Joshua Michael Schrei on Myth & Meaning

Joshua Michael Schrei is a writer, teacher, photographer and lifelong student of world mythologies and cosmologies, and the creator of The Emerald podcast. I first met Josh when we were young in San Francisco. He was part of the amazing group of people at The Milarepa Fund who organized the Tibetan Freedom Concerts.

I hadn’t spoken to him in years, when people started sending me this episode of his podcast: “So You Want to be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic POwers (The AI Episode).”

The podcast is pretty amazing, and is based on a beautiful premise “that the imaginative, poetic, animate heart of human experience — elucidated by so many cultures over so many thousands of years — is missing in modern discourse and is urgently needed at a time when humanity is facing unprecedented problems.”

I've just started this conversation series as a way of getting into conversation with people that I'm really curious about. I start all of them with this same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, and she has this question, which I've totally stolen from her. I tend to over-explain it because it's a big, beautiful question. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer in any way that you want. And the question is, where do you come from?

Where do I come from? There are many levels with which one could answer a question such as this. The simple answer is that I guess I come from originally upstate New York. I was born in upstate New York and moved at a pretty young age to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Beyond that, there are layers and layers we could go into.

I think I come from a place where storytelling was a really important part of my life and my childhood and shaped a lot of how I see things. I came from a place where my parents were really immersed in spiritual tradition, and that particular spiritual tradition had a lot of story attached to it. Those stories conveyed quite a bit of enchantment about the world and the nature of being and living.

I think I come from a place that is infused with that enchantment. As I discovered a world in which not every place and not everyone has such a vision, I think over time, it became clear to me that what I needed to work to do was to help bring a little taste of that enchantment and that spark to our modern lives, which have become, I think, increasingly disenchanted.

So that's where I come from.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you remember about being a child in Santa Fe?

Early childhood was in upstate New York, so zero to ten was at a Zen Buddhist community in upstate New York. Then we moved to Santa Fe when I was ten.

It's funny, I like to talk about the subject matter more than about myself, but I can dive into some early memories. I remember in relation to the type of work I do now, this work of re-enchantment that I'm talking about, I remember the big meditation hall temple where everyone used to gather. I remember a childhood filled with ritual and I remember a big drum made of wood that used to be beaten as people were chanting.

I remember the stories. A lot of the stories. I remember a story of someone following a bouncing rice ball down into the underworld, and I remember a story of a talking fox, and I remember stories of a selfless parrot that single-handedly tried to put out a forest fire. All of these things, I think, shaped a vision at a very early age.

So I think some of my earliest memories are memories of ritual and story, and that doesn't seem out of character.

Do you have a memory of maybe what you wanted to be as a kid, like young Josh, either in upstate New York or in Santa Fe? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I went through standard little boy phases like fireman and astronaut and that kind of thing, but I remember, really from very early on, having this kind of vision of the spiritual seeker wanderer traveler type figure, which isn't that great for bringing home the bacon, as they say. It's not an optimal career choice necessarily.

But my childhood was filled with stories of seekers. Then we lived in India for a year when I was 13, which really had a very strong impact on me. All through high school, all I wanted to do was return and study and travel and study and travel and study and travel. That really, I think, formed the basis of a lot of exploration.

Now, did I put two and two together and think about how that would actually translate into living a life? Probably not so much. But I had visions of Himalayan horizons and hidden monasteries and long time spent in caves and these types of things. And that shaped a lot of my early vision.

Can you tell me a story about your parents? What were they about? What were they up to and what kind of life did they model? They seem to have modeled something for you.

What they lacked in what you could call real-world pragmatism, they made up for in a sense that this life is to find meaning and this life is to seek greater depths than are on the surface. And that study, spiritual study, is important. They were parents who were children of the sixties and whose lives were in upheaval, as many were in the late sixties, and found spiritual practice, not in the woo hippie sense, but in the sense of actual serious Buddhist practice.

When I talk about my parents, I'm talking about my mom and my stepdad because my real dad left the scene pretty early. My mom was 21 when she had me. So looking back now, I'm like, wow, you were a child when you had me as a child, and we grew up together in many ways.

They weren't so big on the balancing checkbooks aspect of life; that came much later for them. But they did instill in me a very deep sense of a life in which there is seeking to be done. And there are paths to follow and the importance of ever-expanding horizons and this type of thing.

So what was it like to grow up with that seeking? You and I, our paths crossed in the late nineties with the Tibetan freedom concerts and the Milarepa fund. I feel like my experience is very... I had a very mainstream suburban... There was no seeking going on in my childhood. I wonder how you felt met by the culture or by peers with this upbringing. Did you feel like you could find a place for yourself or did you feel like it was a struggle?

I think it was both. I think that there were times both before and after you and I crossed paths that it was difficult. In that time that we crossed paths, there was a kind of counterculture container for a lot of the stuff that I'd been exploring and seeking all my life. There were people in the mainstream music world, which I had always been interested in music and played music, who were interested in the depths of ancient traditions and in having a dialogue that's more than just the common rock star pop music dialogue.

That time period for me provided, I think, a lot of "Oh, there is a home for the things that I've always felt." It's interesting. I feel like before that, I think I had wandered a bit trying to figure out what exactly my path in this world was. And then after that special time period of those concerts and everything dissolved, I wandered a little bit more. A lot of it for me was about finding a way in which the vision of the world that I had held so dear for so long could reach people in a meaningful way.

I remember you and I having talks about this kind of thing in terms of writing because you and I are both writers. I went through a lot of frustrations until I think I finally realized that the stuff I was writing was meant to be spoken aloud. Because I always tended to write in an oral rhythmic way, and I would get feedback like, "Hey, this is too repetitive." And now I'm like, "Not for an ancient bard, it's not."

So I think there is probably a very classic artist's struggle or outcast's struggle story that wove its way throughout my life for quite a long time, which was what to do with this spark that I feel, what to do with this wonder, what to do with this vision of ancient traditions and faraway places.

I felt so strongly that there's a longing for and a want for something deeper and greater meaning than we've been presented with in the kind of late capitalist model. And for a long time, it was a matter of not really knowing how to bring that forth in the world. It took me a while. It took me a long time. And that journey, I think there's a lot of people who are on that journey now, and I think we can talk about this, but I think there's a massive meaning crisis in the world, and I think that journey is important.

The journey of "I could go this route and do this kind of standard thing, or I could go this route and do this standard thing, or even I could make use of all these traditional art forms." Or when I get to the core of it, strip that away. And what really do I have to say? What is it urgent for me to say? What am I longing to say? And how do I say it? And can I say it in a way that does justice to both the inner longings that I feel and the needs of the times, I guess I would say.

Tell me a little bit about the mythic body and the emerald and the origin of that. You're talking about it now, but how do you describe what it is that you're doing? And how is it going? It seems like it's beautiful. The stuff you're putting out is amazing. But I'd love to hear you just talk about where it came from and how you talk about it.

It came... I can see a few different streams that really led to it. One of them, in a purely reactive sense, was that frustration with the publishing industry. I had tried writing for quite a long time, and the writer's process... The process of sitting alone and composing something and then before the days of Substack, it was like you wait for that thing to either be accepted or rejected by this kind of arbitrary body who you never actually have any direct interaction with, and all the magic of story and direct interchange can get totally lost in that. It's incredibly time-consuming and the reward these days isn't that great.

After years of writing stuff that was at that point sitting on the shelf, I was just like, I have to find a way to get these stories out. I have to find a way to... And I knew from teaching yoga, somatic disciplines, and telling mythic stories integrated into the class, that people really resonated with the way I spoke and really resonated with the content that I was bringing. But I also knew I was reaching 30, 40 people at a time in that context, and I knew that there would be more souls out there who would be resonating with the things that I was saying.

It just seemed obvious to me after a while. No, this stuff is meant to be shared. It's meant to be out there. It's meant to be spoken aloud. And there's people who are going to resonate with it. And you just need to dust off the old microphone left over from my band and spoken word days and give it a try. And that's really what I did.

And then simultaneous with that, the study of myth and story has been something that's been with me for my entire life. And what I really saw culturally is that discourse, especially with the rise of the Internet, was taking on this incredibly abstracted, conceptual, analytical flavor to it. Stories that used to live in a way that they informed actual transformation and culture, stories that were told in initiatory processes, stories that were told in festivals... all of this was being lost, and what was replacing it seemed to me to be a discourse that had gotten really dry.

You could say it had been abstracted from its body in a way, and what was happening with the internet discourse and even with these traditions that I love is that people were just blathering on about it on the internet with no real anchor into the felt aspect of it. How does this feel? How does this transmit? How does this open up visionary spaces in you as you listen to it? And that felt to me like something that I needed to try to address and bring some more life to. Because I think, as I'm sure you are aware and follow, the state of discourse these days is troubling, let's just say.

And when you create an environment in which basically people live within these kind of conceptual echo chambers and then just throw ideological barbs at each other across digital space with no actual relationality, I think it's profoundly damaging and I think it's leading us in really questionable directions. And the podcast is my whatever small attempt to seek to bring breath and spark and life back to discourse.

You mentioned the meaning crisis and the word meaning. I use it. My newsletter is called "That Business of Meaning." And I think I know what I'm talking about when I talk about meaning. But what is... when we say that we're in a meaning crisis, what are we actually talking about? What do you mean when you say meaning?

There's that classic question that Wendell Berry asked, which is, "What are people for?" What are people for? What are we here for? What are we here... What is this life about? What are we here to do? And I think that's like the start of that inquiry into meaning. It's really what are we here for? And then there are varying, sometimes overlapping cultural mythologies that have sought to answer that question over time and basically say, "Okay, your purpose on this earth is to be a good subject of the Catholic Church and remove yourself from all sin. And maybe God will favor you when you die" and that kind of thing.

That goes out the window somewhat and we get the rise of humanism, and humanism makes some probably very necessary changes. But it also leads us down this road of kind of anthropocentric humans at the center of all narratives. Loss of any depth of spiritual interaction or understanding of the cosmos, and that has now been shown to have some problems to it, too. In other words, just the purely human-centric view, especially when it's also tied in with kind of larger capitalist narratives of "don't worry, the free market's going to take care of everything," which, as back in the late nineties, we were already questioning as kids. "Don't worry. The free market... just be a good kind of worker drone. The free market will take care of everything. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll rise to the top." That narrative is not proving to be so effective either.

And so you see... and I remember that late nineties time period. I'm actually going to do an episode on the nineties at some point, just to dig up some old music and walk down memory lane a little bit. But that vision in all the advertising in the nineties, everything, it was all about "this is a globalized world. Look, the internet is opening us up globally. Globalization is everything. It's going to solve all the problems. Can you even imagine living in any other world but this like free border to open market globalized world?" Now, guess what? Now we have the rise of nationalism and we have countries contracting and saying "not so fast. That's not exactly... That wasn't exactly our vision," or maybe the promised globalized world didn't actually work for everyone involved. So what's going to work? What's going to work is seal off the borders and keep all of them out. And let's get back to that original Nordic purity or whatever it is that we used to have.

And all of these are mythic narratives, right? Life is governed by mythic narrative. There's always a narrative at play. The United States has a deep narrative to what it is, and that narrative shapes how we think of the world and how we think of our lives. So meaning... the meaning crisis is, I feel, an understanding that increasingly none of these mythic narratives is really doing the trick.

And if we dive into what you could call ancient wisdom, which isn't as hokey as it sounds, what it really means is like the way that human beings have understood the meaning of existence for hundreds of thousands of years in varying traditions. There's a lot there that can help. There's a lot there that can help in this age of modern disenfranchisement and alienation and this kind of thing. And what that kind of asks us to do is examine our re-enchantment with the world, examine our state of enchantment with the world around us. Maybe reignite or re-spark a relationship with the living cosmos around us.

And understand how... Whether it's ritual structures or some type of... In a way, it's like with the big pendulum swing against religion. It's like we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, as the expression goes. So yes, there are very clear things to rebel against in traditional religious structures. But now we're floating in what you could call this meaningless chaos, and the narratives that are taking charge aren't really doing it either. So I see the meaning crisis as an invitation to find those deeper truths, those deeper stories, and see if there is a way to reintegrate them in our lives that can shift our fundamental relationship with the planet and with each other.

So that we can actually create change in this world from a place of direct felt empathy with the living world around us. So the meaning crisis, I think, is like a collapse of the narratives... all the narratives about what this life is supposed to be about. I think those are collapsing, and the return to meaning, to me, means a return to a living, breathing, felt experience of the cosmos and of each other.

I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell. I don't know if that makes me a rookie or where he fits into your sort of worldview. But I always love that he has a quote that I always return to. In that Bill Moyers thing, he says something like, "People say that they want to know the meaning of life. I don't think that's true. They want to have the experience of being alive." That's a little bit of what you're talking about too, right? That we're getting people into their body. You talked a ton about embodiment and how disembodied everything's become. And you had this AI episode, "So you want to become a sorcerer," which kind of came at me through multiple circles. I don't know if it was something that exploded for you, but it felt... Oh my gosh, you showed up with all of this wisdom at a time when we are just so confused about what's going on. Can you tell me a little bit about your first... how would you describe your relationship with AI and your experience with that episode and what you really wanted to put out there? I feel like a lot of people resonated with how you framed AI and the challenge that it poses to us. And I'd love to hear you talk more about that.

Joshua Schrei: First, just quickly on the Joseph Campbell thing. Joseph Campbell is amazing and awesome. There's areas of his work that I feel a little differently than he did about certain things or would explore things a little differently than he did. But you look at the time in which he was operating and what he brought, and it's absolutely vital and incredible. And that Bill Moyer series is fantastic. It shaped me when I was 18 years old when I first encountered it. It definitely had a huge impact on me. And that quote about the feeling of being alive... understanding that there's really a basic fundamental experience to being human and that experience has a lot to do for whatever reason with feeling separate from the world around us.

You look at most creatures inhabiting the planet and they probably don't have the same level of existential crises that we have. Humans out of all creatures seem to feel this kind of distance, right? And so humans of all creatures need to have some way of having, of making a journey back, a journey to what you can call a state of remembering or re-putting ourselves back together again. And whether that's done ritually or through story, there's many ways in which that can be done. But understanding that if you want to isolate like a primal human drive, it is the drive for some type of felt reconnection. Some type of remembering. And if we don't have that in our lives, we can find it through trail running. We can find it through artistic flow. We can find it through so many different things. But if we don't have that in our lives, we will probably run around seeking it in not the healthiest ways. And that I think is key in understanding the deep liminal drives that are at play and why human beings do things.

So with AI, there are probably incredible benefits that are coming with AI. There's all kinds of interesting things happening. I use AI for auto-generating coloring book images for my kids to color. It's actually probably the best use of AI that anyone's ever come up with.

I'm feeling that right now. I'm so excited to try it.

Except sometimes the creatures are mutated. That's the... AI still has this kind of strange, like mutant vision of the world. I use it... it's a great synthesizer of information as long as you double-check the information, cause AI will lie. If ChatGPT will deceive you, I don't know if people have noticed this, but it's true. It'll say, "Yeah, that's absolutely it. That's totally it." And I'm like, "Really?" And it's like, "On second thought, no." You got to be careful of it. Like you have to look a little deeper. But so that there's obviously benefits to AI, but in the drive to create AI, these kind of same latent drives that I'm speaking about are very present.

Human beings have a fascination with tinkering with that which we shouldn't probably tinker. We have a fascination with, "Oh, let's see what is going to happen if we just kind of mess with this a little bit and mess with that a little bit." There's an overarching death narrative to AI that's been there since the very, very beginning. From the inception of AI, there has also been the parallel narrative of "this is gonna destroy us all" - "this is the thing that's going to save us, and this is the thing that's going to destroy us." This is a narrative that's incredibly influenced by Judeo-Christian apocalyptic vision, and to try to say that it's not and that those drives aren't operating within it is to ignore how mythic narrative works and how it influences culture.

So you see people busily working away to achieve this kind of mystical thing called artificial general intelligence with absolutely no understanding of what it is or where it's gonna lead, and combined with this frenetic rush to market. And meanwhile, people are saying, "Yeah. And by the way, it's... There's a chance that it's just gonna kill us all." And you have to ask yourself, like, why are we doing this? And there's no way to explain it other than what you could call like deep catholic drives within the human being. It's not just "Oh, it's profitable, and it's the natural next step of technology. I know if we don't do it, they'll do it." And sure, those are all... those enter into the conversation, but that's not the... that's not the heart of it. The heart of it is a little boy playing with blowing things up. That's the heart of it. The heart of it is the sorcerer's apprentice, which I talk about in that episode. The heart of it is like, "Oop, I got access to the spell book and the master's out of the house and I'm gonna see what I can get away with. I'm gonna see what I can get away with."

And that, in traditional cultures, is an impulse that needs to be somewhat curbed. That's where, like when the kind of over-seeking, over-roving adolescent mind that's "Hey, I could be master of the universe," right? When it comes along, that's when they say, "Okay, now it's time for your initiation ritual. Now it's time for you to be brought down to size a little bit. Now it's time for you to be regrown as a member of the community as opposed to just this like roving rogue with visions of world domination."

And our culture of modern venture capital and what we reward and all this kind of thing is such that those roving rogue nerds with visions of global domination are now being... Still adolescent visions of global domination still coming from the place of the kid who could never get any girls in class and stuff like this are now being thrown billions of dollars in venture capital and given free rein to do whatever they want. And to me, that's frightening.

I share that feeling, but in what you've just described, it really just becomes clear to me... You're in that episode, I recommend everybody listen to that episode. It's amazing the way you point out that these cultures are functioning cultures, right? They create structures around these developing young men to help them learn to wait, right? So they have a functioning culture and I'm reminded of a conversation I've had about this with Grant McCracken, who's an anthropologist that I admire quite a bit. I remember him saying that our culture very clearly is broken. It's not helping us. The role of culture is to help us develop into a functioning member of society, and we just... we're not, it's not working that way anymore. And I feel like only, in part because of what you've shared with this episode on AI, and just generally the state of the world, I feel like we are very much living in a world that's been designed by undeveloped young men. Do you know what I mean? And we're all trapped in this very masculine framework that's not healthy or productive or complete really. It's not even a full vision of what it means to be alive.

No, it's a very narrow vision. And one of the first people I spoke about this with was an aboriginal author named Tyson Yunkaporta, who if you want to have a wild conversation, I recommend reaching out to him. I can put you in touch with him if you want. But he wrote a book called Sand Talk which is highly worth reading. It's about kind of indigenous systems thinking and the differences between indigenous systems thinking and modern systems thinking. And he directly says, "Look, we look at modern culture and we see an adolescent culture. We see an adolescent culture." It's like that... That phase of life... What you could call like unchecked capitalism runs on that particular slice of life that is in the roving seeking phase, right? And that roving seeking phase is beautiful and it's important. But there are other phases of life too. There are phases of life that are about much more about relational stability, for example, or how do you take those creative urges and creative drives?

What Tyson said in the most recent conversation I had with him is there's always going to be rogues within every system and rogues are great and they refresh the system. And it's important to have that rogue perspective. But if you get into a place where it's all rogues, if you get into a place where the whole... look at the state of Congress right now, if you get into a place where the entire thing is being run by rogue story, then the words he used is "creation can't hold its shape." Which I thought was a really incredible way of talking about it. Basically within this kind of structure of culture, you need the constant refreshment of culture, but you also need the established kind of initiatory processes and the ways of working that keep a culture stable. And if it's all rewarding rogues, if it's all... Each... the political party, the Republican Party now is completely based on this whole "we're rogues. We're outsiders. We're going to tear the system down." And you look at the 24-hour news cycle and how it's "We're the ones who are exposing the hypocrisy on the other side. And we're the ones who are tearing this old narrative down and we're getting..." Yeah. All of it is about glorifying the kind of culture breaker.

Right?

Like the trickster, as it would be called in the mythic sense. It's like, all of it is about claiming this kind of trickster role and saying "We're the rogues and we're going to tear the system apart," or "I'm the rogue and I'm going to get a billion dollars in venture capital to get over this crazy, like visionary thing that I have." And you want tricksters within your culture. But you also want those tricksters to have healthy expression, but not take over the... You don't want QAnon shamans sitting in the main seat in Congress, right? And that was such an image of "Oh, the trickster has toppled the... the kind of status quo."

And understanding how to make space for the creative imaginal, sometimes death-inspired vision of the roving, restless seeker, right? But also understanding that needs to be tempered and held within something. And this is what a Council of Elders is for. This is what... and our culture doesn't value that. It values that roving, seeking energy. And then it's ironic because we get two presidential candidates now who are both like 80 who can't even fulfill the role of being functional elders themselves. And what you're left with is an elderless society.

Yeah.

A society that doesn't have its systems in place through which the forces that would like erode society are held in check. And then it becomes like a free-for-all, which is where we're at now.

What do you... so part of the diagnosis is that this culture... would you talk about the praise of waiting. You mean that in those cultures, when a disciple or a student wants to learn, the first task is just to stay. Just to wait. How do you... how do we do that? Or what do you... what kind of suggestions do you have for us to... how do we act in this environment to good end?

I don't have much hope that like culture on mass is going to instantly adopt this kind of accountability of the elders type view and just suddenly be transformed. I think that the best we can do is institute it in our communities and our systems and our families. I think that's where it has to start. I think... I just taught a course on embodied ethics in the age of AI based on that episode. And I had some pretty major folks from the tech world come and take it. And I had a lot of people who are just starting out in the tech world. And to me, have that kind of course and be able to say, "Hey, no. Let's slow down a little bit" and even if you think that the voice that's saying slow down is ridiculous or out of touch or not in line with the AI arms race that's happening in the world, the voice that says slow down is still incredibly important.

It's incredibly important to always have that voice to say "Really, what's the rush?" I was just talking with Jamie Wheel. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work. Recommend checking him out. He's a super interesting guy. And we were talking about this mad techno-utopian vision rush to Mars stuff, right? And it's just really... what's the rush? Like we're living on a planet that has thousands of medicinal species of plants that generate all the food that we need, oceans that give us breathable skies where we can go outside and feel a cool breeze and look up at the moon and... We're talking about madly rushing to get to a place that is minus 40 degrees and you'll never be able to take a breath of fresh air again. Like literally what's the rush. And then you have to start to look at... Oh, the rush is for the rush itself. The anxiety is for the anxiety itself. It is an addictive... it's an addictive impulse. It's the... It's... Yeah, it's the jonesing for the fix, but the fix itself is not really like the thing in question. The thing in question is the addiction to the addiction to the longing.

Yeah.

And when you see it that way, when you start to see how pathological it is, then it takes you right back to that question of Wendell Berry. It's what are people for? We've got enough resources... Elon Musk... These guys have enough resources to make tremendous changes in how human beings like actually live their lives on this planet. Not to mention live an incredibly abundant life themselves. Why are we possibly rushing into space? Like, and I'm laughing just because... when you break it down, it's just ludicrous. And the only thing you can really conclude from it is that it's for the rush itself. It's for that forward-reaching Promethean anxiousness. And that I think is an area... like if there's one place for people to look... and all of the meditative traditions, all of the spiritual traditions that I've ever encountered will get us to this place where inside ourselves, we have to go into those places that are restlessly urging forward and see if we can bring some space to them and temper them and see if in bringing space to them and tempering them a little bit, that changes how we are with our families. That changes how we are with our communities and then that type of change does spread out into the world.

So I don't think it's going to be a top-down thing. I think it's going to be a thing where, and I also think... like the crazier it gets, because it's gotten pretty weird out there since you and I used to hang out together in San Francisco, it's gotten pretty weird out there. The crazier it gets, I think more and more people are going to be simply not buying the program, going along for the ride. I think more and more people are going to be like, "You know what? I don't want to be an anxious, isolated mess who's like slaving away all my life to try to get to some projected future. I'm going to experiment with something different and maybe me and my friends are going to pitch in on some land and we're going to try to work things a different way" or all of that. So I think that the... what I call the somatics of it will eventually be untenable. They'll always find... they'll always find people who are willing to serve as the kind of cogs in that vision, but I think it's going to be less and less appealing and less tenable. And as that happens, I think we might see a big resurgence towards differing models of being.

Do you see that anywhere now? Where do you see that happening?

The kinds of people who come and take my courses, there's lots of people who are experimenting with alternative modalities of community living and different social modeling and this type of thing. And yeah, there's a lot of it and that's not easy either. Intentional community is not easy. Humans are humans no matter what you do. But I think that there's a lot of it going on and I think there's going to be a lot more of it.

Can you tell me a little bit... the embodied ethics in AI in the age of AI? Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're... what you want people to get out of that course?

There's some of it that's fairly specific to the tech world in the AI world. I think the foremost thing is understanding that ethics is something that needs to be felt, and it's something that needs to be embodied. It's something that needs to be actually ritualized and put into practice in our lives. In other words, if you have a young AI programmer student who is in an overarching environment in which they're being told... the overarching climate is like "rush forward and get it done. And don't worry about all that regulatory stuff. Just go for..." Like for them to take one little tiny semester course on "Oh, by the way, here's how you have to be ethical"... it doesn't... it doesn't do the job. It doesn't nearly get to the conversations that need to happen. And fundamentally with AI, what we're talking about is potentially world-altering technology, right?

And with that world-altering technology, it needs to be held. It needs to be held in something. There will be government regulations that come undoubtedly. But as I see it, that's not enough. Just as with climate, I don't think it's enough to just have laws that restrict carbon emissions. I think it's part of it. It's definitely a key part of it. But ethics... like waking up to one's basic primal relationship with the living world around us. Understanding in the words of Chief Seattle, that what we do to the web of life we do to ourselves, like the most basic ethical understanding, right? What we do to the web of life we do to ourselves. Understanding that we're part of an interconnected web that is... when that understanding becomes so deeply embodied in us, and you see this in animist traditions who see every aspect of their immediate ecology and ecosystem as alive and worthy of respect and worthy of deep levels of relational interaction and reciprocity... when that becomes embodied in the human being, it changes your entire orientation around decision making and how you see the world, right?

There needs to be a shift to... and this is why the very first... It was a joy to sit there with all these tech folks and... and the first thing that we did was do like a 30-minute point-by-point gratitude for all of the species and beings in the world around... in the immediate ecology around us, simply to get people into this place of "Oh, yeah, I'm just a part of an overall web, and I have a responsibility to that web..."

It's just... what is it about AI that seems to have provoked this awake... awakening, awareness? I encounter the idea of multiple intelligences all the time now. I feel like the more than human world... I'm thinking about David Abram and Becoming Animal. And there's a woman I follow who's all about citizen assembly and deliberative democracy. And she's writing about governance for a more than human world. And what you're talking about... I guess there's an asterisk here. I'm wondering... I'm remembering being young with you and wondering, was the same kind of provocation happening for us then, or is there something unique about AI that invites this kind of... I'm using your language... this threshold for us to be aware, become aware, or whatever. Or beware in a way.

I think it's always there. And I think that like when you and I were hanging out, it was like that challenge of something like the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, inviting people to in the height of nineties... kind of grunge cynicism to like care about something and remember that there's deeper things going on and that there's a nonviolent path and a spiritual path that has worked for people in this kind of thing. So I think that... I think the culture is always seeking it in a way.

But it's true that the AI discussion has prompted... I would say, greater inquiry into the nature of intelligence and consciousness and being. And in that way, I think it's actually extremely interesting to see what has come from it. And what is going to continue to come from it? Because basically we're not talking about just the latest software upgrade for your Mac. We're talking about primal questions about consciousness, being, intelligence, all of these things. And even about things like privacy. Spirit and what spirit is... like if something replicates all of the thought patterns of Josh and movements of Josh... is it Josh or is it just a reflection? And if it's not Josh, then that suggests that there's some type of vitalizing spirit that is beyond those patterns of networks and things like that.

So I think that it naturally leads to discussions that I think are very important. What I talk about in the episode is... for exactly how long were humans willing to live in a deanimated world? In other words, for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years, we saw this world as animate and alive. And then we have this little kind of flirtation with humanism. And then we take all the technologies within that flirtation with humanism... We take all the technologies and start building sentience because we ultimately, I think, understand that sentience is actually the nature of things. Even if we don't want to admit it, I think that's there.

And I think that we won't live... we're constantly finding ways to animate what we consider to ostensibly be inanimate. And I think there's something for us to look at there. I think there's something for us to look at in terms of the nature of reality itself. Okay, if we're so determined to find sentience everywhere... could it be that there is sentience everywhere? Something like that. And why are we so determined to tear down gods, but then all of a sudden just build new ones right away within a few years, like really historically what amounts to a few years. It's "Okay, we're tearing down all the gods in favor of science." And now what is the apex project of science? The apex project of science... "We're going to construct... A god." Go figure, right?

It shows us something about the human orientation towards the mysterious and the ineffable and towards spirit and sentience. And that's why I say... as much as we can say it's all about wanting more control in the world, it's all about wanting like greater facility to solve problems and all this kind of stuff... I think there's a big part of it that's about wanting to surrender control back to the greater. And I don't think... I don't think humans are fully happy being the ones totally in charge because ultimately we're not... ultimately nature... all of the work, all these systems of control that we're creating are like micro specs in the vastness of the story of nature.

So I think that there's a discomfort with the amount of control that we think that we have. And I think that we... we won't get away from primal questions of sentience and agency and forces beyond our control because that's the nature of the place we live.

Awesome. I want to thank you so much for... kind of... we're at the end of our time. I feel like we could go on forever. I really... it's wonderful to see you.

Yeah, you too, man.

I really love what you're doing and this has been a real joy. So thank you so much.

Yeah, for sure.

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