Jem Bendell Transcript

Jem Bendell Interview

Summary:

• Jem Bendell is a scholar and activist on the topic of societal collapse due to environmental damage. Rick and Jem discuss Jem’s deep adaptation paper, his book Breaking Together, and his views on the climate emergency, the money power, and the spiritual implications of collapse.
• Collapse and Transformation: Jem argues that the foundational systems of modern industrial consumer societies are breaking and collapsing into each other, and that this process is inevitable and irreversible. He also suggests that collapse can be an opportunity for breaking together rather than apart, by rethinking our values, assumptions, and identities, and embracing a freedom-loving response to collapse.
• Spiritual Practices and Faith: Jem shares his personal journey of coping with the despair and panic of facing collapse, and how he found solace in meditation, authentic relating, and a faith in the ultimate rightness of existence. He also talks about the importance of helping others through the emotional and existential challenges of collapse, and the role of spiritual communities and traditions in this time.
• Ancient Prophecies and Higher Consciousness: Rick and Jem explore the idea that collapse is part of a larger cycle of human evolution, and that there are ancient prophecies and wisdom traditions that point to a shift in collective consciousness. Jem expresses his skepticism about the inevitability or desirability of such a shift, and his preference for a more grounded and pragmatic approach to the situation. He also questions the dominant paradigm of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain, and suggests that consciousness is more mysterious and fundamental than that.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done nearly 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you would like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the website and a page that explains alternatives to PayPal. My guest today is Professor Jem Bendell. He is a world-renowned scholar on the breakdown of modern societies due to environmental damage. Downloaded over a million times, his deep adaptation paper is credited with inspiring the growth of the Extinction Rebellion movement in 2018 and created a global network, deep adaptation network to reduce harm in the face of societal collapse. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol and his geography BA with honors at the University of Cambridge. For decades, he has worked on sustainable development as a researcher and NGO manager as well as a consultant to businesses, political parties, and UN agencies. One of his specialisms since 2011 is pro-social currency innovation with his TEDx talk from that year explaining reasons for Bitcoin and similar. In 2017, he co-led the development of the UK Labor Party’s communications plan for the general election and co-wrote speeches for their top politicians. Although recognized in 2012 as a young global leader by the World Economic Forum, Jem has been increasingly critical of the globalist agenda on sustainable development. Away from that work, he is partner in an organic farm school in Bali and supports meditation retreats at the main Buddhist temple on the island. And you may think that that last sentence I read is the reason why I’m having him on BatGap because usually we’re talking all about spiritual things, but there’s more to it than that as you’ll see as we get into this conversation. Incidentally, his latest book you can see over his shoulder there, “Breaking Together,” I listened to the entire thing. It’s an audio book. It’s about 18 hours long. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I listened to the introduction twice. The introduction alone took over an hour to listen to, but there’s a whole background in my thinking and understanding of why this idea of societal collapse is pertinent, and I’ll elaborate that as we go along. But I want to give Jem a chance to say hello and introduce himself and give us the elevator talk of, you know, what he’s all about. Let’s pretend there’s a societal breakdown happening and we’re stuck in an elevator for two hours and you can give us the talk, but we can start with a more condensed version.

Jem: Yeah, well, thanks for the introduction, Rick. Yeah, and those who’ve joined us, that’s good, or watching later, hello. I’m joining you from my, I’m back in my dad’s apartment back in the UK. I don’t live in the UK, but this is where I spent quite a few months, particularly last year, writing the book, in fact. So I’m actually looking almost with a bit of nostalgia around the room, just that process of writing the book. For example, I opened the book about talking about my dad’s parents, my grandparents, and the way they used to chat. That’s because I’ve got pictures of them. That was basically why I did that, because I was sitting underneath a picture of them as I started writing, and you have to start a book somewhere. That was why. An elevator pitch about me or the book? The book, okay, the book’s called “Breaking Together.” It has a twofold hypothesis. First is that the foundational systems of modern industrial consumer societies are breaking, they’re collapsing into each other. So they’re not, we’re already within that process, that can’t be fixed. Therefore, I make the case that collapse is the accurate word for that, even though collapse is an unfolding process, will go on for some time. And it will be experienced differently in different places. But the second part of the thesis in “Breaking Together” is that we can break together rather than apart in that context, by which I mean, the fact that all the systems, the institutions are breaking, it’s somewhat of a judgment on their legitimacy. That therefore can invite us to rethink all our previous assumptions, preoccupations, things which kept us busy, stuff we hoped for or believe might happen one day. It brings us very much into the present moment as rethink our values, how we choose to live in this time, who do we want to be. And so it’s in the so that bigger societal breaking leads to inner breaking, which can actually allow us to be something incredible. In the second half of the book, I talk about lots of people who I’m impressed by and the way they’re responding to this. So that’s, yeah, that’s also why the subtitle is “A Freedom Loving Response to Collapse.” So I recenter human freedom, personal and collective as important to value to maintain as things get tough, because the thesis in the book is that it wasn’t human freedom that led to this carnage. But the fact that we have been manipulated from birth to death through something I call imperial modernity, pumped up and maintained by an expansionist monetary system, basically encouraging us to behave in ways where we feel numb about the damage in the world. And we, we are tough with ourselves with each other. And with nature, we feel life is tough. I go into great detail about what I call the money power and how it’s promoted those dynamics and fed those aspects of ourselves that we wouldn’t consider to be that great, positive, to an extent that it then hit ecological limits, and ultimately is collapsing the societies that it’s helped to build. So, um, so yeah, it’s, it’s promoting something what I call ecolibertarianism. So it was an attempt to make a, what should we say an offer of a political philosophy and framework for an era of collapse, one that’s a political philosophy, this solidarity based, because I see a lot of authoritarianism, a lot of nostalgia politics, conservativism, all sorts, emerging as people get more and more nervous about their lives becoming more and more difficult in the future looking more and more bleak. So I wanted to offer something else into the mix, as we try and make sense of this new era of collapse, as I call it.

Rick: Okay, let me, let me give you my perspective, which I already did in an email. I think you agree with some of it, not with all of it, but we can play back and forth. And try to arrive at a common understanding. So, as many of my listeners will be aware, a lot of people who would consider themselves spiritual or, you know, interested in ancient traditions, the wisdom traditions of the world, have been feeling that we’re, we’re due for some sort of big upheaval, that the current systems are not sustainable, and that, you know, many of them sort of believe that this upheaval will be necessary, and that on the other side of it, we’ll have some better world, you know, some more enlightened world, and so on. I’ve been thinking this way since the 70s, not as a certainty, but as a, you know, a theory of how things might unfold. The reason I’ve been thinking this way is, well, the reason I see all, like you mentioned monetary systems, I would consider all systems, political, monetary, agricultural, technological, everything that’s a product of human beings to be a reflection of the, you know, mentality or the ambient level of consciousness of the people in the world. Obviously, some people are more powerful than others, more creative in producing things than others, but basically, it all reflects human mentality or human consciousness. What people think, what various prophecies have predicted for many years, going back to the Babylonians and the Hopis and the Mayans and so on, is that some kind of big shift is going to happen in collective consciousness. When that happens, and I do believe it’s happening now, all these systems won’t work anymore because they reflect a lower level of consciousness. It’s like a kid who’s growing quickly and trying to keep wearing the same clothes, they get too tight, he has to bust out of them and it destroys the clothes. So, anyway, that’s my view in a nutshell. I’ve been, you know, meditating, as many people know, for most of my life, and I feel a big shift. I’ve been interviewing hundreds of people, all of whom are undergoing really profound shifts in consciousness and their awareness, and I buy into the notion of collective consciousness, perhaps reminiscent of Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconsciousness, collective unconscious, but that consciousness is not just a product of the brain, it’s a field, and brains are more like sender receivers that interact or tune into that field. I believe a shift is happening in collective consciousness, perhaps not so much created by people, but actually people are more like surfers. They don’t create the waves, they ride the waves if they’re able to do so, or they wipe out if they aren’t able to do so. I think you’re correctly predicting and explaining in detail how a lot of structures are going, are wiping out, but there are others who are skillfully surfing the waves and actually experiencing kind of a spiritual renaissance within their own lives as a result of this upwelling of, you could say, enlightenment in the world. Alright, so that’s enough of that, and let’s have your response to it, and I’m not in the least bit sensitive if you want to disagree with any or all of it.

Jem: Yeah, thank you. You’ve covered quite a lot. So, I’ll start at the end. What you just said, that a lot of people are experiencing some kind of spiritual upwelling, renaissance, whatever, precisely because of their recognition of the amount of trouble in the world, and possibly if they’re unlucky, they’ve been through a hard time because of ecological damage and various different implications therefrom. Because we know that hurt, we know that tragedy, we know that grief and despair even can be a very powerful means of people letting go. So, in psychology, the theory is called positive disintegration, which is actually about even the, oddly, even the benefit of proper clinical depression in part of that spiritual transformation. So, and that’s, yeah, as you say, you mentioned ancient wisdom. So, even in the Tao Te Ching, they talk about the path to illumination is through the dark. So, you can find it in all spiritual traditions, the importance of this dark night of the soul. So, yes, I would say that’s happening a lot. And so, and that was, I mean, the guy who introduced us, Reverend Michael Dow, that was a big part of his message. And that was what he really was dedicating the last years of his life to. He passed away recently, very recently, and very suddenly, unexpectedly. And it’s amazing to see how many people really just were impacted powerfully by him, but the clarity of his post-doom message that you can’t avoid the despair once you realize how much carnage has happened already, happening now, going to happen, why it’s been done and how we knew for so long, but didn’t change, all of that pain. You can’t just sidestep it and make it go away. But there’s something else on the other side of that, the pain of that realization, which is, yeah, to live in wonder, gratitude, recommit to service, creativity, live your life, try and be the best ever person you can be, precisely because you have that feeling of, essentially, mortality on your shoulder. Again, that’s, you know, again, back to spiritual wisdom, Ram Dass talked about living with death on your shoulder and love in your heart. So just at the end of what you were saying, I just want to connect with you on that and say, absolutely, at an individual level, that’s something I’m noticing. And then therefore, at a community level, because a lot of those people are connecting to help each other, and to realize that people can respond not necessarily in that way that I’ve just described, but just some kind of ego transcendence because of this realization. People can respond sort of almost like with ego affirmation and psychologists call it worldview defense. There’s something called terror management theory, I don’t know if you come across it, but whereby, where people feel threatened, they feel their safety threatened, they therefore feel their identity and worldview threatened, and they can double down on it, and become quite illogical about it and ultimately violent. And the theory arose from analyzing the rise of religious fundamentalisms, but I think it applies very much to looking at people within modernity, then sort of, for example, some scientists who are very committed to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, doubling down on how good it is, that methodology and how perfect it is according to scientific norms, despite current temperature measurements.

Rick: Which methodology are they doubling down on?

Jem: Oh, the desire for consensus. So, with IPCC, there’s a desire for consensus where there needs to be a preponderance of information published, peer reviewed, for it to then be considered as acceptable. However, if you, what that means then, for example, in my book, I talk about it, it meant that in 2014, in their big report, they were talking about future sea level rise. And the lowest range of the projection was actually lower than measured sea level rise from satellite measurements in that year. And that was because there had been dispute over how much melt from glaciers on land was going to contribute to sea level rise compared to other things, basically, thermal expansion of the oceans. So, because there was dispute about how much it would add, they disregarded it altogether. So, that is one example, but it shows you if there wasn’t consensus, they would disregard it. There’s huge complexity, for example, around tipping points, and therefore very difficult to agree that. And so, a number of positive, so-called positive and self-amplifying feedbacks were also set aside, not all of them, but it’s that desire for consensus. So, the thing is now, September was 1.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial average temperatures, which is decades ahead of official consensus scientific projections of the past. Yet, you still have some people in the field of science doubling down on their view that people like me, and there are many people like me who five years ago said, this looks really bad and much worse than what the IPCC have been telling us. They’re doubling down on that we were wrong, we were reckless, we were unscientific, we were naughty, we were upsetting people unnecessarily, and that we should just stick with the consensus establishment science. They’re saying that now, even though it’s pretty, well, it’s obvious. I’ll say as plainly as that, people like me who were trying to spot what was most salient, so for example, I was looking specifically at what the oceanographers studying the Pacific were saying, I see my camera flashing there, whoops, sorry about that. It’s blinking a little bit. We were right, and the people who were slavishly following IPCC were wrong. Now, that doesn’t need to just be seen in terms of vindication. Science, when it’s siloed and institutionalized, it’s self-restricting in how well it can understand what’s salient to society. There’s a huge amount of literature on that. Yeah, I think I’ll switch my camera, because this one is going a bit wobbly. While you’re doing that, I’ll say something, and it won’t matter if you’re on camera. Yeah, I haven’t talked about ancient civilizations and all that. I want to talk to you about that, because that’s a big part of your higher consciousness, and whether we’re going through a phase of the transformation of… Yeah, all right, so I’m on a different camera now.

Rick: Yeah, swivel your screen so that the top of your head isn’t cut off, just a tad. There you go. That’s enough. Good, good, good. Okay, keep going.

Jem: All righty. Really, do you want to say something? Otherwise, I’ll cut you off.

Rick: I can say something. I could address some of the other things you were just saying. I’ll make a couple of real brief comments, and then let you take it away. So, about consensus. Obviously, science is supposed to work by consensus, but scientists are all very siloed, because they have to specialize in their little niche in order to advance the field, and a lot of them just don’t communicate with each other. And also, scientific consensus, even if it’s broad, can be wrong. For instance, the predominant paradigm is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, whereas a growing number of people, like David Lorimer in the Science and Medical Network and many others, feel that consciousness is fundamental and everything arises from that. If they’re right, then the whole scientific edifice is upside down. Another thing I just want to say quickly, and then I’ll get it back to you, is here in the U.S. I mean, you talked about the Pacific just the other day a tropical storm turned into a Category 5 hurricane in 12 hours and devastated Acapulco. And yet, half the politicians in the United States won’t admit that climate change is a real thing, and don’t want to do anything about it. Trump said it was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to gain some economic advantage. Occasionally I hear from some climate denier who brings up Judith Curry. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Judith Curry, but she’s this woman who has credentials and who says that there is not a like 99% agreement that climate change is being caused by human beings, but that scientists are kind of cowed into towing the line in order to get funding and stuff. And if they were to dispute the predominant narrative, they would lose their careers and so on. So, anyway, that’s a few different random points that I’m sure you can sew it together and get onto the ancient cultures.

Jem: Yeah, so when I was talking about this issue of what terror management theory tells us about worldview defense, and there can be this doubling down on your worldview and identity in ways that become illogical and quite aggressive. So, I said, so that’s not just religious fundamentalists, that’s also, it can be climate scientists and we’re beginning to see that. And so the reason I was making that point is that the response to the terrible situation we’re in for the world’s biosphere and the implications for societies and ourselves and everyone we love, the terrible situation we’re in can lead to the ego transcendence. It is a spiritual invitation and some people can respond to that invitation. However, that’s not my view is and my experience of that and also psychology research, I believe, shows that that’s not certain at all. In fact, so I published in a psychotherapy journal on this. In fact, it’s when people feel very unstable and threatened, they can also become authoritarian. Because what you do is you try and find a new form, a new identity structure, a new form of safety, a new kind of belonging. You have this generalized anxiety, you’re told where to run to and who to trust and who to hate, who to blame. So that then Hannah Arendt and others say that that was what was happening through the Industrial Revolution and changes to society which led to fascism rising in Europe. So we could see some of those same potential responses today. So this, not only the breakdown of societies, but the recognition of just how bad it is, the terror associated with that, deep existential terror, the loss of a sense of meaning can be either a moment of spiritual transformation, or it can be a moment of derangement, being manipulated by populist authoritarians, becoming aggressive and leading to lots of violence. So I believe there is a role to play for people who get this, who’ve done their own work, who can find a way of being calm within this storm and help people see that, help people through this. And so yeah, with the Deep Adaptation Forum that I started, we kicked off I think in March 2019, I worked with it for about be with this really emotionally tough realization, rather than just sort of rush to, oh, we’ll fix it with nuclear power, or I don’t know, a billionaire will fix it, or we can’t do anything, blame the Chinese, or it’s a hoax. Yeah, it’s just hoax, they just want to control us. We just wanted to help people be in the pain, support each other, work through the emotions and think what the options for the future for them, their communities might be. So that was the initial focus of that. That was why. So you can see already that no, I do not agree with you, that this will sort of make almost like an inevitable collective transformation of human consciousness to a higher level.

Rick: I didn’t use the word inevitable, by the way, but continue.

Jem: Okay. But some people do, some people do. So I don’t see, what I see is that there are different ways of responding. And part of the way I can feel okay, with my understanding of the world, as I see it, the way I can feel okay, is to try and help more people respond curiously, kindly, creatively, bravely. That gives me a sense of meaning and a sense of joy. I don’t think I would have any other way of responding. So I want to go back to what you were saying about…

Rick: Let me just interject something.

Jem: The Hopi Prophecies and the idea that we’re going to go through a lot of trouble, but that’s just almost like a rite of passage, basically, like a maturing of the human species in our consciousness to emerge into a spiritual and ecological civilization, perhaps. I’ll talk about that a bit later if you want to say something.

Rick: No, in just a second, let me just quick comment on what you just said. So, for some reason, I was reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If,” you know, “If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs.” As you were saying that, and I was on a boat ride with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1974, and he was talking about this phase transition, as he called it, that was going to happen. It was sounding a little scary, and someone said, “Well, how can we survive this?” And he said, “Hold on to the self.” And by that, he meant kind of capital “S” self, you know, in the Advaita sense of, you know, realize your true nature. So, I think this is where spiritual practice comes in because, and you were talking about how different people react to societal chaos in different ways. Some, you know, go scampering to the dictators and others find it as a catalyst to spiritual awakening. You know, I think that whatever else one does, and I believe you follow this advice, if you have some kind of effective spiritual practice or orientation or something, it’s going to help because you’ll realize that there’s a, you’ll experience that there’s a deeper dimension to life that is unperturbed by the chaos that happens on the surface, and it’ll help you, you know, help you whatever happens, even if you die. It’ll be good to have that inner presence as an anchor, as a foundation. Okay, back to you.

Jem: Yeah, so I’ve found it helpful. I’ve found a number of things helpful in myself. I learned a lot through doing a vipassana and doing it with a monk who really, it was just a wonderful experience because I think there were only about six of us and we had quite a while every day then in dialogue, one-to-ones with the monk. This unpacking, this disaggregating of stimulus, reaction, emotion, thought, new emotion, you know, and then disaggregating all the stuff that goes on, and then realizing, wow, I can have different mind states, which will make me more able to just witness and let go, a calmer, open, more loving and gentle to myself and to the world mind state, or I can have a more fearful one or a grumpy one and how that all influences, all that chain of events between stimulus, feeling, thought, feeling, thought, action. And so that is, I guess, another way of talking about it is just recognizing the extent to which we ourselves and everyone is a bit bonkers. If you can just slow down the process, so that we have a, we breathe and we can witness what’s going on, then that, within that, there’s a chance for more wisdom. It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s more wisdom, but there’s the chance for it. So obviously, yeah, mindfulness, meditation, and also for me, discovering something called authentic relating and circling. I use that a lot in my teaching on these topics, because it’s basically doing meditation, but in dialogue, because you’re witnessing what’s going on with you as you’re engaging with another. And in Buddhism, it’s also, some people call it insight dialogue, these techniques. Yeah, but that I was blessed to have discovered those two processes in order to therefore, not just be consumed by my feelings, but, and I’ve had periods of panic, looking at some of the science over the last five years, and then looking at the news of what’s happened with, more, I don’t know, 30 degrees in the Arctic Circle of tundra forest fires and permafrost melting and stuff. And I’ve had, it does trigger in me often these waves of, yeah, a kind of panic, but at least I can witness it and see it as these things are just happening to me. The other stuff, of course, is any spiritual tradition, invites us into a different sense of time. And that, so we’re not so bothered with either, like, what am I doing this year? Or what am I going to achieve in my life even is just realizing there’s an eternal flow. And so that sense of expanse of reality can also help. In my case, and in many people’s cases, there is this, there is what is known as faith to many people, which is that no matter how bad things are, no matter how unnecessary the amount of suffering and destruction that’s happened and is happening now and is to come, there’s some kind of deep, ultimate rightness. And it’s a faith, which is not super logical. It’s experiential. It’s connected to mystery and wonder and just going, wow, isn’t it bizarre and amazing to be alive and that existence exists. So for me, that’s a faith, which is also sustaining. I know that can sound a bit odd to some people like, oh, that’s just your privilege speaking. When you’re really suffering, is that really going to be there? But I hear from people who’ve had terrible suffering that that faith has stayed with them. So yeah, so to connect immediately on that point. But yes, absolutely. But you mentioned some other things. There are two things you mentioned. You mentioned Judith Curry and climate denialism, do you remember? You mentioned ancient prophecies and the fact that there are lots of people who have since the 70s realized that we’re living in an unsustainable industrial consumer society and there will be a collapse and there will be a transformation. Yet they’ve had this in sort of a way of this is what we need to go through. And then we will reach the promised land perhaps in the end. And then you mentioned, well, what an amazing phrase to say that you were on a boat with Maharaj. Great. Anyway, that one. Okay, so I’ll just start with Judith Curry, because that’s the least interesting. Should we get that one out of the way? Okay, good. You have a good memory, by the way, I appreciate that you recall all these points and you’re coming back to it. So, actually, Judith Curry is a bit right and a hell of a lot wrong. So she’s a bit right that there is institutional pressure on climate scientists who want to succeed and get funding and climb up the career ladder and that they have had what’s called carbon tunnel vision. She and John Christie and others are right that there was a huge attempt to make it all about carbon dioxide and play down other factors that influence not only climate in the past, because of course, climate was influenced by all manner of things before humans influenced it, but also to play down other possible impacts on climate right now and in the future. So my chapter in the book actually says, yes, you’re right, Judith Curry and John Christie and the others that there was a little bit of massaging of the data sets in order to produce the hockey stick graph to make the medieval warm period not appear and to ignore the fact that actually prior to human influence, global average temperatures rose hundreds of years prior to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rising. So this is called the carbon lag and they hit that. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a massive problem. It means the opposite. It means the problem is far worse. It means that because we put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, infrared heat and will warm up the planet. But what that means is we’ve done that, we’ve raised temperatures and what the paleontological records show is that means we have committed carbon, meaning as the oceans warm up, they will release more carbon dioxide. As the soils warm up, they will release more carbon dioxide. As the forests get hotter and drier and more diseased, they will burn more and they will switch from being sinks to sources of carbon dioxide and that’s being shown already for many of the world’s most important forests. So it’s a lot worse than what mainstream climatologists say. So I say to the climate skeptics like Curry and Christie and the rest, you’re right and therefore it’s a hell of a lot worse. So it’s not what you’re saying it is. The other thing is the carbon tunnel vision meant that we didn’t focus on the hydrological cycle and how it’s very clear that forests now play a global role in seeding clouds. So for example, the pollen and the bacteria given off by the Amazon will not just seed clouds above the Amazon through evapotranspiration locally, but will actually seed clouds in Tibet. And what this means is that the world cloud cover is influenced by the amount of forest cover on the ground. And we have trashed forests. We’ve cleared as much in the last 200 years, I think, as in the previous 9000. And this rate went up massively since the 70s through economic globalization and basically spreading consumer capitalism around the planet since the 1970s. And so that correlates with a rapid rise in temperature. And so yeah, in my book, I talk about how we need to broaden our understanding of the climate emergency. It’s not just carbon, it’s also methane, it’s also forest cover. And we have to accept that actually, it might well be totally catastrophic for life on Earth, including our own species already. And we can’t do anything about it because of the committed carbon, because of the amount of heating that we’ve already started. We’re already looking at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial in 2023, decades ahead of when the official projections were. So a lot of people hear that. And they think immediately because they maybe haven’t disaggregated the thought, emotion, reaction, mind state and critically analyzed their culture, because they’re totally wedded to consequentialist ethics. They think, well, that guy who’s just said that, he’s telling me to give up. He’s telling me not to try and cut carbon, draw down carbon, restore ecosystems. No, I’m not. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying, don’t do that with any fairy tale that we’re fixing the climate and we’re getting out of this mess. So do it. Do it. Absolutely. Let’s do as much as we can, but don’t be attached to the outcome. Most people, if they allow the despair, I’m talking about environmentalists who work on this stuff, allow the despair, they don’t just quit. They don’t say, I don’t care anymore. I don’t want us to cut carbon or restore wetlands and forests and get toxics out of our food chain or whatever. They don’t. They go back to it. They go back to it with a passion, but without being so attached to stories of techno salvation and everything getting fixed. So that’s my answer to Judith Curry and all that lot. And that’s why I really recommend people who are interested in climate change, read chapter five or listen to it like you did for free on SoundCloud or download it for free. You can jembendell.com. It’s an EPUB.

Rick: I’ll put a link to it on your BatGap page.

Jem: So I’m a contrarian on climate because in the same way we talked earlier about the problem of institutional and siloed climatology or any science, it has its limitations. And there are silos, there are hierarchies, there’s cultural influences. And so yeah, and that’s, so yeah, I am persona non grata with people like Professor Michael Mann, who Curry and Christie hate, because they were, I think, fighting with him in the early days of the IPCC stuff about all this. He won, basically, and they lost. And so they’re pissed off with him. And but yeah, Michael Mann hates my work, because he wants to keep it, you know, this is a gradual warming. As long as we have the right technologies and the right policies and the right entrepreneurship, the right leadership, and all the little people do as you’re told, then we’ll fix it.

Rick: That’s been probably believes that, you know,

Jem: Well, it’s been it’s that’s been his narrative. And I have not talked to him. I have no idea what he really believes. But but he maybe he absolutely believes it. I have no I have no evidence to say he doesn’t believe it.

Rick: You know, I wish I wish that I wish that there were public debates properly moderated. So people aren’t just shouting at each other. And quite lengthy, like this interview, where each side and on various issues, you know, COVID vaccines, and, you know, climate change and gun rights and abortion and all the issues that are tearing society apart. Because otherwise, it’s like, you know, here in the States, you know, some people are listening to the extreme right wing media, others to the extreme left wing media, and they just get their, their assumptions reinforced, but there’s no communication. And there, there is probably some truth on both sides. Although As Stephen Colbert puts it, I think he said that the truth has a liberal bias, at least that’s my bias. But in any case, I wish they were there public dialogues where people could engage in really learning and and hear both sides and give people ample time to to rebut each other, that would be so healthy.

Jem: Hmm. I agree. And we’ve got the opposite of that, as you said, and what’s extremely painful for me, having spent almost three years working on this book. So the first 18 months were commissioning research papers from specialists in various areas, and then working with them, because it’s covering all manner of areas of scholarship. Then 18 months or a year writing it is the like, for example, there’s a whole chapter on free will. I spent a long time looking at that. And that’s also based on previous years of interest and reading on it. Someone will send me a one minute, tick tock video from someone who may have finished her undergraduate, but she labels herself her your friendly neighborhood neuroscientists who’s saying no, there’s no free will because a study shows that there is no free will.

Rick: Yeah

Jem: Because they measured that there was an impulse from I don’t know, in the arm to tell the hand to move before the brain and send it to the arm.

Rick: I have talked about that study. I talked about that study just last week in my interview with Ruth Kastner, who’s a physicist, that study has been thoroughly rebutted.

Jem: This doesn’t take you very long, you could just type in, type into type into Google that that like, what was the study you could use AI now, what was the study that showed this, it will come up with the name of the study. And then you just go to Google Scholar, even you don’t even have to use any of the more than you a scholar, and just type it in, and then see who’s referenced it. And then you’ll see the number of rebuttals or people who tried to do the same study or proved how it was wrong. And no one else has managed to do a good neuroscientific study disproving free will. It’s precisely because no one’s have managed to create a good study, experimentally disproving free will with neuroscience, that people keep referring back to that one, which is old and debunked. And guess what? No, it’s fresh now has got a million hits on TikTok. And I’m being sent this by my friend is like, since when did you decide that this is how you’re going to learn about the universe? Which is kind of cute. Oh, is that why? Okay, well, you know, I’m probably not going to be a TikTok star. I’m not cute enough. But so yeah, it’s we are going in the wrong way in that sense. But what I’ve realized is, if, if you are more than an armchair observer, if you are engaged in any issue of public note current affairs, more than just wanting to feel good about yourself, get a dopamine hit, get a few likes on on Facebook, you’re more involved in it than wanting to feel angry and self righteous in order to have a bit of escape from your general anxiety or sort of dull feeling of meaningless life. If you’re more involved in an issue, whatever it is, than those those reasons, you want to know you want to dig and inquire you want to hear differences of opinion, you want to check and double check your understanding. Therefore, for me, the people who’ve most committed to really understanding this are the people who have decided to risk arrest and going to prison, the climate activists and extinction rebellion. Five years ago, when they decided that they were going to lock on, glue themselves to trucks or whatever, they had to really convince themselves of what they were doing was based on a fair analysis of the science. They really, really looked into it properly. And they were right. And what’s amazing is three of the Extinction Rebellion co founders just published a letter saying, well, they should have just said is, hey, everybody, we got it right. And all you sort of careerist climatologists who slagged us off in the mass media made us out to be extremists who got the science wrong. Well, you were wrong. But no, they they were basically saying, we got it almost right. But we had a bit of carbon tunnel vision, that we should have been thinking about aerosols, we should have been thinking about forest cloud seeding, we should have been realized that ocean health matters massively to the climate, we should have realized it was a broader agenda, we try to talk about it as a broader agenda, the ecological crisis, not just climate, we try to stick to the idea that this is a near and present danger for us and our loved ones. But we had all these climatologists with all the power of you know, sitting on IPCC committees, and all this sort of we want to help you, we want to help you be more scientific. We watered down our analysis and our message and, and we shouldn’t have done because actually, they were wrong. We were right. So yeah, there’s a public letter that that um, and then in response to that 70 scholars from around the world 16 countries, I was one of them, we signed a letter saying, the scientific community needs to learn from its mistakes. It needs to realize also when it’s badly disparaged, scholarly activists now who are facing prison. And an apology would be the least way of making amends. As far as I know, the many, many climatologists who’ve said many derogatory things about climate activists in the last five years, haven’t come out and apologized and said actually, they were right. And I was wrong.

Rick: Well, I agree. I agree with what all these climate activists are saying. I agree with what you’re saying. And who am I to agree, but based upon my paltry understanding, I think you’re right. But I do take issue with throwing tomato soup at artworks or, you know, gluing yourself to stuff. I mean, that just makes these people seem crazy. I think it weakens their credibility, you know, to most people. Do you agree with those tactics? I mean, surely it makes headlines, but it makes headlines like, wow, these people are nuts.

Jem: So yeah, well, the tomato soup wasn’t actually on the artwork itself. They chose the ones that had glass pane covers.

Rick: That was nice of them. Yeah. Still, kinda nuts.

Jem: The thing is that many climate activists, I mean, that’s the Just Stop Oil campaign, a spin off to Extinction Rebellion. Many of the activists in Extinction Rebellion do many, many things. And it is interesting that the ones we’ve heard of are the ones you’ve mentioned. Now, would you have heard of all the other things that they’ve been doing if the ones didn’t throw the tomato soup on a glass covered painting? This is the problem with the way our media communications are in the world, that these stunts seem to be the only things that you’ll get to hear of. So if they didn’t do it, you wouldn’t hear about what Extinction Rebellion is doing otherwise, really. So I don’t waste my time… I don’t participate in those kind of nonviolent direct actions, disrupting sports events and stuff. It’s not my bag. But I am aware of and I acknowledge the argument of people like Roger Hallam, who say that people like you, Rick, and people like me, if we really believe this to be an existential crisis, that will fundamentally change everything and damage everything and cause awful, awful, already is, but will cause a lot more awful problems in society. Yeah, his message is get out on the streets and okay, do something else. But it’s nonviolent civil disobedience. The only reason why they’re doing these sort of high profile stunts is because there aren’t enough of people like you and me, alongside people on the streets causing havoc in a peaceful way. That’s his message. I acknowledge it. And I believe it’s equally valid to my view, which is, I don’t think there’s much point in doing that. I’m much more interested in getting ready for in communities for the collapse, which I believe has already begun. So I’m more interested in turning to where neighbors who, where I live, to try and prepare for the breakdown of industrial consumer way of life and to learn from this and to resist authoritarianism in all its forms. I actually think some of these activists stunts actually sort of help legitimate authoritarianism because it means leads to more draconian policing, more draconian laws, more, I think, undemocratic use of the court systems by judges. I can’t go into that too much because, because those ridiculous behavior of judges in the UK to restrict trial by proper trial by jury. So, so yeah, I acknowledge his argument and I disagree with it. I’m choosing a different path, but I wouldn’t…

Rick: Okay, yeah.

Jem: Okay. Should we go back to those prophecies and whether or not?

Rick: Yes, good. You read my mind.

Jem: Anyone today in a, in a Western or even though let’s not even say Western, anyone today in a modern urban culture, reading about ancient civilizations and their prophecies, reading about or learning about indigenous peoples and communities alive today, any of us looking at that, we’re bringing our own mental models from modernity. And that means we think, although we think we might be learning, we’re actually projecting from our culture onto their own forms of wisdom. So I talk about that in the book as well. So some of the habits of modernity, which are very deeply ingrained is this idea of anthropocentrism or anthropo-supremacy, the idea that somehow reality exists with us at the center. That’s one thing. Another is that we’re always progressing either materially or in some other way. So like what is new can be better, will be better than the past. So just let’s just take two of those things. So with that, you can end up coming up with the ideas in conscious evolution where it’s like, well, you know, we have a, it’s our destiny as humans to evolve to a higher consciousness. I think the opposite could be what’s happened because there is such incredible wisdom in indigenous societies. Also, I think about it, I think I may have mentioned it in my email to you, I can’t remember. I’m working not with that many, but with a few farmers in Bali, in my organic farm school, and they don’t have all the education and they don’t really know about all manner of things. It would be weird to talk about a planetary future, what’s for the whole of Homo sapiens, and that’s all just weird, blah, blah. I don’t think they are any less awake. In fact, I think they might be more awake than the people who write blogs and send emails about a global brain awakening and planetary consciousness emerging. I actually, I really don’t like what I think is the implicit modernity and patriarchy and anthropo-supremacy that’s sort of lingering in that worldview that we are all going to come together in a global consciousness that’s awakening and progressing. I think it’s, yeah, it’s patriarchal. It’s like, no, sod it. Why can’t you just be happy that…what is really frightening, I think, for a lot of people in Western modern culture is that, no, it’s our culture that is omnicidal, that humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without screwing up the planet in the way that we’ve done in 200 years. Even today, 4% of the world’s population is indigenous and where they live, there’s over about 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Now, what does that tell you? If you look again, this is also a bit annoying to hear for some people, but so much of the archaeology and anthropology of the past years has been racist. So basically, it’s assumed that the first peoples were somehow not stewarding and working with their environments and actually looking at it again, for example, now we know that the Amazon was not a wild untouched environment, but a wild gardened one and that hundreds, if not thousands of species in the Amazon are because of millennia of human settlement. And there are many examples of that in North America too. So, no, there was incredible complexity, incredible wisdom and trashed by Eurocentric culture originally, colonialism, but then that became this sort of what I call imperial modernity and taken to the extreme, like all of that on cocaine because of an expansionist monetary system. And a lot of people, older people, privileged people, often white, living in the West, are attracted to stories which absolve any sense of guilt. I think you don’t need that, but I know a lot of people do. So be like, oh, this was predetermined overshoot, any species would do this. It was just, what was it in the William Catton book, natural exuberance. No, not at all. That’s not what the latest scholarship shows. So, just because our culture, our system, when I say our, I mean modernity, which came from colonialism originally, and just because of that is at fault for omnicide, doesn’t mean that we sort of just get lost in self-hatred. An interest in an aversion to blame and shame is itself an aspect of modernity and the Abrahamic religions that modernity was built on. You can just let all that go. And that’s what I’ve also loved from my own Buddhist reading and sinking into this, and this notion of pre-forgiveness, because the way we are is just as the way somebody else is, the way I am is just the same consciousness having a different life experience. So there’s no sort of possibility of damnation of self or other in some kind of deep level. So you don’t need to worry about shame and blame. So yeah, I actually believe that the stories of the problems of our time being necessary to go through to some sort of higher consciousness, I see that as culturally very specific, pretty racially and culturally insensitive. And the people who like it tend to be people of privilege in a particular culture, because it makes them feel better about the horrors of what’s happened and what’s to come. So yeah, that’s my take on that. The positive side of it, I would say is that, and how it relates to a more sort of beautiful heart opening kind of philosophy is simply nature and the universe is perfectly imperfect. We don’t need to think about any transformation to get somewhere. We label things good and bad. This is a human thing that we do. But life is unfolding and we don’t really understand why and all the destruction is super painful. But if there is eternity, then life will come again, both on this planet and elsewhere in the universe. And if we believe that organic life or complex life, even if it’s not organic, is somehow deeply meaningful in the universe, then the possibility for that always existed to create what we are today still exists. So for me, actually, what I’ve learned from my reading of Buddhism is just this deeper acceptance of everything that we might label good and evil, good, bad, dark, light, just sort of is. And so I want to be as present to it and as engaged with it. I want to witness it and I want to be there for other people as much as I can be and not lose myself too much into stories of sacrifice and service. I want to also have fun, therefore not be bitter about anything.

Rick: Okay, a lot to respond to in there. You may be aware of Brian Thomas Swim, you know Brian? I interviewed him, I don’t know, a while back, a year ago maybe. He has a nice little quote which is that you leave hydrogen alone for You know, that illustrates nicely a point which I believe, which is that the universe itself is one huge, giant evolution machine. You know, greater and greater complexity is arising out of simplicity. And in so doing, forms are being created through which the primordial intelligence that gives rise to the whole thing can become a living reality through you and me and mosquitoes and angels or whatever else may exist, Indonesian farmers. But everything’s evolving. I would say everything’s evolving. You said in your email to me that these farmers in Indonesia don’t need to evolve spiritually. That’s just a matter of sort of philosophy, I think, but I think everything is evolving spiritually, like it or not. Everything, everyone. This thing about the ancient cultures, firstly, you know, again, there’s no inevitability. I didn’t use that word. My friend, Duane Elgin, made a little video in which he outlines several different possible scenarios of how things might go. Each of them involves breakdown into chaos, but the first one would be continuing chaos for a long time. Second one would be some kind of AI-driven, Chinese-style authoritarian world. And the third one would be that we do experience a spiritual renaissance out of the ashes, so to speak. And, you know, all this collapse will have been necessary, will be seen as having been necessary for that to come about, because under the current systems and structures, it really couldn’t come about.

Jem: So, you might, go ahead. I might ramble if I continue any longer. You want to respond to those bits? There’s a couple of questions that came in too that I’ll ask. Yeah, I would add to Dwayne’s one, I would add a fourth, which is that, where this idea of collapse going for a long time, but there will be good and bad, there will be spiritual renaissances and the opposite of that, all happening at the same time. So, for me, I see a future for the human race this century of there being a lot of beauty, joy, love, spiritual transformation, and also a lot of hate and violence and stupidity, ignorance, delusion, derangement.

Rick: As there is right now. I mean, so many people living these blessed lives, you know, and then there’s all hell breaking loose.

Jem: So, in terms of, I mean, I talk about this in the book, is that, okay, so some people say, yeah, okay, what you’ve said sounds right, but don’t you have a vision? And I say, well, yes, I do. Because I believe that so much of the suffering is as a result, not of human nature, not as of our freedoms, but because we’ve been so oppressed through an expansionist monetary system and the way it’s shaped us. And I talk about it in great detail in Chapter 10, in the ways that it’s shaped our experience of reality and encouraged us to behave and feel and think in certain ways, and not others. And so, yeah, my vision is that where we are freed, more and more of us are freed from that in order to be more of ourselves, which, what does that mean? Well, it means to be more in discovery of what it is to be us and to be in connection with others and to be in connection with nature. For some people, that might include experiencing non-ordinary states of consciousness, which might affirm their sense that consciousness, it just isn’t in here, but is shared. It might include them realizing that maybe there’s some sort of universal consciousness. They may label it God, they may label it the Akashic Record, they may label it an Atman or an Anatman or whatever, I don’t, whatever, you know, loads of words out there, concepts, framings out there. And I’ve got to the point of thinking that if you start getting attached to those stories, then you’re back in fear, you’re needing order to latch on to. I’m just, you know, some people won’t, some people will have joyful, caring, loving lives, and they won’t necessarily have had an altered state of consciousness where they’ve experienced we space or universal transcendent being. And they will think that when they die, that’s it, they’re just skin and bones and they’re gone.

Rick: And then they’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Jem: Well, yeah, but also they’ll just be there, but they’ll be loving, caring, good people anyway.

Rick: Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Jem: I mean, I know people who’ve been meditating for decades who are absolute jerks, you know. In fact, there’s a sort of a, I think a spiritual egotism that often happens with, with, they think they’re superior and they’re fussy and intolerant.

Jem: I had this very recently because, because death of a loved one really, really helps bring this into, into focus. So, you know, my dad just died, what, three days ago? And sitting by his lifeless body saying goodbye, I said out loud, “So dad, I don’t know. I don’t know whether I’m speaking to you as a consciousness right here, right now, which is like a congruent dad consciousness. If it is, I want to say this. And then I don’t know if you’re just merged with the universal consciousness already.” And I, “Whoa, what a trip that is.” So you’ve like rejoined, like, “Wow, lucky you.” I mean, that’s weird. Look, there I am next to my dead dad. But if that’s true, wow. And then, “Oh, geez, there might be a…” But even in that way, there might be an imprint on that Akashic record that is dad consciousness, Peter Bendell consciousness that will be reincarnated in a new life form. It’s like, “Wow, you’ve got an amazing trip ahead of you. Cool.” Or you’re just, that’s it. None of you exists anymore, apart from the impact you’ve had on people. And the ability of people like me to now have a conversation in my head with my idea of you, which I’ve been doing, which is fascinating to find I was having this conversation with my dad in the hours before I got to the nursing home knowing he’d passed. So it was almost like he’d come alive as a being for me to talk to. But maybe that’s the only way that he’s still alive, which is just in people’s memories of him. And then I thought, “Well, if that’s the case, this is what I want to say to you.” And I think even if I have more We Space moments and more periods of experiencing collective consciousness and telepathy, and so I’ve had all of those. I’m lucky I’ve had those in my life. I say I’m lucky because it means I know there is more. I’m not quite sure how there is more. I don’t know what words are best for describing it. I don’t think my dad wasn’t as lucky. I don’t think he ever had any of that. But I think I’d be okay with that not knowing the way I’ve just described it. Because if we get attached to the stories, as you were saying, people who meditate for decades as well, I think it takes us away from just being nice and kind to each other and ourselves.

Rick: I think that’s the bottom line. Yeah. I mean, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I don’t think that if somebody’s been meditating for decades, it means that they’re more highly evolved spiritually than some simple farmer or anybody else. We all come in at different levels.

Jem: So there was another point I was making there when I said that, which is that basically an Indonesian farmer, like Kadek in my mind, so he’s our farm manager. I mean, his carbon footprint and ecological footprint is infinitesimal compared to the many people who will be pontificating about some great spiritual revolution after the collapse and carnage of the biosphere and modern societies, which they’ve contributed to far more than Kadek.

Rick: Which doesn’t mean they’re not right. There might be some spiritual revolution, even though they’re polluting like heck.

Jem: Yeah, but you see what I mean? It’s like, well, maybe Kadek doesn’t need a spiritual revolution. What I’m saying is it’s a very culturally specific story. And this is it. Stories do, they become popular amongst specific people and groups because they serve the person in some way. And for me, mindfulness is also can be connected to this, what I call critical literacy in the book, which is actually deconstructing these frames and these narratives and saying, well, who’s being served by this and who’s not? And so for me, I often think, well, a lot of these stories in the Western spiritual community, or now the Western doomersphere, can actually just be helping people change nothing in their lives and carry on consuming and just feel a bit less bad about it. So this is with Michael Dowd, I was always saying, very interested to explore this with him always, which is that, you know, he’s spreading the good news that actually after collapse, acceptance, there can be joy. And he was also not wanting to pass any judgment on what that might mean for people. And yet, if through collapse acceptance, you just want to fly around the world and go on cruises and fly first class and drive your SUV, then for me, there’s something going wrong there. There’s a numbing that’s coming from collapse-acceptance. So this is why I say there’s work to be done to help steward each other and help each other through this waking up to just how bad things are, and why they got this way, and what our options are and how we wish to be. And it does require, as you were saying earlier, you know, good critical conversations between people who are happy to disagree. Not take it too personally, not try and cancel each other if you disagree. And that’s what I liked with Michael, because we could talk about these things. And he totally got what I was saying. And he was just super exuberant about the joy of collapse-acceptance as well.

Rick: He was actually, after my interview with him, his wife made an edited version of it, she said, “You’re one of the first interviewers who ever managed to slow him down enough to interject questions and things like that, because he just gets so exuberant.” But I just had a thought while you were saying that. You know, I mean, your whole idea of collapse is a theory, but it’s a very well-researched theory, and you offer a lot of evidence in the book chapter by chapter how each individual area is unsustainable. And I would say that my notion, or others’ notion, of some kind of enlightened age coming down the pike is also a theory, and it’s more difficult to quantify. You know, you can’t measure temperatures and this and that in order to provide evidence for it. But my measurement is in the realm of, you know, just so many conversations – my life’s experience – but so many conversations with people who are undergoing a spiritual transformation that might not at all be evident on the surface, but that it makes me feel like something of this nature is epidemic in the world. It’s a global phenomenon that doesn’t come anywhere close to making the news, or even showing up in a very manifest way anyplace. It’s more of a subjective experience that’s happening among growing numbers of people. But as I said in the very beginning, I think our subjective state is the sort of the fulcrum or the ultimate cause of whatever ends up manifesting on the surface. And I think that if this subjective state becomes more the norm, and you used the word extraordinary earlier or something, so if it becomes more ordinary, then I think that all the surface structures of life will necessarily have to change. And as we’ve seen, most of the people who run these structures don’t change willingly, and so there’s going to have to be some kind of cataclysmic collapse in order for something new to arise.

Jem: So I’m just carrying on from what I was saying earlier then. I’m curious as to, because this is not to, so there’s two ways I could respond. One is to talk about the theory and the evidence for it, and then we would talk about, well, if that’s happening, so what? Like, let’s think about it. But another is to look at where the theory is coming from.

Rick: Which theory?

Jem: The one you just mentioned.

Rick: My theory or your theory?

Jem: Yeah, which is that there is a spiritual awakening under the surface that has momentum.

Rick: Okay, let’s talk about where that comes from.

Jem: Yeah, so what I’m interested in, would your life feel as good if you didn’t believe that?

Rick: It’s kind of a moot question, because my life was going to shit before I learned to meditate. I had dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple times, and I was starting to use hard drugs, and then my life underwent a dramatic turnaround and has been, you know, had its ups and downs, but has been continually enhanced ever since over the last 55 years. And that’s what has formed my opinions about many things, just my own experience.

Jem: But then that could be just your experience.

Rick: It could be.

Jem: But the theory that there is a spreading awakening, spiritual awakening, and there’s momentum, not necessarily that it will add up to, you know, whatever, but where would you be if you didn’t believe that there was this momentum, this spiritual awakening in other people, and that possibly the opposite’s occurring?

Rick: I might be sort of more depressed. I might be pessimistic. But, you know, since I have been in touch with thousands of such people over the years, I feel like that phenomenon is occurring, and it gives me some optimism.

Jem: Okay. So what I’m getting at is that there is a tendency in all of us to look for what we want to see in the world, according to our identity and our stories of reality and our assumptions and the culture and life experiences.

Rick: Yep.

Jem: And so, for example, if you yourself have experienced really tough, unbearable pain, and you’re emotional, psychological, and you got through that through meditation and through a spiritual awakening, then you know that pain. So when you see other people suffering in that pain, that must potentially, you must feel it hard. And it will therefore be a useful story to think that yeah, but at least we’re getting more and more people are getting out of that. So what I’m pointing to is that to become aware of how different theories of reality are ones that we can be choosing because of what they’re doing for us. And what I’ve got from my spiritual inquiry, if we call it that, is just to become more of a witness to like, “Oh, that idea, that appealed to me. That calmed me down. Oh, that one, I didn’t like that idea. That didn’t.” And so whenever I start to hear a theory of what’s happening in the world, I wonder what it might be doing for someone and why they might like it. But the other thing is I’m also a sociologist and I’m very critical of modernity. And so I’m immediately spotting the deep stories of our culture, such as progress, and the idea that there needs to be, or there always will be a progression. And therefore that would be associated with scale. Wouldn’t be just like one human out of 8 billion who progresses to enlightenment. No, there needs to be scale. There needs to be progress. There’s the possibility that the opposite is the natural flow of life. There is the possibility that human extinction through a degrading of the spiritual awareness of more and more humans is exactly what was meant to happen. There’s the possibility that’s exactly what was meant to happen. There’s the possibility with the fact that they have a quantum dance, that bees are closer to enlightenment and higher consciousness than Homo sapiens. And that actually the universe just needs to get rid of us. Possibly, I’m not saying that because I don’t want to dismiss all those incredible indigenous peoples who lived fantastically in harmony with nature for millennia. But possibly the natural future of Homo sapiens is to become less awake, more numb, more aggressive, more stupid, more separate and fearful, and more deluded in our own. Maybe, you see, maybe. And what I’m getting to is that I don’t know, but I’m okay with the not knowing. And what’s still true, what’s still true for me is if I can be mindful, if I can be loving, if I can be courageous, if I can be curious, if I can be creative, and I can help other people that way too, and it might not add up to much. But for me, not being attached to outcome includes not being attached to the idea that humanity awakens.

Rick: Okay, let me jump in here. So yes, I think not being attached is very important. There’s a verse in Bhagavad Gita which goes, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Be not attached to the fruits of action, nor attached to inaction.” And yet, you know, we all have all kinds of ideas. I mean, you have ideas that you’re very, quite certain of and quite, you know, committed to and so on. It doesn’t invalidate them that you’re committed to them, nor does it validate them. It’s just you have a lot of evidence based on your experience and understanding and research and so on. And so, you know, the things you said about the philosophical, more philosophical spiritual type ideas that I’ve been espousing, same thing applies. You know, they’re based upon my personal experience, my observation of other people’s experience, and then there’s, you know, like we mentioned, traditional cultures who talked about these things and prophesied that this or that might happen. In the Vedic culture, for instance, they have this cyclical understanding of history of Yugas, you know, where it gets better, then it gets worse, then it gets better, then it gets worse. And, you know, there are various arguments as to which point in that cycle we might be. But anyway, I’m kind of losing my train of thought, so go ahead.

Jem: So, the other thing I said was that I just wanted to make that point about, well, in the book I call it critical wisdom, which is becoming aware of our attachments to stories because we’re entering a period where there’s going to be generalized anxiety and a lot of derangement. And so, how can we be as kind and wise in that context? So, one of them is to try and look at our deep stories and whether that’s just, we’re just thinking what cultures made us think that makes us feel better in the moment or not. So, I just wanted to make that point with that. But the other thing is, okay, I love your theory. I love the idea that actually Homo sapiens, I don’t like the idea that Homo sapiens, and I reject the idea that Homo sapiens are the most important form of consciousness on the planet. We don’t know. We just don’t know.

Rick: There’s that bit about complexity that I mentioned earlier. A human nervous system is a lot more complex than a bee’s nervous system. Of course, the bees are essential and critical, and we’d probably all die if they all died. That alone could do it. But there is something to be said for a more sophisticated nervous system being capable of greater reflection or expression of the primordial intelligence that underlies and pervades the universe.

Jem: Maybe, but also, if we think of life forms as having a collective consciousness, then the capacity for interrelationship between a swarm of bees may mean that there’s some kind of consciousness there which is highly complex.

Rick: I agree.

Jem: What I loved is there’s a fantastic piece of-

Rick: But I couldn’t have this interview with a swarm of bees, though.

Jem: No, but then maybe our interview is nothing compared to what the amazing stuff that the swarms of bees are doing. But also, yeah, there’s the idea, again, from our culture that the brain is so important in mind, and yet there’s some really weird studies. There are individuals that had hardly any cerebral cortex.

Rick: Oh, yeah, I know. They were like a coconut.

Jem: There was the famous-

Rick: There was just some brain cells around the skull.

Jem: It’s just the fluid.

Rick: The rest of it was liquid, yeah, and they were carrying on normal lives.

Jem: I know, but there’s quite a few examples of that which completely challenge our notion of where intelligence lies in the body or even if it’s just in the body or not or whether- Anyway, so I’m saying, yes, maybe. Maybe humans are special, maybe. But also, maybe we’re special to create the way for the really special species which comes after we wipe out 95% of life on Earth, which it looks like what we’re doing. And so maybe it’s the future swarm of bees or colony of ants in 20 million years who’s actually, that’s where it’s at for consciousness expressing itself through planet Earth. Who knows? But anyway, what I want to say, oh, yes, if we go with your theory, then I would test. I am a researcher, and I say, well, you have a little bit of confirmation bias going on because you love talking to people who like talking about these things. And so you could triangulate that with data on consciousness that people are experiencing and behaviors and all sorts. And then there’s a whole debate there about what would be the sort of objective indicators of a spiritual awakening. That’s pretty difficult.

Rick: I’ve got one for you.

Jem: Okay.

Rick: I don’t know, I mean, I was in the TM movement for a long time, right? And one of the premises there was that collective consciousness is a thing and that it can be enlivened or influenced by large groups of people meditating together. So, I participated in groups as large as 8,000 and at some point we went to various, I spent three months in Iran, you know, with a group of people meditating just before the Shah left. And researchers did a lot of studies on societal indicators, economic and crime and various things and claimed to find, I think they had a vested interest in making TM look good, but they claimed to find a correlation between the existence of these groups and changes, measurable changes in these indicators. And they claimed that the P value or whatever was very strong that these studies really showed something was happening. So, I’m saying this with a little bit of uncertainty because I think there was that sort of agenda to make TM look good, but on the other hand, maybe there’s some truth to it and that would be, and there’s guys like Rupert Sheldrake, you know, and some of his colleagues who tried to do research, like Rupert wrote a book called “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.” And they used all sorts of careful methods of controlling that the dogs had no way of knowing the owners were coming home very randomly.

Jem: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m pretty Sheldrake-ian, if one can, has anyone said that, Sheldrake-ian?

Rick: That’s a good word.

Jem: I lost my cat recently and I was very upset. I had telepathy with my cat and I know that can sound a bit wacky.

Rick: but I believe it.

Jem: When my cat was stuck up a tree, it was the only time in my life with the cat in two years that I thought, it’s daytime, I need, for some reason, I need to go and look for Buki. I had to go out and I found him, you know, 18 meters away, stuck up a tree. And that’s just one example, but there is weird stuff that can that I would just accept, no, that’s not chance. That’s some kind of telepathy. So I’m not arguing against anything you’ve just said, but I’m saying neither of those two things are evidence that there’s a momentum towards a widespread human awakening, which will affect the destiny of life on Earth or Homo sapiens. And I would be able to marshal lots of evidence, for example, in my lifetime, 50 years on Earth, over 60% of wildlife has been wiped out. We’re now down to wildlife on planet Earth constitutes 4% of all mammals, the rest of it’s humans, pets and livestock. And the carnage is extreme. And so, you know, if a spiritual awakening is somehow happening, well, that doesn’t look very good. [Laughter]

Rick: Well, yeah, but I’ve agreed with you from the outset that there seems to be a terrible collapse taking place. What we’re possibly disagreeing on is what may follow this collapse. I’m saying perhaps this will be, like you said, a dark night of the soul, a dark passage of some kind, and there’ll be a bright future on the other side of it, but also perhaps not. And I wanted to make that point because you mentioned the word possibility a little while ago, and I just want to make clear that I don’t deal with absolutes or certainties. I take everything as a hypothesis and I give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but I also take everything with a grain of salt and proportions vary. If somebody tells me the Earth is flat, and I’ve actually, I’m aware of such people, that’s all salt to me. The Earth is not flat. There’s too much evidence that it isn’t. But, you know, if they tell me some other thing, it’s like, well, maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. But I really am not wired in a way to be adamant about any particular idea, including all the points I’ve made today. I think that’s a scientific attitude. That’s the way scientists should think. And I’m not a scientist, but that’s the way I think.

Jem: If someone, yeah, if someone comes in with the knowledge that I have after, where I’ve concluded, and it’s not just I’m predicting collapse, I have a whole chapter, chapter one, which is talking about all the data going in the wrong direction since 2016 for human society. So, the human development, the human development index has been going down in the majority of countries outside the rich world since 2016. It’s been going down, including in OECD countries, the majority since 2019. And some of that data is collected two years prior to being put into the index. Lots of other indices show the same thing. So, we’re talking basics, life expectancy, morbidity, all sorts of going before the pandemic. So, and because it’s global, it shows, therefore, a global set of processes are happening to cause that. It’s not just like one bad leader, oh, you know, we shouldn’t have elected him or her or whatever, or that war, or that was a mistake. No, this is global, it’s happening everywhere. So, it’s just something good. So, it’s happening already. But what was I wanting to say about, oh, I can’t remember now. That was a prelude to saying something else. Rick; It’ll come back to you. Let me ask this question that came in, and then perhaps you’ll remember what you were just going to say. So, let me just get my glasses on here. This is from PG Woodhouse’s grandson. No, I don’t know about that, but it’s Ro Woodhouse from London. How long was the Holocene meant to continue before we destabilized the biosphere?

Jem: Oh, a technical question about climate. How long was the Holocene meant to go on for? Well, I…

Rick: Tell us what the Holocene is.

Jem: That could be answered by someone who looks at ancient climates and Kondratiev cycles and all sorts. But…

Rick: What is the Holocene? Explain that.

Jem: So, I guess it would have been, it must be thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, but I don’t know. I didn’t look into that.

Rick: Okay.

Jem: Google it. Look at how long it was. Come back and tell us. Unless this is meant to be a… What is this meant to be a… Is this a rhetorical question? I don’t know.

Rick: I don’t know. Okay. Did you remember what you were trying to remember?

Jem: Yeah. I also believe that ideas are what ideas do. Stories are what stories do. I’m always interested in the implication. And so, with the understanding I have of that we are already within an era of a creeping collapse of modern societies. If someone over here is saying, “I want to tell you that this is the beginning of the age of Aquarius and we’re going to have a whole spiritual up, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.” And, “Oh, really? I haven’t heard that before. Okay.” Then someone over here is saying, “This has broken my heart. I find it really difficult. I’m so sad about the difficulties that my children are going to face. I’m heartbroken that they don’t want to have kids and I completely agree with them, but I’m heartbroken about that. I want to do as much as I can to create, reduce as much harm as possible, to resist aggressive, authoritarian, nasty policies, to try and help have a better quality of life for as long as possible, with least impact on the planet, relocalize supply chains, become less vulnerable to external shocks like a financial crisis.” So, we’ve got someone over here saying, “Oh, this is just the nasty stuff we’ve got to get through until the global awakening and homo sapiens will finally reach their destiny as the higher consciousness species.” And someone over here, who’s just being a bit more ordinary and kind and loving and heartbroken, “I’m going to go over there.” So, that’s…

Rick: I would say to that, that somebody could be both of those. Somebody could say, “I’m going to do everything I can to mitigate the, you know, the suffering.” And at the same time, I think, you know, there’s a good chance something ultimately good is going to happen and it’s really unfor… In fact, I think some of these spiritual teachers who’ve been coming out to the world in recent decades, who actually gave voice to some of these predictions, maybe their mission was to minimize the chaos to some extent by helping to accelerate the rise in collective consciousness, to minimize the suffering to some extent. You know, maybe they felt it was inevitable, but they just wanted to make it a little smoother if possible. I don’t know.

Jem: Yes, so I’m not entirely against people being fully committed to doing all they can to encourage more and more people to awaken to a deeper and higher reality, spirituality, whatever we call it. I’m for that. But what I’m more for is love beyond hope. And for me, that was a core thing I got from Buddhism, where the Buddha in one of his teachings said, “There’s three kinds of people in the world. There’s the man with hope, the one without, who’s hopeless, and the one who’s done away with hope, who sees it as drawing our attention to the future and therefore drawing our attention away from the present and therefore getting bound up with stories and aversions and cravings.” So I’m trying to live, and I’m excited by living, hope-free. It doesn’t mean I don’t try and work out what might help. I don’t want to… Another way of talking about it is activism and social contribution, whether that’s through doing what you’re doing or working in community on organic permaculture, whatever is your chosen contribution, doing it as a gift. And a gift doesn’t need and doesn’t expect an outcome or a return. It’s just, this is me sharing what’s in my heart and what I want to do and what’s most being me. So yeah, love beyond hope and social engagement as a gift and not being attached to outcome. And because of that, I’m a little bit allergic to some of these stories about, “Oh, this is just the trouble we’ve got to go through to get to the other side.”

Rick: Well, it’s not trivial. I mean, the way you’re saying that makes it sound like, “Oh, there’s a little bump in the road.” I mean, it could wipe out 90% of the world’s population. And that’s not going to be pretty. And it’s not very pretty in Gaza and Israel right now, you know? It hasn’t been very pretty in Syria after the ecological disaster spurred that upheaval. And anyway, on your comment about hope, I think I might be kind of where you’re at in that respect. I don’t like, when I’m saying these things about a possible bright future, I’m not dwelling in hope or, you know, kind of like hanging my emotions on that possibility. It’s more like a hypothesis, again, to use that word. And I see evidence to suggest it might be the outcome, but if it isn’t, then it isn’t. You know, and I don’t think it’ll, I don’t really have a lot invested in that as an outcome. It’s not like the fundamentalist Christian just staking everything on going to heaven after they die or something. We’ll see how it turns out. And like, you know, the Beatles sang in the Revolution, “We’re all doing what we can, and I’m doing something I feel is having an impact, and you’re doing something you feel is having an impact, and we can’t all do everything.” So, you know, we’re all ultimately on the same team, I think. And we’ll just see where it goes.

Jem: It’s interesting you mentioned the Beatles. I’m kind of, you know, they’re reforming because Yoko Ono found a tape recording of John Lennon singing one of the songs.

Rick: Oh, yeah, they’re using AI to make it all work together. And yeah.

Jem: And I’m actually secretly hoping it’s really rubbish. Otherwise, I’ll be sad that my dad, who was a Beatles obsessive, missed the final Beatles song. So I’m hoping it’s really, really, really bad.

Rick: I was a bit of an obsessive myself. I can sing all the songs and with the lyrics, although not very well. And all the harmonies. Yeah, I love the Beatles.

Jem: Wow.

Rick: Well, I was there when they were in the 60s.

Jem: Some originals he’s got from the 60s, just over there, singles.

Rick: Cool. It was very exciting in those days. I mean, when I was in high school, and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” came out, all the kids would open the car doors of their cars and blast their radios. And it would happen. They play that song every morning at the same time and people would be dancing in the parking lot. It was just like this cultural breakthrough after breakthrough with each new album that came out throughout the 60s.

Jem: Yeah, there isn’t quite that shared experience anymore. Everyone’s.

Rick: Now it’s all Taylor Swift.

Jem: When I say shared experience, I mean, yeah, okay, maybe there is a shared experience for younger people on musically. I’m just, I’m just, I’m just on my own musical journey. And yeah, I got to thank SoundCloud and typing in ecstatic dance into SoundCloud and putting it in my ear to get me to get the second half of the book done. Just working late into the night, listening to these down tempo electronica.

Rick: You actually wrote that book listening to that stuff?

Jem: Well, yeah, there’s no words really. It’s just you might you might have some Native American stuff or some Indian I don’t know, weird beats.

Rick: Yeah, getting a little silly here. Did any more question? Oh, a question came in. So we’re gonna ask that in a minute.

Jem: Listening to music is deeply serious.

Rick: Yeah, it is. I just find it divides my mind unless I’m doing something really mindless.

Jem: Okay.

Rick: Yeah. Like I said, anyway, so let me see.

Jem: Anyway, yes, go back to your notes. What is it you wanted to talk to me about? We’ve got what another another 10 minutes for our two hours? Yeah.

Rick: Uh huh. Okay. I’m just seeing if there’s any little tidbits here. Irene’s going to send me another question in a minute. More than one. Okay, good. So we’ll do that. And we’ve covered quite a bit. Let’s see what these we can even edit out this little hiatus and, and then pick it pick it. Well, maybe I’m talking about the Beatles. No, we should leave that in. But right now we’re kind of dead air.

Jem: All right, well, maybe this movie we’ve met that maybe we’ve met a natural a natural end.

Rick: Now there’s a couple of questions coming over right now. Ask him. So here we go. Thanks. You just sent me. Here we go. This is from some Daria M in India. Sometimes coming across people who suffer victims makes me suffer more than them. Even though we are strangers, how to break this pattern, especially in today’s world where something or the other is going on in the world?

Jem: Well, I’ve never heard that. Putting that question. What was it? Sundar? Did you say Sound?

Rick: Sundaria. Yeah, I think she or he feels that they have so much empathy that they suffer even more than the person who’s suffering.

Jem: Yeah, I am. I’m a bit stumped by that question, because we don’t know the extent of another person’s suffering or another animals or other sentient creatures suffering. We don’t know we can we can guess. But our suffering, meaning our emotional distress at witnessing that suffering is actually a human virtue. It’s one of the Brahma Vihara, one of the four natural ways of being. So what I what I loved about the Brahma Vihara set of virtues is it’s not saying what we aspire to. It’s saying what’s natural prior to injury, emotional, psychological injury of our culture. We are naturally empathetic and compassionate. And so I would say, well, it’s very human and okay that you feel pain, suffering and another suffering. But there’s a however, which is if you’re feeling it sounds like you’re feeling so affected by it, that it’s causing you a problem. And I don’t know what in whatever way. And so this often is, it can be a trauma response. So basically, there’s unresolved emotional pain and psychological injury, wounds that haven’t been healed, and we’ve all got them. So but it means that we witness something and it’s, that’s not making us feel that way. But it’s triggering something because of our own life experience and what we haven’t healed in ourselves. Because it’s great to feel compassion and some pain when we the opposite would be awful. But if it if if if yeah, if it’s triggering a trauma response, it’s becoming overwhelming. It’s interfering with the rest of your life, and interfering with making wise choices to promote joy and reduce suffering in the world as you can, then that’s an issue. What to do about it. Key thing is so many people are getting into doom scrolling as it’s called, it’s even got a word now doom scrolling, just paying attention to all the tragedies in the world, or the latest bad news about the climate or the hurricane here or the disaster there. And it is actually, it is a way of not being present, it might feel like you’re being present to the world suffering, but it’s not, it’s a distraction from it. It’s, it’s a way of and often a lot of people will doom scroll, they’ll then share that stuff on Twitter or whatever. And it’s a way of just screaming about it, rather than just, okay, there’s pain and suffering in the world. There’s a lot of it to come. How can I allow that somehow as part of my reality, without it, without me becoming obsessed by it, or destabilizing me so I can’t get on with with the rest of my life. And, and the problem is healing to be done in order for one not to have a trauma response. And it may mean you need to switch off from from seeing other people suffering and focus more on self love for a time comes in waves. There’s only so much of the world’s tragedies and suffering that we can take on board. So maybe just spend more time with self love and healing the your own injuries and traumas. And then be happy with the fact you feel pain and others pain. That would be…

Rick: yeah, that’s a good answer. There’s some one thing I would add is be an ocean. If you try to dissolve some mud in a glass of water, it just really muddies up the water. But if you dissolve a handful of mud in the ocean, it’s just, you know, dissipated. So if you can become oceanic in your consciousness, in your heart, in your inner reality, then you can feel the tragedies of the world but not be overwhelmed by them. And you can probably contribute more to helping mitigate them in some way. Like you need to be a good swimmer to be a lifeguard, you know. All right, next question from Petra in London. If you are saying we don’t know what’s the what’s for the best in the long run, then why do our best to stop the collapse?

Jem: So we can’t stop the collapse. That’s my analysis. It’s already begun. It’s a creeping collapse. We don’t know how fast it will go. I’m talking about collapse of modern societies. It’s associated also with the rapid degradation of the biosphere. So ecosystems all around the world and the derangement of the climate. And we don’t know how bad that’s going to get. We don’t know if anything we do will make a difference. So the question then you asked is in that case, the rhetoric was why do your best, but why do anything to try and make a difference in that case? It shouldn’t be a rhetorical question. I actually think it’s an example of the habit of modernity that we assume consequentialist ethics. This is it’s normal in all wisdom traditions that you choose to do things because that’s the right way to live. You try to live a good life, reduce harm where you can, promote joy and love and care where you can. You try, but it may not work. And so Rick, you mentioned the Bhagavad Gita. It’s in there. It’s in Buddhism. It’s in all wisdom traditions. So it’s the rise of consequentialist ethics. So where you do something because of a story that is definitely going to have a positive impact. That’s just an issue of the dominance of consequentialist ethics is an aspect of modern culture. So I realized that doesn’t help you then in choosing what to do. So there’s another question very, very, very close to the one that Petra you asked or Petro. Is it Petro or Petra?

Rick: I don’t know how it’s P-E-T-R-A. I don’t know how they pronounce it.

Jem: Okay, Petra. Another question is that how do I know what to focus on to try to help if I believe that my way of life is breaking down and will continue to do so? And when I don’t know how fast that’s going to happen? Well, there’s no good answer to that. There’s no one answer to that because we do not know in complex systems how quickly it’s going to break down and where. We don’t know. So I’m not going to give you a simple answer to that. What you can do is know what will help you be more kind, wise and action-oriented come what may. So you know that mindfulness and meditation will help. You’ll know that having worked out what your sense of the purpose and meaning of your life is and your values are will help you. So you can’t just postpone that anymore. You know, we might be in a terrible situation standing in queues for rations with a World War III on within a couple of months even. So you can’t postpone these deep questions about the meaning of your life anymore. So don’t postpone it. Get on with it. What is really important to you? So how can you cultivate the way you wish to be? There’s lots of things like that. How can you not postpone these deep questions about the meaning of your life and what you believe in? And then, okay, what’s next? Well, what comes next depends on those values. So some people will think, well, I do actually want to try and give me and my kids more years of quality life. That’s really important to me. And it’s probably more important to me than helping wake up all my friends and colleagues to the predicament. Or it might be I want to do what I can to try and give humanity a better chance with climate change. So I want to help reforest the world and cut carbon emissions and draw down carbon. And I think that maybe trying to push government to act through climate activism is what’s for me. And then, okay, go and do that. I mean, but you kind of, you can’t skip those first two things that I’ve just mentioned, because anyone who comes along and tells you for certain, this is what’s going to happen, this is what you should be doing, and this is because of what the results will be, they’re just talking nonsense. We’re in a highly complex, unpredictable situation now, apart from knowing that things are breaking down.

Rick: Yeah, and we all have roles to play, different roles, as we said. Petra’s question reminded me of that story of the starfish. I don’t know if you’ve heard this one, but a man and a boy are walking along the beach, and the tide has gone out, and there are just thousands of starfish stranded on the sand, and they’re all going to die in the sun. And so as they walk along, the man keeps reaching down, picking up a starfish and throwing it in the water, and they walk a few more steps, he does it again, he keeps doing that. And finally, the boy says, “What difference can that make? There are thousands of them.” And with that, the man picks up another one, throws it in the water and says, “Made a difference to that one.”

Jem: Yeah. So that resonates with me a lot. And as you say, people have different roles to play. So somebody somewhere on that beach might be sitting in front of a computer trying to work out how best to get as many of those starfish back into the sea. So they may be then trying to use Twitter or TikTok to get a whole bunch of people down to the beach. And then they might be calculating how long will it take to get that many people down, and will the starfish have died, because how long are the starfish going to live before they die? So how therefore, what should be the scope of my ambition for how many people to get to the beach in order to get, you know, someone who loves being nerdy and calculating all that will do all that. And that might help too.

Rick: Yeah, he might get an army of people down there and save all the starfish.

Jem: Or he might be too ambitious and managed to get dead. And it would have been better for him to just join the guy on the beach and chuck a few starfish in. So, you know.

Rick: That’s good.

Jem: We don’t know.

Rick: All right.

Jem: I’ve got to go. Otherwise, I told my mum I’d only have two hours.

Rick: Okay, I’ll let you go.

Jem: It’s an important time in our family history.

Rick: Good. We had a couple more questions, but I’ll let them go. And thank you so much, Jem, for your time. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you. I really enjoyed reading your book. And I’ll be in touch. I’ll send you a follow-up email with a couple of thoughts.

Jem: Yeah, thanks for the invite. And yeah, to everyone who’s watched this, interested, please, please check the book out. I’m quite proud of it. It took a long time.

Rick: Yeah. It’s a free download, right? In addition to buying a physical one, you can just download the thing and read a PDF if you want to.

Jem: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah. I prefer to listen to things, and it’s on Audible. Matthew Slater reads it, a friend of yours.

Jem: Yeah, that’s right.

Rick: He does a really good job. All right. So thanks for those listening or watching. And thank you, Jem. And my condolences on your father’s passing. And we’ll be in touch. Thanks for all you’re doing.

Jem: Thank you. Cheers, Rick. Bye-bye.

Rick: Cheers.

Jem: Keep up the amazing work with this series. Bye-bye.

Rick: I’ll try to. Bye.