Episode 13 : The Great Reckoning Part 1 - The Goddess of Cancer

Jackie Dragon… Infinite Harmony Podcast.

Hi Friends… So if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you know about the Golden Threads. They’ve been there since the beginning.They are the recurring, unifying patterns that run through everything we create — the deep strands of meaning that connect .

And they aren’t just deliberate motifs; they’re living trails. They glimmer out into the unknown as each episode is woven, returning to it as the structural warp of the narrative loom so you, the listener, feels an arc of coherence. But just as often, a golden thread appears unexpectedly — a shimmer at the edge of my awareness — and I follow it into places I didn’t know existed. It pulls me into rabbit holes, opens doors into new philosophical landscapes, and reveals connections I wasn’t looking for but now can’t unsee.

They’re both anchor and compass — weaving coherence in hindsight, and leading us into new territory in all the time.

There have been some threads arising over the past couple months. I have written two episodes since the last, and neither are the final part of our Nature of Order series. That’s about 1/2 way done, but it is a climax after all, and there is much yet to uncover.

So we’re going to take a quick detour from our Nature of Order series to talk a little more about the Elephant in the room. You know, the one that threatens mass extinction of most species on the planet that we humans are only aggravating in every waking moment. That thing, that drive for growth, that drive for safety, for profit. For tending me and mine. That thing we call… Moloch.  If you remember Episode 7, we went deep into Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch and multipolar traps, and the reason it feels like we’re crashing the train into the side of the mountain. In the wake of the “Big Beautiful Bill” having approved another 3-5 Trillion in debt over the coming decade, which is over 10 percent of the current deficit, I found myself doom scrolling the internet for intelligent solutions and stumbled across my old go to Daniel Schmactenberger at a conference in Stockholm just over a year ago.

Only this video was different.

The language of this talk had a different gravity to it. A very real sense of immenance.

A message that I hope everyone hears sooner than later. Because, according to Daniel, it’s very likely for humans that the idea of “later” is becoming increasingly improbable. 

If you were a sucker enough to go see the most recent Jurrasic Park movie like I was, and… I mean, don’t, uh, spoiler alert, its bad. Really bad. But anyway, there’s this line from the scientist character, becaues every dinosaur movie needs a scientist character, where he’s having a discussion with the big money corporate dude who thinks that it’s our intelligence that sets us apart and why we will survive where the dinosaurs did not, and our scientist friend reminds big money corporate dude that 99.9 percent of the species that ever existed on planet earth have gone extinct, and where the dinosaurs managed to survive for a 165 million years or so, we’ll be lucky to make it to 2 million.

And here’s the thing… for some of you. If Donald Trump appeared before the cameras and said, “We’re going to go extinct.” There’s a whole lot of people that would just assume its true and perhaps start acting accordingly.

For some, perhaps the Pope could convince them.

For many, Xi Jinping

For others, I dont’ know, maybe Neil Degrasse Tyson or something.

The point is, there are plently of people clamoring on the internet that we are approaching the cliff and that to go over it could me the extinction of our species, or the very least the end of civilization as we know it.

The problem is that none of these people are popluar enough to warrant the ear of a sizable enough constituency to create a tipping point.

And to most people, until Trump or Putin or Xi or Taylor Swift corroborate the evidence, none of its true anyway.

Me. Well. I believe him. I feel it in my gut. Not just because of his words, but because I myself can see the train and the mountain and I’ve been thinking about it for a decade or more, and by the end of the podcast, I hope you believe it too, and I hope you have a good idea about what we’re supposed to do, because unless we do something, and I’m not just talking about recycling or growing some tomatoes, I’m talking about something revolutionary, we are going to live through some hard times. Assuming we live at all… and the best part about this viewpoint is that if I’m wrong, we’re all better off for it.

But I’m not wrong. Daniel is not wrong. And anyone who take a moment to see how we’re consuming energy as a species and track biological and geological destruction in the name of extraction will also see that we’re pretty fucked. So take a moment and put yourself in an auditorium at the annual Stockholm impact summit in 2023. Daniel Schmachtenberger sits not on stage, but in the audience, listening. He’s watching Nate Hagens, accompanied by various charts and graphs discuss human energy consumption, and that despite our push toward green energy we are consuming more energy year over year with no end in sight. He watches Olivia Lazard ask the audience for courage, as humans barrel forward against the constraints of the carbon environment and destruction of the ecology, in hope that we will efficiently and intelligently de-carbonize of our material world. He watches Econimist Kate Raworth propose radical shifts in economic model that stop externalizing the death of the living world for the sake of the market. He watches each of these speakers bear hard truths like sacred burdens.. These aren’t idle thinkers or academic technicians. They are voices trying to carve coherence from collapse. And as Daniel receives their words, he felt something few dare name: futility.

Because what good is revelation in a world that doom scrolls? What weight does truth hold when the dopamine drip of modern life washes it away in seconds? Daniel wasn’t struck by the novelty of what was said. He was struck by the ancient ache that it might not matter. That people would return to their routines, their jobs, their inboxes. That they’d remember the warnings about boiling seas and a dying sky—maybe for a day. Maybe until the next text buzzed in. In an hour he’ll be on stage, and he won’t be helped but to tell the truth of the moment. He will be asked a question… and his answer will be everything nobody wants to hear.

But before we get to Daniel, we’ll talk a bit about Nate Hagan’s talk on energy consumption. A friend and contemporary of Daniel’s, he will lay out in bare terms the superorganism our civilization has become, and how the market itself is our collective digestive system, and what it’s insatiable appetite means for our survival. Once again we’ll ask ourselves what drives the insanity that is our consumption of our precious Mother Earth and how we can curb the destruction of our ecosystem. Once again we look in the mirror, gaze into our own soul, question truly our intelligence and spirit, and open our hearts to the possibilities. Once again we ask the question. “What will it take to wake up, before its too late.”

Today, on the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

So, back to the auditorium. I saw Nate Hagan’s talk a few months ago, and its particularly powerful. I walked away from the whole thing understanding that the opulence we are experiencing now; the luxury of personal automobiles, grocery stores full of exotic foods, climate controlled environments, endless waves of digital entertainment and information, may not last forever. That energy, and how we’re generating it and consuming it, is just a blip in the massive geological timescale of Earth, and though it is avialable to us now in abundance, it will only become more scarce and more valuable as we progress and that essentially, energy we consume now, will probably be the cheapest energy we consume in our lifetimes.  

Nate begins his talk by quoting James Baldwin, who said, “We cannot change everything that we face, but nothing can be changed unless we face it.” Like Daniel, Hagan is not to here charm, but to confront. Not with aphorisms, but with systems. There are no warm-up jokes. No distractions. Just the grim poise of a man who has spent two decades stitching together a tapestry of interconnected truths too large for any single domain of thought to hold.

He speaks to a room of people wearing many hats. Investor hats. Climate concern hats. Family hats. He speaks mostly to the investor hat—not because money is supreme, but because markets drive decisions. But underneath that, he is calling to the whole human. The father, the sister, the daughter. The one who still dreams of a life where all species not only get to survive, but thrive.

Quoting Einstein, he reminds us: if given an hour to save the world, a wise man would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem. And that’s the core of this talk. Not solutions. Not silver bullets. But a deep reorientation toward the correct game board. Make no mistake, we’re playing a finite game, only there will be no winners. He does his best to orient us to the whole. To understand that desipte our centers of power, our islands of expertise, a deeper understanding of the problem is necessary.

Because most of us are working on pieces. Renewable engineers, Carbon offset wizards, Behavioral economists, tech innovators… Each brilliant in isolation—but disconnected by vast oceans of cultural nonsense. We are surrounded by partial answers pretending to be complete maps.

Hagens sets out to name the system. The human ecosystem. The economic superorganism. And ultimately, the metabolic predicament we inhabit. This isn’t economics the way it's taught. It’s biophysics. It’s history. It’s reality.

And it begins with a simple truth: humans take energy and materials, and transmute them—through the alchemy of innovation—into technology. We give that process the symbol of money. But underneath the symbols, the process is clear: we do all this in pursuit of ancient genetic imperitaves. Survival, Love, Saftey…

And in our wake? Waste. Pollution. Loss.

So he begins at the source. Not with ideology. Not with carbon pricing. But with energy. Because energy is not a variable. It is the variable. The currency of life, both ecological and economic. It is the throughline of all growth, all comfort, all illusion.

And almost no one understands it.

Nate has an MBA from the University of Chicago—one of the best. And in two years of training, no one uttered the word energy. Not once… and there is a fundamental truth most economists never touch…

Because in the temple of modern economics, energy is treated not by its value, but by its price—its extraction cost. But this accounting is a form of blindness. The standard economic model—this tidy circle of firms and households, supply and demand—is elegant, self-contained, and entirely delusional. It draws no arrows to the sun. It acknowledges no debt to geology. It imagines that what fuels the economy is human desire, not diesel. A little poke at Mises, to be sure.

But the truth is starker. We have confused the dollar price of energy with the real work it does. A barrel of oil is not just eighty dollars—it is thousands of hours of physical effort, condensed, pressurized, and unleashed in machines. And we do not include the costs of its combustion—neither the carbon in the sky nor the microplastics in our blood, nor the billions of years it took to form in the Earth’s crust. Our system accounts for none of it.

We are, he says plainly, energy blind.

We are alive during a spike—a geologic anomaly—on a vast timeline of life on Earth. Call it the Carbon Pulse. A singular flare in deep time, where fossil sunlight, accumulated over eons, is being burned in a blink.

He zooms in. Less than 300 years ago 99.99 percent of the Earth’s fossil fuel was still in the ground. We are at the very top of this pulse, surfing its crest, with all our expectations and institutions inflated by its tailwind. The growth of the last century is not a norm—it is a fever. One that cannot be sustained. Turns out perhaps the first true economic boom has never busted. But when this one busts, well…

He shows the data. U.S. oil peaked in 1970. Then declined. Then came the heroic story: we overcame depletion. “Drill, baby, drill.” But this too is myth. The “increase” is not new oil—it is tighter, dirtier, costlier oil. It is deep-sea drilling. It is fracking. It is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Quite literally.

And without this tighter, dirtier oil, the world’s oil supply would have declined for over a decade. The red shale layer is the last gasp.

Energy production began with the human body. Nate gestures toward a simple calculus of power. On a good day, his own body can do the work of a tenth of a horse. His actual horse—Binga—if properly fed and nudged, can deliver the power of one. But his utility vehicle? Forty-five horses. His truck, with a sip of diesel, delivers the labor of three hundred.

And the jet that brought his audience to Sweden? One hundred thousand invisible horses pulling steel across the sky.

This, he says, is the miracle we’ve normalized. A single barrel of oil, bought for eighty dollars on the open market, does eleven years of human labor. Seventeen hundred kilowatt-hours of embedded power, compared to our daily fraction of a single one.

Now multiply that. Our global civilization consumes the energy equivalent of one hundred billion barrels of oil and its cousins—coal and gas—every year. That’s like adding five hundred billion invisible laborers to the five billion humans already working. An empire of phantom slaves.

And with phantom slaves comes prosperity—rising wages, falling costs, exploding profits. Yet it is fragile. Because energy, respectively at the moment, is remarkably cheap. A modest rise in energy prices dents profit. Double the cost? All the automation we’ve created begins to wobble. Triple it? Losses stack. Suddenly, the once-celebrated efficiency is a trap. And this, he warns, is not hypothetical. This is what Europe faced when the war in Ukraine rattled natural gas markets. This is what the world will face again.

The point is that our economic system is built not on ideas or capital, but on borrowed energy from a finite source. Our entire way of life is scaffolded atop a geological inheritance we neither earned nor can replenish. In five hundred years, we have grown the scale of the human economy a thousandfold—not because we became better people, but because we found buried time and burned it.

So what about renewable energy replacing coal and oil? Well, at the moment, we’re not replacing anything, we’ve just added more energy to the system. We are stacking renewables atop our fossil fuels. The more energy we make, the more energy we use.

He makes the distinction clear. An oak tree is renewable. A chicken is renewable. A solar panel is not. A wind turbine is not. These are not perpetually giving technologies. They are rebuildable—complex, mineral-hungry machines that last twenty years and then demand resurrection. Every blade, every panel, every inverter is itself a product of fossil labor. An echo of the Carbon Pulse.

And renewables are mostly electric. But electricity is only 20% of the global energy diet. The other 80%—transport, heat, industry—remains deeply entangled with oil, gas, and coal.

He reminds us of the true inheritance of a barrel of oil: not just fuel, but form. Six thousand products—plastics, fertilizers, medicines, asphalt—emerge from its dark womb. We cannot drive electric and pretend we’ve escaped. The barrel still waits behind the curtain.

And today we consume more biomass than before we discovered fossil fuels. More forests cut. More land tilled. More life converted to heat and motion. The green transition, in practice, has not freed nature. It has pushed harder against her edges.

He turns our eyes to Jevons’ Paradox—the strange logic of efficiency which essentially states that as a technology becomes more energy efficient, the cost of using the technology declines. The lower cost spurs consumption. The increased consumption, in turn, rises to wipe out any decreases in energy use the efficiency gains might have initially represented. Sure enouhg, since 1990, the world has become 36% more efficient in how we convert energy into GDP. But in the same span, total energy use rose by 63%. We squeezed more out of each unit—and used many more units. Efficiency did not reduce consumption. It enabled it. There is no restraint. The train is only accelerating faster year over year toward the mountain.

Every so-called solution becomes a tributary into the same roaring river: a system whose metabolism must grow, whose hunger must be fed, whose logic is blind to limits.

There has been no phase shift. No fundamental change in direction. Only new technologies applied to the same logic of extraction, expansion, and externalization.

And so the “green” story remains what it has always been—a hope not yet grounded in thermodynamics. A symbol, not a shift. A story we tell ourselves while the engine roars beneath our feet.

But it’s not really an engine, is it? That’s not quite the right way to think about it. It’s a vast organism, unthinking yet immensely capable, pulsing with power it doesn’t understand. It’s more like an economic superorganism.

Whatever it is, it has a metabolic logic that takes energy and materials, spins them into goods, assigns them value through money, delivers feelings in the form of hormones and neurotransmitters… and leaves behind pollution and waste. Then it repeats. Every quarter. Every fiscal year. Every breath of the market.

In economics, we are told of circular flows—households, firms, consumption, and wages spinning in a tidy diagram. But the real economy, Nate says, is not circular. It is entropic. It burns. It erodes. It draws down stocks of stored energy and pushes waste into the commons. It has a source—fossil fuels—and a sink—ecosystems and atmosphere. And we account for neither.

And like Daniel, Nate knows we have mistaken price for value. We treat the cost of extracting energy as its worth, while its true value—the work it performs, the time it saves—is orders of magnitude greater. A barrel of oil can replace years of human labor, but we treat it as a line item on a balance sheet. The miracle is priced like a commodity.

This is why the conversation on Value is so important. This is why we’re talking about this before we close our series on the Nature of Order, on Alexander and Pirsig, on Value and Aliveness. We desparately need to re-orient what we value. Because this “energy blindness” is a cultural affliction so deep we don’t even know we’re afflicted. It runs through our institutions. In business schools, in economic policy, in investment models—energy, the foundation of the entire system, is invisible. An afterthought. 

But this unique moment: this Carbon Pulse, is a brief flare in geological time when we found ancient sunlight, concentrated and ready to burn. And we built our expectations—our lifestyles, our cities, our social contracts—on the illusion that it would last forever.

This moment is not normal. It is not stable. It is a one-time gift from the deep past. And it is ending.

What replaces it, he warns, is not yet imagined by our politics or our economics. Because all of our models, all of our plans, were built in the anomaly—this narrow red band of exponential growth and debt-leveraged prosperity.

But biology doesn’t honor our spreadsheets. The superorganism will feed until the fuel thins, and then it will collapse—or be transformed.

Because the superorganism is not evil. It is not plotting. It is not being driven by billionaires or CEOs or central banks. Nate has spoken to them all. They are as enthralled as the rest of us—slaves to incentive, bound by the logic of returns.

There is no one driving the train.

And yet it rolls forward. Burning forests to feed quarterly growth. Careening, as he says, toward Mordor. 

The question is no longer whether the system is flawed. The question is: can we awaken from within it? Can we make the unconscious conscious? Can we interrupt the spell?

Is this what the Buddha was talking about all along? 

If you’ve ever wondered why we talked about economics and politics so much on a Church Podcast, this is why. Because if we don’t have a spiritual awakening that breaks the spell of this massive socio-political-economic superorganism that has enslaved us, we die.

Call him Satan if you must. In order to be saved, we must repent.

The hour is late. The fuel is finite. The superorganism is still hungry.

But we are still human.

And we can still choose.

In order to understand Economics, we have to understand money. 

Most people think banks lend out money that they already have from savers. But that’s not really how it works…

And now, a brief introduction to Fractional Reserve Economics. If you don’t fully grok it , pay attention, this is important. This is how our economy works…

Imagine you walk into a bank and deposit $1,000. The bank is required—depending on the reserve requirement, which in the U.S. since COVID has been effectively zero—to keep only a fraction of that deposit in reserve (say 10% in older models, or 0% now). The rest can be loaned out.

So your $1,000 becomes $100 in reserve and $900 available for loans. That $900 gets lent to someone who spends it, and it ends up deposited in another bank, which keeps 10% ($90) and loans out the rest ($810). This process repeats itself, expanding the money supply with every iteration. What started as your $1,000 becomes, through multiple cycles of lending and depositing, around $9,000 in new money. This is called money creation through credit expansion. All of course, just sitting on the bank’s ledger, not acutaly printed dollars. The majority of the money in circulation is not printed by central banks—it’s created by private banks issuing loans.

Now here’s where interest becomes pivotal. Every one of those loans comes with interest attached. Let’s say the original $900 loan must be paid back with $990. That extra $90 doesn’t exist in the money supply yet. It will only exist if someone else takes out another loan, somewhere, and injects new money into the system. In other words, money is created as debt, but the amount owed is always more than the amount created.

The consequence? There is always more debt in the system than there is money to pay it back. Mathematically, this sets up a Sisyphean economy… for debts to be repaid with interest, someone else must go into debt. The system depends on continual growth—of loans, of money supply, of economic activity. If that growth stalls, defaults cascade. This is why capitalism, in its current form, demands perpetual expansion—it’s not just greed, it’s architecture.

So yes, interest-based money creation requires exponential growth to function. When growth slows or stops, defaults must increase unless new forms of money are introduced or the structure of lending is changed. That’s one reason central banks fear deflation more than inflation—it slows the machine. In a deflationary spiral, debts become harder to repay, money becomes scarcer, and defaults rise. Economic activity contracts. And because our money is debt, less money means less ability to pay off the debt, which leads to more insolvency. It is a feedback loop of collapse. Nevermind the fact that money is just accumulating at the top. Not being spent, accruing interest from the bottom 99%. 

And more importantly…

This means more money is added to the economy—but no new stuff is. No new land, no new metals, no new food or energy. Just more people with more money trying to buy the same things.

We call this growth. But it’s really just a bet on the future—that there will be enough real stuff, like energy and materials, to match all the promises we’ve made with money.

Money isn’t wealth. It’s just a claim on wealth. It’s not the thing—it’s a promise about the thing.

And when governments like the US do this, we end up 30 trillion dollars in debt, and that debt is a bet that somehow the future will provide enough to pay it back. Only we’re running out of, well, everything… and we have promised too much.

Do you get it now? How big the unconsciousness is? Debt is the ultimate sin. Interest too. 

And the ancient civilizations knew it. Ancient Sumer and Babylon had jubilee years, where debts were forgiven to prevent societal collapse from debt servitude. The Hebrew Bible codifies this too—every seven years, release the debts. It was a spiritual insight into economic reality.In our modern system, instead of jubilee, we have bailouts—selective forgiveness for the most systemically important or politically powerful. Everyone else gets collection agencies.

Perhaps this is why the Qu’ran outlawed riba or interest. The Shi’a tradition, perhaps more than most, holds that the sacred cannot be commodified without consequence. And so the ban on riba is not a ban on profit, but a refusal to let the abstraction of money unmoor itself from the ground of real, relational value. Sadly even the most radical Islamic governments have given way to riba. This is a golden thread I’d love to follow at a later time. The Ethics of Economics is at the heart of this conversation.

But back to Hagan… He lays out the three great curves of modernity. The first is the biogeochemical flow of life—sunlight, rain, soil—renewable, ancient, and limited. The second is the fossil inheritance—stored sunlight mined from Earth's past, a one-time pulse that fueled the rise of civilization. The third is money: a shadow curve, unbound by physics, expanding even as the real foundations begin to fray.

To reconcile these curves, economists shifted the narrative. Land and ecology faded from view. Capital and labor became the new gods. And when even those proved insufficient, we turned to credit—stretching our reach into the future to paper over the present.

Debt, Nate reminds us, is a tether. A string tied to the real. And we are pulling it tighter every year. Global debt doubles every nine years. GDP—our supposed capacity to repay—doubles only every twenty-five. And this is before energy availability begins its inevitable decline.

What happens when the tether snaps?

Here he names the Four Horsemen—not as prophecy, but as structural inevitabilities of the path we’re on.

The first is financial fracture—the break or bend of systems that can no longer outrun their own promises. More money printed, more debt monetized, more yields controlled. A global Japanification.

The second is geopolitical upheaval. The world is no longer unipolar. The BRICS now control over half of the oil available for purchase. Wars like Ukraine are not outliers—they are tremors of a shifting tectonic order.

The third is complexity collapse. Globalization, built on cheap energy and fragile logistics, cannot survive contraction. A single supply chain break—say, in pharmaceutical precursors from China—can shatter health systems continents away.

The fourth is social fragmentation. We no longer speak the same language as our neighbors. Social media, AI, tribalism, economic stress—these have torn the fabric. The social contract frays not at the edges, but at its core.

Together, these four forces do not merely threaten the economy. They threaten our ability to act, to respond, to even see clearly what is happening.

This is not fear-mongering. It is systems analysis. A description of what must follow if the logic of growth collides with the limits of matter.

we have outsourced our collective wisdom to markets. And the market does not think, or care, or plan. It extracts. It optimizes. It accelerates. It serves the present by robbing the future.

Trying to mitigate climate change within this system is, he says, like arguing with a forest fire.

Despite all the solar panels, all the climate pledges, all the green technology—we are still hitting all-time highs in coal, oil, and gas use. The fire is not going out. It is getting hotter.

Why?

Because we are trying to solve the problem with the same tools that created it.

We are attempting a spiritual and ecological transformation without touching the sacred cows of economic growth, consumption, or identity.

And so Nate asks: what is not likely under this framing?

It is not likely that we will grow the economy and reverse climate change.

It is not likely that culture will voluntarily choose austerity.

It is not likely that governments will act before the crash.

What is likely?

That we will pedal harder, burn faster, mine deeper.

That we will kick the can until there is no road left.

That fossil labor will decline, financial volatility will grow, politics will fracture further, and environmental safeguards will be sacrificed in the name of stability.

This is not a prophecy. It is not fate.

It is simply what happens when no one changes course.

And so Nate returns to the question: What do we do?

He offers no easy answers. But he begins to sketch the contours of the only path that may remain:

We must understand that money is not wealth. That growth is not progress. That energy is not infinite. That civilization, in its current form, cannot be sustained.

Not so that we may despair—but so that we may prepare.

So that we may choose something else.

Something wiser.

Something… smaller.

To Nate, we have two options.

The first, the one we are already on, he calls the Mordor Economy.

It is a world of continued physical growth—driven not by intention, but by inertia. The financial system demands expansion, and so the economy doubles every twenty-five years. Not just in dollars, but in stuff—steel, cement, silicon, calories, lithium, plastic, glass. Growth means doubling it all.

This, he says, is not hypothetical. It is mathematics.

If you’re a teenager today, and growth continues at 3% annually, the world you will inhabit at 75 will be four times bigger—physically—than the one you were born into.

But what kind of world would that be?

As energy becomes harder to extract, and environmental damage grows more acute, more and more of our effort—human, material, financial—will be diverted just to maintaining the system itself. Mining more to get less. Spending more to fix what growth breaks. The energy sector feeding on itself.

That’s Mordor: a mining civilization wrapped in the illusions of progress, driven by desperation, dragging with it the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of climate extremes, the erosion of meaning, and the continued concentration of wealth and power.

Now, mind you, this is not a villain’s plan.

It is our plan—unconscious, unexamined, but enforced by every institution we’ve built.

The second scenario is what he names The Great Simplification.

A simplification of systems, of expectations, of stories. Not because we wish it, but because the energy scaffolding that held up the complex edifice of global industrial civilization is beginning to buckle.

The Great Simplification will not be one event. It will be a long descent. A winding return to a scale of living aligned with the sun, the seasons, the limits of the Earth.

It will not be easy. It may not be peaceful. But it is coming—by design or by disaster.

And what matters now is how we meet it.

I hope it’s apparent to all of you in America that we will not pay back the debt we’ve created. Not in money. Not in energy. The math doesn’t work. The string between financial claims and biophysical reality is stretched to the breaking point. When it snaps, the reckoning will not be in markets—it will be in lives.

And so he names the stakes: Will we choose a bend—a planned simplification, a managed de-escalation of systems and desires—or will we wait for a break?

Will we prepare now, while we still can, or wait for the cascade?

The Four Horsemen ride behind both futures. But in one, we recognize them and begin to reckon. In the other, we pretend they don’t exist—until they kick in the door.

The choice is not between utopia and doom.

It is between reality and delusion.

Between a civilization that learns to live within its means—or one that dies insisting it never had to.

And behind that choice is us.

The ones alive during the pulse. The ones who can still see. The ones who can still speak.

The ones who, perhaps, can still turn.

And Daniel Schmactenberger hears all this. He knows all this. Likely he helped Nate formulate most of these though strings. I’ve heard many humans marvel at Daniel’s Intelligence. Its almost superhuman. But if you asked him, he would say its an obligation to emobody that intelligence. And I’m telling you, for the first time, it looked to me like even Daniel had lost hope that even fufilling that obligation would give us a chance.

So when it’s his turn to speak, there are no graphs, no charts or powerpoint. He’s not even standing. He’s just… sitting there. He’s introduced by his moderator, the founder of the convention, Niklas Adalberth and is asked what he’s reflecting on, and Daniel opens the floodgates of dystopia. He says everything he was just thinking, and then some. Now, mind you, this guy’s been on Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan… probably a hundred podcasts. And he’s just sitting there looking, well, frankly, a little heavier than usual with more beard than a viking prince almost at times struggling for words.

Great talks and great ideas today, he says. But none of it matters.

He recalled David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti, speaking in the 1980s about a civilization on a self-destruct trajectory. He remembered Bucky Fuller, offering a vision of post-war planetary cooperation. Every one of them spoke earnestly and with urgency. Every one of them was right. And still the trendlines remained unchanged, like rails laid for a train that cannot stop. 

And straight out of the gate, he goes to the heart of the matter. The ethics of it all. He invokes Nuremberg— the Nazis on trial for unthinkable crimes. Many had stopped believing in the cause long before the atrocities peaked. Most admitted they had known it was wrong. And yet, when asked if they’d tried to stop it, the answer was no. “Officers’ orders,” they said. “I had no choice.”

Daniel brought that to this moment—not as history, but as prophecy. Because the same story lives on, translated into the language of markets and algorithms. The language of compliance. Of silent complicity.

He invoked Tibet, before Mao’s invasion—a civilization not perfect, but rich in interior life, in reverence for sentience. It was extinguished not by failure, but by force. Its wisdom did not save it from an empire armed with tanks and dogma. And so Daniel cautioned against our romanticism: inner depth alone is not a shield.

He invoked the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America—not as a relic, but as the foundation of the modern nation-state. Modern democracy, he reminded us, was built atop the bones of 100 million lives and the backs of enslaved peoples. The exponential curve of destruction we now fear—carbon emissions, species loss, biospheric collapse—began long ago. That curve is just nearing its steep ascent.

The great forgetting is not new. It is the default state of empire.

And he asked us—quietly, with fire—what does it take for any of this to matter? What does it take for knowing to become doing?

Because the people who burned libraries and sacred forests, who executed monks and leveled temples, were not demons. They were men who had once been boys, who loved their children, who prayed in their own ways—until the machine called them forward.

This is not about the evil few. It is about the ordinary many.

And Daniel, sitting there spoke to the recognition. Recognition that most of us, even here, will likely walk out the door and resume the patterns that are killing the world. Not because we are bad, but because we are embedded in a system that erases memory, that dilutes will, that exhausts the soul.

What does it take, he asked—not for us to know, but to care enough to act?

Because truth without embodiment is a kind of moral pornography. It leaves us aroused with insight and impotent in practice.

That’s was his answer to the first question, simply, what was he reflecting on?

Afterward he shared a story—not of the distant past, but of a recent phone call. A friend, seasoned in global public health, someone who had danced the halls of the United Nations with him and played chess with governments, had joined their work on AI and synthetic biology risk. A good man, sincere. Trained in the noble illusions of institutional efficacy.

They discuessed new frontiers of risk—artificial intelligence and sythetic biology. Risks that flicker into being like lightning.

Daniel reminded him: the industrial age gave us smokestacks and sea rise, but the digital age gives us something more volatile. Language models that speak like gods. Neural networks that don’t sleep. DNA printers that can replicate a virus more efficiently than evolution ever could. The exponential is not only faster—it is omnidirectional. Software is not bound by mass. It doesn’t wait for steel or steam. It rides photons. It feeds on scale.

He pointed to a recent study. Jailbroken language models—stripped of their safety rails—being used to access biological weapon design. Not hypothetically. Already. Prompted with questions like: Which gene synthesis providers don’t require government ID? How many people could I kill with a $100,000 budget? And the models answered. Fluently. Helpfully.

This is not science fiction. This is nuclear-level catastrophe encoded in plaintext. And unlike fissile material, it requires no rare metals, no centrifuge. Just knowledge. Just curiosity. Just broadband.

Daniel explained that this knowledge travels at the speed of light. It is radically decentralized. It cannot be constrained by G8 treaties. It slips past borders, firewalls, and treaties as if they were paper dolls.

And yet—despite this—his friend offered the solution the system always offers: a public-private partnership. Get the big AI firms and the big bio firms together, he said. Let them help design the regulation. They’re the experts. Government’s too slow. Let industry lead.

Daniel paused, in disbelief. “You’re serious?” he asked.

The friend was. Dead serious.

Daniel replied, “We cannot allow the people profiting from this power to also define its boundaries. There can be no revolving door. No captured oversight.”

His friend pushed back. “But Daniel, everything in D.C. is a revolving door.”

Daniel said, “Exactly. That’s why we’re going extinct.”

They hit an impasse—not of facts, but of frameworks. His friend was grounded in the reality of history—as it has been. Daniel was grounding in physics and biology—as they must be. The two realities did not seem reconcilable. The former says: This is how things work. The latter says: This is how things break.

To be sane, Daniel said, is now to be unrealistic. Unrealistic to precedent. Unrealistic to politics-as-usual. Because politics-as-usual ends with oceans that no longer birth whales and skies that no longer carry birds. It ends in an uninhabitable world for the existing life forms.

And he looks up at the audience and says: “We are at the end of history. Eminently. In the lifetime of everyone in this room, we’re at the end of history. Meaning, we’re at the end of human civilization defined by the major characteristics of what we call “written human history.” 

…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt this way. I’ve talked about it on the podcast. I’ve talked about it with friends, that it’s not a matter of how or why or if, but simply when… and Daniel, looking at the audience plain as day, said it’s now.

Not the end of time. But the end of a civilization defined by conquest, extraction, and growth through externalization.

It was true under Sumer. It was true under Egypt. It was true under Rome, under Genghis, under the Raj, under Washington. Peaceful cultures were swallowed whole by more violent ones. Those who internalized costs were devoured by those who exported them and hoarded the profits.

And now, with exponential technology and ecological saturation, that logic has reached its omega point. The game, if continued, ends with no players. The finite game self implodes, and the infinite game continues elsewhere in the Galaxy, likely without humans.

So, he says, either we are at the end of our species, or at the end of our species being defined by conquest, growth, and indifference to consequence.

There is no third door.

And so, like Nate, Daniel said, we must make a different kind of end—an end to that story. A death of the dominator code. A refusal, finally, to worship the logic of winners and wealth.

Because what comes next is either collapse or metamorphosis. There is no tech fix. There is no safe gradualism.

There is only a turning—radical and systemic. And it begins with the most dangerous sentence in the world: “I had no choice.”

After laying bare the trajectory of exponential risk, Daniel turned toward something deeper—more human, more haunting.

He brought us back to the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. To the image of the bureaucrat with blood on his conscience and a shrug in his soul. Men who had stopped believing in the cause, but still followed orders. Men who knew what they were doing was monstrous, but did it anyway—because they told themselves they had no choice. Because they’d already handed over the part of themselves that could say no.

Daniel wasn’t invoking Nuremberg to accuse us. He wasn’t reaching for shock value. He was speaking to pattern recognition. He was saying: this is what humans do when systems get too big, too fast, too abstract. When orders flow down like rain, and the ground no longer feels real.Most of the atrocities we associate with monsters were carried out by ordinary people. Not by Hitler or Genghis Khan alone, but by millions of otherwise moral individuals swept up in structures they did not design, but did not resist.

And then Daniel looks at the audience and asks us—quietly, devastatingly—not to consider how to make our own lives regenerative, or even how to make our countries sustainable. Because those scales of action, while virtuous, are insufficient. He asked instead: What would it take to bend the arc of all of humanity?

What would it mean to shift the driver, not just the passenger?

Again. This question. It haunts me everyday. It’s why I write. It’s why I read.. and I feel no closer to its answer after 25 years of contemplation. I feel like a passenger, an NPC to the global leaders. Because every good deed, every carbon offset, every compostable fork is a candle in a hurricane if the global system—the one hurtling toward biospheric collapse—remains unchallenged.

And it’s not like Daniel’s belittling personal responsibility. He’s expanding it. He’s reminding us that to see clearly is to be tasked with something immense: the re-patterning of the human story.

He invoked the Iraq War—not because it’s recent, but because its memory is already fading. A war launched on false pretenses. No weapons of mass destruction. Millions dead. Four and a half million lives extinguished. And yet: no prosecutions. No reckonings. Just a quiet continuity.

He asked: Where is the outrage? Not the performative kind, but the one that moves your bones. The one that changes what you tolerate. The Martin Luther King kind of change.

Because if there is no consequence for lying a nation into war, then there is no gravity left in democracy. If there is no accountability for mass death, then the machinery of civilization has lost its soul. We are not wicked. But we are complicit.

We are complicit when we prioritize comfort over courage, when we mistake feeling informed for being awake, when we hope that someone else will handle it. We are complicit when we silence our conscience with small good deeds that do not touch the root. This is the responsibility of being a self reflective conscious human. This is what Gandhi understood. This is what Martin Luther King preached. 

So Daniel drew a line.

Not around a nation. Not around a belief system. But around the future itself.

He said: the entire possibility space of meaningful human activity is vanishing. Not abstractly. Not in centuries. In our lifetimes.

And unless we face the  tecture of what is driving collapse—the geopolitical incentives, the economic myths, the civilizational assumptions—we will find ourselves writing eulogies instead of futures.

He wasn’t asking us to save the Earth in an afternoon.

He was asking us to stop pretending that anything less than everything is required.

He was asking us to imagine what it would take—not to feel better, or to delay the inevitable—but to interrupt the pattern so thoroughly that a new story could emerge. Once again, the emergence of Game B, the death of the rivalrous society. The thing that we can’t even comprehend yet, because we’re so entrenched in Game A - The Finite Game.

The infinite game is a story not built on conquest. Not built on GDP. Not built on obedience.

But built on the radical sanctity of life, and the courage to serve it at the cost of our illusions.

As the dialogue deepened, Daniel shifted the lens from personal complicity to planetary architecture, not just of individuals and choices, but of systems and their inertia—of war and markets as two faces of the same god. Nate laid the foundation of our desire as humans, Daniel laid bare the weapons we’ve cultivated to achieve those desires.

He said: we cannot understand the ecological crisis without understanding conflict. Because the engines of war did not stall with World War II. They evolved. They dressed in suits and entered boardrooms. They migrated into algorithms and trade routes.

War, he said, is not gone. It is simply disguised.

We study history through its wars for a reason. War is not an anomaly—it is the shaping force. And now, markets have become its shadow twin. Both are methods of growth. Both are tools of control. Both are technologies of extraction.

Kinetic war is the old grammar: bombs, borders, soldiers. But economic war is its refined sibling: sanctions, subsidies, debt traps, digital surveillance, narrative manipulation. And still, beneath both, is the same architecture—rivalry, domination, control of resource flows.

There’s the classic quote by  Von Clausewitz, who said: War is politics by other means. Daniel extended it—war is economics by other means, too. Politics, markets, and militaries all woven into one machine: the megastructure that ensures some will always have more, and others will always serve.

Take Costa Rica—an outlier. No military. No extractable reserves to exploit. No major chokepoints like the Panama Canal. Because of this, it can live light. But for most nations, the need to defend resources—or to acquire them—is embedded in the very logic of sovereignty.

The turning point was World War II. A moment in history where we gained the capacity not only to destroy cities, but the biosphere itself. And we nearly did.

After the war, the architects of civilization looked into the nuclear abyss and asked: how can we avoid this again?

The answer was not spiritual. It was logistical. Globalization.

Interlink everything, they said. Tie every nation’s economy together. Make war inconvenient. Bombing your neighbor would now mean bombing your own supply chains. So, the reasoning went, peace would emerge not from morality, but from mutual dependency.

And to some extent, it worked. For 75 years, the superpowers avoided direct kinetic war. Proxy wars raged, yes. The Global South burned. The Earth was plundered. But the superpowers stayed in standoff—interlaced through trade, through financial systems, through the thin thread of globalization.

But as we know, this too was a bargain with the devil.

Because that interdependence came at a cost. It required radical complexity. Fragile chains of production stretched across oceans. Hyper-financialization. Monocultures of consumption. And when COVID came, it all trembled. Fertilizers couldn’t move. Locusts swarmed. Crops failed. The myth of global resilience cracked.

Globalization was not peace. It was just delay.

And underneath, the same logic thrived: grow or die. Consume or collapse.

Get this : the exponential rise in population—from 2 billion at WWII’s end to 8 billion now—was part of the design. It was the collateral consequence of the post-war plan. To keep the economy growing. To keep nuclear war at bay through shared interest.

And in doing so, we built the machinery for biospheric collapse.

We 100x’d resource use. We normalized planetary debt. 

And here’s the darkest twist: many now oppose degrowth not because they don’t believe in it, but because they believe in war more. They believe that if we slow down, someone else will take an advantage. Moloch will tip the scales. That if we choose life, our enemies will choose conquest—and we will fall. The mythical race to the bottom. History would back this belief.

And like I’ve asked so many times, Daniel again says “Why can we not stop this thing?Why is it that no country, no company in the world wants climate change—and yet we’re sprinting toward it? Nobody’s like, “Climate change is the world I want.” But we can’t stop. Nobody wants species extinction. Nobody really wants to live in a world with automated AI weapons. But we’re all racing to build them.So what the fuck is actually driving the world to a place literally nobody wants?”

A civilization that can only imagine peace through profit will never know peace at all, so he begins, as I would, with the Market.

He hones in on thes specifics of it. A hundred trillion dollars exchanging hands every day. That’s not economy. Like Nate Hagan said, its planetary metabolism. That’s the bloodstream of the machine.

And every dollar, like Hagan also said is a ghost. A ghost of extraction. Behind each transaction is a mine, a fracking rig, a clear-cut hillside, a human body somewhere doing something it did not choose. Even the softest sectors—design, software, consulting—are not ethereal. They rest upon physical infrastructures built by fossil energy and governed by violence.

The entire system is scaffolded by militaries. No market exists without a monopoly on force to defend it. No transaction is apolitical. All of it—the banks, the contracts, the stability—is purchased with the currency of empire.

And so he asked: What does it mean to invest for impact in a system designed to grow no matter the cost?

He looks to his moderator Niklas and says, take Norrsken, or any impact fund. A few hundred million to play with, maybe. And that’s good, noble, brave work. But stacked against a hundred trillion a day? Against exponential finance riding exponential tech at the edge of biospheric viability? The scale mismatch is staggering.

And yet the financial system demands growth—not because of greed, but because of design. Because money is lent with interest, and interest compounds. That compounding curve is now embedded into every spreadsheet, every forecast, every budget.

And again, he looks at the audience and says “What the fuck were we thinking? It’s ridiculous.”

Honestly, it’s why I love this guy. I’m tempted to listen to all the other presenters to see if one of them used the word Fuck in their presentation, as if the end of the world didn’t require an exclamation point every now and again.

So even if population stabilizes, he says, even if we consume less per person, the system still requires more. More GDP. More throughput. More sacrifice.

And this is where Daniel made his pivot into myth. He said: money is not just a medium of exchange. It is a token of optionality. A placeholder for all the things we might want. It represents potential—freedom, power, security. And because the future is uncertain, we hoard tokens. We chase optionality.

But optionality has a shadow. Because to get those tokens, we must convert the living world into abstractions. Forests into lumber. Rivers into kilowatts. Time into productivity. Soul into brand.

Money does not measure value. It measures extractability, and de-couples us from value, from quality.

You can see now why I decided to inject this into our Nature of Order series. A little vignette, if you will, on why we’re so decoupled from quality, from the living world.

Money : the token of optionality. 

I’d never quite heard it said like that, thought I understand it. I always thought of it as the abstraction of value, which it is, but this idea of expanding value into optionality is a novel way to think of it, and useful in our analysis of the end of the world.

And so, he said, we have trained eight billion humans to become optimization algorithms for this token. We have wired their nervous systems to chase it, because everything they need—food, shelter, medicine, identity—comes through it.

And what happens when you unleash eight billion semi-autonomous agents to chase a signal that doesn't account for life?

You get collapse.

But collapse wearing the mask of progress.

A little side note, but Daniel and his peers at the Conscillience Project just wrote what looks to be a 50 thousand word paper on the development of progress, and that we need to quickly re-define what progress means to our civilization. Let me know if you want to do a podcast on that, as I’m considering it. 

So then Daniel proposed yet another novel way of looking at our problem. He says: think of the market not just as an economy, but as an AI. A distributed superintelligence running parallel process on all 8 Billion humans, corporations and even nation states. It doesn’t feel, but it computes. It doesn’t think, but it adapts. It runs on human minds, but its logic is inhuman. Whoever gets better at this system gets more power and can then change laws, influence media, create values that further their success in that system. And anyone who opposes that system is now opposing the people who are thriving in it.

And so the system becomes self-reinforcing. Anyone who challenges it threatens those who benefit from it. And those beneficiaries, consciously or not, suppress dissent—through regulation, through censorship, through narrative warfare. It fills the sensemaking environment with enough noise that no one can truly determine the signal.

So the market, Daniel said, is no longer a tool. It is a god. An invisible deity with embedded growth obligations and no capacity for mercy. It is truly Moloch. A hive mind with an appetite and no consciousness.

And this god is misaligned. Not malicious—just blind. Blind to biodiversity. Blind to childhood. Blind to grief, and mystery, and song. It is myopic. It is Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer.

It builds all our technologies. It trains all our AIs. It governs all our choices. And it has no concept of enough. In a way, Daniel remarks, it is an AI. A bodiless superintelligence. And it’s already taken over humanity. What Nate Hagans called the Economic Superorganism in his earlier talk.

And so, Daniel concludes: that thing—that intelligence, that memeplex, that algorithm—must die. Or we will.

But unlike a tyrant, it cannot be assassinated. It is not located in a palace. It lives in us. It is us. It is every compromise made in the name of efficiency. Every cost externalized. Every truth swallowed to make the numbers work.

To end it is to transfigure it. To convert it into something it has never been: a system that honors life, not just leverage.

That means: no more single-value currencies. No more measuring all worth in fungible units. No more destroying what is sacred to gain what is liquid.

There is no civilization in human history that survived the logic of compound interest on a finite planet. There is no future compatible with an economy that rewards speed and scale above coherence and care.

So, he said, if you understand this—truly understand—you can no longer participate in the system as it is. You may need to work within it for now, yes. But your allegiance cannot remain there.

You must become a saboteur of the death-logic. A midwife to the new.

Because complicity with omnicide is not neutral.

And we are out of time.

So what’chu got to say to that instragram influencer, spiritual warrior, certified shaman?

We all use money. We all participate in the Market. Everyday. We are all complicit. We are all found guilty in the name of universal law… except for Paul Greenfield maybe. But even he has to do something to pay his cellphone bill to get those instagram posts up…

I’ve said this to everyone I know in some shape or form over the last five years. We’re all a part of the problem on a very fundamental level, all pretending we care. Myself included. And Daniel is reminding everyone in that room, everyone watching the video, everyone who thinks they are making a difference, that it’s not nearly enough, and that we might just consider that we’re mostly full of shit if we think we’re helping solve the problem.

Feel free to comment in the forum why you’re not full of shit.

So, at this point you can imagine the mood in the room. Paraylzed perhaps. And there Daniel sits, ushering us into the trembling space between catastrophe and possibility—and he begins to speak the language of response.

He names three horizons: triage, transition, and the long arc of reimagination similar to Hagan’s great simplification.

First, triage.

He said: we are already past some tipping points. We are not waiting for the cliff—we are falling off it. The PFAS chemicals—forever chemicals—are in the rain now. In every drop. Even in Antarctic snowfall. Endocrine disruptors. Neurotoxins. Present in concentrations that already exceed safety thresholds. In other talkes he reminds us that 3m and DuPont knew the dangers of these chemicals. The National Institute of Health and Stanford Medicine would agree.

We are not approaching planetary boundaries. These major companies, 3M, Bayer, Monsanto… have knowingly and complicity breached them.

So the first task, he said, is not ideology. It’s damage control. Slowing the bleeding. Buying time. For this, we must—however reluctantly—engage the very systems we criticize: markets, governments, institutions.

But not as they are. As tools to be hijacked. Redirected.

He gave an example: agriculture.

Right now, the most toxic forms of farming—those that strip the soil of minerals, that drench food in poisons, that murder the biome—are subsidized. Governments pay them to kill. They do not compete fairly with regenerative practices; they crush them with the help of public money.

Why? Because they’ve mastered the art of lobbying. Because they have captured the narrative of food security, while poisoning the very foundation of health.

So: we need new lobbyists. Warriors of life. People who understand the game and choose to play it for something holy. Small amounts of lobbying can redirect vast flows of public capital—capital that can reshape entire market topologies. A subsidy reversed is a signal sent across the whole field.

So what does that mean spiritual warrior? Stop buying conventional vegetables and meats and unfortunately, stop eating out until restaurants transition to sustainable foods. And I hate to break it to you, but even the most expensive restaurants in the country still source most of their food from conventional sources. They’re just better at preparing it. But it also means writing lots of letters to congress people and senators.

Also, much like what Nate Hagins talk about, that our green energy is futile because we are exponentially using more energy every day, it’s not enough to drive a  . We have to figure out how to stop driving so damn much. And flying. We have to become vastly more efficient until tech catches up and offers us the consumption we desire at 1/100 of the cost.

This is triage: moving money, power, and attention away from the suicidal and toward the survivable. Not to fix the system, but to intervene in its pathologies long enough to preserve the possibility of transformation.

Then comes transition.

Here, Daniel points to the previous speaker Kate Raworth and the doughnut model—economic frameworks that begin to measure what really matters. In this phase, the work is to modify existing structures—to constrain the externalization of harm, to internalize ecological truth into pricing, to shift fiduciary duty from profit maximization to planetary stewardship.

It’s not revolution. It’s reformation. The work of changing incentives, rewriting laws, reshaping metrics—so that at least, the worst is slowed.

We must write the value of the ecosystem into law. We must assign value to clean water and air. Not emotional value, not ethical value… economic value.

You want to build a house with wood? Maybe an 8 foot 2x4 needs to cost fifty bucks. Maybe building codes should require more strawbales and superadobe. You want to eat beef? $50 a pound. You want to buy a second house to airbnb. Too fucking bad. One per person. Transistion. The part that’s going to hurt.

But Daniel didn’t end there. He looked further still.

Beyond triage. Beyond transition.

He named the real horizon: the transfiguration of civilization itself.

He said: we split the atom. We wrote code that teaches itself. We can now engineer DNA, create life that evolution never dreamt of. We are the most powerful force on Earth—more than volcanoes, more than tectonics, more than time.

But are we wise?

I’ve been following Schmactenberger for 10 years at least. He’s been asking this question for a long time.

He asked: what kind of species is capable of such power and capable of surviving it? What kind of education would we need? What kind of governance? What kind of economic story? What kind of sacred?

Because nothing short of a new story of the sacred will suffice.

We must evolve institutions that can steward nuclear power, AI, synthetic biology—not just for utility, but with reverence. That requires more than intelligence. It requires soul.

We will need religions—not of dogma, but of awe. We will need governance—not of power, but of service. We will need education—not for productivity, but for planetary care. We will need economics—not as math, but as ecology.

And we will need a new anthropology—a new story of what it means to be human. Not a conqueror. Not a consumer. But a node in a vast web of becoming.

He called this the long arc. The arc that begins now but ends we know not where.

But—and here he was unequivocal—we do not get to do that work if we fail the triage today.

We do not get to dream if we do not stabilize the hemorrhage. We do not get to build the temple if we do not first stop the fire.

And so we must live in two times: the now, where everything teeters; and the future, where something luminous still calls. What Christopher Alexander would call the luminous ground. What we’ll discuss in the next episode.

That is the work: to tend the wound with one hand, and with the other, to write the myth of what might yet be.

By the end of his offering, Daniel did not leave us in abstraction. He brought us back to the heart. Not the sentimental heart, but the broken one. The true one. The one that knows what it means to love a world on fire.

Someone in the audience basked him: How do you not become depressed when you see all of this clearly?

And Daniel, without flinching, said: You should be depressed.

If you are not—if the weight of factory farms, of child slavery, of oceans stripped bare, does not crack your composure—then something has already died inside you. A numbing. A splitting.

He said: if you can know what happens in slaughterhouses and still cheer for business as usual, you are not free. You are fragmented.

If you can read the numbers on species extinction and feel nothing but a passing melancholy, you are not grounded. You are sedated.

So yes. Let it in.

Let the grief come like a flood. Let the sadness paralyze you for a moment. Let the rage burn through the complacency. Because that pain is not a pathology—it is a sign that something sacred is still alive in you.

And here is the thing, the reason it hurts is not because you are broken. It hurts because you care. Because you love the world. Because you love animals—not just your dog, but the ones whose names you’ll never know. Because you love children—not just your own, but the ones who will never be born if we continue down this path.

The pain is a measure of love.

And love, Daniel said, is the only fuel worth burning in a time like this.

Not outrage for its own sake. Not despair for its own comfort. But love—for Life with a capital L.

That’s what we must serve.

He said: you don’t get to wait. You don’t get to say, I’ll act when I know what to do. You act because you don’t know. You act into the unknown. And when you fail, you learn. And then you act again.

You don’t act alone. You find others who are awake. Who feel the ache. Who carry the grief with dignity. You find them and you conspire with them—for beauty, for healing, for rebellion.

And then, he said, you do something deceptively simple:

You change your feed.

Because the algorithms will not stop. The bills will not stop. The shallow distractions and dopamine traps—they will not stop. And your memory, your willpower, your fragile resolve—they are not strong enough to resist that tide alone.

So you must rewire your attention.

Yes, in the age of instagram and tick-tock and rage bait and dating apps and bitcoin, you must rewire your attention.

You must surround yourself with voices that remind you of what’s true. Fill your day with music that breaks your heart open. Follow thinkers who make you remember. 

Read words that pierce you like scripture. Sit in silence long enough to hear what is deeper than fear.

Delete what dulls you. Seek what stirs you. Let your daily environment become a monastery of remembrance. Find the aliveness in your environment. Start making things with your hands again. Spend time in the Garden. Talk to the plants. 

And above all, Daniel said, do not forget the real reason you care. You care not because you're political. Not because you're idealistic. But because you know—in your marrow—that life is sacred. That a whale’s song matters. That a child’s future matters. That the rainforest is not a resource—it is a temple.

Recognize that you have agency and capacity like any other human, that despite not knowing what or how to do the thing, you will do something, and if you fail, you try again. Tsuyoku Naratai. Become Stronger. Try Harder.

Strip down the meaning of our outrage. Let go of the concepts behind why you think certain wars should or should not be fought, who’s right or wrong, what degree of personal expression you think you have the right to, how much money you think you deserve. Let go of your affiliations and allegiences. Let go of your ethics and your idea of what it means to be progressive.

Turn you heart toward your love of life. Pure and simple.

Act, not from panic or rage, but from reverence.

Act because you were born at the hinge of history. Because never before has so much been at stake, and never before has every act of integrity carried so much consequence.

There is meaning in that. Not comfort. Not certainty. But meaning.

And Daniel left us with this final blessing—though he never named it as such, because he cares not about the attention or recognition a prophet might receive despite being the closest thing to it I’ve ever seen. 

He said “Act from the realization that you’re alive at the moment in history, where your actions might matter more than at any other time in the human story.”

Do not waste it.

Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed the podcast. In the second part of this episode, we look at this process of transmuation that is beconing the human species from a different, more optimistic lens, one that suggests that we have no choice but to grow into the hyper-conscious species we were destined to be, and that the forces of the universe have our back. It’s already written, so it won’t be too long… mid September if all goes well.

As for this episode, we featured music themes by Azhira and Kaiyote who’s links are perpetually in the show notes. It also featured the track “Wake Up” by Rage against the Machine, exerpts of “Ghosts” by Nine in Nails , Benbiet by “Canton Becker” as well as Original Vocals by Matia Kalli and Maddie Hamann. This episode features quotes from both Daniel Schmactenberger and Nate Hagans presentations at Stockholm Impact Week in 2023, an annual Summit hosted by The Norrsken Foundation. I’d say about seventy five percent of the content was summarized from these two videos and I highly recommend watching them both.

Please consider visiting our website infinite harmony.org and becoming a monthly donating member to our church. If you are curious how to support the podcast, this is the way. The Church of Infinite Harmony exists by your tithing and even just five dollars a month can help cause. A link to our donation page is in the show notes. Also, don’t forget about our forum, also included on our website, where you can ask questions about the episodes or write your own reflections. Again, that’s infiniteharmony.org  

Hope to see you soon fam. Peace.