In this episode, Jamie Wheal explores the question of “Can radical hope save us from despair in a fractured world?” He argues that most of the feel-good positivity we are sold is useless when facing real crises, from climate collapse to meaninglessness. But there is a kind of hope that survives contact with brutal reality.
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Key Takeaways:
- The internal and cultural struggle between hope and despair in the context of global crises.
- The concept of “radical hope” as a resilient form of hope amidst harsh realities.
- The inadequacy of typical positivity in addressing complex real-world problems.
- The need for a new “rational mysticism” suitable for the 21st century.
- The dangers of failing to establish a stable, shared sense of meaning in society.
- The critique of hyper-individualistic and consumer-driven culture in relation to existential risks.
- The historical evolution of existential risk narratives and their implications for modern society.
- The importance of community and connection in fostering healing and growth.
- The challenges of creating secular communities that provide meaningful structure and belonging.
- The potential for a revived Western rational mysticism to address contemporary spiritual needs and crises.
Jamie Wheal is the author of the Pulitzer-nominated Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work and the global bestseller Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind. He’s the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance (with a 200K mailing list). His work and ideas have been covered in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Inc., and TED. He has spoken at Stanford University, MIT, the Harvard Club, Imperial College, Singularity University, the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command, Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, the Bohemian Club, and the United Nations. His work and talks have generated millions of views
Connect with Jamie Wheal Website | Instagram | X | YouTube
If you enjoyed this conversation with Jamie Wheal, check out these other episodes:
How to Overcome Cynicism and Embrace Hope with Jamil Zaki
Human Nature and Hope with Rutger Bregman
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Episode Transcript:
Jamie Wheal 00:00:00 Either we create a rational mysticism for the 21st century, or we end up with national mysticism. And that’s the Nazis, the Third Reich, right? That’s Jews will not replace us. Charlottesville. That is a lot of hate filled ethno nationalism. So the bottom line is in that meaning crisis, if you don’t create a rock in the middle of that ocean, everyone just goes whooshing past the moderate middle. And the first place they find community, the first place they get seen is in increasingly fundamentalist and extreme versions.
Chris Forbes 00:00:38 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. Here we see what we don’t have. Instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking.
Chris Forbes 00:01:07 Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:22 Today, on the one you feed, we’re naming the wolves, the ones fighting inside us and in our culture at large. Hope versus despair. Jamie Weal argues that most of the feel good positivity were sold is useless when facing real crises, from climate collapse to meaninglessness. But there is a kind of hope that survives contact with brutal reality. We talk about his book Recapture the Rapture, the loss of shared stories, and what it would mean to build a new rational mysticism for our time. If you felt the tension between giving up and giving your all. This conversation is for you. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Jamie, welcome to the show.
Jamie Wheal 00:02:10 Thanks for having me.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:11 I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing a whole bunch of things.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:15 We’ll spend some time on your book that was called Recapture the Rapture Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind. We’ll also be exploring some of what you’re doing on Substack with your home grown humans. But before we get into all that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Jamie Wheal 00:03:01 Well, I mean, it’s actually pretty, pretty tightly coupled because in some respects, my thinking research, writing the trainings we do kind of everything and you know, more and more so over time have been between the two wolves facing us right now.
Jamie Wheal 00:03:18 which is which I would propose, especially in the realm of existential risk. The poly crisis, culture wars. Just the state of our world. And the highly likely trajectory of our world is hope versus despair. And. And not just like whistling past the graveyard copium hope, you know, kind of magical thinking. The secret, right? The secret. I’ve got my post-it note affirmations, and I’m going to live my hashtag. Best life, no matter what happens to the rest of the world, but actually, like, legitimate. what? Jonathan Lear at the University of Chicago calls radical hope, and he actually came up with that concept from studying like 19th century Indian reservations. So literally after their lands were destroyed, they were removed from their territories. You know, the hunting and indigenous lifestyles canned couldn’t have been a worse possible time. And he’s like, okay, radical hope isn’t just optimism. And it’s not just picking yourself up when you get knocked down, it is having hope for a future that you cannot see from here but commit to nonetheless.
Jamie Wheal 00:04:20 Yeah. So for me, right, this, you know, being a sort of historical anthropologist and thinking in, you know, decades and centuries and millennia and not hot takes and tweets. Yeah. Right. The arc of where it appears we’re going is, you know, quite likely that our best times, our most comfortable times are behind us and that we are quite likely going through some. Let me take your pick as to the explanations. You know the key factors that you choose to map, but let’s just say we’re going in for a hard landing. And as Peter Zion, you know, is a kind of a global strategist wrote in his recent book, it’s the end of the world is just the beginning. He’s like, you know, first paragraph. He’s like, things will never be cheaper, faster, quicker, more abundant, more comfortable, easier than they’ve been in our growing up. You’re like, okay, so how if that’s the case, do we not collapse into despair? Do we not give up hope? Right.
Jamie Wheal 00:05:17 And so the idea of like, what does radical hope look like that actually can survive, sustain contact with hard realities? Yeah, right. Feels like really important inoculation. It feels like really important. Like to be able to share that and articulate that and not to give people. You know, I always think of like the realm of, like, super hipster vampire movies and shows, you know, like from True Blood on. Right? They’re all kind of like, not nodding and winking to the old ones, the old horror movies. And they almost all have some moment where the vampire, you know, someone makes the sign of a cross or spritzes them with holy water or garlic and they’re like, there’s an old wives tale that just doesn’t work on us, right? Yeah. And you kind of feel that way about our future, right? Like most of the inspo, posting on TikTok and Instagram is wholly inadequate and not fit for purpose. Right. It’s really good for bougie, worried, well people to slightly overcome their neuroses, but it’s absolutely crap at how to 8 to 10 billion humans navigate the incredibly complex poly crisis we’re facing and not end up in, you know, mass tragedy.
Jamie Wheal 00:06:29 Yeah, right. So so yeah, I would say I’m zeroed in on which wolf we feed and trying to figure out how do we actually, come up with true valorized helpful, dignified responses to the totality of our current situation?
Eric Zimmer 00:06:50 Yeah. The radical hope reminds me a little bit of you’ve probably heard of it, The Stockdale Paradox. Admiral James Stockdale.
Jamie Wheal 00:06:58 Will use it. Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:00 Yeah. Who came out and basically said you have to be able to both face the the cold, hard, brutal facts of your current reality without losing hope that you’ll find a way through. And I think about hope in that way. I often think about horizons. Right. And that we can’t see beyond a horizon. And so the thing that we hope for, like you said, we may not be able to envision or we can’t even envision yet. So if comfort and convenience and cheapness goes away, those are all problems from our current view, but from a different view. Potentially the loss of those things is not necessarily an awful thing.
Jamie Wheal 00:07:39 Yeah. It’s just that it’s sort of super incompatible with the with our hyper individualist, pleasantest consumer society. So it’s like I, I, me, mean mine now, right? And I’m going to pull a Karen and call the manager if I don’t get what’s coming to me. I was thinking, I always think of, like, little Sally and The Charlie Brown Show when she’s doing, like, the deer Santa. You know, she’s like, I just want what’s coming to me. I just want my fair share, you know? And you’re like, our fair share might not be might.
Speaker 4 00:08:10 Not feel so fair.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:12 Precisely compared to what we’re used to. So you’re putting yourself and talking about in a role of a futurist. You’re you’re looking at the the tons of crisis that are coming our way, the collapse in meaning across religion and institutions and government and media and all of that. I don’t want to belabor this point particularly, but I am curious how you respond to people who would say, you know what? We’ve been predicting the end of the world since it started, right? Like these doomsday cries are nothing and you’re not predicting doomsday, but but pretty bleakness.bHard landing, perhaps. How do you make sure that you’re just not falling into that again?
Jamie Wheal 00:08:59 Yeah. No. Look, there’s a lot of, like, sort of intellectual or conceptual sand traps or minefields around this whole space, or crevasses, like, if you’re on a mountain, you have to be, you know, and it’s glaciated terrain. You have to be aware of where there’s snow bridges. It all looks safe and it’s not. And the way you do that is you put bamboo wands or sticks around the perimeter of your camp. You make sure that the space you’re hanging out in is safe, and no one’s just going to disappear 300ft into the abyss. So there’s a lot of those. And just a quick clarification. I would never consider myself a futurist. I look ahead to see what’s potentially going to happen. But futurists often has the connotation of I believe in techno utopian solutions. Okay, I don’t I’m actually like a brass tacks traditionalist. In fact, my entire next book is on making a case that if we’re going to survive and transition into a future that works for the majority of humans, it’s going to look a it’s not going to look like Elon Musk meets Star Trek at all.
Jamie Wheal 00:10:02 That’s pie in the sky. An incredibly high embedded energy takes a ton of calories to do it, and high technology. If we’re going to pull this off, it’s going to actually be Buckminster Fuller meets Swiss Family Robinson. It’s going to be highly engineered. So ingenious humans, right. But very low embedded energy. So a lot more bamboo and thatch and like, you know, windmills, you know, like like it’s going to be much simpler and lower tech. So just just to make that point, then to your point about, hey, and one of my favorite, New Yorker cartoons ever is a guy with a long beard sitting on a sidewalk corner with a, you know, with a sandwich board, and he’s waving his bell and he says, the end is nigh ish.
Jamie Wheal 00:10:45 And and that is the mind fuck of our moment, right? You’re like, wait, the wheels are still on the bus. I mean, everybody’s talking about the wheels coming off the bus or us being off a cliff, but like, I can still play this game. I can still get followers and likes. I can still go on vacations and go to the grocery.
Jamie Wheal 00:11:02 Yeah, yeah. I mean, and, you know, and for the most part, I mean, obviously Covid was a sort of scary shakeup. Wake up for people of loss of mobility, loss of incomes, government intersecting with private lives, all that, you know, all that kind of stuff. Who’s trustworthy. Right. Trustworthy information sources for me to follow. Yeah. And I think all of that boils down to just this, the simple schizophrenia of our moment, which is, you know, things are getting exponentially better. All the new breakthroughs, all the new science, all these things, things are getting exponentially worse. You know, melting ice caps and droughts and fires and, you know, and wars and you’re like, well, which is it? And I just need to know. And you’re sort of like, well, it’s both and that’s not easily modifiable.
Jamie Wheal 00:11:42 And that definitely doesn’t, you know, submit to soundbites bites very elegantly. And people with different dogs in the fight. Different agendas will be selling or peddling different versions of this story. So you can go to Ted and be like Steven Pinker. Yay! Everything’s better. It’s just underreported. I don’t, you know, like, if it bleeds, it leads. Our news has a, you know, deliberate, catastrophic bias. And then you can go to a different conference or read a paper or a new and you’re like, oh my God. Like, we’re already past one and a half degrees and you know, and the Amazon is now a net negative on carbon sinks and like what the right profoundly concerning. And so most of us can’t handle that. And so between coming alive like I want to live my best life and we’re moving forward in a progressive, egalitarian, post-racial, multicultural society of inclusion and dignity for all. Like that’s our story, right? You know, or staying alive. Holy fuck.
Jamie Wheal 00:12:29 Do I have a second passport? Do I need to be out of fiat currencies and into crypto? Right. And and do I have a bunker like all the tech guys do? Yeah, right. That intersection of coming alive high into the right, infinite timelines, infinite resources and infinite possibilities versus staying alive. Finite timelines, you know, dwindling resources and choices is where most of us are. So to your point about, hey, haven’t we always been dooming and gluing the end of the world? There was a really cool paper that I found super duper useful on this in the MIT Technology Review, and it was based on a book I think it’s even called. I think it might be called Existential Risk, but anyways, it’s in it. It’s in the tech review, and it was basically a survey of basically end of the world narratives from for as long as we’ve been having them. And he broke it down into like 4 or 5 different eras. So it’s like, you’re absolutely right. People have from, you know, thousands of years ago always been talking about the end of the world.
Jamie Wheal 00:13:28 But back then it was religious. So it was always God was going to come and change things. The Ragnarok or the, you know, Noah and the floods or whatever it might be. And it was totalizing like the entire universe would end or change or go into the next thing that’s supposed to come after it. It’s not until you get to the 18th century. And this is kind of so. I mean, you say it out loud, you’re like, oh yeah, of course that makes sense. But it was the simultaneous discovery of dinosaur fossils and Halley’s Comet that together really induced, at least in European, Western European intellectual traditions, this kind of awareness of like, oh, wait, there’s all these big ass bones, and these creatures are clearly not still here running around. What’s up with that? So something could have existed before that exists no more. That’s interesting. You know, and it’s crazy to think that, like, there’s there was a time when people did not have that online.
Jamie Wheal 00:14:25 And then also Halley’s Comet. Wait a second. There’s this crazy shooting star, and we can run the calculations. It’s come around, you know, Newton, mathematics, three body problems, all this kind of stuff. And it’s come around before and it’s going to come around again. And it’s really close at one point. And it could smash us and we could go the way of the dinosaurs. That was an entirely new concept, and funnily enough, it prompts the first bit of dystopian science fiction. And like 1801, this French guy writes a science fiction story right about a future that doesn’t exist. So again, new forms of novel, creative literature about the last man and existential crisis. And it bums him out so much he ends up committing suicide. The poor bastard.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:05 Oh, when did the theory that the dinosaurs, perished largely due to an asteroid come online? That’s. It’s interesting that both dinosaurs and Halley’s Comet was what sort of trigger doomsday. And then as we go on, we find out like, well, that’s kind of accurate.
Jamie Wheal 00:15:21 Yeah. They might they might be dance partners. Yeah. Yeah. Super fascinating. I think that’s more of a 20th century, even post-World War two. Right. So so that’s one huge inflection point. And the big difference was the religious apocalypses were always divinely inspired, totalizing, and was a complete phase shift in the universe. You then get to like, World War two, you know? And everybody’s now seen Oppenheimer. So behold, I have become death destroyer of worlds. Right? Oh, shit. We could snuff ourselves. Right? You get into Rachel Carson and Silent Spring and, like, we could actually be poisoning our planet and doing all these things and the idea that we might snuff it, but life and the universe would go on, possibly in a degraded form, possibly in some other way. Maybe it returns and recovers and is better. But either way we could get taken out by actions of our own doing, not divine intervention. That is new. And it’s really critical to to understand the sort of intellectual historiography, because the classic thing is, are.
Jamie Wheal 00:16:19 Yeah, people have been saying that forever, right? The seventh day Adventist. Right. The great disappointment in the 19th century where they all got up on their roofs to get beamed up to the mothership on the appointed evening and that it didn’t happen. And they’re like, fuck, okay, maybe it’s like we got our math wrong. It’s six months later. And then that didn’t happen. And most of the people were like, fuck this noise. This wasn’t real. Yeah, so that’s legit. And then there’s also the question of the motives and perspectives of anybody clanging those bells. Right? Is someone looking to sell us? They’re they’re, you know, they’re gold bullion. They’re bugout bags. They’re fucking, you know, iodine nuclear pill, you know. You know, what’s that crazy bastard here in Austin? Infowars. Alex Jones. Right? Like, are they flogging something based on making us afraid, right? Or are they’re kind of level headed, heartfelt, compassionate, technically and factually accurate assessments that aren’t so overly overly biased or in the tank for one particular narrative that you can actually kind of trust this more or less as somewhere in the middle of truth claims.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:23 That’s a really helpful reframing of that for me, that that was actually surprisingly insightful. Not surprising that you’re insightful. Yeah, I was I could not believe something coherent came out of your mouth. Yeah. I mean, I was really shocked. no, just I had not heard that framing of it before, so.
Jamie Wheal 00:17:42 I found it so helpful. I found it super useful when I read it too. I’m like, oh, okay. That is that tracks that. That explains a lot.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:49 Yes, yes it does. There’s a quote that you’ve used a lot of times that I thought we could, we could jump into and it’s, it’s an E.B. white quote. Do you want to share it with us?
Jamie Wheal 00:17:59 Sure. I mean, it’s it’s I mean, a E.B. white, right? The one who wrote Charlotte’s Web. Yeah. but he’s, you know, and I just feel like it sums up that coming alive versus staring at this thing because most of most people are like, well, I do want to know what’s happening, but I don’t want to get gripped.And then fearful and reactive, I want to still embrace and love life, etc.. How do we do this? How do we balance that schizophrenic crisscross of coming alive and staying alive? And he said, I wake up every morning torn between the desire to save the world and savor it. And then after further reflection, I realized that, in fact, the savoring must come first. Because if there was nothing worth savoring. There would be nothing left to save. So, you know, in that respect, and of course, you’re playing to the base here because everyone’s like, oh, great, I still get to go to my yoga retreat in Bali. You know, I still get to do hashtag best life. Like, yay! Thank you, E.B. white. So it can be a cop out if you’re not careful. Yes. Or it can be a, you know, a sort of Dead Poets Society kind of call to action to live a heroic and joyful and courageous life.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:04 Yeah. I think part of that quote that I’ve heard you use before is that this makes it hard to plan the day. Right? Probably aiming to humor. Right? Which it is funny, but I do think that those are two sort of extremes. And like you say, I think for a lot of us, it ends up somewhere far more pedestrian than either of those, right? We’re not really saving the world, nor are we particularly savoring it. We are going through the the day to day motions, which is part of life. But one of the questions I’ve thought about a long time, and this show has been an 11 year exploration of of a of several questions. But this is one of them. And it’s related to exactly what you’re saying, which is how do I both honor the natural, I think, in-built human desire to grow, change, become better, improve the world, be compassionate right, improve ourselves and improve the world. And like it says there, appreciate the world exactly as it is. That tension, that dynamic I find incredibly animating. How do you think about. There’s no simple answer to this, right? The answer is obviously some form of both. But what do you think about that?
Jamie Wheal 00:20:15 Meaning the sort of the clear eyed look at reality and then us doing our level best to kind of live our story and make the most of it all?
Eric Zimmer 00:20:25 Yeah. I mean, or or even more prosaically, even if I take it down from world level to human level, right? I right now, you know, in, in many moments of my life and my day. I’m I’m brought with a question of do I find a way to be grateful and appreciate and embody and be here for this thing? Or should I change this thing like your job? Is it good enough? And the question is, I just need to learn to get on fully on board, embody it, or should I change it? Or spiritual practice? I’m doing meditation and there’s an inbuilt like desire to be different. That’s part of what’s driving it. And yet the actual practice is calling for me to stop doing that. And I think as humans, we have both that are happening in very close proximity to each other.
Jamie Wheal 00:21:16 Yeah. I mean, look, I think the bottom line is, is that thinking in terms of either or binaries, which is arguably Aristotle to Descartes to Instagram, you know, is a very, very helpful model for certain specific things and completely flawed and inadequate for a whole bunch of other stuff. And actually, in this next book that I’m writing, I’m going to sort of suggest that that is the cause of much, much of our grief and angst and confusion is that we’re applying the wrong cognitive models. And so rather than it being, is it one thing or like, is it acceptance or is it raging against the dying of the light? Should I go with the flow or rage, rage, rage. Which is it? You know, and the same thing for, you know, the same thing for relationships. Like, I know that being in a long term partnership is going to uncover all my shit. The only question is, is, is that the right person to go through all my shit with? I don’t know, and I can’t know unless I fully commit, but I don’t want to fully commit if this is the wrong person, which is it so.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:13 Precisely.
Jamie Wheal 00:22:13 Right. We are observers in our own experiment, and we’re and we’re affecting the outcomes by our choices. So in one respect, I think that I mean, this is a little nerdy, but in the eastern tradition, Daoism expresses, everyone is familiar with that yin yang symbol. Right? And that idea that it is negative and positive. And then there’s a little bit of, of the opposite inside the other. So you’re like it is forever moving, mixing and flowing. Alfred North Whitehead. Right. The Western philosopher called it process philosophy. Right. Which is the idea that, hey, there’s not a fixed true and good or bad, you know, and false. It is the it is the ebbing and flowing of life. We are in a process, right? We are becoming. We’re not being. And so the idea that things come when things go, things shift and things change. And to surf or ride those waves is actually the only thing you can do is to seek balance within the only constant of perpetual change.
Jamie Wheal 00:23:12 And unfolding is arguably a better thing than trying to cling to a specific rock and then being bummed where the waves of existence inevitably wash you off it. So. So that doesn’t mean, right that you’re just a piece of driftwood, right? It doesn’t remove agency. So like, do I like my job? Should I quit my job? Should I go and become a fucking massage therapist or life coach. I want to be a.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:33 Dog massage therapist in my next career. Exactly. It seems like a good job, right?
Jamie Wheal 00:23:38 So? So I think I think that there’s a there is some growing up and decoupling again from this. I think we’re mostly running some profoundly unhelpful scripts right now. And they are at odds with the fundamental route nature of being. And a lot of different cultures and societies are a little bit more fatalist than Western and American and Western European, you know, postmodern societies. And people might be like, oh, you guys don’t hustle. You don’t get to get things done.
Jamie Wheal 00:24:03 What’s wrong with you? You know, you can hustle more and never be content and never be happy and have all this cool shit. Like, our houses are big and our TVs and our phones. I mean, there was just an article in The Atlantic, I think, this morning that millennials midlife crises are very different than the ones that have been happening before. And if you think about the story that they inherited from their baby boomer parents, it was you can have your cake and eat it too. You’re special. Beyond any immediate accomplishment, the whole trophy generation thing. You should follow your bliss and you should be rewarded outrageously for it. This is the this is the entry level kids being like, I need 120 K, you know, to support the lifestyle I want to live or that I’ve seen on the gram. So, you know, you should give it to me even though I’m doing all for your company as far as value addition. Right. and if it’s not working out that way, it’s because of.
Jamie Wheal 00:24:48 Thank you, Gabor, mate, it’s because of trauma, you know? And trauma is my A.D.D., and it’s my addiction to caffeine and cocaine and nicotine and Adderall, and it’s trauma. And then what you’re supposed to do at that point is go back and go on your journey to heal and process your trauma. And if you do all that friends and neighbors, then you’ll be back to the top of the slide and you’ll be able to manifest the life you want. And basically they’re getting into their 40s and they’re like, oh shit, I didn’t settle down. I didn’t commit to a life partner. I’ve been swiping right. I’ve been playing the game. I didn’t commit to a job or a career, and now I’m in some weird ass lifestyle influencer hell realm where I was, where I was promised I was supposed to have passive income and be living. What Tim Ferriss told me was my four hour workweek. but that’s gone thanks to Airbnb and Starlink, right? And so, you know, in some respects, we’ve all been sold a bill of goods.
Jamie Wheal 00:25:35 Yeah. And the idea that it is obviously a combination of, you know, it’s the Serenity prayer, right? It’s like, except the things I can’t change. Change the things I can. Smart enough to know the difference. It’s that dialectic.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:05 That’s smart enough to know the difference. I think, is the real challenge. Right? I think that’s the art of living. It’s an art, not a science of of living life. And I agree with you. I mean, I just did something with a company there called Rebind II, and they basically pair someone with a great book. And I did the Daodejing, and I did 20 hours of commentary that you could go interact with and have a conversation with, and they do other great books they’ve done a lot of, a lot of philosophy, you know, people like Margaret Atwood and John Banville, and it’s kind of a cool project. so I’m a I’m a big Dow fan and I’m a big fan of the Whitehead model of said slightly differently, less nouns, more verbs, you know, in the in the way life actually is, you know, let’s change direction just a little bit here.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:54 I want to try and summarize a little bit of your book, an idea, and then ask some questions about it. And I’m going to let you correct my very short summary, which is basically meaning is disappearing all across the board. We’re stuck in a place where where we don’t have meaning. People are turning to either fundamentalism or nihilism where they don’t believe in anything. To use your your river analogy, like we could often be surfing or riding the river sort of blind. We don’t have any maps that actually work for us anymore. with the maps we have don’t make sense. And that there was some benefit in religion. It gave some meaning, it gave some structure, and that there might be ways to bring some of those good things back. In very different forms, though, that would help us with this meaning crisis. Is that a is that a reasonable short summary?
Jamie Wheal 00:27:52 Yeah, sure. I mean, I just don’t, you know, don’t throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:56 Yeah, yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:57 You go on to talk a lot about peak experiences and different peak experiences is being part of that. And I get the idea that these more peak experiences, this more embodied, alive feeling is a good thing to have just to have, because it’s I mean, I think part of the point of life is to live it, and this is a way of living it in a more heightened way. The piece that I had a hard time in my mind connecting the dots on was how does that lead to meaning? Does it or is it just part of a broader meaning structure?
Jamie Wheal 00:28:36 Can you say more about the broader meaning structure that you’re thinking?
Eric Zimmer 00:28:40 Well, you start the book with the sort of core idea that one of the big challenges that we face in meaning crisis, things like religion, you talk about the three elements that are important to have in their.
Jamie Wheal 00:28:52 Healing, inspiration and connection.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:53 There we go. Healing. Inspiration and connection. Perfect. Okay. So framed that way, it all sort of makes sense, I don’t know.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:01 I didn’t I didn’t actually pull those exact words. So. So explain a little bit more about those three things and and how the world we’re in today. Finding those things for ourselves is a really valuable endeavor.
Jamie Wheal 00:29:14 Yeah. So that’s kind of leaning on my, my, my academic training as sort of a neuro anthropologist. Right. Like, how do we do this culture thing? And then also why does it work or not work. Right. So if there’s a practice that is persisted for centuries to thousands of years, what’s the mechanisms of action underneath it? Like it presumably it works. And it works because it’s also doing stuff in our bodies and brains. And if we both know that it’s culturally significant, there’s a record of it. And you now understand the mechanism of action like this, not just vaporware or superstition. Now you can potentially build new things that still work right going forward. And they could be better adaptive and more helpful. And so the argument I made in Recapture the Rapture was just, hey, the flywheel of of human existence and culture is some version of ecstatic or peak states inspiration.
Jamie Wheal 00:30:00 So it’s really important to know or to feel that there’s something more capital and more to life than just the daily grind. Because if anybody if some I mean, it’s a legit question to ask, it’s why most emo kids get really sad, you know, or cynical or depressed. It’s why there’s diseases of despair like, fuck this, this grind, life’s a bitch, and then you die. And all you’re ever doing is Sisyphus pushing rocks uphill only to ever have them fall down. Fuck this. Just this. This is not engaging. I don’t want it. So many people are like, no. So inspiration is like, hey, there are places, there are experiences you can have peak experiences that where it all makes sense, even if it’s just from moments to minutes. You’re like, oh, wow. You know, it’s a beautiful concert where everyone’s singing for the encore and you feel connected in a sea of humanity. It could be a sunrise or sunset on a mountain. You’re like, oh my God, I feel like I’m in a Nat Geo cover or something like that, or or play or movement or embodiment or romance and lovemaking or, you know, whatever it might be.
Jamie Wheal 00:30:58 Wine, women and song, sex, drugs and rock n roll. Like, like all of it, you know, it lets us get back to our burdens the next time we have to inevitably pick them up again and feel just a little standing, a little taller, you know, just with a little more spring in our step. So there’s an important kind of relief of the burdens of life and affirmation that there is something worth striving or struggling for. I often think of it as like, let’s just say you’re on a multi-week backpacking slog with a big ass heavy pack. Like, my metaphors are either historical or action sports, because that’s just my life and background as a guide and other stuff. So I tend to trust the stuff I’ve actually felt. You know, I’m like, oh, that’s a, that’s an analog for for other things. So you’re trudging through the swamps and you’re bushwhacking through the forest, and it’s it’s dark and it’s wet and you can’t see shit. And then you climb up a nearby mountain and you’re like, oh, wow, look, that’s where we started and that’s where we’re heading.
Jamie Wheal 00:31:56 And I can even see there’s that crazy little junction or crossroads. Now I’ve got perspective on what we’re grinding out down in the flats with no visibility. So there’s that, there’s inspiration. There’s something worth living for. There’s perspective on my actual quotidian day to day. And there’s also often I don’t know why this is, but there is often, something that tends to accompany at peak experiences. I’m a golden god, you know, almost famous, right? Like I am more than my deskbound day to day beat down self. That’s nice. But there’s often also a printout sheet like here’s where you’re banged up, broken, here’s where you’re out of integrity, here’s your homework. Here’s your shit to do when you get back down on the flats. So there’s often heightened perspective. And this is the whole genre of psychedelic assisted therapies, you know, all that kind of stuff. People are like, okay, if you get out of your normal waking consciousness, can you have a subject object shift and a perspective on me and my stories and my habits, behaviors in life that I don’t normally have, and is that helpful in some way? So that leads you from inspiration inevitably to healing.
Jamie Wheal 00:33:02 And not only do I have a punch list of things to fix and patch, but I also hopefully have some stoke. I have some enthusiasm left over from my peak experience, so I actually have increased motivation to maybe go and do some of those things I’ve been postponing. And then invariably we don’t do this in a closet, right? We do this as tribal primates in relationship to each other. And so the connection is essential. And what’s interesting is that, you know, you can get into that flywheel via any one of the doors, but they all three seem to come online. So as an example. Right. You know, AA comes in from healing like I’ve had my rock bottom moment. My life’s out of control and I’m hurting and harming myself and others I care about. And I can’t keep doing this or I’ll die. Right. That’s everybody’s more or less rock bottom. So they go into. So that’s their their catharsis moment. But then they find AA and they have their first meeting or something like that, and they’re like, oh my gosh, I’m not alone in this.
Jamie Wheal 00:33:59 This human condition is suffering. And holy shit, this they can hold me and my story and my shame and my my habits, etc., etc. and the sponsors and all that. Then invariably, what do they call it? They call it like the pink, the pink cloud. Pink cloud.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:13 Yeah. I’m a I’m a recovering heroin addict, an alcoholic. So I spent a lot of time in 12 step programs. So carry on. I know exactly what you’re talking about, but they call it a pink cloud.
Jamie Wheal 00:34:23 Pink cloud. So invariably they’re like, oh my God, I’m not alone. And this is possible, and we can do this. And I’m right. And I don’t have to be alone in my in my burdens. So that’s that’s one example. Right. Another would be like, oh, you come in straight from a peak experience, you have your own accidental mystical experience, and you find a a spiritual community of practice, and then you actually go and do the rest of your work, you know, or, you know, or I go to Burning Man and I’m like, oh my gosh, and now I find my people, etc., etc. like, take your pick, right? So you can come in through being wounded and broken open and then you find your people and then you do your healing.
Jamie Wheal 00:34:52 You can come in through the peak experience, and then you’re inspired to do your work and you find your communities of practice. It’s sort of this is just the flywheel of our life. And as a result, you can kind of troubleshoot, well, how’s my life and how’s our culture? Take your pick the elevation USS and is anything missing? Am I lighter on one thing versus another? And so to your point about the rise or return of religion, it’s arguably Because religion just as a social technology. Never mind. It’s like. Theological truth claims, right? A lot of studies have shown that it doesn’t matter who you believe in. It could be Buddha, it could be Vishnu, it could be Jesus, it could be Allah, right? That matters less then that you believe, and that you believe and observe in a community of practice, and that the people who do that around the world are healthier, wealthier and happier than the people who don’t. Yep. Right. So you’re like, okay, that is social technology worth being respectful of, not just dismissive like the New Atheist or like, oh, that’s all superstitious claptrap.
Jamie Wheal 00:35:54 That’s all just tops down. Opiate of the masses, thought control. You know, by by dysfunctional, you know, power hungry priests and bishops. Like actually no, there’s a there there. And can we help it be healthy and pro-social versus regress us back to ethno tribalism, which it seems like is kind of where it’s going these days.
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Eric Zimmer 00:37:05 What I find fascinating and interesting, and is how I think lots of people recognize that they want this thing that you’re describing here. They don’t have an obvious entry point. They you know, they don’t stumble into Burning Man and feel at home. Their life never gets bad enough to stumble into a 12 step program. And I think you’ve you’ve spent time trying to build communities of people that come together and and, and do something that that provides some of these frameworks. I’ve certainly spent, you know, years through some of my programs building that. And it still seems, even though there’s a ton of people who seem to need it and want it. It doesn’t seem like anything really gets off the ground too much in that area.
Jamie Wheal 00:37:56 In which area in particular.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:58 In that area of bringing together a community of people who don’t have a common, necessarily religious belief but want those benefits. They want the community. They want the healing. They want the inspiration they recognize. I want a church without God. In essence, I see the benefits of it. But we don’t see those. We don’t see those emerging on any sort of mass scale yet.
Jamie Wheal 00:38:23 Yeah. No, it’s, What’s his bucket? He won the Nobel Prize for his behavioral economic nudge.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:30 Kahneman.
Jamie Wheal 00:38:30 That’s not Kahneman. But anyway, you can.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:32 Oh, Thaler.
Jamie Wheal 00:38:33 Yeah, yeah. Richard. Thaler. Yeah, yeah. right. So so behavioral econ had its moment. The Freakonomics guys, you know, all that kind of stuff in the 20 tens on and that’s when Obama was like doing all kinds of like government paternalism, like, let’s put the salads in front of the cafeteria lines and people will do more. And, you know, like all that kind of stuff. And then it kind of got debunked. There was like, that sounded great at Ted. and then a few, you know, pop psych bestsellers. But the reality is, is we are just complex and messy and confounding, and we’re just not really subject to easy manipulations.
Jamie Wheal 00:39:02 We will we will put it in the ditch just to put it in the ditch. You know, this is a little bit like B.F. Skinner, like back in the 60s, right? Like behaviorism, you know? And the whole idea of, like, that whole generation attempted to parent their kids with behaviorist models.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:15 Psychology doesn’t matter. Like that was, you know, Skinner. Like it’s irrelevant what you actually think and feel, right?
Jamie Wheal 00:39:22 Treat your kids like Pavlovian lab rats and reward them and penalize them. And they end up just sweeping shit under, literally sweeping shit under the carpet to get their cookie for their chores so they can go outside and we just game whatever system we’re in. Yep. Right. So the simplest answer about what you’re saying of, like, nondenominational, low doctrine, quasi religiosity not working. I completely agree with you. That’s prompted this last six months study of American churches that we’ve just done. I’ve been writing about on Substack because I was like, all right, what’s working and what’s not? Yeah.
Jamie Wheal 00:39:57 And paradoxically, the big tent spiritual but not religious. Everyone has their own conception of the divine. You do you. The world’s religions are all true. They all have their wisdom. We should. We should source widely and inclusively, etc., etc.. Right? And none of this should be hard, difficult, challenging, confronting, or ask anything other than you, other than soothing you and helping you feel better. That shit is not getting any traction. And what is getting traction, interestingly, fascinatingly, is the sort of existential kink. There’s a huge movement towards old school pre Vatican, you know, pre what is it called. Vatican Vatican two. So like that last convention. Yeah. Right. Like late 60s when they stopped doing the mass in Latin and it kind of tried to go more liberal in the Catholic Church. There’s this huge movement to like old school smells and bells and even, like millennial women wearing veils, they’re getting off on the Latin Mass. They want the high church in ritual.
Jamie Wheal 00:40:56 There’s a huge boom in Eastern Orthodoxy as well, including this bizarre hybridization. There was an interesting article in Texas Monthly about the Ortho Bros In Texas who are basically like God, guns and guts. Confederates like roid it out. MMA like Rogan, podcaster bros piling in to Eastern Orthodox churches. JD Vance, right, was a recent convert to Opus Dei. Like like the guy, the bad guys and the Da Vinci Code is Opus Dei. That’s a real that’s a real Spanish secret society arch. Basically fascist, neo Nazi Catholics who have been at war where, you know, were completely opposed to Pope Francis and have got $6 million of funding. They have a lobbyist office on K Street, you know, in DC, like these guys are pulling strings. And there’s something that a recent, journalist articulated as the cradle versus the converts clash right now in this whole pull towards super traditional religions, which is that the newcomers are often typically male, although in the case of like the, the Catholic stuff, there’s also women involved but but it’s skewing male young male.
Jamie Wheal 00:42:11 So sort of 18 to 40. And these guys are getting radicalized online. Yeah. To this whole kind of like neo reactionary. You know, if you’ve seen the memes like Deus Volt, you know, like the Crusader ideas like God wills it, you know, like it’s they’re setting up like clash of civilization stuff and basically rebooting the Crusades. And then they’re coming into these communities of practice where the cradles, the people have been born and raised in Eastern Orthodoxy or Catholicism or like we believe that our popes and bishops have direct they’re infallible and they have direct line, and they are they are the spokespeople, mouthpieces of God, full stop. That’s like that’s linchpin. And the converts who have been getting radicalized online to these kind of like cosplay LARPing, medieval versions are coming in and being like, who are you, snowflake cocks? You guys are fucking soft selling. Like we’ve been radicalized to the craziest old school versions possible and sort of like, again, like fantasy land on lines. And they’re now trying to like bend and push these traditional churches to become even more traditional. It’s fascinating.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:33 I’m curious your thoughts about how, like, what you just said, the, you know, spiritual but not religious group that wants to come together and build a community that that everybody gets along and it all goes well. And all the things that you described not working. Do you believe that it it can’t work, that fundamentalism is the only model that works? Or what? What are people who are trying to create something sane missing?
Jamie Wheal 00:44:01 Yeah, I mean, I think and actually I just gave a version of this talk for the first time. I tend not to speak super publicly about these things all the time, but it was at a conference at the University of Exeter in England and it was over Easter weekend. So Exeter has a very famous medieval cathedral. So I was like, I was like, all right, if I’m going to do it, I should do it this weekend, you know, right here. Yeah. on making the argument for a revival of a sort of Western rational mysticism and taking both the Lucien mysteries and the Greek tradition.
Jamie Wheal 00:44:32 So from Socrates to Plato and and the Lucien mysteries, they’re kind of, you know, psychedelic initiations taking that plus sort of first century Gnostic Christianity. And can we dust that shit off? Can we articulate a clear, rational mysticism where you don’t have to, like, just bite the bullet and just accept some crazy ass make believe story from 2000 years ago, or you don’t get to play. Can we do that? Because in our absence, either we get that right. Either we create a rational mysticism for the 21st century, or we end up with national mysticism. And that’s the Nazis. The Third Reich, right? That’s. Jews will not replace us. Charlottesville. That is a lot of hate filled ethno nationalism. So the bottom line is, in that meaning crisis, if you don’t create a rock in the middle of that ocean, everyone just goes whooshing past the moderate middle. And the first place they find community, the first place they get seen is in increasingly fundamentalist and extreme versions. So my sense is, is that, that’s what needs to happen.
Jamie Wheal 00:45:35 It just isn’t particularly happening. So it’s not that we need to or have to go to fundamentalism, it’s just that no one is articulating in the middle and one of the best. I mean, not only do like Unitarians, they’re getting their clocks clean. Method.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:46 Yeah. Because you go to Unitarian. I mean, I love them as people, but I go and I’m like, I have no idea what we believe in here. Like, I have no idea what’s actually happening here.
Jamie Wheal 00:45:56 Totally. And there’s not a there’s not enough, structure to the container to have a clear identity. So, I mean, you know, the old info marketer thing is there’s riches in niches, right? So like specialize and focus on your people. And one, you’re all things to everyone. You’re nothing to anyone. And a classic example to me is there’s a group called Sunday Assembly. And they started in England. Right. You’re familiar with those guys?
Eric Zimmer 00:46:18 I’m familiar. Yeah. And they they did well, but it doesn’t seem like they stayed doing well.
Jamie Wheal 00:46:23 No. And so basically they. And this was a bunch of recovering Anglicans, which is relatively traumatic. I mean, Anglicans are, you know, post Henry the Eighth, they’re about as weak sauce, you know, just sort of observing the thing as possible. Yeah. But nonetheless, they left the church as kids, but they’re like, we still miss it. What we miss is we miss the hymns. We miss the community, and we miss the cucumber sandwiches that was there kind of bit. So that’s healing inspiration and connection. So we we miss the inspiration of singing and being in a beautiful building and stained glass and all that. We miss some version of, like, I’m a sinner, but I can do better. And here’s some inspiring stories, right? And we miss the connection. The cucumber sandwiches, you know, in the church basement, so they attempted to reboot it without doctrine? Yes. And their songs. And it was really funny because I was like, I just checked back in.
Jamie Wheal 00:47:08 I met with their founders a few years ago in London, and I just checked back in like six months ago, like, how are these guys doing? I thought they were kind of dwindling. They had a big, you know, big press and lots of buzz. And then it kind of was eroding. And I was like, all right, what’s going on there? And then I saw their song list because very nicely, they have a sort of, you know, an open source toolkit like, hey, you can do Sunday Assembly, like things wherever you are. Here’s our songs, here’s our piece. You know, here’s how we do it. You can go knock yourself out and try it yourself. And I saw their songs and it was like journey, Don’t Stop Believing and like Monkeys, the monkeys, I’m a believer and you’re like, oh guys, that’s so horrendously cringe. And I and I, and I kind of felt like, oh, that’s it. These guys are doing the monkeys.
Jamie Wheal 00:47:50 Everyone really is holding out for the Beatles. And you need deep and profound art. And the other element that I was, I was tracking and I’ll share it with you And you can tell me if it makes sense, which is what is this whole turn towards Orthodoxy? Why? Or it’s existential kink. It’s sort of like I want to submit, right? Like I am tired. And what’s her face? She wrote, strange writes, she’s got a triple barrel name. It’ll come to me in a second. She writes for the New York Times as well, but she she wrote about spiritual kink. And her point was that millennials in particular, just as a cohort who have been raised on this hyper individualist, narcissistic view of life and reality and meaning are fucking exhausted. They’re just tired. None of it worked. The cacao, the combo, the ayahuasca, the the conch festivals, the ifs, internal family systems, my trauma. None of it’s worked. I’m still stuck in this human condition, and it was all supposed to be about me and my hashtag.
Jamie Wheal 00:48:55 Best life. And for fuck’s sake, polyamory. Like none of it has worked.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:00 And so tell me what to do.
Jamie Wheal 00:49:02 Yes. Yeah. And so there is a, there is a, there is a yearning for submission. Like, can I just set aside me having to steer and navigate all of this for myself in this hyper, hyper individualistic, neoliberal marketplace of meaning? Can I just give up and can I be told what to do? And then there is also on a higher level. So submission is the sort of base psychological level. But then I think there’s a higher yearning which is surrender. Can I, can I experience all and surrender to a force, to a consciousness, to whatever it might be that is, but that is bigger and vaster and wiser than me. And can I experience that I thao relationship right in a way that helps soothe the absolute mental schizophrenic Clusterfuck of trying to make sense of our current moment.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:00 Yeah. I mean, I think that you see these different things.I love what you said about, you know, it hasn’t worked for them. The millennials, I don’t millennials. I don’t think it’s just that I think lots of people I mean, I know a lot of our audience is like, I’ve done all that shit, right. You know, and I’m still I’m still sort of me. And you have a great story in, in this book about how despite lots of healing, lots of peak experiences, all this stuff in many ways, that little kindergartner who used to boss people around is still in there and and is part of part of what’s happening. So I think that on one hand, a lot of this is, as you’re saying, there is a certain surrender when I think about what what religions give or gave, I’ve had a I’ve thought of it through slightly different words, but was like a view, like, what does all this actually mean? What the hell is going on around here? Some sort of practice, something to do and then community.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:59 Right. And I think that what a lot of these disjointed things that we’re talking about give you one of those things, you know, psychedelics give you a view, although it’s not necessarily a fully constructed view or IFS gives you a view. Here’s the way here’s why I’m the way I am. There’s a view. It doesn’t seem like anybody is doing a great job, and myself included, in trying of putting these various pieces together in a way that there’s enough, there’s enough meat on the bone that there’s something you can you can grab on to that people who are hyper individualistic will do. Right. And I think that’s the other thing, is that there probably some people are turning away from the hyper individualistic. But I think for so many of us, it’s so hard to get away from the base comfort that our phones and our TVs and our stuff give us that sort of just don’t add a lot of value, but are kind of comfortable to then go into community where something is asked of me, where something is demanded of me, where I’m going to have to encounter people I don’t like.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:09 Right. And being willing to to do that seems to also be a modern hurdle.
Jamie Wheal 00:52:15 Oh yeah, now we’re fucked. I’m here.
Speaker 5 00:52:18 I mean.
Jamie Wheal 00:52:19 Right. Like like again. Like like part of this church survey. So it hadn’t been in churches for, you know, decades went to kind of half a dozen interesting ones and different ones in Austin. And one of the first ones we went to was based on Father Thomas Merton. So kind of a Catholic, mystic, contemplative, contemporary guy really writes great stuff. And Gurdjieff, so sort of this kind of mystical, spiritual Christianity. So it’s like, okay, that seems like an interesting place to start. They had a big kind of octagonal geodesic dome chapel. This was kind of clearly a 70s 80s era baby boomer build, and they were sort of navigating their way into this, this next chapter. And I remember looking around and just kind of getting a pulse check. How does it feel? What are they up to? How formal is their liturgy? How are they smuggling in Gurdjieff? Because that’s some heretical shit, you know, to most mainline Christians.
Jamie Wheal 00:53:06 Yeah, right. I was just fascinated. And then I was like, oh my gosh. how many of the Kanchi spirituality big dumb hat crowd, right. This sort of is, is the placeholders for contemporary spirituality, right? Online and elsewhere. How many of them could even make it in the front door of this? And just be a humble, anonymous congregant bowing down to a shared higher purpose? They’d be coming in with their phones like, here’s me, here’s I am, I’m thinking of my updates and my tweets. What does this do for me? Like I want to say something. Give me the mic. You know, I’m going to overexplain when I get my chance to testify and you’re like, oh my God, we actually have to strip and undo so much buggy programming and conditioning to just put ourselves back in the realm of humble, not main character syndrome. You know, just congregant and participant and submission to a tradition that is bigger, longer, older, deeper than my personal truth.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:09 And is your belief that Western mysticism is the right answer? Because that’s what we are culturally steeped in, because there’s lots of Buddhist sangas around that. I’ve been a Zen practitioner for for years. So, you know, there are communities there. They’re not big communities generally. They’re they’re smaller communities. But they they seem to function, but they do stay in a certain realm. And I know in your book you talked about how for you, you explored all these other religious ideas, but something about the Western Christian tradition felt like the ideas there were so culturally embedded that they made more sense to you.
Jamie Wheal 00:54:49 In no way would I argue that something in the like. Like I’m not a Western chauvinist, right? I’m not making the case that, like Tom Holland did in his book Dominion, he’s that Cambridge PhD. He’s got a very popular history podcast. Right. And Dominion was his book on, hey, many, many of the things from like representative democracy to human rights to like, you know, a thousand pieces of this to care for the poor.
Jamie Wheal 00:55:12 You know, social, social service is actually deeply Christian, even and especially in the Western secular societies that have let go of the requirements for faith. Right. So that was his book. It came out a few years ago. Jordan Peterson, Barry Weiss, lots of people along that realm have been taking that as CC second monkeys. Proof positive Christianity is best. And when we have this, you know, when we have, you know, Muslim immigration into Europe and Elon’s talking about we you know, the West has a has a suicidal empathy. Yeah. And all these things like it’s setting up culture war clash of civilizations kind of stuff. Right. So I’m not I’m not saying that. But what I would say is that if you’re just, you know, the hour is late and and the stakes are high and we’re almost out of bullets, then look around and see what we’ve already got, because what we’ve already got is going to be quicker, faster, cheaper, and arguably more potent or effective than starting from scratch with something that a bunch of post-modern galaxy brains cook up out of thin air, right? Just I mean, you know, it’s like it’s the classic product market fit.
Jamie Wheal 00:56:13 And like most of entrepreneurial success is timing, you know, is like if you if you want like, it’s far easier to dust off something that exists, remind people of its value and kind of spin it back up again than it is to spend all the dollars and all the marketing to bend people over for your solution in search of a problem. Right?
Eric Zimmer 00:56:34 And so you’re saying that you think there’s a lot of people who, sometime in the not too distant past were Christian adjacent? Yeah. And they and culturally, they understood it. And these are not the people who hate Christianity, you know, or have this like, because there’s a whole there’s a whole group of people who feel like they’ve been like, you know, that it was the cause of so much pain and trouble in their lives that like, they’re allergic. You’re saying there’s a big group of people who are non allergic who at least understand, and we do understand. Right. We we could talk about Cain and Abel or we could talk about pillars of salt, or we could we could use 100 cultural phrases that we all understand that are coming from a particular place.
Jamie Wheal 00:57:20 Yeah, absolutely. Like that is the cultural baggage of the Western tradition, you know, as are the Greeks and Romans, as is Shakespeare, etc.. There’s there’s a bunch of stuff there, and a huge chunk of what we take as the Christian story is actually these weird mashups over time, like, precisely. Right. I mean, it’s like Christ’s nativity, like Christmas, you know, like there’s the little Star of Bethlehem and there’s a manger and there’s wise men and there’s shepherds and there’s like, none of that actually ever happened in the Bible, like different gospels tell different fragments of that story, and that it all got bundled together into like inflatable fucking nativity scenes at Costco, which are wonderful.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:58 By the way. I don’t know why you’d want to run those.
Speaker 5 00:58:00 Down.
Jamie Wheal 00:58:02 Super classy, especially when they deflate. But you know, the point being is just that there’s a massive, deeply resonant from Leonard Cohen to Bob Dylan to, you know, you name it, right? Songs are literature, poetry, unpacking these stories.
Jamie Wheal 00:58:18 So there’s that’s that’s one thing, just a utilitarian, practical argument. Cheaper, faster, quicker to use what we start with, what we got. Then there’s also a place where, like Kurt Vonnegut did his grad work at the University of Chicago on narrative structure in the shape of stories. And he’s like, stories have different shapes. There’s up and down, down and up, up and down and up. Like, you know, boy meets girl, you know, like like man in a hole. Like he, he maps them. He’s like. And the coolest one ever is the Cinderella story, which is starts out terrible, gets awesome, you know. Dancing with the Prince, you know. Stroke of midnight. Then precipitously terrible stagecoach turns into a pumpkin. All is lost until fits the shoe. Happily ever after. And then he says, as a sidebar, he’s like, actually, in that Cinderella story, that’s the most resonant one we’ve got. But it also maps 1 to 1 with the New Testament.
Jamie Wheal 00:59:03 So I tell that whole setup in my last book to then make the case that, like, well, the Atomic Bulletin of Scientists say we’re 90s to midnight, we’re in our own Cinderella story, you know, and what happens next as far as a potential crash to the worst ever? Looks like it’s some version of that is likely to happen. The question is, is what’s our happily ever after? And if we situate ourselves in that story, can we both have, you know, brace for impact, understand what’s coming and not be completely spun out or lost in it, and then also keep reading for that happily ever after. Back to the beginning with the wolf you feed radical hope. Yep. All right. So that was the case I made. I did not also then say, hey, by the way, it’s the New Testament, right? Because because I didn’t want to be the Jesus guy. Right. So I was like, all right. But by the way, it is also the New Testament, right? So the New Testament is east of Eden.
Jamie Wheal 00:59:49 You know, even the apple is the worst ever. Noah in the flood. Tower of Babel. Exodus. Imprisonment in Egypt. All the shitty shit till. Oh, hey! High point. Little star of Bethlehem, right? He’s come to save us all. Oh, no! Terrible. Good Friday and then. Yay, Easter Sunday. Roll back the stone. We’re all saved. So you’re like, oh, shit. So the fact that our current existential predicament happens to map the Cinderella story, which is more deeply based on the New Testament Christian tradition, just leaves us saying not that it’s better or more accurate or true than Buddhism or Sufism or Hinduism or anything. It’s just to say, hey, in our current moment, this idea of being humiliated, lost, broken down and betrayed and somehow bearing witness and then being redeemed right through the worst possible situations ever that might, just might be speaking to us in a way that is uniquely and especially timely. And if we can pass it cleanly, like artistically, creatively, ethically, historically, if we can do that well, does that provide a story that can get us to feeding that wolf of radical hope a little more?
Eric Zimmer 01:01:01 Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.
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Well, that’s a beautiful place to wrap up. You stuck the landing there. You and I are going to continue for a few minutes in a post-show conversation where I want to talk a little bit more about Leonard Cohen, actually. And because I can talk about him forever. And then I want to talk about a little phrase of yours. Seek novelty, make art help out, which I think is a great little framework. So, listeners, if you’d like access to that, you can go to one. You feed, join, become part of our community and also support the show, which we would much appreciate. Jamie, thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure.
Jamie Wheal 01:02:06 Yeah for sure.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:07 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.Can Radical Hope Save Us from Despair in a Fractured World
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