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Hey ihr lieben Menschen da draußen, ich wünsche euch erstmal einen wunderschönen Tag. Dies ist eine kurze Intro zu meinem neuen Interview mit Saeed Elias Davlabani. Ich werde jetzt in der kommenden Zeit wieder mehr Interviews mit bemerkenswerten Menschen durchführen.
Ich hoffe, das trifft auf euer Interesse und ich möchte euch von Herzen einladen, wenn es jemanden gibt, von dem ihr denkt, ich sollte ihn unbedingt in meinem Podcast einladen, könnt ihr das sehr, sehr gerne hier unten in den Kommentaren hinterlassen.
Heute geht es um ein spannendes Thema, es geht um die Ebenen des Bewusstseins und es geht um eine Entwicklungsstufe, die viele Visionäre und Visionären in den 70er Jahren vorausgesagt haben, der sogenannte Second Sapiens, eine völlig neue Art, die Komplexität des Lebens zu begreifen und das Mensch demütig und sehr bewusst unseren Platz in der Komplexität im Gewebe des Lebens einzunehmen.
Ich möchte heute zum allererst mal eine Trägerwarnung aussprechen. Saeed ist jemand, der sich sehr ausführlich mit Spaldanamex, mit den Entwicklungsebenen der Menschheit und auch mit der Entwicklung unseres Klimas beschäftigt.
Ich weiß nicht, ob du die Nachrichten, was unser Wetter, was Mota Gaia betrifft, an dich herankommen lässt, Fakt ist, diese Nachrichten sind schlecht und ich verstehe, dass manche Menschen heutzutage sagen, okay, ich bin eh schon am Rande, meine Aufnahmekapazität, ich kann keine schlechten Nachrichten mehr verkraften.
Ich möchte dich darauf hinweisen, dass es in diesem Podcast auch Nachrichten gibt über mögliche Zukunftstrends oder auch über den aktuellen Zustand. der Erde, die negativ sind. Ich persönlich bin der Meinung, es ist wichtig, dass wir das wissen, es ist wichtig, dass wir uns davon berühren lassen und dann eine innere Haltung von, ich nenne das Zukunftslust entwickeln, eine Bereitschaft wirklich gerade jetzt in dieser besonderen heiklen Zeit der Menschheitsgeschichte,
alles was du bist, was du weißt, was du hast, in die Waagschale zu werfen. Und ich möchte dich einladen, erwachsen und selbst verantwortlich eine Wahl zu treffen, ob du dich in diesem Podcast damit konfrontieren möchtest.
Ich möchte euch von Herzen einladen, euch das Buch von Sir I. zu besorgen, Second Sapiens, für mich persönlich, es ist ein ganz ganz wichtiges Buch, ein unbequemes Buch und gleichzeitig ein Buch, was mobilisiert und was auch erklärt, warum wir stehen, wo wir stehen und wohin wir uns entwickeln müssen.
Wie immer freue ich mich nach dem Podcast über eure Kommentare im Postbereich. Was war deine wichtigste Erkenntnis? Was hat dich berührt? Was nimmst du mit? Ich freue mich, wenn du dem Podcast teilst.
Es finde ich persönlich. Ganz, ganz wichtiges Thema. Und wenn du es noch nicht gemacht hast, abonniere den Kanal. Das hilft immer bei den Algorithmen. Ich danke dir sehr, dass du dabei bist. Ich danke dir sehr, dass du dich den existenziellen Fragen im Incheid stellst.
You First, I have to thank you very much that you were able to quickly respond to my request. I’m very happy to meet you. Likewise, Spidey. It’s a pleasure meeting you as well. So my getting to know Pond with you is, of course, your new book, Second Sapiens.
And we will speak about this, but first I would like to ask you to give our audience a little bit inside about your background and yourself as a person. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity to do this.
Before coming into the work that Don Beck was doing, I had a career in real estate. I was building homes and commercial properties and being an investment advisor. And then around 2002, Don asked my late wife, Elsa, if she considered helping him in bringing the Spidey Dynamics framework to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And she had already been trained with Don, and he saw how well she knew. knew the political system. She’s an attorney. She went to law school in Lebanon. So she studied, among other things, Sharia law.
And of course, Lebanon having a French system also understood the Napoleon Code and the Commonwealth law and so forth. So she was aware of the comparative differences between the different cultures, between the different laws that needed to be applied.
So Dr. Beck found that as a very important thing for him to be able to do his work. So you fast forward a few years and I found myself being a lot more involved in the work that they were doing. And then in about 2004, the three of us formed the Center for Human Emergence, the Middle East, through which we did our work for several years.
So this now becomes the application of spiral dynamics at the large scale. This is really, you know, most people who take spiral dynamics or spiral dynamics integral. use it for the dawn rates, the degrees of complexity in the size of the application that you’re applying the framework to.
So 95 percent of people who get certified in spiral dynamics or spiral dynamics interval or integral theory itself really deal with the issues of personal growth, personal consciousness, corporate consulting, group dynamics, and things of that nature.
Those are levels one and two on the complexity scale. And so what we were doing in Israel and Palestine was more of the level of complexity three, four, and five. So we’re talking about a country, a region, and possibly the dynamics, the outer dynamics that would affect geopolitics overall.
So that’s really one of the first distinctions I want to bring up in this work. Then at about 2006 or so having had the background in finance and economics, I began to write some articles about the economic problems we were having with the housing crisis here in the United States.
And I was doing that through the spiraling and its framework. And I found a lot of people responding there, like we never considered that economics or anything that has to do with the economy can be placed in an evolutionary form.
And so that as the financial crisis of 2008, set on, I shifted the focus to addressing really the greater global financial crisis. And from that, Dr. Beck basically told me, you know, unless you’re building homes and making a loss, you should drop everything you’re doing and write a book about this.
And so, you know, by that, and by 2013, I had written my first book, Memonomics, and it seemed quite a bit of success. But then at around 2015 or so, Dr. Beck and I started having this casual conversation about whether or not either spiral dynamics or integral theory are sufficient, are models that are sufficient enough to address the existential problems that we’re facing.
Primarily, all the volatility and the chaos that we’ve been being created by the digital age add to that the idea that politicians who run the world really don’t know how to deal with this huge disruption.
And of course, the largest disruption overall was climate change. And so we began this conversation about that. And every time we talked about it, Dr. Beck would tell me, Said, you’re not zooming out far enough.
So what he was basically referring to is that if I was looking at this from a perspective of level four or five of complexity, I really needed to zoom out to level six and beyond. Look at this from a planetary perspective.
And so Through the years, you know, I’ve started listening to podcasts about climate change, to people who really know the causes of climate change, and almost every time they would end their conversations with something along the lines of human intelligence could never be as complex as Mother Nature’s intelligence.
And so it was me that clicked and I go, okay, well, this is this is how we transition the model to address issues of climate change. This is how we move the model to the future. And it has to be, it has to move from this idea that, you know, one of the scientists called the human exceptionalism paradigm.
We have to go from this idea that, you know, if we think about a problem with the predominant form of science and research that we can solve it, when in reality, we really needed almost a return to nature.
It’s almost like skipping the entire enlightenment era, take its best practices, and return it back to how we were before the Orange Thieves of development came about, to how life was, you know, when we were all, you know, Indigenous intelligence groups, tens of thousands of us populated the world, where we really still believed in the spirituality of Mother Nature, what it is like to be in touch with the ground,
with the cosmos, and really the mystery that the Orange Stage just completely dismisses in favor of reductionist science, in favor of, you know, analysis that keeps happening and provides us with solutions that we don’t know if they’re right or wrong.
So that really led me to start the research on this, and that’s how I found the idea of what Don calls the repurposing of secondary intelligence. So in reality, what I’ve done in my work is take the second tier, which, you know, when, when Dawn and Ken created, they created an environment where climate change wasn’t an issue.
It wasn’t on the horizon for that. So the model’s defaulted to addressing human build structures. And so what Dawn supported in the idea that second tier needs to be purposed is that, you know, human intelligence needs to be nested in natural intelligence again.
And so that’s the huge distinction that I make in my book, is that we should stop looking for human exceptionalism and our idea that we can analyze everything down to the micro detail and derive solutions from that to the idea that we should really listen to what Mother Nature is telling us and how she reacts to things and how she adapts to things and incorporate that into new scientific methods.
So this is what I’m calling the anthropogenic guidance sciences. which are at the turquoise level. You know, when you nest the model in natural intelligence, you know, I mean, before even that, and you know, Don considered the turquoise stage as a, you know, the theme of it was the ecological alignment of all living things on earth.
So, I mean, we’re talking about an ecological crisis here. So why wouldn’t that be the purpose of the turquoise system empowered by ecological sciences? So that’s the, really the foundation from where I approached my book.
Yeah. So there’s a, I mean, I have to admit, your book has given me some sleepless nights. It’s not a nice book. Yeah. I think it’s a very, very important, it’s a brave book. Yeah, because it puts the finger in the wound.
So I have a challenge for you. So in my audience, I would say we have 10 to 20% of people which are very familiar with spal dynamics and so on. The other part of the audience is very open, very curious, but they don’t know what is the first tier, the second tier.
So in your book, you’ve write a lot about the first sapiens and the second sapiens. So how you would describe this very different kind of sapiens to somebody who never heard anything about spirodynamics, right?
Yeah, okay. So basically the theory of spirodynamics goes all the way back to the original researcher who conceived it, a professor, developmental psychology professor by the name of Claire Graves. And through his research, he had uncovered human evolution develops in stages and that he uncovered a total of eight stages, based on his research back in the 1960s and 70s.
And he figured the first six stages of development are what he called the first expression of an endless symphony of humanity. So the first expression being really driven by deficient motivations by, you know, for example, if you live in a tribal culture, you live in the fear of the enemy, that’s stage number two.
If you’re like so many autocratic politicians that are rising to power, if you believe in your own ego and your own personal powers, this is a solution everything, you’re at stage three. If you believe in institutions and the idea that there is things like, you know, life after death, there’s a need to postpone gratification for rewards later, you know, that’s level four.
I mean, it’s level four when you apply it to the to the macro stage, that’s really where democracy begins. That’s where the shift from, you know, believing in the power of the ego to nesting power in the hands of the institutions of a culture.
So democracy begins at that stage. So, beyond that stage where there’s absolutism, you know, religion, for example, is the entry stages of that fourth stage of development and believes in absolute, you know, it’s either black or white, it’s white or raw.
And because of that, you know, people with higher intelligence begin to reject that model and they ascend to the next level. So, level five in the model was born with the age of enlightenment, with the scientific revolution where we begin to think in multiplicistic scientific ways.
The general theme of that stage of development is to uncover the secrets of the universe through scientific research and mathematical analysis and modeling. And so, and it is also that stage, so every stage has a good expression and expression.
What we’re seeing now is the bad expression of that fifth level of development. It has gotten us to where we are. It is you use what is called the reductive sciences to promote the idea that we can consume forever.
If we create a peaceful society through trade and consumption that we will never have war again. Well, you know, that fallacy is beginning to show now, great, we haven’t started another great war against each other, but we collectively started the war against Mother Nature.
And so, this is the nature of the fifth stage of development that is responsible for most of the problems now. Now, the stage above that is stage six, which believes in the humanitarian nature where we are in the egalitarian values and community values in treating each other with respect and equal.
And, you know, the idea that, you know, someone is better than the other is a fallacy. We’re within that stage, although it’s very harmonious and very good. And it’s something that we really need to emerge to.
to, before we move further up to higher stages, the very idea that you can treat someone like Donald Trump or someone like Putin as someone who’s equal is a fallacy. The minute you start treating them like that, they will take advantage of you and will destroy the entire developmental hierarchy that got you there.
And so that’s why the sixth stage, the green system, the egalitarian system, has been ineffective in addressing ecological problems, problems with geopolitics, issues with peace. Peace happens by design.
And you have to be, you have to understand all those stages that are below that sixth stage in order for peace to be effective. And so to do that, you can’t do it from a sixth stage. You have to go to what’s called as second tier.
So what Dr. Graves had uncovered is that But this is the first tier, right? So the first tier ends at level six. And Dr. Graves says, that is quite a dangerous stage to be stuck in, simply because of the idea that we think that we’re all equal.
This is the best humanity is going to be. And as Dr. Beck used to label it, we will throw the ladder out from under us, the ladder that got us there. Oh, no, there’s nothing else that exists. Oh, no, yeah, you’re a bloodthirsty dictator.
Oh, no, no, come on, you know, if we give you a chance to sit in a circle with us and we hold hands, everything’s going to be OK. That’s BS. That’s, you know, they look for that opportunity to destroy the complexity that has been built.
So Dr. Graves uses this expression, says, when you’re at stage six, you’re really the only thing that moves you because you’ve thrown that ladder that got you there from under. The only thing that moves you to realize there are higher stages of existence is that when you’re sitting in a meditative state, staring at your navel and using daddy’s gold credit card, suddenly the ceiling begins to collapse on your head.
Yeah. You know? And what he’s saying is the ceiling is an indication of the problems that begin to appear that need higher intelligence to be solved. And so the ceiling collapsing on your head is what’s happening now.
The idea that we have ignored the collogical issues is that ceiling falling in on our heads. And so we’re in this deep and profound search for new ways on how to address, how to not only fix the ceiling, but how do we preserve it for the rest of humanity that we can pursue?
that issue as long as possible and so this is the difference between first year and second year. Second tier is made up of two value to additional value systems level seven which is labeled the integrative level or color yellow I labeled it in my work safe in 2.1 and it is really that transitional stage between the first and the second tier it finds what went wrong in the first year where we are stuck where do the barriers exist that don’t that stop us from addressing certain issues and it and it opens them up it really plugs them on a trajectory towards a healthy second-tier view of you know a better picture of that stage and a better picture of ourselves and then comes in the the eighth stage that says well okay now that we’re aligned you know I am the the long-term caregiver for this humanity that are going to accommodate humanity to live in ecologically aligned in a thriving way as much as we can.
So primarily those are the two differences between what I call first sapiens. People are motivated by deficient needs to second sapiens. People who use full brain capacities but nest those capacities in the intelligence of mother nature.
In the intelligence that predates human intelligence by 3.4 billion years. That’s the nature of what we’re trying to describe here and it is complex. And like you said, it’s not for the week of heart.
So I work a lot for people which are in green. And usually if I talk about turquoise and I explain it a little bit, a lot of people which are in green think, oh, that’s me. That’s me. So what is the main difference?
How can I find out for myself if I’m honest, if I’m self honest, that there’s still a gap? I can only speak about my experience. Most people in green who I ran into belong in the unhealthy aspect of green.
To really become, to have a healthy first tier, meaning that you could transition to second tier to second sapient thinking without really too much problems. All the entire systems below you have to be in a healthy stage.
Now what that means is you really have to understand the motivations of the lower systems. There isn’t a single green person that I met who understands how the ordinary system, the capitalist system, the that runs the world, especially in the States.
They have absolutely no clue how it runs. They’re very angry at it. They understand it marginally, but that is not enough. You really have to dig deep into understanding the mechanics of what makes the systems below you tick.
And unless you’re able to address these effectively and really test to see if your hypothesis is effective, you just won’t be able to ascend to the second tier of intelligence. The primary example I use in politics here in the States, we have one senator by the name of Elizabeth Warren, who is really a second tier thinker.
You know, she was a healthy Republican, you know, realized in the orange stages of development and capitalism at its best, but she saw it erode over the years. So she’s able to understand where things went wrong.
You know, she was able to understand how the… for example, how the banking industry got deregulated, which is at the heart of the causes of the financial crisis and the political players who did that.
She was also to see how weak the regulatory element was. So we’re talking now about her diagnosing what was wrong with the fourth stage of development, what was wrong with the fifth stage of development.
And also, if you’ve heard what you had said about leaders like Donald Trump and Clinton, you get a clear understanding that she also understands how the third stage of development functions. So unless a person understands the function and the dysfunction, the healthy and the unhealthy aspect of the systems below them, they won’t be able to ascend to secondary intelligence.
So when green tells you, we all know that that’s turquoise, that’s projection, that’s pure projection. Simply ask them, why do you think so? And if it’s a look for phrasing that is mostly green more than it is turquoise, do you know, not only, oh, I care for all of humanity, do you know how to care for all of humanity?
Are you able to access the systems that are in place to change them to not care for humanity? So it’s more of like a macro and a mega scale application, not, you know, I really don’t apply much of the spiritual aspects of spiral dynamics and Ken’s teaching to second tier, simply because, you know, the further you move away, the further you develop yourself spiritually and philosophically, the further you’re moving away from real solutions.
And so I really want to stick to, you know, this is a scientifically based concept. And unless we understand that whatever we’re doing now is going to fall short from it, addressing climate change, that is disasters in nature, you know, the world’s not gonna have a chance to emerge to second tier.
And so there are ways to measure whether someone’s in turquoise or not. They could be wrongfully assimilating that the values of turquoise. And so there are certain asset tests that you could do, you know, value match if you know who they are.
They can easily run the test. And even if someone who really knows how to manipulate the test, you know, how can the value match can tell, you know, who just by again, you know, assessing what I just talked about, if they have a high rejection to the orange system in their psychological profile, that means they’re green, they’re not turquoise.
If they have a high rejection to, you know, to all the lower elements of the spiral, they just don’t belong in second tier. Yeah. That means I have to find orange in myself. I have to find blue in myself.
I have to make peace with this in myself. Yeah. In your book, you write with a strong urgency about this time and you call it the great obsolence. Could you please explain what do you mean with this?
So, you know, I want to go back to the discussions of Dr. Beck and I were having 2015 and 2016. So, as I did my research into, you know, how to repurpose the model. Why weren’t we really addressing the issues?
I first wanted to identify what the issues were. And, you know, with him telling me, you need to stand on Jupiter and look at this from the outer hole on that we’re getting used to. What I, you know, my research has uncovered is that there are three factors that are contributing to what I became, what I came to call the great obsolescence.
Many people in the integral community call this the metacrisis. Well, the metacrisis has one thing in common and it is the idea that the values that we embrace post-World War II are at the heart of what’s happening now.
The idea that we can, you know, a model for governance can last forever. It’s a big fallacy. The dynamics of the world has changed since the, you know, the post-World War II framework that gave us the reality the way it is.
Population has grown by more than three times. The, you know, that we created global institutions to accommodate modernity and development. But, you know, the size of the global economy has grown by 15 times since those times.
So, of course, you know, the more complexity a system gets, means the more complex solutions you have to find. So our institutions aren’t moving as fast as the evolutionary trajectory be the degree to which we conduct commerce, the degree to which so much of the world’s population is emerging into that modernity phase, where we without really knowing the consequences of it.
So the first major factor that was contributing to the great obsolescence was the idea that the values and the ethos that have driven us for the last 80 years or so have reached a decline stage. And the further they move without us changing the mechanics of how these institutions work, the further the randomness of these problems are going to show.
So one of the equally important issues was our quick adoption of the digital age and how that came about. The whole digital age being accessible to you and me and every person on the street came about in the mid-1990s.
And it was, you know, the people who created the very first navigable and popular internet browser were well-meaning engineers at UC Berkeley, University of California in Berkeley. Well, if you know what Berkeley is, I mean, it’s the hub of where the hippie movement was created in the States.
So it’s a very green environment, very anti-establishment development. And so you get Berkeley, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley that knows green values, that are entrenched in those green values, and that reflects in the kind of work that they do.
So when you’re green and you feel that, you know, everybody has to have access to knowledge and information and how to do things, to resources, you know, you’re beginning to level the asymmetries that existed in the silos that we have known forever.
You know, knowledge was contained in silos. You know, I don’t want, you know, my local waiter operating on my brain. I mean, that’s just, you know, there are knowledge silos that determine how that person got it.
And what the internet has done, it has leveled that playing field in an attempt to make everybody equal. So the idea of the second element of disruption is part and parcel goes back to the nature of the green system.
When you ignore the differences of the people below green, you allow them to rise. And who takes advantage most of that situation? Of course, red does. The red system takes when you’re green. you know, all they want is the disappearance of rule.
All they want is the disappearance of the blue system. So when you pacify the blue system and you do it ubiquitously through the spread of knowledge through the internet, you know, suddenly red begins to rise and suddenly red begins to shape how its people who sympathize with it receive information and knowledge.
And so to me what’s at the heart of the decline of liberal democracies around the world is this very idea that the knowledge that we have gotten used to receiving in the models that we created before the internet were the right way for us to keep values in an emergent way and not fall back to the dictatorships and the ages of empire that existed in the red system.
When you remove that layer, you allow that red system to rise and it can only do it through the existing institutions. So that’s why people believe that Trump is an effective leader. That ecology of knowledge has been there for 30 years and I mean You know, these are the rational people that you talk to who support Trump and they just simply believe that that’s the truth and How do you explain this?
How can somebody Who is at his mind think Trump is a good leader? Well People who think Trump is a good leader come from two camps The first one primarily from the orange values from from the idea that you know Capitalism or free markets Should continue the way they are forever.
So that’s where he gets it most of his primary support is You know, that’s who he that’s who funds his campaigns that Elon Musk 200 million dollars to help him Get elected You know, so so that infrastructure has been put in place to disrupt the blue system Then the rule of law that was put in place 40-50 years ago before the internet became a thing So you have that pressure acting from the top and then the the the other people who believe So so their purpose if you’re orange looking at Trump your purpose is the only thing that matters to me is a Completely deregulated economy where I could take advantage of everyone Where I can maximize my profit and if it happens to hurt millions of people around the world So be it so that’s perspective number one perspective number two are people who share his values from that bad system People who who who don’t particularly like the way the law has treated They fail to assimilate into the blue system that has institutions and suddenly they they see a guide Talking at their level at the red levels.
Ah, yeah, that’s our leader. Yeah, great So we would start believing in that and when you have a media ecosystem that has been put in place for 30, 40 years, you know, you don’t have to go anywhere else to, you know, this becomes like a normal thing, to listen to Fox News becomes a normal thing, to listen to write conspiracy theorists who rationalize their arguments through books that were published,
through a, you know, a radical or racist perspective on things, you know, I cite many you know, institutions in this country that have causes, you know, when you cite racist thing and column academic and, you know, and have merit, it fulfills your curiosity to search anywhere else.
And so it becomes a full landscape that you look at to get your information. And so this won’t go away with the Trump, you know, not running or it won’t go away with electing another democrat. That infrastructure has been placed permanently, and the only solution for it is really for politicians to understand the depth to which the digital infrastructure has disrupted the old silos.
None of them understand this. We don’t receive our news from the four major national stations that existed 30 years ago that were all progressive in nature. We have a million information. You and I are talking the way we’re talking because of that disruption.
We’re able to meet our platforms because of that digital disruption. But there’s a good side of this in the bedside, right? Always. The pair of opposites, our enlightened mind by its nature dismisses the dark side.
We always embrace the bright side because it makes us feel better, because it makes our bank account better. It makes more sense. What happens is when we grow the dark side, it doesn’t go away. It becomes a cumulative part of our shadow that sooner or later we have to face.
That’s the aspect number two. Then the aspect number three is the primary focus of the book, which is our inability to address climate change the way it should be addressed. I have a question to you as a human being, because I read your book and I really can feel that you are deeply moved by what you’re seeing.
We are going with so much speed into a catastrophe. How do you cope with this? That’s really a difficult question to answer. People cope in different ways. People manage to grieve in different ways. I’ve, you know, I’ve lost my soulmate and love of my life just a few years ago.
And, you know, I grieved for what people would consider a far longer period than, you know, loss of a person would be because, you know, it, it was, it was, you know, my wife, Alza, me and Don Beck, who were going to redefine the world.
And suddenly, you know, I lose them within, within two years of each other. And so the migrate, my own grieving process was, was, was deep and prolonged. But in that darkness, you know, I, you would say, I found the goal to find the answers on, on the things that, that were in me that, that, that I can use as tools to help me cope.
You know, the idea that, you know, sooner or later we all have to face our own mortality. Sooner or later, whatever shadow is building will accumulate and the sooner we begin to pop that bubble, you know, the sooner we begin to feel better about ourselves.
And if that means that, yeah, we’re heading towards catastrophe, that’s going to be our destiny. You know, I don’t want to say that in a cold way, you know, the purpose of me writing the book is really to shift advocacy, to not just believe in the politicians and talents, not just to believe in what those, you know, annual, you know, meetings with the climate change sponsored by the UN.
They’re, you know, when the single biggest conference about climate change is sponsored by the state that produces the most, you know, last year, it was sponsored by the UAE, one of the largest contributors to the carbon footprint.
When that happens, you know, there really isn’t sincerity about addressing this. They’re not getting their information from where it needs to be, from what Mother Nature still is. So, so, so to me, what I’ve uncovered fight is the idea that so many of the planetary systems have moved past their tipping points.
The solace that I find in understanding those, what I call, you know, the anthropogenic guy in sciences is the idea that, you know, Mother Nature does not work on the same calendar as we do. Mother Nature is not worried about what the outcome of the next, you know, corporate quarter is going to be or what next year is going to be.
She works on a geologic time table. So, you know, when I say collapse, it not happen in a few years, it might not happen for a few decades. But the idea that things related to climate change keep increasing in intensity is an early warning sign for me to say, we have to change the way we advocate for change.
And so once you allow yourself to be in that darkness, you begin to see that gold in the shadow. So the advocacy shifts from, oh yeah, I support, you know, green economy efforts, I support, I support, you know, regenerative agriculture and this and that, when in reality, a simple decision like the one that Donald Trump just made withdraws from the Paris Climate Accords has tremendous impact on what we do.
So the advocacy become not to support these industries, the advocacy become replace our current leaders with leaders who don’t know what climate change is all about. And so that’s where I want the energy to be shifted towards focusing on what’s really causing our disruption beyond what our leaders are telling us.
Please tell me why the ice caps are melting so fast. The top scientists who specialize in that study don’t know. If they don’t know, how do you expect our politicians to know? I mean, there isn’t a single politician in the United States, local, you know, state or federal level that really understands the complexity of that science.
They barely understand how the digital work operates. You know, so it’s more of an advocacy, if that makes sense. It’s more of an advocacy that will bring us out of that idea that everything’s going to be okay.
Yeah, there are a lot of, especially people from the younger generations, which probably see it the same way like you, and I really can feel the pain and the frustration of these people and the feeling of, okay, we cannot wake up the other people.
They’re just sleeping. So what kind of advice do we have for these generations that really probably agree with you totally? I would ask them to develop rational arguments with their parents, with their teachers, with their communities on why they generally feel the way they do.
Why fear and dystopia reoccupies their views on what’s happening. And I would advocate for them. Every time I say this at a speaking engagement, I get standing applause. youth to stop going to school like to convince your parents that you know don’t go to school and when they ask you why because because I don’t see a future why go to school when the planet is collapsing you need to focus on on these issues I mean you know talk about a survival model I mean this is this is what Spiral Dynamics is all about you know you and I can’t be having this discussion if we don’t have shelter over us you know if we don’t have food to eat so why would I want to go to school when the idea that you know environmental changes are going to you know make everything that your generation the older generation has taken for granted so you know I would say quit school go demonstrate you know create advocacy in your local communities just empower the idea that a lot more research needs to go into uncovering really what’s happening with with our climate change because it’s no longer the carbon footprint we’re talking about nine different planetary systems and climate change is only one of them I mean,
we’re looking at the last study going back to 2023 that six of the nine systems have reached certain tipping points, where the behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable, exponentially unpredictable.
So that’s what we’re looking at. Now, exponentially unpredictable in geologic time could mean that we won’t have a major disaster for another 50 years, maybe for another 100 years. And people would say, ah, Said was wrong.
You know, he’s, yeah, well, yes, very, I could very much be wrong, but I’m looking at the scientists who really study changes with with with the earth systems from that stage of development, from from the turquoise stage that tells us, you know, in order for you to survive at this stage, you know, wherever you are now, you need to really figure this out.
It’s like you’re living in a home with with so many rooms, and each debate that goes on in the world is taking place in one of those rooms. These are justifiable debates, issues about, you know, decline of democracy, issues about women’s rights, issues about equality, issues about poverty.
Those are all conversations that belong in every room of that big house. But that house is on fire. And so, you know, what do we do? Okay, those are legitimate conversations to have. We need to get out of that house and focus our energy on how to put the fire out first.
You know, and so this is the approach of my book. And this is the kind of research that I’ve done that the its intention is to really help people shift their focus to the to the far larger container that makes life possible.
In your book, you say we have to learn, we have to listen to the intelligence of Gaia. And you surely don’t mean it like a green, retro, romantic vision. So can you explain? explain what we mean by the guy intelligent and for example how can I very concrete listen more to this kind of intelligent.
So the nature of guy and intelligence, the way I followed the trajectory of the research into science, the main difference between that and all the sciences that we have now is that guy’s intelligence is driven by what’s called the complex adaptive systems of life and the key element to that fight is the idea that mother nature, whether it’s at the nano level, the micro level, the macro level or the planetary level,
always gives us feedback loops. For every action there’s an opposite and equal reaction, that’s how mother nature works. And what we have done is we’ve ignored the negative aspect of these feedback loops because of our nature.
We accepted the the the positive feedback loop and ignored the rest of it. So what I say is You know before you before you embark on a business name before you embark on on You know what you want to be in your next stage of development?
look at what You know How mother nature gives feedback loops if you don’t water your flowers are gonna die action reaction If you do this this is gonna happen don’t ignore the subsequent result of your action And so when you account for these feedback loops, you have a sense of Things being more balanced.
You’re not driven by the idea that I want to be first You’re not driven by the idea that you know Competitive need to be to be on the top of the evolutionary apex anymore You come into a place where you live in this homostasis Exist to select the rest of mother nature You begin to realize.
Oh, wow, you know the You know, whatever I’m doing to drive to this place It’s you know, it is increasing the carbon footprint and you know, although many people would dismiss it I should be aware of that if You know every every little action if you know if you propose a business plan without looking at whether it’s gonna affect the Ecological footprint.
We’re not talking about the carbon footprint We’re talking about the ecological footprint, which is you know, the largest footprint if you want to create a product you have to start looking at the very Extractive point from where you get the raw material for that and see if that’s affecting that a college and then you You study, you know, how it’s being manufactured how it’s being shipped and how you know The end user uses it and how they dispose of it.
You have to study the ecological impact along every line Hey, that is really being in touch with every feedback because because if we all do that We will come to the awareness that we’re not doing enough to justify the change And then the serious conversation begins.
Well, you speak in your book a lot about a copy C API. So capacity of authority, power and influence. Yes. Yes, it doesn’t have authority. Yes. So if a normal person reads this, I can imagine this person thinks, okay, I’m not this.
So the center of power is there. So they have to change it. They have to do it. So what kind of advice you can give people that feel very powerless in this time and think I have no power, I have no influence.
Yeah. Well, you know, as I say in my book fight, when Dr. Beck, Elsa and I started our mission in Israel and Palestine, the first question we asked is, how much of the cappy element do we hold? the coalescence of authority, power, and evidence.
And that grows in concentric circles as well. And what we uncovered is that we have very little kept. We, you know, among the people who know spiral dynamics and integral theory is the extent to which we can influence change.
And so we began at the grassroots level to develop that to outer rings. You know, suddenly there wasn’t just a specialized community anymore. We trained a greater circle in understanding the framework.
We put them out to the community. We trained greater members of the community to understand the difference between, you know, with traditional view in the modern lens, the traditional view on pieces to how peace is a product of design if you use the spiral dynamics model.
So we kept, over a five year period, we kept increasing the size of CAPI, who holds coalescence authority and power to the point where, you know, in 2008, we had a what we call the nation building conference for the Palestinians.
We’re all over 600 community members from the West Bank and Gaza at the time showed up to the conference. We, you know, even politicians from the younger generation of the moderate party in Palestine, Fatah, you know, politicians from that group showed up.
We got letters and phone calls from Israel’s, you know, office of prime minister and president, saying that they’re sorry they could not attend, due to conflict. So that’s how you grow influence. You know, if you feel, oh no, I can’t do this, start talking to your friends about it.
Start, you know, having conversations that meets them where they are, you know, they don’t have to know about how, you know, my geometric framework works. You know, they have to know that, you know, we really need to know a lot more about this, that our leaders probably are not telling us, maybe because those leaders are not telling us.
just don’t know, maybe they have a different motivation for not noticing. But the idea that you start to influence the smallest circuits first and move outward is the way to approach this. So you have invested so many time of your life and energy and emotions, for example, into the Middle East.
What are you feeling and thinking? And you see right now what is happening there. It saddens and depresses me to see how, you know, as you’re probably aware, Israel holds the upper hand in that whole dynamic.
And though, although we created a really a super ordinary vision for what the Palestinian territories could be, we really wanted them to have a goal of becoming the Hong Kong of the Middle East. which was supported by both sides, by both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
What has happened on the Israeli side, unfortunately, is the moderate left has disappeared. Those were the power. I mean, the political spectrum was a lot closer to the center in Israel when we started this.
It was leaning more towards the left, and that’s where things get done. You have to be as close as you can to the political center. That center doesn’t exist anymore, completely to the right. In part, due to the help of what’s happening with the global digital disruption, in part due to the voices of the settlers, the people in the red system being much louder than they should be.
The whole calculus moves towards, I mean, no one talks about a two-state solution. I’m still in touch with my liberal friends in Israel, and they’re sad. They’re very sad that the nation has moved into this dark space where they don’t believe in coexisting with the Palestinians.
That’s the status of that. Now, Trump and his ideas about peace, there is a slight legitimacy to that aspect, in the sense that he’s approaching it from you get peace through commerce, basically. The things that have driven the world for the last 80 years or so, that if we signed a trade agreement that the Middle East region, including Israel, will become a superpower as far as economics is concerned.
That is definitely a carrot to dangle in front of the different fighting forces, but you’re really not addressing the basis of the conflict. You’re not addressing the fact that people who exist in tribal existence derive their values from looking to the past.
There have been so many Palestinian people people that we trained, who pull a key to their ancestor home out of their pocket and they say, I’m not going to stop fighting until I get my parents home, my ancestral home back.
Did you address that? You know, peace is not going to be sustained. And so, you know, by chance, if Trump succeeds in doing this, you know, maybe, maybe the Palestinians will be, you know, too tired to fight.
And maybe there’ll be a change in the structure in Israel where, where the push to, to, to get rid of the Palestinians and put them somewhere else. Maybe that drive will stop as well and somehow find, find a solution.
But based on the current dynamics, it’s a very, very sad situation. So you understand so much about development of human consciousness. Yes. You, you know, theoretically, where we would have to be. Yes.
You have spoken with so many people, how do you manage to not get very cynically? Well, I’m not saying I don’t get… I mean, I’ve… Like so many people, like here in the States, you know, everybody was angry and in disbelief that Donald Trump was elected in the first term.
The second term was more of acceptance of reality. You know, talk about stages of grief. I’m at a stage where, okay, this is reality now. This has happened. The idea that, you know, up the street from me here is one of the largest research universities in the world.
University of California, San Diego, and they have just lost an axis of $300 million in research. The cutting edge research of, you know, Alzheimer’s disease, of, you know, biotech, you know, the entire training project and the Christmas, what to do with it.
So that became a reality. So what I’m rooting for now, if I believe you or not, is this collapse. What I’m rooting for now is even if Donald Trump is stopped, okay, the entire infrastructure is still in place.
The Democrats are ineffective to bring us back to where we were 30 or 40 years ago. So I’m rooting for the idea now that chaos is going to, you know, take over. Because this is a system that is in a zombie state.
It’s well financed, it has controlled all of our institutions, and it is hell-bent on destruction. And the only way to get rid of that, there’s no more assimilative reform, if you will. It has to become something that’s a lot more coercive.
It has to become something that seeks the… expose its foundation that is that is laid on a false premise. And that infrastructure is far deeper than anything we’ve seen before. And so those are the challenges that so yeah the short answer is I’m rooting for collapse and I’m rooting for the idea you know I voted Democrat most of my whole life and I get these you know messages in email oh did you see what Donald Trump did today you know donate for this candidate and my response is like you’re so incompetent and ineffective please stop these email start looking into what the party needs to do to reclaim the rightful path towards democracy they’re not doing them they’re being reactive and and the whole line this is what red does this is what the third stage of development does look at me I’m in charge don’t look anywhere else you know because that’s a distraction look at me,
I’m beautiful, whatever I’m doing is the right thing that you do. If you look anywhere else, I will cut your hand. If you look anywhere else, I will cut your funding. If you’re a lawyer challenging me, I will put your law firm out of business.
This is where we’ve reached. And it’s going to come to a point where the narrow line between what determines institutions and what determines complete chaos in mayhem is no longer there. It’s beginning to collapse, piece by piece, and it’s going to reach a point where it’s not sustainable.
So I’m rooting for collapse. And you know, I know that will be chaotic. I know that will be, it’s almost like, you know, you’re dealing with pain and someone is telling you, you need surgery and you postpone that pain and say, no, no, it’s going to get better, but the pain gets worse, but slowly and finally realize I should be rooting for the surgeon.
That’s where I am now, is I’m rooting for that surgery that’s going to remove this cancer and begin really the long search for what the next form of democracy is going to look like, you know, with the full awareness of the disruption that got us to where we are now, without understanding how knowledge is acquired, how knowledge is affecting the new generation that is born into the ecosystem of their right wing parents,
where they have no choice but to absorb that information. Till we understand, till we replicate what existed in the physical world before the digital world came about, we’re not going to be able to preserve democracy.
I can imagine a lot of my people, of my audience are thinking right now, wow, I didn’t want to hear this. Why is it important to see this? You know, because I see it that a lot of people, especially kind of denial.
We still think we can manifest our dreams and everything will be fine. So why is it important at first really see the worst scenario? Yeah, I really, I don’t want people to see the worst scenario when they’re not ready.
They really need to, you know, Don needs to say, people are not ready to evolve unless they are till they are. So basically, you have to be searching for answers. It was in my nature to search for higher answers from the time I was a child.
You know, it was in my nature to say, wow, you know, Don and Elsa are doing something for the entire Middle East that I think would work that made me abandon a lucrative career in real estate and join them.
And then, you know, it’s my higher view of what’s going to be next after after Don, after Wilbur, after, you know, after all that. So you have to have that input. People who are suddenly hit by what I’m saying here, because of trauma, you know, might want to examine what’s stopping them from wanting to hear this.
Because a lot of us are traumatized. A lot of us are not finding answers for the things that are bothering us. And so I will probably translate down from what I’m saying a little bit and say, okay, where in your life do you feel there are blockages?
You know, it could be as simple as, you know, I just lost a loved one, and I’m not ready to hear about the demise of all of the men. That needs to be processed. Before you can move into higher inquiries, those traumas, those small traumas have to be processed, but not fully processed, but at least to make you functional enough, or you can consider the possibility of higher problems, how to figure them out,
and how to approach them. If I’m ready to see it, to feel it, how can I let us say, how can I transform my feelings, for example, from my feelings of grief, of sadness, but also my feelings of compassion, how can I transform this in a kind of hope, not a naive hope, you know, in a kind of constructive, okay, I see what can happen, but I will bring everything what I am and what I know at the table right now.
And the answer that keeps coming back to me is, once you are in a place where you feel comfortable with what you know, what the future is going to look like, at least some certain aspects of it, and you feel comfortable comfortable enough to talk about, and comfortable enough to understand that many of our leaders are not paying, are not merely paying enough attention to us.
They’re preoccupied with keeping the current economic paradigm in place than they are with actually climate change. Once people begin to understand that, they resort to a different form of advocacy. One that is, you know, not on the street, custing people or, you know, doing demonstrations.
That’s great. You know, get as many people as you can. Get the youth. This needs to be a systemic movement. This needs to be, you know, kids across a city, across a country, across a region, stopping going to school in the middle of the day and say, we are going to the state house.
We’re going to the, you know, to the House of Commons to make our politicians aware that unless they act in destroying our future, it becomes that kind of advocacy. So in a sense, it empowers the individual with the idea that they are responsible.
They have a sense of responsibility towards their own future and towards the future of humanity. I mean, this is what drives me. This is what made me write this book over an eight-year period. And my wife passed during that time, and I put it down, and I deepened my own understanding of what the purpose of grief is, and come back to the book and figure out that some of the parts weren’t exactly accurate,
go back and maybe deepen the perspective on how to process trauma, what aspects of depression this whole issue leads us into. Ecosychology is a new field. Collapse psychology are new fields that people can look up online and attend free seminars.
Things of that nature are… We need to look at the continuity of life as a possibility, not as a guarantee. And so from that, you begin the inquisition into, okay, so what do I do to really make it a certainty?
We’ve moved into a space where, you know, Mother Nature is telling us, I’m going to evict you from the planet. You don’t know when, because I work with my timetable not yours. How do we respond to that?
And so it’s in that that we find the goal and how we act, and it’s unique to every individual. Let us dream for a moment. Let us dream that we could bring together the 1,000 most powerful influences of the world.
And by magic, we could put them all in a very open state, and you could place them all in a very open state. free thoughts into their mind and into their heart. Yeah, if they’re sincere about doing something at a global scale, so this would require really a global format of cooperation.
It’s not going to happen unless the leaders of the world are equally aware of the dangers that they’re facing. If they are at that state and they want to inquire more about, okay, Said and other people are thinking about this issue, what leads you to think this way?
And my simple answer would be, are you listening to what the scientists who are realizing the Terracoy’s value system are telling us about climate change? Are you listening to their voices? And the voices tell us that, number one, solutions, technological solutions are not enough?
that the scale of the solution needs to address the scale of the problem, meaning that it needs to be at a planetary scale. What are you as a leader willing to do to make sure that this happens at a planetary scale?
What are you as a leader willing to do to avoid the idea that every scientific concept that’s created towards fighting climate change has to be scalable, has to go through the market mechanisms, has to find investors where to go.
No, we’re talking about essential survival. The governments of the world need to step in like they’ve never done before. I mean, we talk about global governance. This is it. This is the golden opportunity for global governance to rise.
And we’re not talking about one person leading the world. We’re talking about a neurosphere that contains these ideas that this is now not the Magna Carta that has driven us for the last eight, nine hundred years.
This is the Gaia Carta that’s going to tell us how we survive and thrive. And so we all have to adhere to that and then take from that whatever they need to empower those scientists that are telling us, we’re at day zero of understanding how the ice colds are melting.
We’re at day one in understanding complexity science. Because you can’t vet a lot. You can’t take a model under the traditional ways of how we know science, do a paper on it, vet it in a lab and then have it peer reviewed and then publish the year later.
Because a year later, what your research was changed a month after you finished your research. That’s the nature of complexity. We have to begin to understand the complexity. And that level of complexity is not contained within the scientific paradigms that we have now.
So what do we do till we discover that paradigm? Put a freeze on things. Begin to pursue issues of degrowth. all gonna, you know, burn on the planet with, you know, a million dollar bank account? What good is that?
And not really that level of humility that there’s a higher power than, you know, our own, you know, egos as leaders, as global leaders. That idea that there’s a higher power called Gaia that will determine our destiny and you don’t have the metrics to know how she will do it.
That’s what’s going to have to inspire those leaders and develop the humility to start addressing this in a very, you know, coalescent way. You said, I said, I really want to thank you for this brave book.
It really got under my skin. It’s not a pleasant experience, but it’s a very important experience. And I wish that a lot of people are very brave and read your book too. of course we will put a link under this.
I would like to give you the last words to our audience. Is there anything that you would like to share with our people? Yes. The feedback I’ve been getting from people who have read the book or have listened to my presentations is that right away I believe that I’m a pessimist.
I am really not that and I’m sorry if I carried forth the idea that part of humanity is doomed. The whole purpose in really writing this book is to explore the ideas of whether we’re doing now are appropriate or the right things to address the issues at hand.
And so the book is more of an invitation. I address five or six chapters in the book of design to really uncover the ways we need to be. We need to move from this idea that I call it pantometry in my book.
Everything that defines our culture are designed by the genius of our own mind to a place defined by guidance, by what mother nature wants us to do. So you look at how psychology transitions to the other side and becomes eco-psychological.
How the biology of our own bodily health becomes the health of the body. All of these are ways for us to begin to identify this. I didn’t put them in the book just to say this is what the science looks like.
I want people to embrace what that is. And once you begin to discover that tremendous shift that needs to take place, you’ll become empowered by what needs to be done. And people have commented on the last chapter as not being optimistic.
That last chapter says if we fail to do what, you know, I’ve uncovered the scientists are telling us, and what I’m saying as a response to that, and what thousands of other scientists that are not being heard are telling us.
If we fail to do that, we’re going to end up with what the last chapter says, that really civilization, as we know it, will come to an end, and we have to start from the survivalistic, tribalistic value, and build again.
And by that stage, Mother Nature is not going to be cooperative. Many of the habitable environments that we’ve taken for granted won’t exist anymore. So the previous half of the book says, how do we avoid getting to that place of inhabitability?
And that’s what I’d like people to focus on. So there’s a lesson. That’s it, my friends. Thank you very, very much. Yes, I enjoyed your conversation, and I hope that a lot of people would find it brave to read your book.
I greatly enjoyed this conversation as well. Thank you for the invitation and please don’t hesitate to call me again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching.
