A wide-ranging conversation on the experience of sensemaking during the pandemic, with Zubin Damania (ZDoggMD).
Zubin first came to my attention with a viral video at the start of 2020 where he channelled some righteous anger at the medical establishment's response to the pandemic, and said he hoped that the crisis would be the trigger to “burn this broken system to the ground”. For years he's been arguing for a significant change to the medical system, away from treating people as interchangeable parts in a machine and towards a more holistic vision of what he calls Health 3.0.
During the pandemic we compared notes on what we were seeing, through shared frameworks like Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and Jonathan Haidt's “moral tastebuds”. He argues for nuance and complexity, and dubs his political perspective as “alt-middle”.
0:00 - The Pandemic & the Information Ecology
04:02 - Zubin & Health Care 3.0
08:09 - The USP of Rebel Wisdom, curating a conversation
10:09 - The pandemic was a stress test that we failed
14:03 - The internet leaking out into the real world
16:37 - The religiosity of the Covid debate
19:53 - The rise in conspiracy narratives
22:56 - Questioning our own thinking
29:33 - Public intellectuals going off the rails
32:48 - The hermeneutics of suspicion
39:00 - A culture of bullshit
44:14 - Conspiracies thrive in the gaps of the mainstream
46:31 - The pre/trans of the insurgency after 2018
53:34 - Paradox of being outside the institutions - audience capture
58:27 - Warping effects of the tech platforms accelerated on creators
01:00:37 - Attention hijack as opposite of mindfulness
01:02:41 - The tragic arc of Jordan Peterson
01:06:55 - The return of the repressed
01:14:14 - The return of psychedelic medicine
01:18:57 - The limitations of psychedelics
01:22:51 - Meditation & Awakening
01:29:36 - Ayahuasca
01:32:14 - Culture War 2.0 & the memetic tribes
01:43:06 - Post Pandemic Awakening
01:46:39 - The English Taboo Against Earnestness
01:49:30 - Mutual Appreciation Society
