Ep. 1 - Zach Leary

Hello, everyone. This is your host Noah Lampart, and this is Synchronicity. That's the name of the show. Before we start today, I have a favorite ask of you, dear listener. If you could, please record yourself on any device saying, "This is Synchronicity," and then send that to me. My email is nLampart@minepodnetwork.com. Send it to me. I'm gonna do something cool with it, and I would love for you to do that. If no one does that, I'm gonna record a bunch of people and still pretend like you guys did that. So you'll never know how popular or unpopular this is, but I think it's gonna be pretty cool. So without any further ado, I would like to introduce myself introducing my first guest, Zach Leary.

My first guest today is Zach Leary. He has his own podcast called It's All Happening Podcast.com, if you want to go there. It's pretty cool. I really recommend checking it out. He has some very, very awesome guests. Rhonda, Douglas Rushkoff, Trudy Goodman. It's just some really cool people, so I definitely recommend checking that out. So Zach is a really interesting dude. He knows about a lot of different things yet. It's a pretty grounded guy, at least from my experiences with him. He's able to kind of move from world to world pretty seamlessly. He's involved in the Kirtan scene out in LA, which is devotional chanting.

For those of you who don't know what that is, and it is not nearly as weird as you think it might sound devotional chanting. I had my first experience with that Kirtan a couple years ago at a Rhonda's retreat. It was my first one I had been working with the foundation love server member for about a year and a half. And I went at the behest of my co-worker and boss, Raghu Marcus, over there, and I was really looking forward to it. I mean, it was on Maui. It was like going to be amazing, regardless of whatever was going to happen, even though I didn't really know what was going to happen. But I was a little skeptical of the Kirtan. I was like, what is this going to be?

Like, why am I going to have to chant things back to people? Is it going to be like a little culty? So I didn't know, and I was definitely a little freaked out. But I went, and I had listened to Kirtan. Someone who I work with and admire greatly, Krishna Das, is you can look him up, has tons of awesome stuff that you can check out on Spotify iTunes anywhere, find digital retailer. You can check it out, and it's really great music. It's undeniable, but I still didn't really know what the experience was going to be like. So I went and I was, you know, the first night they have it, it was Krishna Das, and I was like, oh, shit. It's like this A isn't weird at all. B, this is like incredibly awesome.

Anyway, I digress. Kirtan is cool. Zack is involved in it. He's involved in a lot of other cool things. At the beginning of the podcast, you'll hear him give a definition for transhumanism, which I asked for explicitly because I didn't know what it meant. I do now. You will after listening to it. So without me brambling on anymore, here is Zack Leary. Thanks. You know, just keep your audio MIDI set up, the little keyboard thing in your dock, because you can come up with all these different configurations that'll work. Okay. Yeah, it's a lifesaver. We used it at school, Berkeley. Yeah, that's right. I found out about it. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you for taking some time to do this in the middle of the week. So I don't have like any actual format or anything. You're one of my first interviews for this, but I did some cursory research. And I know we met last year, hung out at the retreat, but I was going through your stuff. And I have always wondered this, and now I actually have the perfect person to ask. I saw in your bio on it's all happening podcast website, which is your podcast, that you're a transhumanist, or you consider yourself a transhumanist. And that is a fascinating area to me that I actually have very little knowledge about. So I would love to hear what your definition of a transhumanist is and how that kind of like feeds into your life and what that's about. Yeah. Well, I mean, transhumanism, well, first of all, let me back up a step. Yeah. Like I am a technologist through and through in the sense that I think given all of our current situations and challenges as we're facing in the world today, technology, we're going to have to invent ourselves sort of out of our mess, as it were. Yeah. And you know, I know a lot of people in, you know, the community that I reside in and that you reside in too, and the spiritual community and the yoga community. And it's kind of the greater, just to kind of label it a little bit, the generic new age community.

There's there's a rejection of technology. There's like, we got to go back to the earth. We've got to go back to nature. Like all of this being connected all the time. It's not working. We've got to go back, you know, and you know, I get the sentiment and I do and I appreciate what like, you know, we're losing our connection to Mother Earth and the importance of that. But at the same time, you know, the train has already left the station. Yeah. Yeah. We cannot turn back now. So what we have an endless resource of and an endless well of is the power of innovation and the power of human ideas. Like that is one thing we have an endless resource up. And I don't ever doubt the power of, you know, of human potential and how we can kind of create and we back ourselves into a corner and we can figure out ways to kind of get out of that corner. So like, for instance, we'll get to transhumanism in one second. It's a long answer. But like for instance, like a very basic example in Los Angeles, there are a couple. One smog in the early 70s, all throughout the 80s until I was growing up in Los Angeles, the smog was so awful in LA that you would have what would be called smog days at school. Like we would have like, there were days where we couldn't go outside during recess or maybe they would cancel class because the smog was too bad. We have invented a way to, you know, clean our emissions to cars and curbing factory output and stuff where that has virtually gone away. A smog day doesn't exist. I think the last smog day in Los Angeles was in the early 90s. We have to lift that up. But it doesn't exist. So we found we found a solution and it worked. And the second one is the heel of the bay and the Santa Monica Bay when I was growing up in Santa Monica to and there were days where you could not go in the ocean.

You would come out with a rash all over your body and it was just a disgusting mess. And the heel of the bay project, you know, which was not necessarily a technology project. It was just like an awareness and a consciousness project about rerouting sewer lines and and putting, you know, and curbing what you put into sewer lines and on dumping into the ocean. And it just, you know, it worked. Now the bay is, it's pretty much, it's clean. You can go swimming in it. So I mean, these are just two little examples. So transhumanism, to me, is really about the adaptation or the augmented reality of the human condition. Like we can, you know, I'm a, I'm a believer in nanotechnology and bio enhancement and all of these things. And I don't consider them to be artificial. I consider them to be an extension of the human experience. So if you believe in the most basic terms that human beings are, you know, are an extension of nature or of God of the one, whatever it is, then whatever it is we manifest as just an extension of that. So transhumanism is just a way to sort of augment our nature into making a better model.

That's never heard it put like that. And that's really, that's very interesting. I have a question. You mentioned the bio enhancement because this is, I am guilty, I think, on some level of being one of those kind of new age people who's like, yeah, we got to go back to the earth. You know, it's, it's the nature. I like the plant medicines, all of them. Of course, of course. But I also, like you, I mean, my job, I'm sitting in front of computer and technology and, you know, these information systems most of my day. So I also realized that there is an amazing power there that can be harnessed and used for good. It's not like something, there's always too, like, technology to me is neutral, just like, you know, almost everything is neutral. It's the intent that goes behind it that defines the outcome that happens. But I would say, so the bio enhancement stuff is something I've had conversations about with several people. And I still, I still get a little weird about it. Like when I, when I hear someone like is implanting something in their brain to regular like glucose, so they can like work out for longer or something and have better recovery time. And I know that's kind of like a very, you know, grotesque version of it. Or I think one of the natural fears, I don't know where it emanates from, maybe sci-fi, is that, you know, we're going to slowly evolve into like these android people who have like, you know, the Borg in a Star Trek or something. Yeah. Yeah. And also to, I mean, a parallel of it is, of course, there could be class warfare. Right. Right. That only, you know, rich exceptional people. There was some recent movie, which one was it sci-fi movie? I think the Matt Damon one with the utopian sort of moon floating over the, over the, over the earth. Oh, what was, I didn't see that.

I remember that coming out. Yeah. And then down on earth, it was like, everyone was left. Yeah, exactly. It was like a separate society. Yeah. It was like a separate society. And there is, I do have fears of that is that, you know, bio enhancement and nanotechnology and making like the perfect, you know, subhuman species that becomes just this incredible, like, you know, perfect Adonis all the time, you know, who can speak 10 languages and, you know, and like just, you know, of course, the generic cliche matrix. Right. Right. I know Kung Fu. Yeah. Exactly. All of a sudden, yeah. So there's that, there's that problem. And I do have that, that fear of it.

You know, but I don't have the fear, like, you know, Douglas Rushkoff, who's, who's my friend, says I'm on team human. And, and I like that. So I don't have the fear that, you know, humans are creating a model to make themselves outdated or, or, or, or anything like that. You know, there are, there's a lot of interesting things happening. You know, there's a, there's a fund and Elon Musk is a donor to it that is a fund generated for, to, to make sure that AI companies make responsible artificial intelligence. I just read about this today. I was reading about that. And I thought it was really interesting. And they obviously point out the flip side is, is that if any kind of rogue nation or country or corporation decides to go down that route, it's like, you know, then everyone has to. It becomes an arms race.

So it becomes an arms race. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, it was, yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that piqued my interest today. This goes into something else we can talk about later and the role of Facebook and social media and how certain things are kind of implanted in our consciousness at times, which I think is related in a way. But yeah, the, I was reading that exact same thing there. They're, they're really putting into a fund to, to make sure that we're approaching this in kind of a conscious way, which I think is really needed. Um, and great. So we don't great artificial intelligence. That's going to, yeah. That's going to come to us.

Exactly. Yeah. Skynet. That's going to come, you know, robots from the future are going to come and kill us and arrest us for our, our sins of the future. Right. Right. Incredibly interesting scenario. Yeah. But I think part of the perils of this and why so many people have so many, so many fears around it is because it's happening so fast. Yeah. Everything is like this idea of, you know, a future shock and we have to be prepared for that, you know, the abnormalities of the future and the acceleration of the future is a, it was once a real concern. But the difference is, now if you kind of look at that concept is it's happening right now. Yeah. Like what we referred to as the future. Yeah. This is it. Yeah. Yeah. This is it. Yeah. This is happening right now. And we see with, with, you know, those of us who were old enough to go, you know, before, who are around before, say, for instance, social media or smartphones. Um, like, you know, I'm, I'm a great example. I'm right in that age. Yeah. Of course, I had a very full healthy adult life before social media. But in some ways, like, I can't remember what it's like. Yeah. I was talking about this the other day because I, I grew, I was born in 83. So I remember what dial tones sound like. I, I was in a world where you, you just didn't have a phone on you all the time. The internet wasn't a thing for my entire life. Um, for most of my childhood, it wasn't. And I also had the exact same experience. Me and my wife were talking about it where it was akin to us getting a dog.

Like we remember kind of not having a dog, but it seems like we've had this dog forever in our lives and we honestly can't remember. And that's what it feels like now with social media. And one of the things that really brings us to the forefront of me is that's that my early part of my career was really tied to social media in a big way. I mean, the, the amount of acts, the access you had to mass consciousness via social media, especially in the early days where, say, if you ran a Facebook page and had like a hundred thousand people, you put something up like 80,000 people are going to see it. That was unprecedented. I mean, especially for a non paid advertising route. So it's, it's still shifting. It's still dramatically changing. I, this, this reminds me of something, uh, just to go into the social media stuff that, uh, I think it was like two years ago, maybe longer that Facebook was running a covert experiment and kind of social engineering to figure out that how people would react to, uh, if they started prioritizing negative kind of life events and news events in people's newsfeeds. And then they did a sample size where some people got negative events and some people got positive events. And then they tracked to see how that influenced their, you know, consumption on the web, but also what their posts were. And they found, they labeled it as kind of like an innocuous, uh, innocuous kind of, you know, experiment, but they were like, yeah, we found it is very viable to influence, influence people's mindsets just by, you know, showing them stuff on their screen, whether it's even consciously perceived or not, which to me is, I mean, mind blowing, obviously considering how much we see in a given day. So, um, yeah, and also is are also sort of the, of the perils of it. And, you know, and in a lot of ways, also, the trainers left the station, we can't back. Yeah. But, you know, there are a lot of interesting paradigms and movements out there, like digital detox. Yes. Yes. Which is an important program.

And I, you know, I've spent tons of time in social media and some parts make my living in it as well. But, you know, we have, it's kind of, it's not dissimilar to how, you know, when television came up, you know, then all of a sudden, you know, I think by the late 60s, early 70s, the average American household was spending, you know, six to eight hours a day in the television. Yeah. All of a sudden without any sort of, you know, responsible, you know, any sort of guidelines, right? Right. As the set and setting of television and it would just became this, this. I'm the present thing. Yeah. Yeah. And just this, this, this life suck. Yeah. And in some way, social media is, is, is the same. And the power that Google and Facebook has with controlling what it is we see and how we are programmed and delivering us the filter that is most applicable to Noah or, you know, relevant to Zach. It's very, very, it's a complicated issue. And I think we really do have to promote responsible and intelligent, healthy uses of detachment with it as well. So we can find the balance. I agree. And I've, I stumbled on something on your website too, Zachleary.com, where you were talking about six rules for making Facebook a better place. And this is, yeah, this is, this is something that I've really been interested in for a long time because I, at one point, wrote an article called, you know, Facebook is basically for narcissists, you know, it's the only reason people use Facebook. And it was actually a relatively well thought out treatise on why Facebook was bad. But then I realized very quickly that yes, there are some aspects that are super imposing kind of force on you with Facebook. But most of the responsibility lies with the individual in these days. And maybe that's not the way it should be. But it is. And you're very responsible. And one of the things you pointed out in your article, which I think is very, very important is actively go out and seek differing opinions. Go and find media that you wouldn't necessarily that you don't actually agree with. And I think that not only one of my favorite things about the web, and I think this is a, as a concept that sometimes missed, is it's the same thing as offline.

It's a different permutation, but it's the same thing. And in the same way that you recommend kind of going out if you're a liberal, finding some Fox News stuff, finding some things that are not in your mindset, if you do that in life, and you know, you can put this in any permutation you want, you end up learning a lot more. You don't get into your own pigeonhole and straight narrow focus consciousness, which sometimes focus is good. But if you're just getting fed, the stuff that you like, are you really changing? Are you growing? And furthermore, is it creating silos of information and group think that are very cut off from other people, which is, I think, you know, probably not a good thing. This is the filter bubble. The classic book by Eli Parsi of the co-founder of Move On is the filter bubble. It was sort of an accidental tangent of what happened in social media because of the way Google and Facebook are engineered. They are engineered to deliver personalized results. So that sounds great. And early on, that sounded really great, because it was great for advertisers. And we would get the ads that we like, when we get the content that we like, and that's all fine and well. But basically, what happened, and we're seeing this in the supreme manifestation of this problem is the political landscape. It is so divisive and so polarized. There are very few people in the middle. And a large part of that is because, you know, if you are a right wing hardcore Neil Kahn, you're probably only seeing right wing hardcore Neil Kahn information. You're watching Fox News and your social media and your Google search results are just feeding you all of that. And it's the same for the left as well. So yeah, my point was like, and I try to do it, is I interact, I like Fox News, I like Rush Limbaugh, and I like Glenn Beck's pages, I like all of those pages. And I kind of now and then I dip in and I interact with them. And it's true, it's changed my Facebook algorithm. It shows me stuff that I normally wouldn't see. But to me, like you mentioned, like, it's the same as the offline world. It isn't, it isn't, because like, it's much safer to do this experiment online. Like, I'm not about to go to like an RA meeting and go like, I'm not, I'm not going to do it. You know, I'm not going to go have pizza with the local, you know, Mike Huckabee for president chapter. I'm not going to do it. So, you know, social media as much. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's a great point. Yeah, I mean, I definitely, that's true. And I do make the parallel that it's the same thing. I think a lot of the, the way we view the web, I mean, it's digitized consciousness. That's one of the first thing that kind of struck me when I was getting into Twitter in like 2007 or 2008, is that normally when people speak, right? They have some filter that says, I'm with another person. I have a way to act and I'm going to think things in my head or, you know, there's some, there's some dynamic that set up, but something that that kind of removed that with this newsfeed kind of stream of consciousness posting is you don't have to verbally communicate it anymore. And I think there's a process that actually dictates kind of social, some, if you read like someone's tweets, right? They're, they're generally very, maybe even if they're the same kind of vibe, they're different than the way the person speaks typically. Absolutely. And that to me is very interesting because it's just showing that not only is this a data sample that we can actually look back and analyze, which you can't really do the same way with the human brain, but I just find it digitized consciousness to me is just such an interesting kind of paradigm because I think in the same ways that ideas and kind of concepts permeate kind of through the ether, not on the web, they, you can actually track them on the web and see what's going on, which to me is just a fascinating concept. And to see how it continuously evolves with some kind of meta awareness of what's going on. But like you said, I mean, I think people still think like, oh, in the future, in the future, and you're right, we're in it, we're in this kind of quantum leap exponential kind of change going on, but it's hard to kind of get a grasp on it. Yeah, I'd love to hear you take on it.

It is. And it's hard to, I think it's also hard to represent your life in it, you know, what you said, and which is so interesting, the way people tweet or even post on face, you know, short term or long term is very different than how the person sounds in real life. And, you know, the classic symptom of this to me is that rarely do people post their hardships, or post their struggles. So yeah, everything is sort of like this glossy, idealized, my life is great. Sort of, I don't really have any struggles kind of, you know, paradigm. Yeah. And, you know, and I'm guilty of that too. I think, you know, we all are to some extent.

And now people aren't posting. I just had a savage fight with my significant other, said so many names that were horrible. Here's a list of them. I've not seen that, but we should. We absolutely should, you know, we should. And I know you can relate with us in so much of like, you know, the bhakti path and the yogic path is about that exposure and that awareness to vulnerability, but opening up your heart a little bit and being sensitive and compassionate to the world around us. And I think that really needs to be reflected in how we, you know, display our lives in, in Facebook, in Twitter, and you know, how is it that we're using the megaphone and like to be vulnerable and to say, look, I really had a shitty day here. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm depressed. I can't get out of bed. Whatever it is. Yeah. Having one of those days, like, you know what I mean? And that, yeah. It's true. I mean, it's, it's something that evolves.

I think that is right. It's kind of like a persona, right? Everyone has the masks that they wear in everyday life. And some not even for a, you know, any shady reasons or anything. It's just that everyone has to develop a personality and kind of a relationship with various things in the world. And the online one is just kind of a step, not, I don't even want to say removed, but it's a different, different thing. And people craft their own personas. And then everyone kind of acts like that's just how it is, right? You know, and there are authentic people. I will say, I do know a few people who are actually very real on social media from the good things to the bad things. And those are typically my, my favorite follows. Like I, I always famously give people a hard time on social media, especially on my Twitter. I only follow like 70, 75 people. And sometimes people will like, weirdly overtly ask me for a follow. And I'm like, no, like here's the thing.

There's two ways. I look at this. Like I'm kind of a dick about it. Yes. But also I really am very, I'm very protective about what I know that I'm looking at Twitter 20, 30 times a day. I know I'm on Facebook 10, 15 times a day. For that reason, I do want to be somewhat responsible and protective of what I allow in, kind of my own filter bubble in a way. And I don't want to just, you know, push away everything that's bad. But I definitely am cognizant that if you're following, you know, a thousand people on Twitter and you're actively going through your feed, you're not seeing everything, but who knows what's coming in through there. And that to me is, is one of the biggest kind of things that I don't think people really focus on, like this, all of this stuff, just like advertising in the world. Like if you're walking down the street and a bus comes across, you know, and it says drink Coke or whatever it is, even if you don't consciously register it, somewhere in your brain is picking this up. This is, this is one of the things that always interested me so much about psychedelics. When I first started doing psychedelics when I was 15 and from then on, psilocybin and LSD primarily, I started getting a glimpse. I think Rhonda's calls it the witness, right, the observer consciousness, this kind of thing that's detached from your regular personality, but there's still an awareness there. And I started kind of seeing all these little things underneath what we're going on. I'm like, wow, this stuff is actually happening all of the time, just because I didn't consciously pick up on that sound doesn't mean it wasn't filed somewhere in my brain. And that relationship to the web to me is just fascinating and relatively unexplored.

I think they're probably advertisers and big corporations who are looking at this stuff but from individual standpoints, I think that that's somewhat lost. I don't, I don't know, what do you mean? Yeah, I mean, you've got to control your own reality. And that's the great thing about the web and all digital technologies is that you can fine tune it enough to really control your own reality into, yeah, like you said, your own filter bubble. And the biggest, you know, not now in the mirror, I still have a few friends left who God like who the biggest complaint they say is God, my Facebook is so lame. All I see is stupid cat pictures and like, stupid news stories. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, well, it's all right, I don't mean to be mean, but maybe you need to control who it is you add as your friend. That's that's the biggest thing.

And hide them, unfollow them if they just post, you know, too many stupid cat pictures all the time. Yeah, it's and you can really control like the tools are there to control your own reality, to control your own content bubble and filter bubble to what you're taking in. The advertising gets a little sticky because that's not as, you know, you don't have control over that as much, but you do as far as content. Yeah, and I think that's important. I mean, I, I like probably a lot of people. I use an ad blocker now on almost exclusively. Yeah, I purposely don't want to see ads. It's kind of the same logic. And I don't know if this is correct or not, but I really, really, really used to be into like cable news and politics. I protested outside of the Supreme Court here in DC when Al Gore didn't win the election because of the recount. I was out there Supreme Court, you know, half of it was probably I wanted to miss a school day, but I actually really cared. After that 2000, 2004, my relationship kind of with the political world and news world changed where I stopped seeing it kind of as like an information sources where a lot of our parents probably relied on the nightly news or the newspaper to get information as to kind of like something that's trying to feed me a narrative of how the world is that I don't really find that productive.

And so I'm always kind of, I haven't watched news. I don't even have cable anymore. I haven't watched it in like a year and a half, two years. And I've noticed, I don't know if this is naive or not, but I've noticed my general outlook on life and what's going on in my day to day seems a little bit lighter. It doesn't seem as heavy with kind of getting inundated with all of this other stuff. Now, that doesn't mean that if I see an article that's compelling. That's how I rely on social media now. I have friends who I trust. I trust their viewpoints. I trust. And I see when they post something, maybe about ISIS, which I'm not actively seeking information on.

But I know that they're not just putting this up as some inflammatory thing, but they're actually putting it up for a reason. Then that's how I get my news. That's how I get my news. Yeah. That's a good method. At least you're getting the news. In some way or some form, even if it comes through social recommendation or just peer-to-peer feeding news through peer-to-peer networks. That's a really interesting way to do it. But I am of the belief that you have to get your news in some way, shape or form. That's another, gosh, I feel like I've said this 10 times, but that's another bone I have to pick with the greater new age community. I really hear that a lot. I can't tune into the news just because I'm so sensitive and I just don't want to know about that and it just ruins my whole reality. To me, I feel like that's an irresponsible way to live because the problem is you can't hide your head in the sand anymore. If your entire life is just inside of this self-created bubble and you're denying the reality of what your brothers and sisters are going through in wherever it is. Middle East, North Korea, Sub-Saharan Africa, the problem regions of the world, you're denying the reality of the human experience.

We have to know what our brothers and sisters are doing. Granted, I don't need to walk and wake up in the morning first thing and turn on the television and just get fed this year. Set your whole day up. It's somewhat, insanely biased and saccharine news experience that we're being fed all the time. We have to pick and choose. One of my favorite things when hanging out with R.D. at the house is that he looks at the paper every day. I love that. It's an old school thing. I mean, he was born in 19th built. He was born in 1331. That's an old school thing. You get the paper and you look at the book. It sits there and eats his breakfast and looks at the paper. It's just a little ritual of just kind of tuning in to like, "Oh, okay, this is happening and this is interesting that this is happening and here's why it is."

Well, it's true and it deals with this the Buddhist concept of grasping and aversion. I think that what you're talking about is the aversion. The people want to create their own reality to detach because they're, "Oh, I'm not attached," but they're actually actively detaching, which is a form of aversion. Don't deny the aversion, detach from it. Exactly. It's a very big difference, but it's also one that I think can be... When you start waking up to how much suffering there is around the world, I don't think it's a completely insane reaction to try to shut off from that. I mean, most people aren't going to lean into it, although I think that's probably what you should do. But it's just a natural thing.

So I have a quote I found because I want to do these quotes. If anyone knows me on social media, I'm a big fan of putting quotes up and I think some people think that... You didn't know the Sucksley thing today. Yeah, I did know the Sucksley one. This is a different quote from the other day. And I like these quotes for a couple of reasons. One, I think if you wake up and just kind of toss a quote around in your mind throughout the day, you'd just be surprised how it can interact in different ways, little synchronicities. And also, I just think it's smart. Try these people. These are quotes and they're saying in wisdom that I at least try to pick out that have some personal meaning. I mean, there's a lot in this day and age of social media, right? There's...

People put up quotes for everything. They're misattributed. They're kind of just... You can tell they're just platitudes. But I do think there's still value in tossing over words of wisdom. So here's a quote. It's from Marie-Louis von Franz, who was a Jungian analyst, worked with Carl Jung in anthropology. She was great. Amazing. She goes, "It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame." Which to me is an amazing quote because I've experienced both sides of those things. I think I would say I started most of my life as a cynical realist, thinking I had a very good idea of what's going on. I'll look at that. That's not as smart as it could be. Oh, this is the world's all messed up. And then I had a very dramatic shift into a naive idealist. Everything is love, but not in like a thinking way. But everything is love and a, "Oh, everything is great. There's no problems in the world. If I don't think about the problems, they don't exist." And then you kind of... I had this balancing thing and this is no way to say that I have it all figured out in any way, shape, or form. But I've now approached difficult situations in the world, in life, with a bit more balance and not just kind of push away or grab onto this pleasant experience. And I found that to be amazingly transformative. I don't know. It doesn't happen right away. But over time, I think if you can be aware of the differences, the idealist stuff and the realism of the world, it really does transform your life in a positive way. So how do you find that balance? I mean, that's the trick. I mean, that's the practice, right? Yes. That is the practice.

I would love to say that that balance is once you find it, it stays. But it doesn't. I mean, those are the waves. Right? I think I put up another Ken Keezy quote the other day, which was, "The goal isn't to not engage with the world. You have to go in to the world and ride the waves of the world." And that's been my experience of life. I don't know if someone else has kind of a plateau experience, but it's up and down, up and down, up and down. Yeah. I was talking with Jack Cornfield not that long ago, just about some personal kind of stuff that I was going through. And he put it in relationship to the world at large is that you descent up the mountain and you can attain these pearls of wisdom or the nectar or whatever language you want to use from any tradition and ascending up the mountain. But you have to decent.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to go up and just kind of ride these waves or the classic Buddhist thing. The world is an ocean of joy and a sea of tears. It's both simultaneously. It's all happening at once and simultaneously all happening. Yeah. I go into those zones so often with the cynicalulates. It's like, "What difference does it make?" It's like the entire government's bought and sold in a way and it's just one big corporation. All of these people are clowns. So what difference does it make? Let's just forget it. But that's too convenient. It's too simple. It doesn't work. It doesn't feel right either. I think if you stay in that zone after a while, you begin to notice, at least I did, that it creeps into your own being too. That's how you're viewing. Yeah. It creeps into your own being and also part of it, which I go on this thing all the time that, especially as you get into the political arena, or not even just political arena, but just the bigger social issues arena, is that we're all complicit. We're all part of the problem and we're all part of the solution. Even the most idealistic, progressive, and really action-oriented, progressive person out there, they're doing the best that they can and leading by example, but we're still complicit. We're all part of the first. I put gas into my car today.

I pay taxes into this machine. I live in these constructs of these walls of the material world around me and I pay rent and I live in the city. It's all part of this reality that's in, I bank and maybe I'm ashamed to say, but I bank with a major banking institution that was part of the Wall Street meltdown and all of that. We're all sort of complicit in it to a degree. We're all paying money into the problem. If we could just admit that and stop admitting that we live outside of the bubble, unless you're part of the one in a gazillion people who lives truly off the grid, it doesn't subscribe to any of this shit, but that's so rare. Once we sort of admit our complicitness, then we can dance in and out of the solution with a little bit more ease of speech and ease of action and ease within the choices we're making as well. That's where it starts and just the choices we're making. I think that's important. It sounds like one of the things you're touching on, which I think is really important, is acknowledging what's going on. This is something, I'm a big Carl Jung fan, so you'll hear me talk about him a lot, but one of his concepts that I love is the shadow. This alternate kind of, this is the dark aspect of our personality that most of us truthfully don't really like to face. It comes out when we get angry or frustrated or whatever it is, but it exists in all of us. It's typically unconscious and I think actively trying to examine that and acknowledge that that's a part of all of us really then promotes change in a positive way. I don't think that you would, I think a fear is if you acknowledge the shadow aspects of yourself or personality or whatever you've done. Everyone's done fucked up shit. Everyone's had fucked up shit happen to them. That's all life for everyone truthfully, but when you start kind of examining it in yourself, there's less constriction and tension around it. I think that's one concept I really love about Buddhism is this concept of space and creating enough space in your own head, in your life. It's one of the most important concepts to me because I've just, things get a little bit easier when it's not the most important thing in the world. For me, when I get angry, that's why I get angry. I rarely can notice it in the moment, but usually when I'm angry, I'm yelling or I'm screaming. It's because I'm either afraid of something deep down that I didn't know or I'm frustrated and I feel tight and constricted like there's no way out like a prisoner. And then afterwards, immediately, once you cool down, you're like, "Oh my God, what did I do? I was the reaction. That was not what I was trying to do." I definitely think that that acknowledgement aspect of what you're talking about is just huge. That's beautifully said. I'm glad you touched on. I mean, that's the story of my life because I've had a lot of shadow work, I guess, as it were, kind of come to the surface in ways that have been slightly higher than average than most people around specific issues and substance abuse stuff, and that's really the plane crashed into the mountain in a major, major ways. I've definitely been at the precipice to where like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to make a choice here. I'm going to go on this way and might not make it." So I have to acknowledge my shadow side if you give myself and go back into the love and the forgiveness of the awareness to get out of it, to get in, to get out. That's absolutely true. And the Jungian work that you're talking about is vital importance. I'm always interested, and your dad was a part of this too, I'm interested in people and movements that bridge these two worlds, which is probably a little too simplistic, but the East and West, the esoteric, the pragmatic, those types of... I've just noticed, even just from something as simple as web analytics, that's the stuff on the web, at least for the networks that I help run and manage, that's the stuff that people respond to them much, because it's the internal and the external. It's this dichotomy of this play that when it gets kind of brought to the surface a little bit, that's really when stuff starts to happen, like synchronicity. Everyone knows synchronicity. That's a term that almost anyone is familiar with.

A lot of people don't know Carl Jung came up with it, and he calls it, I love his definition of it, he calls it a principle of a causal orderedness. So there is actually a weird orderedness that just doesn't have like a causal thing, which is actually exactly how quantum physics works. When you start going down to the quantum level, there's not like a A goes to B, and that's it. If there's two particles, and one goes in another direction, but they're a length and another, they're linked forever throughout time and space, and you know, the observer principle, it's all very related, which I love. I want to move on, because I have some questions for you, that I want to get to. Personally, like you mentioned, how do we get this balance, right?

What are some things that you do? I know you do kirtan. I know that you're kind of in a similar community to me, the satsang, the Maharajian Yim Krolli Baba satsang. But what are some things you do that have helped you in your life kind of shift your perspective or just help you in any way? Well, in the last few years, or in several, six, seven years or whatever, having some daily sadhana, some daily practice, and forcing yourself to engage in that daily practice. For me, it's, you know, I say I do kirtan, but I also have a formal meditation practice. Yeah, which I do most days, you know, some days I skip it, but most days I'm pretty good about it.

And, you know, one little ingredient to success, which I'm finding in that, it's something I learned from Tim Ferriss, you know, Tim Ferriss is really, really big on the daily routine issue. And he has really great wraps about how to balance technology and how to incorporate technology into your life, like he has some very strict rules about when to even look at your email. You're talking about, so I did this, you're talking about the, I actually set this up, I'll admit two months ago, where I was gating, basically, when I was checking my email, I had an auto responder up that basically told people if they were emailing me at a certain time, that I wasn't going to respond because I only checked twice a day. So I left that up for about a month and a half, and it worked really well, and that space started happening. But then, for some reason, I got sucked back in. I got sucked right back in.

And it is tough. And I love that, and he's right. And Tim is totally right in the sense that nearly every email that I get, not all of them, but almost everyone that I get, it's an ask. It's somebody asking something from you or to perform something or to do something. And so one thing that I've incorporated in is, you know, I don't look at it before my morning meditation, which has really changed, has helped me create balance and et cetera, because if you do look at it, when the first thing when you wake up, you take it into your sitting. You can't help it. All the alarms of the day just go off, and the clients that I have, and just, it's all happening. And I don't want to know. So that's one good thing that I've done.

But yeah, so I mean, a morning sitting practice has helped me to find that balance and singing kirtana and creating a morning sadhana. But the most important element for me, and, you know, by no means am I accomplished, a spiritual giant of any kind, but it's to just to stay in motion. And elaborate, elaborate. Like, just keep going. Like, you know, one of the great, if not the best sort of 12 step cliche is that, you know, they say, keep coming back. And the principle behind that is that you just keep doing things. You just keep coming. You just keep doing things until something changes. So, you know, for me, the biggest enemy in life is if you like, you know, you have a really shitty day and you stay in Ben, you realize, scream, and you watch the sign felt reruns for the umptie. You just described like a month of my life.

Right. And that's it. And it's just like this hellacious thing that I've repeated a million times over. And I'm just going down the rabbit hole. And I know where the rabbit hole goes. And I'm there and the blinds are closed. And it's like, Oh my God. But if you just kind of stay in motion and doing things and and you and just, you know, perform little actions, even in the mundane, you know, it's making your bed, taking your car to get washed or, you know, whatever it is, playing with the cat going outside for a walk or going for a hike or talking to friends. Eventually, these things kind of catch up and help to, you know, improve upon life. For me, I'm an isolationist. You know, that's my my go to my default, my default thing, you know, I'm a I grew up an only child and a very complicated household that was kind of forced me to grow up probably a little too quickly. Bad sound alert, bad sound alert. Hello, listener. You may have noticed that there's some digital interference creeping in on my microphone. If you haven't noticed that you will because it gets pretty pronounced. If you can stick through it, great.

If not, no problem. I'll catch you soon on another episode, but I do encourage you to listen because there's some good stuff that Zach talks about in the end here. Thanks a lot. And now back to the show. So when I was a kid, I was just this isolationist video games and toys in my corner and making Star Wars fortress. So, you know, a lot of that has kind of stuck with me. It's just, you know, I want to go in the corner and still run and hide. So, you know, I just do everything I can to avoid that. What you remind me with the keep going thing, it sounds kind of like one of the parameters, the six parameters, the six perfections, which is diligence, which is kind of just continuing to do what needs to be done. It's staying on the scene, you know, not losing. And I think faith is involved in there too, because, you know, that's one of the things that can help us to keep going, knowing that it's not for nothing that things do happen. And I think that's kind of an experience that's born out over time. Chomp would carry water. Yeah. There you go. There you go.

For enlightenment, chop would carry water after enlightenment, chop would carry all you can do is show up and do it. I love it. All right. I have one last thing because I want to because we go pretty deep on this stuff. But I want to ask you, is there anything in popular culture or kind of that you're into right now or have recently been into TV show, movie, music, anything going on that you're digging? Wow. Well, music wise, I'm absolutely at the moment, which is a weird thing for me. I have completely the wrong guy to ask on my umpteenth millionth kind of grateful to advice because of, you know, all the yeah, yeah, fairly well stuff. So I just got right back into that and I'm somewhat tuned out on new music for them. Sure. Yeah. And I don't mean like it has to be new. I personally move a believer that like I'll go in and find like a David Bowie album that I've never heard and be like, this is the best thing I ever talk about it like it's new. Like everyone you know, I was not everyone not talking about a Latin saying all the time. What's going on? And it is a great album. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, one thing about the and just what about the Grateful Dead thing and which I'm really experiencing lately and a lot of my friends are is like when we were around seeing the Grateful Dead, you know, back in the late 80s and early 90s and all of that, it feels like it's like now it's like this vindication like all of a sudden like, you know, even pitchfork like the most snobby indie music just like rag that just hates pretty much hates classic rock. Yeah. Yeah. Gave the fairly well concerts a really glowing, pretty sweet review. And it's like, you know, when I when we grew up, everybody hated the Grateful Dead, you know, it was just like and less just the core, the core deadheads. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that. I what else pop culture wise, I love what John Oliver is doing. Yeah. And he's amazing. And and the vice guys, you know, I think that is an amazing shift in pop culture is changing our news form and changing the way that, you know, we consume this this this narrative of what some people think is happening out in the world. You know, both of those guys, it's just it's amazing what they're doing in the stories, they're telling them how they tell them. Love it. Cool.

All right. You know, I'm, you know, I'd like to have you on again, because this is awesome and time flew and we didn't even touch on some other connections like we both went to Berkeley School music. There's other lots of cool stuff going on. So I'm definitely going to have you on again, but just thank you for coming. I mean, this is this is great. Thank you. No, it's on. Yeah. Greetings earthlings. Going to start that over because that is lame. So let's talk about some of the ways you can help support not me. I don't really need the support. I appreciate it. If you would like to, you can get in touch with me. There's plenty of things I like and enjoy and you can fund my life, but I don't actually need it. So what I would like you to do if you like this podcast or you're just kind of into stuff that can help you. Yeah, because everyone could use some help, you can support this podcast and a lot of other podcasts by going to mindpodnetwork.com.

And there you'll find a plethora of really, really awesome podcasts from some really cool teachers, some non teachers, just cool people. And I encourage you to delve in and take a listen. And I think you might like it. I think some of you will be listening to this and already know about my pod network. So this is a gentle reminder that you can go there and support in a variety of ways. It doesn't have to be financial. You can just spread the word, let someone know. And that would be awesome. It really helps the whole effort. So yeah, that's my little spiel here. And thank you again for listening. All right. Bye bye.

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