian authoritarian tendencies. Right? And it was a kind of interesting conversation. And so even that whole thing of like I'll be objective and open to all sides, I was like, "No, you're not understanding who these people are." And it was a lot of like kind of right-wingish tinged material that was like kind of homophobic and anti-trans and Christiancoded in ways that I don't think he really fully was recognizing in the way that the toxic parts of Christianity that we've talked about,

you know, like it was that kind of stuff. And I was like, you're not seeing, you're thinking these are honest actors and we're having an honest conversation. We're not. This is not an honest conversation. This is a group of people who are political operatives who are propagandists who have and I remember even saying like, "Well, you know, this stuff that you're sending to me, these people are homophobic. You understand that, right?

It's a Christian nationalist homophobic stuff that you're sending to me." And he was like, "No, I'm just trying to send you alternative ideas." And I was like, "That's bullshit." And I think that was a major thing that was happening in that whole time period. It was a lot of propaganda popped out. And this is not like a dumb person. It's a person who's a smart person. And we've had known each other for a while. And I was like, "Your filter's been broken for this, right? You're not seeing this for what it is. We would have been able to call this propaganda before, but something's wrong with your filter. You're not seeing this." And as we've gone on, and we've talked more about this in retrospect, he's like, "Yeah, that was propaganda. I didn't realize to the extent that I was being propagandized, it was being framed as if it was objective argument. Let's debate the facts, you know,

and it wasn't. It was a propaganda campaign. Anyways, I'll throw it back to you, Daniel, but that that comes to my mind, too.

And I think the thing is very similar. It's a propaganda campaign.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and there's always going to be propaganda from whoever is is currently leading the the culture, the society. So, that's this is expected. But what ends up happening is that when you have weaker legitimacy, meaning that your ideas a are not popular, b are generally not helpful for the vast majority of the people, your tools have to get stronger in order to implement those relatively illegitimate ideas.

And so what end what ends up happening is what's happening now, which is a consolidation of media. We always, you know, this country makes fun of, you know, Russian state TV because they're not technically state TV and yet the majority of their news outlets via print and television all pair at the same talking points. And we look at that rightfully so, and we're like, that's look at those dummies. You know, they where they going to get they're being fed the same thing. And yet now with the consolidation of you know CBS and Tik Tok and Paramount and you know eventually CNN is going to be you know and not that CNN is good now but the the distrust for uh linear TV slash legacy media has already been highly eroded. Okay. Particular I mean from COVID but even before but particularly during particularly during COVID when a lot of these uh you know we call them alternative ideas for you know how to take care of yourself and so on and so forth were dismissed whole cloth right and they were just paring the the the the narrative that the government was putting out. Those are now being consolidated and even though they don't have as much sway as they did before, they're still vastly powerful and highly influential. And so the tools for messaging, the tools for propaganda in particular are getting even stronger. But it is my assertion that if what you were doing was actually beneficial for people, you wouldn't have to push so hard for that message to be out there. You could stand on the truth of what it is that you were wanting to do and let it be as opposed to having it, you know, dressed up with a shield and a sword saying, "Don't worry about what's behind this shield and the sword. I'll stab you if you continue to ask questions. This is good for you. don't worry about it like that. Never. Who's going to trust that? No one is going to trust that. And so then you, like you said, you you take the the wind out of the sales completely. And then we find up ending ourselves have being, you know, completely decentralized with our media, which is totally where we're at currently, right? For most people, they're not watching mainstream, you know, kind of TV. I mean, yes, they still have a large audience, but there's far more people who are getting their their news and information off various other sources. And that's good in one sense. You could say that that's the capital capitalization, you know, capitalist ideology in

the free market of ideas perhaps.

There you go. Right. However, however, and this is a big however, those people are not well researched. They're not well researched. And so people are being informed by people who might be well-meaning, might be just talking or asking questions, right? But those conversations are absolutely influencing millions and millions of people, but they're not based on anything. They're not based on truth. They're not based on lies. It's just questions based on questions. But at some point, people are going to stop asking questions and start taking answers from the questions that are getting asked and they're going to ascertain information that is either a false or be worse detrimental to their own well-being. And that I think has been probably the one, you know, for the purpose of this episode, uh, one of the pillars of what has come out of the sort of fracturing of this truth and power dynamic from co. Okay, I'm gonna like we didn't talk about this ahead of time. I'm gonna reference one other thing. Always researching for the episodes. Always researching. There's a guy named Robert Kagan and I happen to hear him being interviewed. It's funny because probably if I were to look at him and where he's at in the political perspect like spectrum, he's probably a much more conservative person than I would be. But he's writing this book called I want to say it's rebellion. and he's basically making like a point about it's a little bit about American history and culture but probably a little bit about maybe human beings overall. So, I'll throw this out as an idea and maybe we'll revisit it some other time, too. Sure.

But basically like he's goes he's doing in the book he goes through the whole like American history thing and it was kind of a little bit inspiring to listen to because he's like okay look at America it's a flawed place right and it's always had issues of racism. It's always had these issues and yet it had this other stream within it which he calls the liberal stream. And he doesn't mean liberal like political and conservative liberals and the political parties or something. He means something bigger.

He's really talking about like sort of freedom. So what he's really saying is there's anti-liberal forces that are kind of always going to be drawn more to like authoritarianism. And in America they're tied in a lot to like histories of racism and other kinds of uh uh prejudices like we're Protestant and we don't like the Catholics. We're white, we don't like black people. where this we don't like Hispanics like this line is always a little bit like blobed together in American culture but as a thing there's a bigger principle at work which is like the authoritarian tendency right and then the more like freedom liberal tendency playing itself out right and I found this to be quite interesting and I realized like this really does speak to me as we get more to the end of the episode but I'm like yeah part of what you can use maybe as a gauge age is ask yourself, okay, where is this at in that question? Is it is this an attitude that's really more oriented towards authoritarian things and totalitarian things? Is that where this is going? I should be suspicious of that. Is this something that's going more towards acceptance and freedom and the liberal thing, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness

or liberating thing?

Liberating thing. Which way is this going? And maybe that creates like an internal gauge and maybe we can debate like details of this, but overall here's a guy we probably don't align on certain parts of the political perspect like spectrum, but he's able to say, "Listen, I'll tell you a story of what happened. There were liberal-minded forces that wanted to support individual liberty, freedom, self-exression. That's a line, right? We can say that that's a flawed line because it it wasn't done right." And he acknowledges that, right? But that's a force that was there. And let's just say it's a force. Luke Skywalker.

It's a force, right? And then you have a we were talking about andor that show before we miked up. It's a force that's trying to support the liberal his language, right? That line. And then there's another force which is unfortunately the dark side. Right. In this conversation,

I want to do like this and see if he'll choke. Dun. Okay. So, you know, that other side, you know, and that can become a little bit of maybe how we can all kind of get our geer counters out

and be able to go, okay, where is this thing tending? Where is this trying to go? You know, and even with my friend I was talking about earlier, he was like, you know, a lot of the things that I was taking as maybe semi-objective honest actors, no, they were pulling in this direction of a kind of an authoritarianism. And I think that's it has been an honest conversation between the two of us. You know,

some things he's right about, some things I'm right about. We have an honest friendship. But he was like, you know, there's something about what you're saying is true. Because when you watch how this all tends to go, you look where the line goes and it all ends up like end ending up with EMP. Is it Emperor Palpatine?

No, Palpatine.

Palpatine. That's the bad guy in Star Wars.

It goes to Emperor uh Palpatine or something. Did I say that right that time? Okay. Anyways, and you can kind of go, okay, that's a gauge. And he's saying that you can see that through American history, you know, when you're the the when it goes to that side, you can always sort of sense it. And always, of course, it being America, there's always something kind of prejudice. There's always something kind of racist. There's always something authoritarian. There's always like a dark side of religiosity. Not the positive aspects of Christianity, the freedom parts, the parts that want spiritual evolution, the parts that want you to care about your neighbors. It'll always go to this other weird side of it. You know,

we're going to completely ignore the sermon on the mount. [...] that one. That one doesn't matter.

That sermon we don't care about. The one about like helping the poor and helping the stranger and [...] that one. We're not interested in that. That one always gets trashed. And you can kind of develop a gauge. So, if that helps anybody else, I found that to be a very interesting conversation. And then you can just get your radar out

and go, "Okay, which way is this really going?" And then you can kind of tell what maybe you think are the reliable sources from the unreliable ones just based on maybe that as a criteria.

Yeah. Yeah. Related to that real quick. Okay. That might be a place to stop if you want to stop.

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think I think it's a good place to stop and Yeah. because that's it's a good way for people to identify what it is that who are you listening to, what are they sharing, why are they sharing it, and where is it leading you? That's, you know,

and I think you could start to then trust your own radar. You know, you can start to develop a radar, uh, a detector, right?

Go, wait a minute. This is suspicious. This is actually starting to look like this person's trying to like

tease off in this direction. They're pretending to be an honest actor, but they're really not.

Maybe we do an episode on like uh framing.

Yeah.

Because there's so much to be said. I mean, you know, what what you're what you're alluding to is like is a where is the person guiding you, but b where is that person coming from also if it's not clear as to where it is that they're what they're trying to share with you or trying whether where they're trying to lead you? You know what I'm saying?

Well, that was interesting my conversation because he was saying like, I'm just hearing the arguments. I don't care where the source comes from. That was a big thing over the last four or five years, too. I don't care where the source comes from. I'm just going to listen to the argument. And then he would send me something with this friend I was talking about and I would go this person is from a reactionary authoritarian think tank dude.

This is not an honest actor. I So that's a deal breaker. So you can source stuff out in that sense too.

And and unfortunately information is not just information because the source does matter. We're not talking about numbers. Numbers we can be objective about. A three is a three. A three has an intention of being three. I mean maybe it wants to be a four but [...] it. Maybe it wants to be a two. But for right now, it's a three. Whereas a person inherently has their own biases. So the information that they're putting out is is absolutely trying to move you in one way or another. Why? Because they were because everything is monetized at this point. Everything is monetized. And at some point your audience,

they're politicized and about power and about manipulation. Like it's not a factual world anymore. It's a propagandized world.

It's a propagandized world. So the question is is what are they how are they propagandizing you and uh what do they want? And you have to decide do you want to be propagandized. I don't want to be propagandized personally. Either way,

I think like to me again we've done these episodes on like gnostic things and we can talk about this in the context of like Daoism or Tantric Buddhism or Tantra. There's one line of impulse that wants to go to freedom. Let's just say that that's how it is. And there's another line of impulse that wants to go to control of others and uh probably in a way manipulating and using others to like my own benefit and like you just have to maybe start developing a radar for that would be my thought and that is a deeply spiritual question to pull it back to like you know the themes of our podcast overall like developing that radar I think is really important and I have to be able to say okay these are the liberation ideas. I like your way of saying liberal. It means liberation, right?

These are liberation ideas and uh promoting individual expression, letting people be who they are, you know, letting people grow and spiritually develop. Those are the liberation ideas. Those are those tendencies and these are the tendencies are trying to like in a certain sense skew skew all of that and skew it.

Skew and skewer

both.

That's how it is. And in a certain sense, you could read that as maybe being oversimplistic, but in the weird way, it's not. In a weird way, it's like it is something that you can kind of like sense.

Yeah.

I think it's I think it's spiritually reliable.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, essentially you it comes down to asking what you know where is someone's what's someone's moral compass and how deep is that how deep is that compass actually what which direction is that compass pointing them

and if it's pointing you for a place of of freedom and uh compassion and you know again we're we are a spiritual podcast. I know today is a very conventionally truthd uh kind of ide you know discussion but overall that's essentially where you have to go to and if you can't determine that from who you're talking to then you have to have that very strongly within yourself so that you can take things in and not have it take you off your path that's

yeah I think that's a spiritual question I think that's how this all comes together so to speak right and not

and the idea of like then it becomes like okay so what is the motivation of this person Where are they coming from on that spectrum?

And then where are they trying to direct things too? Correct.

Right. And then you can kind of develop a sense of this.

Yeah.

And I don't I think that's like

again, you know, you could say, well, this is a conventional truth episode and we're talking about things that are outside the spiritual domain, but I don't think that's true. I think this is at the heart of a certain set of spiritual questions. You have to be able to like kind of get a mindset and a a clarifying radar around these things.

Yeah. We're Yeah. understand yourself and others, right? And yeah, and

it's developing discernment.

Yes, it's developing discernment. The quality of like the mind and the the fire energies, if you want to get metaphysical in that way, that is that can start to like tease this apart.

And these are like, you know, dominant forces in human life. So, we have to get clarified for oursel and then we'll be in a better position to help see where others are coming from so we can be of value to others.

Y that's

good place to stop. Eric, thank you so much as always. Appreciate it, brother. Audience, thanks for tuning in. If you made it to this point in the episode, you are in the top 3% of human attention at this current time.

Uh so we appreciate you uh tuning in and making it all the way to the end. Thank you so much. Uh if you would like, comment, subscribe. Uh feel free to send us an email at jynantragmail.com. Hit us up on the gram uh the Jyn and Tantra podcast or you know, leave a comment here. We'll get back to you. Questions, comments, concerns, hate, we'll take them all. We'll catch you on the next one. Peace.